In Evelyn Waugh's Helena, when the titular character first explores the world outside of her kingdom, she does so with a learned enthusiasm for discovery; "so foreign, the gate to a new life, the starting point of the road ... to Rome, and whither beyond" (p. 44). But as her ambitious new hsuband, Constantius, explains to her the plans for a wall around the Roman empire, she realizes that the world outside is just more of the same. "Must there always be a wall?" she asks (p. 47), to which Constantius answers:
"... I love the wall. Think of it, mile upon mile, from snow to desert, a single great girdle round the civilized world; inside, peace, decency, the law, the altars of the gods, industry, the arts, order; outside, wild beasts and savages, forest and swamp, blood, mumbo-jumbo, men like wolf packs; and along the wall the armed might of the empire, holding the line. Doesn't it make you see what the City means?" (p. 47)
Helena, of course, then counters by asking the question, "Instead of the barbarian breaking in, might the City one day break out?" (p. 48) She speaks of Rome, and the idea that it might spread its influence and the benefits of its civilization rather than selfishly keep it behind a wall, unavailable, perhaps, to those who might seek it from beyond. The context in the novel of Rome as the center of civilized life, later to be read as the center of religious life -- specifically Christian/Catholic -- is an important one to consider as we think of Helena's missionary sensibility, her desire to spread what she believes is good to people who she thinks may benefit from it. Her initial skepticism of Christianity, followed by her eventual baptism ("one seed in a vast germination" [p. 125]) and mission to find what remains of the true cross, provides a trajectory by which to view the period as a whole (Helena was living in the 3rd/4th centuries) as one of almost contagious Christianity, represented by the proliferation of religious architecture -- a sort of architectural evangelism.
Emperor Constantine's (Helena's son) desire to build a triumphal arch for himself reveals the superficial ornamentation, rather than substance, represented by the old tradition. Later he imbues his monument with Christian relics, further confusing his intent. But he understands a responsibility to populate the world with new architecture: "All I live for is other people -- teaching them, keeping them out of mischief, putting up buildings for them" (p. 173). And this is a central part of Helena's efforts when she leaves Rome in search of the true cross; it is said that she "directed the buildings of shrines and basilicas" (p. 185), and even as imperial architects invade Jerusalem and begin building, the bishop himself "lost among dust and industry" (p. 195), Helena begins the project of building a basilica in the place in which she also completes her search for the cross, as though the very act of proliferating a particular kind of architecture could be rewarded by such a monumental discovery.
When Helena begins to feel that Rome itself is an "echo from an old empty world" (p. 129), even as the city had once represented the summation of all of her hopes and dreams, I was reminded of Brideshead, the estate central to Waugh's more famous novel, Brideshead Revisited, and its protagonist's shifting relationship with the house itself. Charles Ryder first experiences the house as the representation of a whole new world opening itself up to him, but when he eventually becomes an architectural painter, taking commissions to paint flattering portraits of extraordinary homes, his occupation becomes a remarkably apt representation of his relationship with Brideshead:
After my first exhibition I was called to all parts of the country to make portraits of houses that were soon to be deserted or debased; indeed, my arrival seemed often to be only a few paces ahead of the auctioneers, a presage of doom. (p. 227)
Indeed, the first house he "paints" (in terms, at least, of his garden-room series within the confines of Brideshead) is the old troubled mansion itself, home of his first love, Sebastian, and his diversely complicated family; and the house -- and the entire Flyte family, by extension -- also seems to come to ruin upon Charles's involvement with it. The house of Brideshead acts as a container for all of the family strife that Charles encounters with the Flytes, and indeed he comes to respect architecture, or "buildings," more than he does his fellow man:
I have always loved building, holding it to be not only the highest achievement of man but one in which, at the moment of consummation, things were most clearly taken out of his hands and perfected, without his intention, by other means, and I regarded men as something much less than the buildings they made and inhabited, as mere lodgers and short-term sub-lessees of small importance in the long, fruitful life of their homes. (p. 226)
This relationship to buildings and homes suits the novel's sense of nostalgia, especially as the loss of Brideshead -- as Charles turns away from the family -- coincides with a loss of inspiration, particularly the inspiration of youth. When Charles first leaves the house behind, thinking it to be for the last time, he feels that he "was leaving part of myself behind, and that wherever I went afterwards I should feel the lack of it, and search for it hopelessly, as ghosts are said to do, frequenting the spots where they buried material treasures without which they cannot pay their way to the nether world" (p. 169). And then: "I had left behind me -- what? Youth? Adolescence? Romance?" (p. 169) Charles has tied up his feelings about his youth with his relationship to Sebastian, expressed in the context of Brideshead; and when, years later, he encounters the house in a much different context, that of a wartime captain, it is a confrontation with an older version of himself and all of its associated memories (his love for Sebastian, his ambivalence about the future, even his drinking) that he finds most troubling. And this is remarkably similar to the trajectory Waugh explores later in Helena, in which the stateliness of Brideshead is replaced by the splendor of Rome: at first incredibly alluring, the places come to represent a hermeticism that is antithetical to growth, either personal -- in the case of Charles Ryder -- or spiritual, in the case of Helena and, indeed, Christianity itself.
