The Englishness of Aberdeen
Max Egremont
UMBRELLA
hen a novel is said nowadays to have the characteristic of Englishness the description invariably carries at best a hint of condescension, more likely outright abuse. The implications are that it is quaint, short, provincial, genteel, sexually reticent and has an excessive emphasis on class redeemed only partly by sensibility, humour and the twilight glow of the bitter- sweet. Umbrella should make us think again. It is most definitely an English book in that I do not think that it could have been written in any other country in the world. But it has few of the attributes I have mentioned, apart from an occasional appropriate touch of melancholy, an important part of many novelists' armoury, and a shortness of the kind that made me wish for more.
Umbrella sees the past with a sympathy and realism which makes one think of two other traditionally English characteristics: those of romanticism and common sense. Its subject is the 19th-century politician Lord Aberdeen whom I had previously thought of as one of Queen Victoria's dim- mer Prime Ministers. But Ferdinand Mount's Aberdeen is a figure of heroic dimensions, possessed of foresight and integrity. Lacking craftiness or sensitivity to the national mood, he is replaced by his old rival Lord Palmerston, whom he despises, when the British public becomes aware of the disasters of the Crimean war, a conflict Aberdeen had tried hard to avoid.
The child of doomed parents, Aberdeen's other advantages seem at first to make up for this. As the heir to a for- tune and a Scottish estate, the cousin of Byron, observer of battle and high Euro- pean diplomacy and youthful acquaintance of Pitt, Napoleon, Metternich, Sheridan, Lady Hester Stanhope and the Princess Lieven, he has a thrilling youth. There is something so very English again in the way that the young nobleman appears, to make a muddle of many of his opportunities yet glides ahead all the same. Dining at Mal- maison, he has trouble in grasping many of the Napoleonic nuances because of his inadequate French; during a night in a hayloft with Metternich he scarcely speaks at all. Only some amateur classical excava- tions in Greece, and a chance amorous encounter with a local girl, seem to arouse unabated enthusiasm in him, perhaps because, in true English fashion, these take place in comparative silence. Here 'for the first time in his life, he felt he was fated to be happy'.
The awkwardness stems not from ineptitude but from a profound emotional inarticulacy. Outrageous flirting by his two wives attracts Aberdeen to them, perhaps partly from good manners; then he falls in love and inevitably it is followed by tragedy. Aristides 'the insufferably just' is his hero; we see that an absence of parental love has made him, in the way of many upper-class Englishmen, unable to express the usual intimacies of friendship or human understanding.
Umbrella touches only lightly on the great man's political career. We learn that he was a successful Foreign Secretary who kept the peace and pointed the way to the founding of Belgium, and as Prime Minis- ter in 1852 presided over what Bagehot described as the ablest cabinet since the Reform Act. This novel is the story, and a very entertaining one, of a man of unspec- tacular courage directing his formidable but artless intellect to the problem of how to put ideals into practice and cope with his often inexpressible and alarmingly chaotic feelings. Aberdeen suffers disappointment and bereavement, and keeps his imagina- tion at bay in an extraordinary exercise of will. This is the self-confidence of an Aris- tides, and the unapproachability as well.
The author clearly means us to draw par- allels with the present. Ireland and Bosnia were among the problems facing Aberdeen and he is finally brought down by a scur- rilous press campaign. In retirement he is shocked by the militant jingoism of Ten- nyson's Maud, though one wonders if the poem's strange undercurrents of sexual repression and madness may have hit him equally hard. The novel ends with an excur- sion into the supernatural, a brave plunge beneath reality's surface which matches well the author's earlier quick observations of those odd, dark vignettes of history, such as Josephine's rotting teeth, the summer- house at Teplitz full of rotting limbs or the fact that the Princess Lieven smelt of fish. Umbrella is a work of romance in the best sense, of feeling suffused with wisdom and civilised compassion.
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