TROTTING ON

Until all we drivers are electrified, horses are much like our vehicles. Cars have a gear-box and four gears to choose from. Horses have something like a gear-box and four paces to choose from. At the Grand National, we see them all. It’s the same at other equestrian events: walk, trot, canter and gallop. Somebody, long ago, prescribed this routine. Not even a John Wayne could change the prescription. It’s the way King Arthur knew it. It’s how they charged at Agincourt. The Light Brigade galloped for the guns in the Crimean War. The highwayman came riding, riding, riding up to the old inn door.

The horse and its paces are one of those things in life that are given. We cannot change them. We might wish to see a new colour spectrum. Monet and Chagall might deplore our discontent but the colour range is unyielding. The limit placed upon the artist evokes the best use of space. As G.K. Chesterton said, the most important part of a picture is the frame.

We now live in days when a change in the terms and conditions of human life seems to beckon. Generation after generation accepted what may now be regarded as arbitrary limitations. We may be on the brink (in terms of millennia, that is) of liberation from inherited restrictions.

A visit to Genesis reminds us that life in a garden and life with other animals is how things have been through millennia. Adam named the animals. He did not give the zebra its stripes nor the crocodile is armour. We have discovered selective breeding and DNA and we look at what many would regard as an open door. But ‘thus far and no further’ has its place in the human condition. We may find ourselves curbing our ambitions. We may find truth in the early pages of Genesis.

ESTHER WATERS

George Moore’s novel of that name came out in in 1894 and dealt with gambling and a single mother. Moore was Irish and he broke fresh ground by his choice of subject.

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