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Page 20
Ah, Yseult! hadst thou but been a book!
VII
THE DELIGHTS OF FENDER-FISHING
I should like to have met Izaak Walton. He is one of the few
authors whom I know I should like to have met. For he was a wise
man, and he had understanding. I should like to have gone
angling with him, for I doubt not that like myself he was more of
an angler theoretically than practically. My bookseller is a
famous fisherman, as, indeed, booksellers generally are, since
the methods employed by fishermen to deceive and to catch their
finny prey are very similar to those employed by booksellers to
attract and to entrap buyers.
As for myself, I regard angling as one of the best of avocations,
and although I have pursued it but little, I concede that
doubtless had I practised it oftener I should have been a better
man. How truly has Dame Juliana Berners said that ``at the
least the angler hath his wholesome walk and merry at his ease,
and a sweet air of the sweet savour of the mead flowers that
maketh him hungry; he heareth the melodious harmony of fowls; he
seeth the young swans, herons, ducks, cotes, and many other fowls
with their broods, which meseemeth better than all the noise of
hounds, the blasts of horns, and the cry of fowls that hunters,
falconers, and fowlers can make. And IF the angler take
fish--surely then is there no man merrier than he is in his
spirit!''
My bookseller cannot understand how it is that, being so
enthusiastic a fisherman theoretically, I should at the same time
indulge so seldom in the practice of fishing, as if, forsooth, a
man should be expected to engage continually and actively in
every art and practice of which he may happen to approve. My
young friend Edward Ayer has a noble collection of books relating
to the history of American aboriginals and to the wars waged
between those Indians and the settlers in this country; my other
young friend Luther Mills has gathered together a multitude of
books treating of the Napoleonic wars; yet neither Ayer nor Mills
hath ever slain a man or fought a battle, albeit both find
delectation in recitals of warlike prowess and personal valor. I
love the night and all the poetic influences of that quiet time,
but I do not sit up all night in order to hear the nightingale or
to contemplate the astounding glories of the heavens.
For similar reasons, much as I appreciate and marvel at the
beauties of early morning, I do not make a practice of early
rising, and sensible as I am to the charms of the babbling brook
and of the crystal lake, I am not addicted to the practice of
wading about in either to the danger either to my own health or
to the health of the finny denizens in those places.
The best anglers in the world are those who do not catch fish;
the mere slaughter of fish is simply brutal, and it was with a
view to keeping her excellent treatise out of the hands of the
idle and the inappreciative that Dame Berners incorporated that
treatise in a compendious book whose cost was so large that only
``gentyll and noble men'' could possess it. What mind has he
who loveth fishing merely for the killing it involves--what mind
has such a one to the beauty of the ever-changing panorama which
nature unfolds to the appreciative eye, or what communion has he
with those sweet and uplifting influences in which the meadows,
the hillsides, the glades, the dells, the forests, and the
marshes abound?
Out upon these vandals, I say--out upon the barbarians who would
rob angling of its poesy, and reduce it to the level of the
butcher's trade! It becomes a base and vicious avocation, does
angling, when it ceases to be what Sir Henry Wotton loved to call
it--``an employment for his idle time, which was then not idly
spent; a rest to his mind, a cheerer of his spirits, a diverter
of sadness, a calmer of unquiet thoughts, a moderator of
passions, a procurer of contentedness, and a begetter of habits
of peace and patience in those that professed and practised it!''
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