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Many modern novels leave one with a sense of desolation, as though the end of times has really arrived, and there is nowhere left to go.
But, Waugh's ending with Brideshead, despite the complete change of circumstances: there was a war on, Charles is separated from Julia, Brideshead is swarmed by cocky soldiers who never would have gone near such a place hadn't it been for the war, allows for a sliver of hope.
Ryder describes his final encounter with Brideshead, linking the country's history of wars and soldiers, joining them with the flicker of a lamp, in the chapel of this house of generations.
The chapel showed no ill effects of its long neglect. The art-nouveau paint was as fresh and bright as ever. And the art-nouveau lamp burned once more before the altar. I said a prayer, an ancient, newly-learned form of words, and left, turning towards the camp…
The builders did not know the uses to which their work would descend; they made a new house with the stones of the old castle; year by year, generation after generation, they enriched and extended it; year by year, the harvest of timber in the park grew to ripeness; until, in sudden frost, came the age of Hooper; the place was desolate and the work all brought to nothing. Quomodo sedet sola civitas—vanity of vanities, all is vanity.
‘And yet,’ I thought… ‘that is not the last word; it is not even an apt word; it is a dead word from ten years back.’
‘Something quite remote from anything the builders intended had come out of their work and out of the fierce little human tragedy in which I played; something none of us thought about at the time; a small red flame - a beaten-copper lamp of deplorable design re-lit before the beaten copper doors of a tabernacle; the flame, which the old knights saw from their tombs, which they saw put out; that flame burns again for other soldiers far from home, farther, in heart, than Acre or Jerusalem. It could not have been lit but for the builders and the tragedians, and there I found it that morning, burning anew among the old stones.