| <The Saturday Review, October 26, 1867>
| <Donkey Racing>
| <pb n="534">
| It would be impossible, we fear, to convert Tattersall's to 
| any very vivid belief in the theory of donkey-racing, or to 
| secure a shrine in the columns of <hi> Bell's Life </hi> for 
| the great line of asinine victories which pass away 
| unrecorded for want of a bard. But, sport or not, it must be 
| owned that the donkey-race has a subtle pleasure of its 
| own, and that, if banished from the affections of the Ring, it 
| appeals, and not wholly in vain, to a class of sympathizers 
| who are for the most part unstirred by the Derby. At this 
| particular time the amusement comes the closer to us in the 
| opportunity which it affords for alleviating the inevitable 
| boredom of a country-house. We wave a last farewell to 
| croquet as it passes away with the rain and the east wind, 
| but rain and east wind give an additional zest to the 
| extemporized donkey-race; and while croquet is more 
| adapted to the feet of Lord Macaulay's <p> "laughing 
| girls" </p> than to the gouty toes of declining age, young 
| men and maidens, old men and children can alike find joy 
| in a donkey-race. The race itself may be taken perhaps as 
| the highest expression of the absurdity which results from 
| the sudden inversion of common ideas. To mount a steed 
| with the view of as nearly as possible standing still, to 
| devote the energies of one's whip to the back, not of one's 
| own, but of one's rival's donkey, and finally to win the 
| prize by coming in last in the competition for it, are three 
| elements of the donkey-race which are in sufficient contrast 
| to our common habits and conceptions of the nature of 
| things to make up a sufficiently humorous whole. It is 
| difficult perhaps to analyse all the subtle pleasure we derive 
| from them, but certainly one essential ingredient lies in the 
| grim satisfaction with which we watch the ridiculous waste 
| of human effort. It is a little hard upon quiet people to live 
| in an age of power-looms and express trains, to have roared 
| into ears deafened by the whirr and steam-whistle that <p> 
| "labour is the universal conqueror," </p> and to be 
| elbowed off the pavement of life by every rough fellow 
| whose idea of existence lies simply in toiling and moiling. 
| We are far from grudging energy its success, but after all 
| the paeans which have been chaunted in the daily papers 
| over the boundless powers of human endeavour, there is 
| certainly a glow of secret satisfaction in the discovery that 
| nature has set bounds to it which it cannot pass, and that the 
| <p> "strenuous effort" </p> which makes such a clatter 
| about us is wasted on a donkey.
| But of course the climax of absurdity, and with it the height 
| of pleasure, is reached in the award of the prize for the 
| contest, not to the first donkey, but to the last; and it may 
| be worth while to examine how many of the more refined 
| feelings of our social life derive their pleasure from 
| circumstances somewhat analogous to a donkey-race. Take, 
| for instance, the reverence for old age. It must be owned 
| that the mere fact of preservation in the face of the 
| extinction of contemporaries, gives a sort of value to a host 
| of old people who are simply valueless in themselves. We 
| all agree to acknowledge a sort of consecration in eighty 
| summers, and though Jack started as the fool of the family, 
| yet, if Jack lives long enough, his words, which really 
| remain as foolish as ever, will be listened to and quoted as 
| devoutly as the sayings of Nestor. The old, in fact, win 
| most of their reverence like the donkey, simply by coming 
| in last. And this is especially the case with the class which 
| we may be permitted to call <p> "Social Dodos," </p> 
| where, in the changes of time and fashion, the generation 
| which has passed away differs so totally from the 
| generation to which we belong as to confer on its solitary 
| survivor the representative character of a type. We can 
| hardly imagine, for instance, anything more perfectly 
| wearisome than a fop of the golden days of George IV.; but 
| as the race of fops has passed away, a fop who has 
| managed to survive becomes inexpressibly precious. We 
| are charmed with the peep he gives us into a past so 
| incomprehensible, and airs and affectations which would 
| bore us out of patience in a contemporary acquire in a 
| Dodo the romantic interest of historical remains. In other 
| words, the bird which was brought by Tradescant from 
| Madagascar was a fat, unwieldy, waddling creature, but it 
| was a Dodo, and the fragments we have of it are the last 
| representatives of the Dodo race. And the interest we are 
| speaking of is far from being confined to persons; an 
| opinion, however ridiculous, gains value as soon as it is left 
| high and dry in the mud, and every professor of it, save the 
| last, has passed away. It was only when the survivors of the 
| '45 had dwindled down to a few lairds and widows that the 
| fever of Jacobite enthusiasm broke out in every Lowland 
| household, and the children of men who had sworn at the 
| <p> "bare-legged reivers and cattle-stealers" </p> twanged 
| their harpsichords to the tune of "Charlie over the water." 
| In the same way, now that hatred of the French and the 
| worship of port hover on the verge of extinction, it is 
| amusing to
| <pb n="535">
| find how proud we are at being able to exhibit some 
| bigoted old squire who still holds tenaciously to the creed 
| of his youth, and believes in the virtues of a bottle and the 
| wooden shoes of the French. He is <p> "a fine old Tory" 
| </p> because he is one of the last of the Tories. He has won 
| his crown simply by letting other men go by him, and by 
| standing still.
| But, beside this tribute to the virtue of pure immobility 
| which life borrows from the donkey-race, there is in both 
| the interest which man seems inevitably to feel in anything 
| which offers a determined resistance to human effort. In all 
| cases of conversion it is not the early convert that we prize, 
| but the late one. The comer into the vineyard at the 
| eleventh hour gets usually something more than his penny 
| a-day. If the father of the family is to be wheedled into 
| taking that delightful grouse-moor in the North for his 
| spendthrift in the Guards, his generosity will be appreciated 
| in exact proportion to the extent of his resistance. It is when 
| he has the sagacity to yield at the precise moment of his 
| son's despair, that filial gratitude reaches its highest pitch. 
| It is seldom pops over whom much fuss is made in the case 
| of an imprudent engagement; he is far too easily talked 
| over, and wept into compliance with fate, to be of much 
| importance in the matter. But the steady obduracy of the 
| British mother makes her a very important person indeed. 
| She is great just because it is known that of all the 
| household she, like the donkey, will insist on coming in 
| last. But perhaps the nearest approach to the theory of 
| donkey-racing may be found in the theory of the British 
| jury, where twelve men are penned up, without fire and 
| candle, with the view of ascertaining which can hold 
| longest out against hunger and evidence, and when, of the 
| twelve, it is the last to be convinced who alone becomes an 
| object of public interest. Nobody who has ever read Lord 
| Macaulay's narrative of the Trial of the Seven Bishops will 
| forget the juror who singly held out for a conviction, and 
| the breathless thrill with which we wait to see whether he 
| will fulfil his threat of eating his boots, and so doom the 
| saintly patriots to the Tower. But the crown of the 
| donkey-race is often won on a more public arena than these; the 
| glories of any political cause invariably go, not to its earlier 
| advocates, but to the man who is the last to espouse it. Sir 
| Robert Peel, after clinging to Protection long enough to see 
| most of the donkeys of politics in front of him, took meekly 
| the chaplet of the victory of Free Trade; and in our own day 
| a yet adroiter politician ~~ after fighting, as he had pledged 
| himself to fight, <p> "to the last," </p> the battle of the 
| Constitution ~~ has passed at that last hour into the 
| enemy's lines, to be at once hailed as the hero of Reform. 
| Religious proselytes are, we believe, usually appreciated in 
| the same manner, in exact proportion to the difficulty of 
| securing them. The enthusiastic 'vert who rushes to the 
| bosom of his new communion finds very little warmth in it, 
| the warmth being in fact reserved for the shy, wary bird 
| before whom the net is spread oft-times in vain, and who, if 
| he is to come in at all, comes in after a thousand evasions, 
| and manages to come in last. In theological and religious 
| matters, indeed, donkey-racing finds its grandest field. 
| Bigotry, however ferocious, and prejudice, however absurd, 
| give their holder a certain definite theological position if he 
| happens to be the last who holds them. It is one of the 
| mysteries of the age, a mystery which we do not pretend to 
| fathom, why the electors of Peterborough persist in 
| returning Mr. Whalley to Parliament. But there can be no 
| cause for wonder at the position which, once returned, he 
| secures there. The last of the Romans has always been a 
| character of great historic interest, and Mr. Whalley is the 
| last of the anti-Romans. All the wild unreasoning hatred, all 
| the childish suspicion and insult of men who differed from 
| them in religion, which were in past times the common 
| heritage of Englishmen, linger now in a single Whalley. 
| And as the last Dodo of religious persecution, the one 
| living representative of departed Alvas and Torquemadas, 
| Mr. Whalley holds his position in the House. Whack and 
| spur are simply wasted on the member for Peterborough; in 
| the donkey-race of theological toleration Mr. Whalley wins 
| his peculiar victory by coming in last.
| The feature, however of the donkey-race which most 
| impresses an observer strange to the sport is the energy 
| which each rider displays in inducing his rival's donkey to 
| precede his own. But it is hardly stranger than the pleasure 
| which some of the cleverest men in every age have felt in 
| success which only their self-devotion has achieved for 
| others. The parasite is commonly an animal of the lowest 
| order, but it seems to be the privilege of men such as 
| Mirabeau to throw a spell over minds at least equal to their 
| own ~~ minds which learn at least to live and move only in 
| the life of the second self whom they inspire. A man like 
| Dumont, for instance, is content to sacrifice his own 
| individuality that his hero may think Dumont's thoughts 
| and win fame by Dumont's epigram. There is no doubt 
| something of the charm of mysterious power in acting thus 
| through another hand and another tongue, as well as a 
| cynical amusement at the comedy of errors which is being 
| played out. It is far harder to account for the fate which 
| seems to turn men, even wise and good men, into furtherers 
| of a cause which they know to be evil while they further it. 
| Falkland fighting for a King whom he distrusted, and 
| against a freedom which he loved, is the saddest of all 
| instances of the irony which seems to hover over life and a 
| donkey-race. But it is in the class of <p> "impracticable" 
| </p> men that this characteristic finds its widest 
| development. We hardly know any set of men who reverse 
| the conditions of life so completely as the half-shy, 
| half-humorous fellows who have a smile and a helping hand for 
| <reg orig="every one"> everyone </reg> who is pressing 
| to the front in the donkey-race of 
| life, but whom it is impossible to bring to the front 
| themselves. The pleasure which Dumont felt in being 
| obscured in the glory of a single man they seem to feel in 
| being forgotten in the success of the whole of their fellows. 
| The country rector who has helped one friend on to a 
| deanery and another to a bishopric clings to his rectory still. 
| The squire whose influence returns the most unpopular man 
| in the county shrinks from the prospect of St. Stephens. 
| Their one effort is to whack their neighbour's donkey, and 
| their real content in life arises from the immobility of their 
| own.