Noble Brutes: How Eastern Horses Transformed English Culture by Donna Landry (review)

99 beautifully illustrated books on eighteenth -century topics, most recently Fragonard’s Allegories of Love, Carmontelle ’s Landscape Transparencies, and European Art of the Eighteenth Century. While none of these works directly engages the Scriblerians, all provide a broadened perspective on the aesthetic theories and practices of the eighteenth century and hence are of increasing value as we reeducate ourselves to think about literature as something other than economic, social, and political propaganda. Melvyn New University of Florida DONNA LANDRY. Noble Brutes: How Eastern Horses Transformed English Culture. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 2009. Pp. 240. $50. The larger part of this study concerns itself with the emergence of the ‘‘English ’’ Thoroughbred, a hybrid breed of horse genetically acquired by mixing delicate but powerfully agile Eastern blood stock—Arab, Barb, or Turk— with sturdier, weight-carrying English horses. Between 1650 and 1750, when horse ownership throughout the British Isles increased dramatically, the Thoroughbred was embraced as the equine ideal. Elegant, fast, and uncommonly sensitive to its rider’s will, it excelled at racing and hunting, two pastimes central to English self-definition. Richly represented in literature and art, the Thoroughbred became metonymically evocative of English national identity. Yet as Ms. Landry points out, the Thoroughbred ’s ‘‘Englishness was as much a fiction . . . as was the consumption of coffee and tea as quintessentially English drinks.’’ Nevertheless, this fiction became a reality. In addition to their genetic codes favoring intelligence and agility, the imported Eastern horses arrived with exotic legends about their sensitive and cooperative relationships with humans, forged by the desert’s brutal living conditions. The Eastern horse’s speed and its history of cooperative partnership with humans resulted in a new and lighter English hunting seat, particularly fit for racing. This, Ms. Landry claims, marks ‘‘racing’s triumph within the English imagination.’’ The lighter seat, with its emphasis on partnership with the highly sensitive horse, became a favorite way of representing English leadership. The Thoroughbred’s speed propelled ‘‘the ideology of free forward movement,’’ which became ‘‘an enactment of and analogy for political liberty and imperial adventuring.’’ These are richly suggestive claims that complement the notion of ‘‘progress’’ so central to post-Revolution concepts of Englishness and of English history. The study provides a compelling review of the elements of free forward movement by examining bits, saddles, riding postures , specific horses, and their genealogies . Determining how such movement embodied ideology and what that ideology was are tasks left largely to the reader. At times, the narrative’s forwardmoving linearity diminishes the complexity of the genetic and cultural hybridity it aims at exposing. Ms. Landry argues rightly, for example, that the older , highly stylized training of the art of manége riding or the haute école, enthusiastically promoted by William Cavendish, Duke of Newcastle, was supplanted by a new training focusing on speed and freedom. But beneath her ‘‘before’’ and ‘‘after’’ snapshots are complex historical processes endemic to cultural hybridity. Cavendish was not 100 simply a relic of the past, though he was, to be sure, considered outdated by the Restoration. When he boasted in 1667 that his horses ‘‘wanted nothing of Reasonable Creatures, but speaking,’’ he certainly met with laughter. Older courtiers like Cavendish and Clarendon were booted out by a new order of savagely satirical ultra-sophisticates, who would have scoffed at such a claim’s lack of irony. Cavendish’s skilled horsemanship did not, after all, make up for his deficient military strategy. When his cavalry was attacked at Marston Moor, he was haplessly calling for a pipe of tobacco. Nevertheless, his faith in his horses’ rationality , evident in his lavishly produced volumes on horses, proved profoundly influential and was in itself innovative . As this study itself explains, the legacy of Cavendish’s theories can be detected in eighteenth-century equine portraits. George Stubbs’s painting of Cavendish’s descendants, William Henry Cavendish-Bentinck, 3rd Duke of Portland, and His Brother Lord Edward Bentinck, with a Groom and Horses (1766–1767), depicts the brothers with their horses in a field near a leaping bar. As Ms. Landry observes, ‘‘the leaping bar may not have signified the haute école as plainly as would the twin pillars of the mane...