ak of the war, current
literature did not suffer from any lack of fauns. But when Braxton's
first book appeared fauns had still an air of novelty about them. We had
not yet tired of them and their hoofs and their slanting eyes and their
way of coming suddenly out of woods to wean quiet English villages from
respectability. We did tire later. But Braxton's faun, even now, seems
to me an admirable specimen of his class--wild and weird, earthy,
goat-like, almost convincing. And I find myself convinced altogether by
Braxton's rustics. I admit that I do not know much about rustics,
except from novels. But I plead that the little I do know about them by
personal observation does not confirm much of what the many novelists
have taught me. I plead also that Braxton may well have been right about
the rustics of Gloucestershire because he was (as so many interviewers
recorded of him in his brief heyday) the son of a yeoman farmer at Far
Oakridge, and his boyhood had been divided between that village and the
Grammar School at Stroud. Not long ago I happened to be staying in the
neighbourhood, and came across several villagers who might, I assure
you, have stepped straight out of Braxton's pages. For that matter,
Braxton himself, whom I met often in the spring of '95, might have
stepped straight out of his own pages.

I am guilty of having wished he would step straight back into them. He
was a very surly fellow, very rugged and gruff. He was the antithesis of
pleasant little Maltby. I used to think that perhaps he would have been
less unamiable if success had come to him earlier. He was thirty years
old when his book was published, and had had a very hard time since
coming to London at the age of sixteen. Little Maltby was a year
older, and so had waited a year longer; but then, he had waited under
a comfortable roof at Twickenham, emerging into the metropolis for no
grimmer purpose than to sit and watch the fashionable riders and
walkers in Rotten Row, and then going home to write a little, or to play
lawn-tennis with the young ladies of Twickenham. He had been the only
child of his parents (neither of whom, alas, survived to take pleasure
in their darling's sudden fame). He had now migrated from Twickenham and
taken rooms in Ryder Street. Had he ever shared with Braxton the bread
of adversity--but no, I think he would in any case have been pleasant.
And conversely I cannot imagine that Braxton would in any case have been
so.

N