82 Chapters on Animals. 



stimulus. Races are a popular institution ; vacant minds 

 like them ; and they are liked also as an amusement by 

 some minds too distinguished in serious pursuits to be 

 liable to any accusation of vacancy. Yet it seems prob- 

 able that the truest lover of horses would be of all men 

 the least likely to devote himself passionately to the turf. 

 What, to him, could be the pleasure of keeping animals to 

 he trained and ridden by paid agents, and never to know 

 their master .' 



The influence of the turf upon the physical perfection 

 of the horse has not been favourable to his beauty. The 

 race-horse has lost the beauty of nature in one direction, 

 as the prize-pig has departed from it in another. That 

 which his forms express is not beauty, but culture. You 

 see at once that he is a highly artificial product, the 

 creature of wealth and civilisation. Many people admire 

 him for that, because there is an inextricable confusion 

 in the popular mind between ideas of beauty and ideas 

 of careful cultivation. The race-horse has the charms of 

 a tail-coat, of a trained pear-tree, of all such superfine 

 results of human ingenuity, but he has lost the glory of 

 nature. Look at his straight neck, at the way he holds 

 his head, at his eager, anxious eye, often irritable and 

 vicious ! Breeders for the turf have succeeded in sub- 

 stituting the straight line for the curve, as the dominant 

 expressional line, a sure and scientific manner of eradicat- 

 ing the elements of beauty. No real artist would ever 

 paint race-horses from choice. Good artists have occasion- 

 ally painted them for money. The meagre limbs, straight 

 lines, and shiny coat, have slight charms for an artist, who 

 generally chooses either what is beautiful or what is 

 picturesque, and the race-horse is neither picturesque nor 

 beautiful. Imagine what would become of the frieze of the 



