n due to jealousy
alone. Braxton had imagination, and his rival did not soar above fancy.
But the point is that Maltby's fancifulness went far and well. In
telling how Ariel re-embodied himself from thin air, leased a small
house in Chesterfield Street, was presented at a Levee, played the part
of good fairy in a matter of true love not running smooth, and worked
meanwhile all manner of amusing changes among the aristocracy before he
vanished again, Maltby showed a very pretty range of ingenuity. In one
respect, his work was a more surprising achievement than Braxton's. For
whereas Braxton had been born and bred among his rustics, Maltby knew
his aristocrats only through Thackeray, through the photographs and
paragraphs in the newspapers, and through those passionate excursions
of his to Rotten Row. Yet I found his aristocrats as convincing as
Braxton's rustics. It is true that I may have been convinced wrongly.
That is a point which I could settle only by experience. I shift my
ground, claiming for Maltby's aristocrats just this: that they pleased
me very much.

Aristocrats, when they are presented solely through a novelist's sense
of beauty, do not satisfy us. They may be as beautiful as all that,
but, for fear of thinking ourselves snobbish, we won't believe it. We do
believe it, however, and revel in it, when the novelist saves his face
and ours by a pervading irony in the treatment of what he loves. The
irony must, mark you, be pervading and obvious. Disraeli's great ladies
and lords won't do, for his irony was but latent in his homage, and
thus the reader feels himself called on to worship and in duty bound
to scoff. All's well, though, when the homage is latent in the irony.
Thackeray, inviting us to laugh and frown over the follies of Mayfair,
enables us to reel with him in a secret orgy of veneration for those
fools.

Maltby, too, in his measure, enabled us to reel thus. That is mainly
why, before the end of April, his publisher was in a position to state
that 'the Seventh Large Impression of "Ariel in Mayfair" is almost
exhausted.' Let it be put to our credit, however, that at the same
moment Braxton's publisher had 'the honour to inform the public that
an Eighth Large Impression of "A Faun on the Cotswolds" is in instant
preparation.'

Indeed, it seemed impossible for either author to outvie the other in
success and glory. Week in, week out, you saw cancelled either's every
momentary advantage. A neck-and