Rose, thou must die
Jan Morris
The Cousins Max Egremont (Collins E6.50) I sometimes pine for a cultivated oligarchy: something less than autocracy, but more than populism, to give us government based upon the consent of the intelligent .many, and exerted by the gifts of the talented few. One of the most dazzling of such corporations, the oligarchy of gentlemen which ruled England around the end of the nineteenth century, provides the background of this excellent book, and at first it confirmed me delightfully in my fancies. How handsome and assured they were, those Balfours and Curzons, Asquiths and Lyttons! How splendid to have a poet as Viceroy of India, an accomplished critic as War Minister, a Prime Minister nicknamed by his own contemporaries 'the last of the Athenians.' Above all, how truly civilised the specific subject of the book, the lifelong friendship of two cousins, George Wyndham and Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, who stood at opposite ends of the political spectrum, but sustained despite their violent disagreements an immutable comradeship of taste and background!
There was something splendid to it all, and the Blunt-Wyndham relationship aptly exemplifies it. The system had symmetry, founded as it was so firmly upon class, and never was a pair of cousins more precisely and piquantly balanced than these. Both romantics, both poets, the one was an almost theatrically decorative ex-Guardee and politician, the other an almost absurdly picturesque traveller and I itterateur. Wyndham married the gentle Sibell Lumley, widow of Earl Grosvenor, and remained faithful to her for the rest of her life; Blunt married the flamboyant Anne Noel, Byron's granddaughter, and was faithless to her until the end of their marriage. The one cousin became the staunchest of Tory Imperialists, his most memorable achievement being the methodical reorganisation of Irish land tenure; the other became the most maddening of all thorns in the flesh of the Pax Britannica, and laughed all the way home to Sussex when he read in the train that Gordon had been killed at Khartoum.
And enclosing these disparate extremes, like one of those circular double frames the Victorians loved, was the circumstance of their birth, their time, and, as Wyndham would say, their Race. They were the most truly privileged of the privileged of Europe, moving freely and easily around a world their nation dominated, unwinding with congenial friends in lovely country houses, bred to a civilisation so assured that'it could tolerate the most outrageous opinions, and absorb all but the most obdurate non-conformists. Both the'cousins loved this ambiance. Wyndham wanted to extend its beneficent order across the world; Blunt wanted the world to go its own way, but England, sweet, comfortable, loyal, civilised England, to stay just as it was for ever.
At first Max Egremont's steady exploration of the theme excited a vicarious nostalgia in my mind—as Wyndham once remarked, 'the "gentry," whether of territorial birth or literary distinction, represents something that is valid more truly than the domestic politics of nation-states . . . the members of it have the same manners and thoughts. They understand each other in spite of imperfect communication in divers tongues . . I know just what he meant; but the more I thought about this book, the weaker that gentlemanly cohesion came to seem, and the less enviable the oligarchy of the Blunts and the Wyndhams. Theirs was an elite that glittered marvellously, but was not all gold; it was brilliant, but often silly; it seemed wholly confident, but was frequently maudlin and neurotic.
Consider that archetypal institution. the Crabbet Club, of which Blunt was the president and Wyndham, of course, a member. Its sole purpose was a facetious self admiration, indulged during all-night sessions when members, presided over by Blunt dressed as an Arab prince, recited their own comic verses or tirelessly displayed their powers of repartee. It makes me squirm even to read of it in Lord Egremont 's fastidious prose ('Frivolity sometimes sought with almost too much determination'), yet its members were the very flower of the English ruling class, Renaissance men and late Olympians, whose right to govern was almost unchallenged, and whose urbane authority was the envy of Europe. Would I really wish to be ruled by the officers of such a society? Were those oligarchs really fit to govern, as they did, not merely Britain, but a quarter of the population of the world ?
Distilled as their culture is so neatly int° this double portrait, they seem in retrospect more self-conscious than stately, and often more anxious than arrogant. In their private lives they were constantly embroiled in somewhat sickly emotionalisms; in public they were, most of them, carried away into immoderate excesses of patriotism by the imperial climax. Wyndham, the very model of the English officer and gentleman, carve near to nervous breakdown and ruined his own career by negligence; Blunt, the ePi" tome of the compassionate radical, so illused his admirable wife that their daughter remained an inveterate enemy to his reputa" tion until her own death in 1959.
They were not great men after
strong men. They were Edens, not Churchills. When it came to ultimate emergencies, outsiders swept the oligarchy away an.c1 took command—Welshmen, half-Amery cans, men who could not parse a Greek verse, lei alone declaim a satiric eulogy in the Crabbet Club at midnight. Even IMPeri. alism, the great political excitement of theirt heyday, was stage-directed for them, if n° actually invented, by a Birmingham screvi manufacturer.
The Cousins is an impressive and enj0Yable debut. Lacking much of the vivacitY and most of the humour that are so often the saving graces of first books, it possesses instead a remarkable collectedness. It is 3 very composed book. I gather from readingd The Queen at the hairdressers that Lort, Egremont, who is still in his twenties, is cast ing around for another subject. I hope rie,7 time he chooses a more straightforward bin: graphical approach, for he seems to the destined to write Lives in the grand The classic manner: and in that genre, if Cousins is anything to go by, he is sure achieve a far More than Crabbetian dis tinction.
Previous page
