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What Great Race Horses Must Have BT SALVATOR. That entity known as "modern fiction" does not gTeatly interest me, especially those s terms of it that are made up into bound i books. It is too much of a revel of smut and slime, of various kinds of "complexes" : and roticisms; too full of fools and flappers, i or else of unbearable and borcsomc people, f either oversexed or no-sexed, to engage the j attention of anybody who has seen quite a few decades slide behind him and during l the process come in contact with all kinds j of real people in all lands of circumstances i and become thoroughly aware how vastly moreTntcresting real life is than what most novelists try to manufacture as presentments of it. Once in a while, however, the dreary mess of husks contains a nice nubbin and once : in a while a good, sound car of corn, that i one can set his teeth in and gnaw clear down to the cob, from end to end. These 1 are the real books, which, like real race i horses, are few and far between. Books 1 which are really worth your while and that you will long carry in memory after their : perusal. A HEAL BOOK. Probably few turfmen have heard of Shane Leslie. However, he has written a real book, which I have already been much en- joying. It is called "The Oppidan," and is , a story of life at the famous English pre- . paratory school, Eton by far the most -famous of the kind in the world. There are ; various classics of English school life, of j which "Tom Brown at Rugby" was the first ; and still remains the most widely read. An-other is Kiplings "Stalky and Co.," for which, however, I must confess small tolerance, ; as it portrays such a gang of young toughs i and miscreants that one cannot accept it as a true picture except of juvenile abnormality, i "The Oppidan" is of the same genre as i these two celebrated stories; it may never , become as celebrated as they are, but in some respects it surpasses both of them. It : is an admirably conceived and written tale, ; which impresses the reader as extremely true to life, full of flashes of poetry but . never exaggerated or sentimentalized. Its somewhat queer title to an American is due to the fact that one class of students at Eton are known as "Oppidans." Shane Leslie was himself an Oppidan, and so is his hero, Peter Darley. The only quarrel I have with the author is that after he has made his hero a living personage by a truly creative art, he has to kill him in the last chapter which, as I see it, is a wanton and unforgiveable thing, for the tragedy was in no way necessary to the proper winding up of the tale. But this, I suppose, was a concession by Shane Leslie to the unwritten law of present-day "literature" that a "happy ending" is "inartistic." XOT LITEJtAItT CItlTICISM. What I have been getting at, howbeit, is not a literary criticism, but something else. As a matter of course, athletics cut a big figure at Eton and they run through "The Oppidan" like a sort of musical theme, which is constantly recurrent and sounded in turn by all the different instruments of the orchestra. One of the big athletic events at Eton is the annual junior steeplechase not a turf event, in the strict sense of the term, yet one of sorts. It is a three-mile cross-country foot race, in which the "new boys" compete with several incidental obstacles and, at the end, an eighteen foot water jump. To Eton it is what the Grand National is to turfmen. According to Shane Leslie, there has been but one junior steeplechase in all Etons history in which the winner at the end of his exhausting three-mile run, was able successfully to make that final eighteen-foot water jump. All the rest, without exception, have landed in the stream and crawled out of it to victory on their hands and knees. Which, indeed, is not at all surprising. Only a super-Etonian could ever have helped such a finish. And great athletic prowess was accorded those who did crawl in. One of the latter is not Peter Darley, but his chum Socston, and after vividly describing the incident, the author goes on to say: THE QUESTION OF "GUTS." "Under the great test his guts had proved their mettle. Now, a great athletic career in running or rowing depends not upon shapeliness or science so much as guts. Form or knowledge cannot procure athletic success, unless there are reposing within many yards of clean white gut, unworn by overstrain, untarnished Dy the hereditary diseases. Upon his guts, the most primitive and insensitive of his organs, an Etonian depends to carry him through the lung-tearing ordeal of rowing or steeplechasing. He must suffer all that a race horse must suffer, the nervous start, the fierce emulation of others as nervous as he, the throbbing course, the slow, drowning exhaustion, the wrestle for speed, the hard agonizing finish, with only the spur of shame or ardor to drive the failing, flagging flesh." Well put, is it not? And eternally true. Shane Leslie uses the race horse for comparative purposes, in unfolding the thesis of the necessity of guts to an athlete, for the race horse is the greatest of all athletes, human or animal. He has not the knowledge behind him of the human athlete to spur him on. He is only the tool of a superior animal, obeying his behests and making a truly sublime struggle purely from instinctive stimuli for no artificial ones can galvanize him to victory if within his organization nature has not implanted the impulse and made it regnant over all others. Shane Leslie rightly uses the homely old word "guts." More euphemistic writers, when referring to these indispensable adjuncts to racing greatness, call them "internal viscera." Of course, the term "viscera" can be used to imply our entire "diabolical inards," but as a matter of common usage it means the intestines, bowels, or guts. Old-fashioned writers on the thoroughbred used to dilate upon the superiority of the "internal viscera" of the blood horse to those of all other and baser breeders. It was quite an article of creed with them. But these days you hear little such doctrine. And "there is a reason." Especially in our own glorious land of freedom. The reason is that races in which guts are desperately needed to pull a horse through are fast becoming outlawed from American race tracks. This is the day of the sprinter, wiiose "internal viscera really dont matter much. Guts play little part in our up-to-date jazz system of racing. It is almost a matter of indifference, if a horses life is to be spent racing five or six furlongs. s i : i f j l j i : i 1 i 1 : , . ; j ; ; i i i , : ; . occasionally seven or eight, and perhaps on i some rare occasion a little bit farther, whether he has anything but just speed. The turf swarms with horses which can get any of the sprinting distances in close to record time, occasionally beating it. In the stud we have stallions, the prospective progenitors of our future turf idols, whose owners proudly "tell the world," at space rates, how they beat the six-furlong record at Aqueduct or Jamaica, or approximated the mark for seven furlongs at Belmont Park or Saratoga. This appears to have become something greatly to be boasted of. DECLINE OF GUTS. But if you are in search of horses with something beside just speed; of horses with guts, capable of desperate things should occasion require, something really great or heroic, tests that only greatness can sustain, you will look for the most part in vain. And the most notable examples you will encounter will, with few exceptions, prove to be not home products, but importations. The gut-testing classics still exist across the water which is one reason why breeders keep going there and spending their money for breeding stock. AVhen a stallion is put to the stud he can transmit to his offspring only a certain proportion of his own attributes. AVhen the gamete of the males spermatoza conjugates with that of the females ovum and a new individual is born, that individual inherits from both sire and dame. Sometimes one may be dominant in influence, sometimes another, sometimes a sort of "balanced ration" from both may obtain. But the point is only a portion of the begetters own character can be inherited. When, therefore, that begetter has practically nothing but just speed to transmit, there is bound to begin a petering-out process from the start. The transmission of heredity is by the process of fission, or splitting-up and many arc the splinters that result. As evidence, our race tracks today are littered with them. For are there not herds of thoroughbreds which, if the form charts are correct and to be relied on, quit to nothing in getting even five or six furlongs? SPEED WITHOUT GUTS. Wlhen a progenitor has nothing to split up, among his offspring, but six and seven-furlong speed, without guts to go on, ycji must not expect too much of him. He hasnt much to deposit in the bank of heredity and it is easy to overdraw the account. The cheerful way in which many breeders and owners continue to write checks against accounts that nature has labeled "no funds" continues just the same to be one of the most perennial of turf phenomena. Occasionally, however, there develops a case of atavism; a throw-back or "revert." Here and there a real horse, with real guts, appears. And he is not long in making himself felt. He "stands out" as they say. But as the biggest prizes are not for his kind at least in our America he is becoming something of an anachronism. He is almost as much out of place as a Wagner would be doing a saxophone "blues" in a "palais de dance" or ere long will be. And the public, which, when all is said and done, still loves horses, as it does men, with guts in themi, while it may be fooled into the idea that it is getting "what it wants" a good deal of the time, is not all the time. How instant is its answer when it can in any way persuade itself that the real thing is being served up to it! In other words, not just speed with which it is in the way to be satiated but something else beside. Something which, like the Eton boy in "The Oppidan," proves, under a great test, that it has guts and mettle in it.
