Samaria concealed its somewhat chilly architectural beauties beneath a
veil of feathery elms and round-topped maples. It was not until you had
climbed the hill from the clump of houses and shops which had grown up
around the railway station,--a place of prosperous ugliness and
unabashed modernity,--that you perceived the respectable evidences of
what is called in America "an ancient town." The village green, and
perhaps a half dozen of the white wooden houses which fronted it with
their prim porticoes, were possibly a little more than a hundred years
old. The low farmhouse, which showed its gambrel-roof and square brick
chimney a few rods down the northern road, was a relic of colonial
days. The stiff white edifice with its pointed steeple, called in
irreverent modern phrase the "Congo" church, claimed an equal
antiquity; but it had been so often repaired and "improved" to suit the
taste of various epochs, that the traces of Sir Christopher Wren in its
architecture were quite confused by the admixture of what one might
describe as the English Sparrow style.
The other buildings on the green, or within sight of it along the roads
north, south, east, and west, had been erected or built-over at
different periods, by prosperous inhabitants or returning natives who
wished to have a summer cottage in their birth-place. These structures,
although irreproachable in their moral aspect, indicated that the
development of the builder's art in Samaria had not followed any known
historical scheme, but had been conducted along sporadic lines of
imitation, and interrupted at least once by a volcanic outbreak of the
style named, for some inscrutable reason, after Queen Anne. On the
edges of the hill, looking off in various directions over the
encircling vale, and commanding charming views of the rolling ridges
which lay beyond, were the houses of the little summer colony of
artists, doctors, lawyers and merchants. Two or three were flamboyant,
but for the most part they blended rather gently with the landscape,
and were of a modesty which gave their owners just ground for pride.
The countenance of the place was placid. It breathed an air of repose
and satisfaction, a spirit which when it refers to outward
circumstances is called contentment, and when it refers to oneself is
called complacency. The Samaritans, in fact, did not think ill of
themselves, and of their village they thought exceeding well. There was
nothing in its situation, its looks, its customs which they would have
wished to alter; and when a slight change came, a new house, a pathway
on the other side of the green, an iron fence around the graveyard, a
golf-links in addition to the tennis-courts, a bridge-whist afternoon
to supplement the croquet club, by an unconscious convention its
novelty was swiftly eliminated and in a short time it became one of the
"old traditions." Decidedly a place of peace was Samaria in
Connecticut,--a place in which "the struggle for life" and the
rivalries and contests of the great outside world were known only by
report. Yet, being human, it had its own inward strifes; and of one of
these I wish to tell the tale.
In the end this internal conflict centred about Leviathan; but in the
beginning I believe that it was of an ecclesiastical nature. At all
events it did not run its course without a manifest admixture of the
_odium theologicum_, and it came near to imperilling the cause of
Christian unity in Samaria.
The Episcopal Church was really one of the more recent old institutions
of the village. It stood beside the graveyard, just around the corner
from the village green; and the type of its wooden architecture, which
was profoundly early Gothic and was painted of a burnt-umber hue
sprinkled with sand to imitate brownstone, indicated that it must have
been built in the Upjohn Period, about the middle of the nineteenth
century. But Samaria, without the slightest disloyalty to the
principles of the Puritans, had promptly adopted and assimilated the
Episcopal form of worship. The singing by a voluntary quartette of
mixed voices, the hours of service, even the sermons, were all of the
Samaritan type. The old rector, Dr. Snodgrass, a comfortably stout and
evangelical man, lived for forty years on terms of affectionate
intimacy with three successive ministers of the Congregational Church,
the deacons of which shared with his vestrymen the control of the
village councils.
The summer residents divided their attendance impartially between the
two houses of worship. Even in the distribution of parts in the amateur
theatricals which were given every year by the villagers in the town
hall at the height of the season, no difference was made between the
adherents of the ancient faith of Connecticut and the followers of the
more recently introduced order of Episcopacy. When old Dr. Snodgrass
died and was buried, the Rev. Cotton Mather Hopkins, who was an
energetic widower of perhaps thirty-five years, made an eloquent
address at his funeral, comparing him to the prophet Samuel, the
apostle John, and a green bay tree whose foundations are built upon the
rock. In short, all was tranquil in the ecclesiastical atmosphere of
Samaria. There was not a cloud upon the horizon.
The air changed with the arrival of the new rector, the Rev. Willibert
Beauchamp Jones, B.D., from the Divinity School of St. Jerome at
Oshkosh. He was a bachelor, not only of divinity but also in the social
sense; a plump young man of eight and twenty summers, with an English
accent, a low-crowned black felt hat, blue eyes, a cherubic smile, and
very high views on liturgics. He was full of the best intentions toward
the whole world, a warm advocate of the reunion of Christendom on his
platform, and a man of sincere enthusiasm who regarded Samaria as a
missionary field and was prepared to consecrate his life to it. The
only point in which he was not true to the teachings of his professors
at St. Jerome's was the celibacy of the parish clergy. Here he held
that the tradition of the Greek Church was to be preferred to that of
the Roman, and felt in his soul that the priesthood and matrimony were
not inconsistent. In fact, he was secretly ambitious to prove their
harmony in his own person. He was a very social young man, and firm in
his resolution to be kind and agreeable to everybody, even to those who
were outside of the true fold.
Mr. Hopkins called on him without delay and was received with
cordiality amounting to _empressement_. The two men talked together in
the friendliest manner of interests that they had in common, books,
politics, and out-of-door sports, to which both of them were addicted.
Mr. Jones offered to lend Mr. Hopkins any of the new books, with which
his library was rather well stocked, and promised to send over the
_Pall Mall Review_, to which he was a subscriber, every week. Mr.
Hopkins told Mr. Jones the name of the best washerwoman in the village,
one of his own new parishioners, as it happened, and proposed to put
him up at once for membership in the Golf Club. In fact the
conversation went off most harmoniously.
"It was extraordinarily kind of you to call so early, my dear fellow,"
said Jones as he followed his guest to the door of the little rectory.
"I take it as a mark of Christian brotherhood; and naturally, as a
clergyman, I want to be as close as possible to every one who is
working in any way for the good of the place where my parish lies."
"Of course!" answered Hopkins. "That's all right. I guess you won't
have any trouble about Christian brotherhood in Samaria. Good-bye till
Monday afternoon."
But as he walked across the green, the skirts of his black frock-coat
flapping in the September breeze, and his brown Fedora hat set at a
reflective angle on the back of his head, he pondered a little over the
precise significance of his _confrère's_ last remark, which had not
altogether pleased him. Was there a subtle shade of difference between
those who were working "in any way" for the good of Samaria, and the
"clergyman" who felt bound to be on good terms with them?
On Monday afternoon they had appointed to take a country walk together,
and Hopkins, who was a lean, long-legged, wiry fellow, with a deep
chest, gray eyes, and a short, crisp brown beard and moustache, led the
way at a lively pace over hill and dale around Lake Marapaug and
back,--fourteen miles in three hours. Jones was rather red when they
returned to the front gate of the rectory about five o'clock, and he
wiped his beaded forehead with his handkerchief as he invited his
comrade to come in and have a cup of tea.
"No, thank you," said Hopkins, "I'm just ready for a bit of work in my
study, now. Nice little stroll, wasn't it? I want you to know the
country about here, and the people too. You mustn't feel strange in
this Puritan region where my church has been established so long. We'll
soon make you feel at home. Good-bye."
An hour later, when Jones had sipped his tea, he looked up from an
article in the _Pall Mall Review_ and began to wonder whether Hopkins
had meant anything in particular by that last remark.
"He's an awfully good chap, to be sure, but just a bit set in his way.
I fancy he has some odd notions. Well, perhaps I shall be able to put
him right, if I am patient and friendly. It is rather plain that I
shall have a lot of missionary work to do here among these dissenters."
So he turned to his bookshelves and took down a volume on _The
Primitive Diaconate and the Reconstruction of Christendom_. Meantime
Hopkins was in his study making notes for a series of sermons on "The
Scriptural Polity of the Early New England Churches."
Well, you can see from this how the great Leviathan conflict began. Two
men meeting with good intentions, both anxious, even determined, to be
the best of friends, yet each unconsciously pressing upon the other the
only point of difference between them. Now add to this a pair of
consciences aggravated by the sense of official responsibilities, and a
number of ladies who were alike in cherishing for one or the other of
these two men a warm admiration, amounting in several cases, shall I
say, to a sentimental adoration, and you have a collection of materials
not altogether favourable to a peaceful combination.
My business, however, is with Leviathan, and therefore I do not propose
to narrate the development of the rivalry between these two excellent
men. How Mr. Jones introduced an early morning service, and Mr. Hopkins
replied with an afternoon musical vespers: how a vested choir of boys
was installed in the brown church, and a cornet and a harp appeared in
the gallery of the white church: how candles were lighted in the
Episcopalian apse, (whereupon Erastus Whipple resigned from the vestry
because he said he knew that he was "goin' to act ugly"), and a
stereopticon threw illuminated pictures of Palestine upon the wall
behind the Congregational pulpit (which induced Abijah Lemon to refuse
to pass the plate the next Sunday, because he said he "wa'nt goin' to
take up no collection for a peep-show in meetin'"): how a sermon beside
the graveyard on "the martyrdom of King Charles I," was followed, on
the green, by a discourse on "the treachery of Charles II": how Mrs.
Slicer and Mrs. Cutter crossed each other in the transfer of their
church relations, because the Slicer boys were not asked to sing in the
vested choir, and because Orlando Cutter was displaced as cornetist by
a young man from Hitchfield: how the Jonesites learned to speak of
themselves as "churchmen" and of their neighbours as "adherents of
other religious bodies," while the Hopkinsians politely inquired as to
the hours at which "mass was celebrated" in the brown edifice and were
careful to speak of their own services as "Divine worship": how Mr.
Jones went so far, in his Washington's Birthday Speech, as to
compliment the architectural effect of "the old meeting-house on the
green, that venerable monument of an earnest period of dissent," to
which Mr. Hopkins made the retort courteous by giving thanks, in his
prayer on the same occasion, for "the gracious memories of fraternal
intercourse which still hallowed the little brown chapel beside the
cemetery": how all these strokes and counterstrokes were given and
exchanged in a decorous and bloodless religious war which enlivened a
Samaritan autumn and winter almost to the point of effervescence: and
how they were prevented from doing any great harm by the general good
feeling and the constitutional sense of humour of the village, it is
not my purpose, I say, to relate in detail.
The fact is, the incipient fermentation passed away almost as naturally
and suddenly as it began. Old Cap'n Elihu Gray, who had made a tidy
fortune in his voyages to the East Indies and retired to enjoy it in a
snug farmhouse beside the Lirrapaug River, a couple of miles below the
village, was reputed to be something of a freethinker, but he used to
come up, every month, to one or other of the two churches to sample a
sermon. His summary of the controversy which threatened the peace of
Samaria, seemed to strike the common-sense of his fellow-townsmen in
the place where friendly laughter lies.
"Wa'al," said he, puffing a meditative pipe, "I've seen folks pray to
cows and jest despise folks 'at prayed to elephants. 'N I've seen folks
whose r'ligion wouldn't 'low 'em to eat pig's meat fight with folks
whose r'ligion wouldn't 'low 'em to eat meat 't all. But I never seen
reel Christians dispise other reel Christians for prayin' at seven in
the mornin' 'stead of at eleven, nor yet fight 'bout the difference
'tween a passel o' boys singin' in white nightgowns an' half-a-dozen
purty young gals tunin' their voices to a pipe-organ an' a harp o'
sollum saound. I don't 'low there is eny devil, but ef ther' wuz, guess
that's the kind o' fight 'd make him grin."
This opinion appeared to reach down to the fundamental saving grace of
humour in the Samaritan mind. The vestry persuaded the Reverend
Willibert that the time was not yet ripe for candles; and the board of
deacons induced the Reverend Cotton Mather to substitute a course of
lectures on the Women of the Bible for the stereopticon exhibitions.
Hostilities gently frothed themselves away and subsided. Decoration Day
was celebrated in Samaria, according to the Hitchfield _Gazette_, "by a
notable gathering in the Town Hall, at which the Rev. Jones offered an
eloquent extemporaneous prayer and the Rev. Hopkins pronounced an
elegant oration on the Civil War, after which the survivors partook of
a banquet at the Hancock Hotel."
But the rivalry between the two leaders, sad to say, did not entirely
disappear with the peaceful reconciliation and commingling of their
forces. On the contrary, it was as if a general engagement had been
abandoned and both the opposing companies had resolved themselves into
the happy audience of a single combat. It was altogether a friendly and
chivalrous contest, you understand,--nothing bitter or malicious about
it,--but none the less it was a _duel a l'outrance_, a struggle for the
mastery between two men whom nature had made rivals, and for whom
circumstances had prepared the arena in the double sphere of love and
angling.
Hopkins had become known, during the seven years of his residence at
Samaria, as the best trout-fisherman of the village, and indeed of all
the tributary region. With the black bass there were other men who were
his equals, and perhaps one or two, like Judge Ward, who spent the
greater part of his summer vacation sitting under an umbrella in a boat
on Lake Marapaug, and Jags Witherbee, the village ne'er-do-weel, who
were his superiors. But with the delicate, speckled, evasive trout he
was easily first. He knew all the cold, foaming, musical brooks that
sang their way down from the hills. He knew the spring-holes in the
Lirrapaug River where the schools of fish assembled in the month of
May, waiting to go up the brooks in the warm weather. He knew the
secret haunts and lairs of the large fish where they established
themselves for the whole season and took toll of the passing minnows.
He knew how to let his line run with the current so that it would go in
under the bushes without getting entangled, and sink to the bottom of
the dark pools, beneath the roots of fallen trees, without the hook
catching fast. He knew how to creep up to a stream that had hollowed
out a way under the bank of a meadow, without shaking the boggy ground.
He had a trick with a detachable float, made from a quill and a tiny
piece of cork, that brought him many a fish from the centre of a
mill-pond. He knew the best baits for every season,--worms, white
grubs, striped minnows, miller's thumbs, bumble-bees, grasshoppers,
young field-mice,--and he knew where to find them.
For it must be confessed that Cotton Mather was a confirmed
bait-fisherman. Confession is not the word that he would have used with
reference to the fact; he would have called it a declaration of
principles, and would have maintained that he was a follower of the
best, the most skilful, the most productive, the fairest, the truly
Apostolic method of fishing.
Jones, on the other hand, was not a little shocked when he discovered
in the course of conversation that his colleague, who was in many
respects such a good sportsman, was addicted to fishing with bait. For
his own angling education had been acquired in a different
school,--among the clear streams of England, the open rivers of
Scotland, the carefully preserved waters of Long Island. He had been
taught that the artificial fly was the proper lure for a true angler to
use.
For coarse fish like perch and pike, a bait was permissible. For
middle-class fish, like bass, which would only rise to the fly during a
brief and uncertain season, a trolling-spoon or an artificial minnow
might be allowed. But for fish whose blood, though cold, was
noble,--for game fish of undoubted rank like the salmon and the trout,
the true angler must use only the lightest possible tackle, the most
difficult possible methods, the cleanest and prettiest possible
lure,--to wit, the artificial fly. Moreover, he added his opinion that
in the long run, taking all sorts of water and weather together, and
fishing through the season, a man can take more trout with the fly than
with the bait,--that is, of course, if he understands the art of
fly-fishing.
You perceive at once that here was a very pretty ground for conflict
between the two men, after the ecclesiastical battle had been called
off. Their community of zeal as anglers only intensified their radical
opposition as to the authoritative and orthodox mode of angling. In the
close season, when the practice of their art was forbidden, they
discussed its theory with vigour; and many were the wit-combats between
these two champions, to which the Samaritans listened in the
drug-store-and-post-office that served them in place of a Mermaid
Tavern. There was something of Shakspere's quickness and elegance in
Willibert's methods; but Cotton Mather had the advantage in learning
and in weight of argument.
"It is unhistorical," he said, "to claim that there is only one proper
way to catch fish. The facts are against you."
"But surely, my dear fellow," replied Willibert, "there is one best
way, and that must be the proper way on which all should unite."
"I don't admit that," said the other, "variety counts for something.
Besides, it is up to you to prove that fly-fishing is the best way."
"Well," answered Willibert, "I fancy that would be easy enough. All the
authorities are on my side. Doesn't every standard writer on angling
say that fly-fishing is the perfection of the art?"
"Not at all," Cotton Mather replied, with some exultation, "Izaak
Walton's book is all about bait-fishing, except two or three pages on
the artificial fly, which were composed for him by Thomas Barker, a
retired confectioner. But suppose all the books were on your side.
There are ten thousand men who love fishing and know about fishing, to
one who writes about it. The proof of the angler is the full basket."
At this Willibert looked disgusted. "You mistake quantity for quality.
It's better to take one fish prettily and fairly than to fill your
basket in an inferior way. Would you catch trout with a net?"
Cotton Mather admitted that he would not.
"Well, then, why not carry your discrimination a little farther and
reject the coarse bait-hook, and the stiff rod, and the heavy line?
Fly-tackle appeals to the æsthetic taste,--the slender, pliant rod with
which you land a fish twenty times its weight, the silken line, the
gossamer leader, the dainty fly of bright feathers concealing the tiny
hook!"
"Concealing!" broke in the advocate of the bait, "that is just the
spirit of the whole art of fly-fishing. It's all a deception. The
slender rod is made of split cane that will bend double before it
breaks; the gossamer leader is of drawn-gut carefully tested to stand a
heavier strain than the rod can put upon it. The trout thinks he can
smash your tackle, but you know he can't, and you play with him
half-an-hour to convince him that you are right. And after all, when
you've landed him, he hasn't had even a taste of anything good to eat
to console him for being caught,--nothing but a little bunch of
feathers which he never would look at if he knew what it was. Don't you
think that fly-fishing is something of a piscatorial immorality?"
"Not in the least," answered Willibert, warming to his work, "it is a
legitimate appeal, not to the trout's lower instinct, his mere physical
hunger, but to his curiosity, his sense of beauty, his desire for
knowledge. He takes the fly, not because it looks like an edible
insect, for nine times out of ten it doesn't, but because it's pretty
and he wants to know what it is. When he has found out, you give him a
fair run for his money and bring him to basket with nothing more than a
pin-prick in his lip. But what does the bait-fisher do? He deceives the
trout into thinking that a certain worm or grub or minnow is wholesome,
nourishing, digestible, fit to be swallowed. In that deceptive bait he
has hidden a big, heavy hook which sticks deep in the trout's gullet
and by means of which the disappointed fish is forcibly and brutally
dragged to land. It lacks refinement. It is primitive, violent,
barbaric, and so simple that any unskilled village lad can do it as
well as you can."
"I think not," said Cotton Mather, now on the defensive, "just let the
village-lad try it. Why, the beauty of real bait-fishing is that it
requires more skill than any other kind of angling. To present your
bait to the wary old trout without frightening him; to make it move in
the water so that it shall seem alive and free"; ("deception," murmured
Willibert), "to judge the proper moment after he has taken it when you
should strike, and how hard; to draw him safely away from the weeds and
roots among which he has been lying; all this takes quite a little
practice and some skill,--a good deal more, I reckon, than hooking and
playing a trout on the clear surface of the water when you can see
every motion."
"Ah, there you are," cried Willibert, "that's the charm of fly-fishing!
It's all open and above-board. The long, light cast of the fly, 'fine
and far off,' the delicate drop of the feathers upon the water, the
quick rise of the trout and the sudden gleam of his golden side as he
turns, the electric motion of the wrist by which you hook him,--that is
the magic of sport."
"Yes," replied the other, "I'll admit there's something in it, but
bait-fishing is superior. You take a long pool, late in the season;
water low and clear; fish lying in the middle; you can't get near them.
You go to the head of the pool in the rapids and stir up the bottom so
as to discolour the water a little----"
"Deceptive," interrupted Willibert, "and decidedly immoral!"
"Only a little," continued Cotton Mather, "a very little! Then you go
down to the bottom of the pool with a hand-line----"
"A hand-line!" murmured the listener, half-shuddering in feigned
horror.
"Yes, a hand-line," the speaker went on firmly, "a long, light
hand-line, without a sinker, baited with a single, clean angle-worm,
and loosely coiled in your left hand. You cast the hook with your right
hand, and it falls lightly without a splash, a hundred feet up stream.
Then you pull the line in very gently, just fast enough to keep it from
sinking to the bottom. When the trout bites, you strike him and land
him by hand, without the help of rod or landing-net or any other
mechanical device. Try this once, and you will see whether it is easier
than throwing the fly. I reckon this was the way the Apostle Peter
fished when he was told to 'go to the sea, and cast a hook, and take up
the fish that first cometh up.' It is the only true Apostolic method of
fishing."
"But, my dear fellow," answered the other, "the text doesn't say that
it was a bait-hook. It may have been a fly-hook. Indeed the text rather
implies that, for it speaks of the fish as 'coming up,' and that means
rising to the fly."