It may be that we would all be better off if we could rid history of some of the romantic haze which keeps blurring the outlines. This (it is only fair to add) is a responsibility of the citizen at large as well as of the historian. The romance is there, all right, and there is no way to avoid seeing it; the trick is to keep that fact from distorting our scale of values.

The romantic outlook does no particular harm if it is confined to the past. The trouble is that it won’t stay there. It gets into the present as well, and then it represents a flight from reality. It embodies an attitude toward life—an attempt to perpetuate an impossible dream-image of bygone times—which makes it impossible to cope with today’s problems. When that happens the future is apt to become rather difficult.

As a case in point, consider the American Civil War.

Whatever values we may see when we look back on that war—and both the romanticist and the cold realist can find plenty to look at—what stays with one the longest is the realization that the whole tragic business represented a national inability to face up to the future. The future was arriving, in the iSGo’s—what we live with now was struggling then to be born—and the need to study it and make the inevitable adjustments was simply too much for everybody. The war was an attempt to escape, with men on both sides imagining that they would preserve (each section in its own way) a cherished version of the past. The romantic outlook could hardly be followed with greater te- nacity, nor could it easily lead to a greater disaster.

The one Civil War figure who, more than any other, draws the attention of the romanticist is that famous leader of Robert E. Lee’s cavalry, Major General James Ewell Brown Stuart. You have to adopt the romantic outlook in looking at Stuart because there is no other way to see him. He wore a gray cape lined with scarlet, he kept a plume in his hat, when he rode off on some perilous expedition he went gaily, with a banjo player twanging a lively tune and the whole staff, as likely as not, joining in song; and he could posture for his own eyes and the eyes of posterity at the same time that he was most efficiently leading a hard-hitting group of fighting horsemen. He is presented now in a good new biography by Burke Davis— Jeb Stuart, the Last Cavalier —which is very much worth reading.

Mr. Davis has the right title. Stuart was the last cavalier. The Civil War was the last war in which he could have operated; indeed—and this is perhaps the point of the whole business—he was just slightly obsolete even for the Civil War, although neither he nor the men who fought against him