A Little Learning by Evelyn Waugh

Author:Evelyn Waugh [Waugh, Evelyn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780718197681
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2012-04-02T16:00:00+00:00

4

I returned home for Christmas to find a new member of the household. This was no surprise. I had been kept informed of the change by letter, but whether or no I had met the newcomer before, I cannot now remember. I certainly knew a great deal about her. She was Barbara Jacobs, to whom my brother had become engaged after a brief courtship which he has described in detail in his own autobiography. She was less than three years my senior, a soft, drooping girl, lethargic but capable of being roused both to strenuous activity and to gaiety. I think I acted as an animator to her. I heard it remarked that when I was about she was less liable to lapse into reverie. She had a gentle sense of the absurd in all around her. Her hair was bobbed; she wore low-heeled shoes and was mildly artistic in dress; never outrée, but unconventional in eschewing hats and gloves and sunshades, and adorning herself with crude jewellery of beaten silver and copper, enamel, semi-precious stones and amber, that was made by a bearded crank in Berkhamsted. She had many admirers, but I never thought her particularly beautiful or attractive (I was given to insignificant romantic attachments to girls of my own age). I liked her very much and enjoyed her company. She must have enjoyed mine, for, until my brother’s return from the army, she spent the holidays with us as my companion in the house where she had originally come merely in order to attend lectures at a ladies’ college in Regent’s Park.

Barbara requires more than passing mention in a chapter attempting to describe my education. She was well educated and well read, but the knowledge she had acquired and the names she revered seldom coincided with anything I had been taught. Her experiences and upbringing had been entirely different from mine; her tastes, her reading, her opinions were in some respects antithetical, in others complementary. She was an agnostic, a socialist and a feminist. Until I met her, maiden-aunts and Anglican clergy had been in the ascendant; in Barbara I met the new age. I did not surrender to it without reserve, but I was stimulated by the encounter. My father always assumed (as I do now) that anything new was likely to be nasty. Barbara found a specific charm in modernity. She did not pursue novelty; she was no butterfly of fashion flitting from vorticism to dadaism. She was, rather, subversive by tradition, a spaniel lolloping dreamily along at her mother’s heels. I argued sturdily with her but I picked up many of her arguments, which I reproduced next term in my essays, with the result that Mr Howitt in my report made a rebuke which I have seldom incurred in my later years: ‘He must learn to “approve those things that are excellent”, not merely those that are ultra-modern.’

Barbara’s original aspiration in coming to London had been to enter the Slade School of Art, not

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