A Man of Parts
IN a period when the part is equal to the whole, the man of parts who combines them into a whole is a sufficiently rare phenomenon, and now that the specialist has it all his own way, Major Buxton must resign himself to being considered in the right circles as decidedly old-fashioned. His new book—a record of the happy events that came his way in 1948—is as personal as it well could be. Whether he travels or stays at home at Horsey on the Norfolk Broads, he is describing his own adventures, commenting upon his own experiences and ventilating his own interests. Yet the reader constantly sees him generically and as a representative as well as
an individual and very personable narrator. lie speaks for the bygone country squire who was the master not only of his particular acres but of the arts involved in their management, who was not only a resident landowner but deeply versed in all the phenomena, human and natural, that were characteristic of the land he managed. He acquired a remarkable knowledge of a microcosm which, in the eighteenth century, for instance, served as an apprenticeship to the more complex and extensive control of a macrocosm, the power as well as the powers to govern a nation. The promotion went to his head, and he turned on his own people by the enclosures and on his own land by the mania for game-preserving. Major Buxton is a survivor of the many-sided squires and freeholders who, before they were virtually taxed out of existence in our own time, and before they were corrupted by wealth in an earlier period, used to be called the backbone of England.
The painters, architects and rulers of Renaissance Italy called themselves humanists, and surely Lne reason was because they were men of many parts—it was uncommon for an artist to paint easel, pictures and do nothing else. In this book, of a modest size and a modest demeanour, it is surprising to note how many different roles are assumed by the author—those of a naturalist, a fisherman, a student of the fascinating bridal customs of roedeer, a landlord of the difficult terrain of Horsey Mere, a tree-planter, a mediator between interested parties in a Broads dispute, a critic of Govern- ment policy in respect of National Parks, a historian of the capercailzie introduced into this country and of Pay- cockes at Coggeshall, an ecologist. an ornithologist and biologist of Broadland, a member of the League of Nations staff at Geneva for twelve years who has some shrewd and courageous observations to make on the faultiness of " the natural history of human beings," a man of ideas on the future of the Broads, one who has to exercise much tact and discrimination in dealing with the crowds which flock to Horsey Mere on holiday, and, above all, a humane and sensible man in all his dealings. I personally would trust Major Buxton on a ticklish issue 'where I would avoid the professionals like the plague.
This is a book, therefore, for many tastes, though it is doubtful whether the unqualified townsman would find much nourishment in it. The specialist would no doubt find him amateurish, though he has been able to discover more about the habits of roedeer in the rutting season than the whole pack of departmental scientists. Withal, he has an easy, unaffected way of writing which puts his
reader on good terms with him. H. J. MASSINGHAM.
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