FRENCH HORSEMANSHIP 



■79 



In this country the varied vicissitudes of the hunting- 

 field are the playground of anecdote and imagination. Even 

 if we have not ourselves owned him — and at times most of us 

 have done so — we are all familiar with the exploits of the 

 old horse. He has invariably only given his owner one fall ; 

 even that, poor old chap ! was not his fault. Or worse still 

 — for in her case the tender grace of a day that is dead 

 encourages more elaborate sentiment — the old mare ; she 

 has never turned her head or missed her turn. Indeed, she 

 often insists upon anticipating it in conversation. 



Mr. Disraeli's fine observation told him that something 

 to do with riding across country and falling on your head 

 must come into any true picture of English society in the 

 most national and unrestricted sense of the word society. 

 What can be better than the steeplechase in ' Coningsby,' the 

 after-dinner discussion over its impromptu conditions, and 

 the emergencies of the water-jump ? I do not know whether 

 people read Mr. Disraeli's novels now. They should. But, 

 in this particular book, nine Englishmen out of ten will 

 admit Mr. Guy Flouncey to be a more lifelike figure than 

 Sidonia, merely because his horse lay across his diaphragm 

 in the brook. Although upon one occasion he settled the 

 field on his Arabian — a mare, of course — I cannot suppose 

 that Mr. Disraeli had any personal experience of steeplechase 

 riding ; yet his artistic sense enables him, as it were, to ride 

 a capital race home, and indeed gets him over some little 

 solecisms, such as the yeoman's white mare making the run- 

 ning at a severe pace, lying at the time third or fourth — which 

 would have been fatal to a less gifted writer. All this sort 

 of thing, which makes the characters breathe, and which 

 oxygenises the atmosphere in a story of English life, can 

 contribute nothing to a French novel. So far from that, I 

 even remember M. Octave Feuillet playing the deuce with 

 the disturbing conception he had given me of one of his most 



