according to the evidence, and most of his days were passed in the solitude of the woods or among horses. He seems not to have cared much for his mother, nor she for him; but I do not know why. His life was not a normal village boy's life, though most of his biographers have assumed that it was, on evidence which will not stand the most casual scrutiny.

There is no hint of this youthful loneliness in his Memoirs, but they were written fifty years later, when he had become one of the most distinguished men in the world, and the sorrows of youth had dissolved into the shining aureole of a great career. Besides, his Memoirs are extraordinarily objective, and reveal almost nothing of Grant as a human being-except by implication.

Y

CHAPTER II

OBSESSIONS AND FANTASIES

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OUNG GRANT had a girl's primness of manner and

modesty of conduct. There was a broad streak of the

feminine in his personality. He was almost halfwoman, but this strain was buried in the depths of his soul; it never came to the surface, except indirectly, and he was probably not aware of it himself. I know this observation will be received with incredulity, for the conventional portrait of Grant is that of a bearded, puffy, middle-aged man who was never seen without a cigar in his mouth, whose clothes smelled of tobacco, and who was crammed full of masculine prowess.

In his youth his face was like that of a young girl's in its freshness of complexion and delicacy of outline. He was small and slender—but not fragile, for he had muscles of iron. His voice was always soft, clear and musical-though he cared nothing at all for music-and his hands had the long, tapering fingers of a woman. In the army before the Mexican War he was called the "Little Beauty" by the officers of his regiment.

His sense of physical modesty was most unusual-for a man and a soldier-and, in other respects, he was something of a prude. During the Civil War he would take his bath in his tent with the flaps carefully closed and pinned. While his bathing ritual was going on he would not admit even his own The other generals at headquarters were not so finicky. Usually they stood naked in front of their tents in

servant.

the early morning and had their orderlies dash buckets of water over them. Grant declared, when he was nearly sixty years old, that he had never been seen naked by any one since he had been a small boy.

Some of his biographers, feeling that there is no life without romance, have endeavored to find a ray of sweetheart sunshine in his juvenile years. Hamlin Garland writes:

There is a whisper to be heard, also, of a little maid living in those days whose face and voice had come to be very precious to Ulysses. This boyish love was of the sweetest and daintiest type-perhaps unspoken on his part, for he feared the ridicule of his friends, and especially of his elders. It is only a tradition nowodor as of pressed roses and spice-pinks.

-a faint

This legend, with its faded bouquet of roses and spicepinks, has obviously a very insecure toe-hold in history. Mr. Garland was unable to learn the name of this girl, although he went around Georgetown listening to the garrulity of oldtime inhabitants.

The idea that every life must have in it the cherished fire of an early romance is an invention of novelists, and its tacit acceptance as a principle of biographical structure is a proof of the pressure of the novel on other forms of intellectual expression. As a matter of truth, large numbers of men and women reach maturity without ever having been in love; and it is not at all uncommon for people to go through their whole lives without either love or sexual experience.

It is as certain as any historical fact can be that Grant was never immersed in love in the manner of the great lovers; that he never gave himself wholly, at any time, to its ardors. With him love was a function rather than a passion.

But he did take the Georgetown girls on sleigh rides. . . loads of them at a time, boys and girls, gliding over the crisp snow under the yellow winter moon. For this service he was

in great demand, for he had a sleigh and a team of his own, as well as an obliging disposition. One may see him in fancy, hunched over in the front seat, the reins in his hands, clad in his heavy coat and with a fur cap pulled down over his ears. The keen wind plays with the girls' curls and wraps. As the sleigh swings the corners the girls and boys are jumbled together, and there is bucolic jesting and laughter. Ulysses looks straight ahead, flicking the horses now and then, and replying briefly to some occasional bantering remark. This was as close as he ever got in those early days, so it seems, to the golden heart of romance.

$2

The fixed center of Grant's objective character was a highly developed matter-of-fact-ness. Among his contemporaries Lincoln was perhaps his most conspicuous antithesis in personality. Grant was much closer to the soil than Lincoln, despite Lincoln's extreme lowness of origin and the poverty of his early years. Lincoln looked instinctively to the dim twilight regions of the human spirit for his sense of values. The images of men and events did not fall primarily on his mind, but on the retina of his soul. He had the gift of feeling his way through life. Nevertheless, he was neither emotional nor sentimental, for he possessed the rare faculty of turning his spiritual perceptions into logical forms. That is why Lincoln's reasoning was so precise, so closely knit, and so simple it came from the most primitive sources.

On the other hand, Grant's thinking ran outward, not inward, and he thought always in terms of material force. Whenever he found himself in circumstances which made it necessary for him to turn his conceptions into abstract ideas he had to readjust his mental focus with fumbling and effort. His cosmos was composed of streams of physical energy which appeared on the blank wall of perception in the form of com

prehensible human events. When anything happened he realized that it was happening because of physical forces in motion.

This material world was so near to him, and he was so completely in harmony with it, that he might be depicted truthfully-yet symbolically-in the posture of a man standing eternally with a spadeful of earth in his hands.

But, after all, such a picture would be a caricature, fertile with truth, as caricatures often are, though a caricature just the same, for he was not a materialist all the way through. Under the shell of his objectivity lay a repressed sensitiveness which came to the surface in unexpected ways-as in strange personal taboos.

One of his taboos was an aversion to firearms and to the killing of animals.

In southern Ohio, during his youth, every man was an occasional hunter of game, whatever else his occupation happened to be. Men gave pet names to their shotguns, and when they met in groups they discussed the merits of their respective firearms as earnestly as a country club group of our day discusses golf balls and automobiles. Even ten-year-old boys became expert executioners of birds and rabbits.

Ulysses, with his horror of game-hunting, must have seemed somewhat ridiculous to that community of shotgun experts. His aversion to shooting animals lasted all his life. He never attempted to explain it, perhaps because he did not know there was an explanation.

There were times, however, when he came very close to breaking through his taboo. One of these occasions was during the Mexican War, when his regiment was stationed in Texas. He says in his Memoirs:

Each officer carried a shot-gun, and every evening, after going into camp, some would go out and soon return with venison and wild turkeys enough for the entire camp. I, however, never went out, and had no occasion to fire