I think I missed this leap more than anything at Lebanon when, finally, we set out for Arkansas. We made our first considerable halt early in May, at Batesville, on the White River, a lovely, rose-grown village, carrying, in the neatly kept homes of its New England secessionists, evidence that they remembered their native land, where, in their day, before the age of railroads, the "village" flourished in all its freshness and simplicity. It had now acquired the picturesque dilapidation, in the matter of fences and gates and defective window-panes, that marked the Southern domicile during the war. Ruby had strained himself quite seriously on the march, and had been left to come on slowly with the quarter-master's train. This left me quite free for the social life, such as it was, to which we the only available men that had been seen there since Price gathered his force at Springfield were welcomed with a reserved cordiality. Our facilities for forming correct opinion of society were not especially good, but I fancied I should have passed my time to as good advantage in the saddle. a We soon left for an active expedition in the direction of Little Rock, of which it is only necessary to say, here, that it lasted about a month, and brought the writer acquainted with some very unsatisfactory horses, -a fact which heightened his pleasure, on striking the White River bottom again, at finding that Ruby had been brought over the ferry to meet him. Tired as I was, I took a glorious brisk trot through the Canebrake Road, with a couple of leaps over fallen trees, that revived the old emotions and made a man of me again. While we lay at Batesville we were unusually active in the matter of drill and reorganization; and this, with our engagements in the town, kept us too busy for much recreation; but Ludlow and I managed to work in a daily swim in the White River, with old saddles on our horses, and scant clothing on our persons. Talk of aquatic sports! there is no royal bath without a plucky horse to assist; and a swim across the swift current at Batesville, with a horse like Ruby snorting and straining at every stroke, belittled even the leaping at Lebanon. From Batesville we commenced our memorable march to join the fleet that had just passed Memphis, following down the left bank of the river to Augusta, and then striking across the cotton country to Helena, -a march on which we enjoyed the rarest picturesqueness of plantation life, and suffered enough from heat and hunger and thirst and stifling, golden dust to more than pay for it. Helena was a pestiferous swamp, worth more than an active campaign to our enemies, filling our hospitals, and furrowing the levee bank with graves. It was too hot for much drilling, and we kept our better horses in order by daybreak races. With the local fever feeling its way into my veins, I was too listless to care much for any diversion; but Ike came to me one evening to say that he "reckoned" Ruby was as good a horse as anybody had in the "camps," and he might as well take a hand in the games. I told him I had no objection to his being run, if he could find a suitable boy, but that both he and I were too heavy for race-riding. "I don't weigh only about a hundred and a half," said the ambitious man. "Well, suppose you don't, that is ten pounds too much." did jest give Ludlow's darkey a little and had suggested the venture, debrush once." spaired of ever getting his promotion by any fair means, when we rejoined him by the return leap and rode safely to camp. Conquering my indignation and my scruples, I went over, just for the honor of the establishment, and made up a race for the next day. I have seen crack horse-races in my day, but I never saw more artistic rid ing nor more capital running than that summer morning on the River Road at Helena, just as the sun began to gild the muddy Mississippi. The satisfaction of this conquest, and the activity with which new engagements were offered by ambitious lieutenants, who little knew the stuff my man and horse were made of, kept off my fever for some weeks; but I steadily declined all opportunity of racing with horses outside of our own command, for I had been reared in a school of Puritan severity, and had never quite overcome my convictions against the public turf. A corporal of an "Injeanny rigement" took occasion to crow lustily-so I heard — because "one of them French coveys" was afraid to run him a quarter for five dollars. It appeared that a cleanly European was always supposed by this gentry to be French; and in the army at large I was better known by the company I kept than by my New England characteristics. Naturally, Ike thought that, while Ruby was engaged in this more legitimate occupation, he ought not to be ridden for mere pleasure; and it was only when a visitor was to be entertained, or when I went out on plea of duty, that I could steal an opportunity to leap him; but he took one fence which fairly did him credit. It was a snake fence measuring four feet and two inches, with a deep ditch on each side cut close to the projecting angles of the rails. Ruby carried me over the first ditch into the angle between the rails, then over the fence into the narrow space on the other side, and then over the second ditch into the field. It was the most perfect combination of skill, strength, and judgment that was possible to horseflesh; and I think Glückmansklegge, who was with me Unhappily, even entire satisfaction with one's horse is powerless to ward off such malaria as that of the camp at Helena, and in due time I fell ill with the fever. The horse was turned over to the care of the quarter-master, and Ike and I came wearily home on sickleave. Late in the autumn we returned to St. Louis, where one of the German officers told me that the regiment had joined Davidson's army at "Pilot K-nopp"; and after the Hun, our new adjutant, arrived from the East, we set out for head-quarters, and took command of the cavalry brigade of Davidson's army. From November until January we were tossed about from post to post, wearing out our horses, wearying our men, and accomplishing absolutely nothing of value beyond the destruction of an enormous amount of the rough forage, which would otherwise have been used to feed "nags,"— stolen, or to be stolen, - and would have thus tended to foster the prevailing vice of the region. At last we settled down in a pleasant camp at Thomasville,—a good twelve miles away from Davidson, — and were at rest; it was only those near him who suffered from his fitful caprices, and he was now encamped with the infantry. Pleasant as we found it with our little duty and much sport, I can never look back to Thomasville without sorrow. To say that I had acquired a tenderness for Ruby would not be strictly just; but I felt for him all the respect and admiration and fondness that is possible short of love. Vix had been my heroine, and my only one; but Ruby was my hero, and I depended on him for my duty and my pleasure more than I knew. With his full measure of intelligence he had learned exactly his role, and he was always eager, whenever occasion offered, to show the world what a remarkably fine horse I of Ruby's enormous lifts, that brought the whole company to their feet. It was the supreme moment with him. Full of consciousness, as though he knew the opportunity would never come again, and quivering in anticipation of his triumph, he was yet true to his training, and held himself subject to my least impulse. One sunny Southern day, toward the end of January, Davidson had ridden over, with his following, to dine with us; and as we were sitting before our mess-tent, mellow with after-dinner talk of our guns and our dogs and our horses, the General was good enough We had lain in our camp for more to remember that he had seen me than a week, and there was not a vestige riding a chestnut that he thought left of the recently substantial fences, much too finely bred for field work: only the suggestive and conspicuhad I been able to keep him? Then ous gateways that stood to mark the Ruby was discussed, and all his suc- march of our armies from the Chesacesses were recalled, first by one friend peake to the Indian nation. But Ruby and then by another, until Davidson built fences in his imagination higher needed ocular proof of our truthful- than any he had ever faced, and cleared them without a scratch, landing close, as though the Helena ditch were still to be taken. ness. Ike had taken the hint, and brought Ruby round in due time, glistening like gold in the slanting rays of the setting sun, but blundering along with his head down and ears drooping in his old, dismal way. "O no, I don't mean that horse," said Davidson; "I mean a very highstrung horse I have seen you ride on the march." "Very well, General, that is the animal; he keeps his strings loose when he is not at his work." "No, I have seen you riding a far better horse than that; I am too old a cavalryman to be caught with such chaff." To the great glee of the Hun, whose faith in Ruby was unbounded, Davidson's whole staff turned the laugh on me for trying to deceive the General just because he had been dining. It would take long to tell all he did and how perfectly he did it: he went back at last to his canvas blanket, loaded with adulation and as happy as it is given a horse to be. In his leaping he had started a shoe, and Ike took him in the morning to the smith (who had taken possession of an actual forge) to have it reset. A moment later, the Hun cried, "My God, Colonel, look at Ruby!" Hobbling along with one hind foot drawn up with pain, he was making his last mournful march, and we laid him that day to rest, as true a friend and as faithful a fellow as ever wore a chestnut coat. He had reared in the shop, parted his halter, and fallen under a bench, breaking his thigh far up above the I mounted, and started off with one stifle. George E. Waring, Jr. THE RECENT LITERATURE.* HE verdict which public opinion has pronounced, or, rather, is from time to time pronouncing, on the writings of George Eliot is certainly a very complicated one. That she is an acute delineator of character, a subtle humorist, a master of English, a universal observer and a comprehensive student, a profound moralist, all this is part of her established reputation. That she is, besides this, a poet of great force and originality would, if we took as the test the most widely published criticism, be also established. That she has also succeeded, - in an age in which the public has been satiated with novels, and critics have begun even to doubt whether novel-writing were not a thing of the past, — if not in founding a new school of novel-writing, at least in proving that this literary form could be adapted, in skilful hands, to purposes which her predecessors had never dreamed of. Thackeray, Dickens, Bulwer, Disraeli, between them and George Eliot there is no relationship; and yet George Eliot, in the hold which she maintains upon the public interest, is certainly their successor. But is this all? Does not every one who reads generalizations like these involuntarily say to himself, this is nothing? To say of an author like George Eliot that she is distinguishable by this or that abstract quality is very much like trying to revive the effect produced upon our imaginations by a broad and majestic river by describing the general direction of a body of flowing water, the height of the banks between which it flows, the measurements of its soundings taken by the latest hydrographical survey. When we Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life. By GEORGE ELIOT. Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons. New York: Harpers. Backlog Studies. By CHARLES DUDLEY WARBoston J. R. Osgood & Co. 1873. NER. A Hand-Book of English Literature. Intended for the Use of High-Schools, as well as a Companion and Guide for Private Students and for General Readers. By FRANCIS H. UNDERWOOD, A. M. 2 vols. British Authors. American Authors. Boston: Lee and Shepard. 1872. The Woods and By-Ways of New England. By WILSON FLAGG, author of Studies in Field and Forest. With Illustrations. Boston: J. R. Osgood & Co. 1872. The Minnesinger of Germany. By B. E. KROEHurd and Houghton, and Trübner. 1873. GER. think of all the immense variety of her books, from the Scenes from Clerical Life to Middlemarch, of the range of feeling and thought that they cover, and the wonderful manner in which the work has been done, one is tempted to give up the task of studying this student, of observing this author who has devoted her life to observation, or of analyzing this professor of analysis. Several critics have agreed, and it is almost becoming the fashion to say, that the leading trait in all of George Eliot's works is the constant presence of the idea of Fate or Destiny, of the helplessness of man in his pitiful attempt to struggle with the eternal forces of nature; and no one will dispute that both the Mill on the Floss and Middlemarch have given undue reason for this opinion. But the idea of fate is very different in different minds, and it seems to us by no means clear that the fate of George Eliot is of a sort which has hitherto been known to literature. The conception of destiny with which we are most familiar is that of the Grecian tragedies and myths, - an individual fate, or at most a family fate, which attends, during a long succession of years, a particular man or family. They are born into the world together; they move through life together; perhaps, even, they struggle for the mastery: at last the fate is accomplished, whether for good or evil. In the Arabian Nights we find a conception of somewhat the same kind in the story of the young prince who is fated to die on coming of age, and whom his father, the king, sends out of the kingdom to an island, where he is to live in a subterranean palace Modern Turkey. By J. LEWIS FARLEY, Consul of the Sublime Porte at Bristol. London: Hurst and Blackett. 1872. A Journey to Egypt and the Holy Land in 1869-70. By HENRY M. HARMON, D. D., Professor of Ancient Languages and Literature in Dickinson College, Carlisle, Pa. *Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co. 1873. The Class-Room Taine. History of English Literature. By H. A. TAINE. Abridged from the Translation of H. Van Laun, and edited with Chronological Table, Notes, and Index. By JOHN FISKE, Assistant Librarian and late Lecturer on Philosophy in Harvard University. New York: Holt and Williams. 1872. Modern Leaders. Being a Series of Biographical Sketches by JUSTIN MCCARTHY. New York: Sheldon & Co. 1872. until the fatal moment is past; but to the same island comes by accident a traveller who discovers the prince's retreat, and lives with him on terms of great intimacy and affection, consoling him for his solitude. At last the prince's birthday—the last of his imprisonment - arrives, and the king's vessel is descried above the horizon coming to take his son home in safety. The moment, however, has come; the prince, reclining on a sofa, asks his friend for a knife from a shelf above; there is a misstep, and the king arrives to find the fate fulfilled. Perhaps the destiny which appears in Scott's novels in the Bride of Lammermoor, for instance, or Guy Mannering-is of the same essential kind as that of the Greeks, but the coloring is totally different; while the Mohammedan, with his "will of God be done," has given to the idea a religious character, again of a quite opposite kind. The idea takes a thousand different forms, which a scientific treatment of the subject would no doubt show in their real order and historical sequence. The fate of George Eliot is not one of them. Hers is a more modern and truer conception. The destiny which surrounds her characters, which leads to their several allotted ends the lives of Tito, Maggie Tulliver, Tom, Hetty, Romola, Lydgate, the Vincys, or the poor drunkard whose last agonies are described with such minuteness in Middlemarch, is the compounded destiny of natural laws, character, and accident which we call life. It leaves nothing out of view; neither the material nor the moral forces; neither the immutable fixity of physical succession, nor the will. Man is, in these novels, neither a creature who controls us and who controls nor who is controlled by nature; he is himself part of nature. We would not, however, overlook the fact, -which is of the first importance, that George Eliot's fate is a moral fate, or, to put what we mean in other words, that the moral lessons enforced by life are the most important lessons for her. It is not the strangeness and awfulness of life, it is not the joy of life, it is not the misery of life, nor the absurdity of life, that is first with her all these she understands and feels; but what she most keenly understands and most keenly feels are the lessons which all this strangeness, awfulness, joy, misery, and absurdity bring for those who will read them aright, as well as the obligation That fate should, in English hands, assume a moral color is natural enough; but if we compare the novels of George Eliot with those of a Continental writer whose novels have a distinctly fatalistic turn, we shall begin to doubt perhaps whether this view of life is the growth of any one soil. Turgénieff's character, or at least some of his characters, are the playthings of fate quite as much as any of his English contemporary. And Turgénieff, too, is impressed with the moral side of his subject. His Liza, if it were not for the pervading sadness of the book, might be distributed as a tract among refined people. Yet, after all, the sadness is more fundamental than the morality, and perhaps it would be fairer to say that there is a general way of looking at life, peculiar to modern men, which Turgénieff happened to take in Liza, although he certainly did not very distinctly grasp it, as George Eliot always does. And what is this modern view of life, which is different from all others, so sad, and so moral, so ironical, so didactic, yet so undogmatically didactic? M. Taine, in his English Literature, after speaking of Byron's unhappy career, and that of the poets whom he calls "romantic," answers this question in a way that, whatever may be thought of the criticism in other respects, is complete: "So lived and so ended this unhappy great man; the malady of the age had no more distinguished prey; around him, like a hecatomb, lie the rest, wounded also by the greatness of their faculties, and their immoderate desires, some extinguished in stupor or drunkenness, others worn out by pleasure or work; these driven to madness or suicide; those beaten down by impotence, or lying on a sick-bed; all agitated by their acute or aching nerves; the strongest carrying their bleeding wound to old age, the happiest having suffered as much as the rest, and preserving their scars, though healed. The concert of their lamentations has filled their age, and we have stood around them, hearing in our hearts |
