CHAPTER XI. Angling. THE anglers are a race of men who puzzle us. We do not mean for their patience, which is laudable, nor for the infinite non-success of some of them, which is desirable. Neither do we agree with the good old joke attributed to Swift, that angling is always to be considered as 66 a stick and a string, with a fly at one end and a fool at the other." Nay, if he had books with him, and a pleasant day, we can account for the joyousness of that prince of punters, who, having been seen in the same spot one morning and evening, and asked whether he had had any success, said, No, but in the course of the day he had had "a glorious nibble." But the anglers boast of the innocence of their pastime; yet it puts fellow-creatures to the torture. They pique themselves on their meditative faculties; and yet their only excuse is a want of thought. It is this that puzzles us. Old Isaac Walton, their patriarch, speaking of his inquisitorial abstractions on the banks of a river, says, Here we may Think and pray, Stops our breath. Other joys Are but toys, And to be lamented. So saying, he "stops the breath" of a trout, by plucking him up into an element too thin to respire, with a hock and a tortured worm in his jaws— Other joys If you ride, walk, or skate, or play at cricket, or at rackets, or enjoy a ball or a concert, it is "to be lamented." To put pleasure into the faces of half a dozen agreeable women, is a toy unworthy of the manliness of a worm-sticker. But to put a hook into the gills of a carp-there you attain the end of a reasonabl¿ being; there you show yourself truly a lord of the creation. 10 plant your feet occasionally in the mud, is also a pleasing step. So is cutting your ancles with weeds and stones Other joys Are but toys. The book of Isaac Walton upon angling is a delightful performance in some respects. It smells of the country air, and of the flowers in cottage windows. Its pictures of rural scenery, its simplicity, its snatches of old songs, are all good and refreshing ; and his prodigious relish of a dressed fish would not be grudged him, if he had killed it a little more decently. He really seems to have a respect for a piece of salmon; to approach it, like the grace, with his hat off. But what are we to think of a man, who, in the midst of his tortures of other animals, is always valuing himself on his harmlessness; and who actually follows up one of his most complacent passages of this kind, with an injunction to impale a certain worm twice upon the hook, because it is lively, and might get off! All that can be said of such an extraordinary inconsistency is, that having been bred up in an opinion of the innocence of his amusement, and possessing a healthy power of exercising voluntary thoughts (as far as he had any), he must have dozed over the opposite side of the question, so as to become almost, perhaps quite, insensible to it. And angling does, indeed, seem the next thing to dreaming. It dispenses with locomotion, reconciles contradictions, and renders the very countenance null and void. A friend of ours, who is an admirer of Walton, was struck, just as we were, with the likeness of the old angler's face to a fish. It is hard, angular, and of no expression. It seems to have been "subdued to what it worked in ;" to have become native to the watery element. One might have said to Walton, "Oh! flesh, how art thou fishified!" He looks like a pike, dressed in broadcloth instead of butter. The face of his pupil and follower, or, as he fondly called himself, son, Charles Cotton, a poet and a man of wit, is more goodnatured and uneasy.* Cotton's pleasures had not been confined to fishing. His sympathies, indeed, had been a little superabundant, and left him, perhaps, not so great a power of thinking as he pleased. Accordingly, we find in his writings more symp. toms of scrupulousness upon the subject than in those of his father. Walton says, that an angler does no hurt but to fish; and this he counts as nothing. Cotton argues, that the slaughter of them is not to be "repented ;" and he says to his father (which looks as if the old gentleman sometimes thought upon the subject too), There whilst behind some bush we wait The scaly people to betray, We'll prove it just, with treacherous bait, To make the preying trout our prey. This argument, and another about fish's being made for "man's pleasure and diet," are all that anglers have to say for the innocence of their sport. But they are both as rank sophistications as can be; sheer beggings of the question. To kill fish outright is a different matter. Death is common to all; and a trout, speedily killed by a man, may suffer no worse fate than from the jaws of a pike. It is the mode, the lingering cat-like cruelty of the angler's sport, that renders it unworthy. If fish were made to be so treated, then men were also made to be racked and throttled by inquisitors. Indeed, among other advantages of angling, Cotton reckons up a tame, fish-like acquiescence to whatever the powerful choose to inflict. We scratch not our pates, Nor repine at the rates Our superiors impose on our living: But do frankly submit, Knowing they have inore wit In demanding, than we have in giving. • The reader may see both the portraits in the late editious of Walton Whilst quiet we sit We conclude all things fit, Acquiescing with hearty submission, &c. And this was no pastoral fiction. The anglers of those times, whose skill became famous from the celebrity of their names, chiefly in divinity, were great fallers-in with passive obedience. They seemed to think (whatever they found it necessary to say now and then upon that point) that the great had as much right to prey upon men, as the small had upon fishes; only the men, luckily, had not hooks put into their jaws, and the sides of their cheeks torn to pieces. The two most famous anglers in history are Antony and Cleopatra. These extremes of the angling character are very edifying. We should like to know what these grave divines would have said to the heavenly maxim of "Do as you would be done by." Let us imagine ourselves, for instance, a sort of human fish. Air is but a rarer fluid; and at present, in this November weather, a supernatural being who should look down upon us from a higher atmosphere, would have some reason to regard us as a kind of pedestrian carp. Now fancy a Genius fishing for us. Fancy him baiting a great hook with pickled salmon, and twitching up old Isaac Walton from the banks of the river Lee, with the hook through his ear. How he would go up, roaring and screaming, and thinking the devil had got him! Other joys Are but toys. We repeat, that if fish were made to be so treated, then we were just as much made to be racked and suffocated; and a footpad might have argued that old Isaac was made to have his pocket picked, and be tumbled into the river. There is no end of these idle and selfish beggings of the question, which at last argue quite as much against us as for us. And granting them, for the sake of argument, it is still obvious, on the very same ground, that men were also made to be taught better. We do not say, that all anglers are of a cruel nature; many of them, doubtless, are amiable men in other matters. They have only never thought perhaps on that side of the question, or been accustomed from childhood to blink it. But once thinking, their amiableness and their practice become incom. patible; and if they should wish, on that account, never to have thought upon the subject, they would only show, that they cared for their own exemption from suffering, and not for its diminution in general." * * Perhaps the best thing to be said finally about angling is, that not being able to determine whether fish feel it very sensibly or otherwise, we ought to give them the benefit rather than the disadvantage of the doubt, where we can help it; and our feelings the benefit, where we cannot. |