CHAPTER X.
REINS, VOICE, AND WHIP.
When you have decided to your own satisfaction that you are mistress of the art of riding from balance—can trot and canter in circles, and in a figure of 8, without reins or stirrup, with waist pliant and nicely hollowed, and shoulders well thrown back—you may, with advantage, take up the reins and learn the uses of them.
Learners, to whom I have endeavoured to expound this theory of teaching, have asked me once or twice whether there was not some less difficult way by which they might be taught; and I have no doubt that many among my lady readers are longing to ask me the same question. Certainly there is; in fact there are several ways which will be found very much less difficult than the one that I am striving to teach. Hosts of riding-masters will engage to perfect you (or very nearly so) in six lessons—will put you on a horse, give you a stirrup and a stout pair of reins, and adjure you volubly to “hold on,” taking very little further trouble about you; and if you are a plucky, intelligent girl you will hold on, and will canter and trot too, in a sort of way, within the specified time,—and your instructor will take your money with a smile, and allow you to go out into the park and make a show of yourself, until some really kind disinterested friend warns you that things are entirely wrong, and persuades you to go and unlearn all that has already been taught you.
There are just two ways of doing everything in this world—the right and the wrong, and the latter is always, unfortunately, very much the easier of the two, although so much the more unsatisfying in the end. I am quite willing to acknowledge that some very nice horsewomen have learned all that they know of riding without ever having gone through one-half the labour which I have set forth as necessary; but those four little words, “all that they know,” contain the whole meaning of the matter. I am willing to allow, also, that there are prodigies in the world—at riding as at everything else—who can look nice, and go straight, and seemingly do nothing amiss, and who yet have never been taught to ride at all; but these are uncommon creatures, quite beyond the study of books on horsemanship, or on anything else. They form, in fact, the exceptions to the rule, that ladies who have learned to ride in the ordinary way and from ordinary teachers, do not ride well, or correctly; and that even in cases where their appearance on horseback is fairly satisfactory, and their park riding quite as good as many others, the efforts made by them at cross-country riding are miserable, and dangerous to a degree. Balance-riders can alone negotiate a difficult country with safety. Hundreds of ladies get serious falls every season over the difficult doubles of our trying Ward country and the ragged fences of old Kildare, which they would never get had they in the first instance been properly taught. Therefore, being desirous, as I truly am, that all my lady readers shall excel at an art which is so well worth studying, I have laid down the best practical directions for their instruction, in the hope that they may accept and profit by them; and I promise fearlessly that by so doing they will be in the first flight when others are on the roadside, and in the saddle when those who trust for safety to rein and stirrup are exploring the slimy depths of some uncomfortable ditch.
WALL JUMPING.
Having now arrived at the question of holding the reins, we shall consider their uses and abuses from a common-sense point of view. You are not to regard them in any degree as a means of preserving your own equilibrium—this I have already taught you. To ride from a horse’s head is one of the gravest faults of which an equestrian can be guilty; nor must you depend altogether upon the bridle for the management of your mount, this is a very general error, and one that I want you strictly to avoid. Horses are controlled by three things: the reins, the voice, and the legs—and a lady rider must make her whip-handle serve her for the management and guidance of her mount on the off side, where a man has the advantage of having his right leg to assist him in the office. Of this more anon, for I mean to touch lightly upon the three controlling powers.
First, the reins. Teachers of the haute école style of riding may possibly have told you wonders about military horsemanship, and how the movements of an animal may be regulated by certain subtle touches of the thumb or little finger. I must candidly say that I don’t believe a word of their efficacy for general-purpose riding. I do not think that a learner could ever be brought to understand such theories from printed rules, or to profit by them if understood. Put a girl, for instance, on a high-mettled hunter, loop the reins over the fingers of her left hand only—as fashionable riding-masters do in schools—give her the whip, pointed upwards (another general symptom of defective teaching) in her right hand, and then send her out, not over the smooth grass fields and through the convenient gates of beautiful Leicestershire, where, a few years ago, a whole day’s hunting might be had without having to jump a single fence, but away over the rugged plough and trying ridge-and-furrow which take the wind out of our Irish hunters. The high stone walls of Galway hunting-fields are excellent tests of skill; so also are the five-barred gates of Meath and Carlow, and the yawning chasms—sixteen feet wide and twenty deep—at which we in this hapless yet lovely old country have to steady our horses when coming up, and support them when over, or else lie gasping at the bottom, with broken ribs and damaged noses, and dreadful saddle-pommels making havoc with our frames at every struggle of our engulfed and terrified steeds. Send, I say, a haute école rider out over Irish hunting-grounds, and see what good she can accomplish with the little finger of her left hand! Such teaching is a mere tirade of ornamental nonsense, for which, I believe, no pupil would in the end feel at all obliged.