‘In Nature there is nothing melancholy’
Mark that slender, graceful, yellow warbler, running along the high oak
boughs like a perturbed spirit, seeking restlessly, anxiously, something
which he seems never to find; and uttering every now and then a long
anxious cry, four or five times repeated, which would be a squeal, were
it not so sweet. Suddenly he flits away, and flutters round the pendant
tips of the beech-sprays like a great yellow butterfly, picking the
insects from the leaves; then flits back to a bare bough, and sings, with
heaving breast and quivering wings, a short, shrill, feeble, tremulous
song; and then returns to his old sadness, wandering and complaining all
day long.
Is there no melancholy in that cry? It sounds sad: why should it not be
meant to be sad? We recognize joyful notes, angry notes, fearful notes.
They are very similar (strangely enough) in all birds. They are very
similar (more strangely still) to the cries of human beings, especially
children, when influenced by the same passions. And when we hear a note
which to us expresses sadness, why should not the bird be sad? Yon wood
wren has had enough to make him sad, if only he recollects it; and if he
can recollect his road from Morocco hither, he may be recollects likewise
what happened on the road—the long weary journey up the Portuguese coast,
and through the gap between the Pyrenees and the Jaysquivel, and up the
Landes of Bordeaux, and across Brittany, flitting by night, and hiding
and feeding as he could by day; and how his mates flew against the
lighthouses, and were killed by hundreds; and how he essayed the British
Channel, and was blown back, shrivelled up by bitter blasts; and how he
felt, nevertheless, that ‘that wan water he must cross,’ he knew not why:
but something told him that his mother had done it before him, and he was
flesh of her flesh, life of her life, and had inherited her ‘instinct’—as
we call hereditary memory, in order to avoid the trouble of finding out
what it is, and how it comes. A duty was laid on him to go back to the
place where he was bred; and he must do it: and now it is done; and he is
weary, and sad, and lonely; and, for aught we know, thinking already that
when the leaves begin to turn yellow, he must go back again, over the
Channel, over the Landes, over the Pyrenees, to Morocco once more. Why
should he not be sad? He is a very delicate bird, as both his shape and
his note testify. He can hardly keep up his race here in England; and is
accordingly very uncommon, while his two cousins, the willow wren and the
chiffchaff, who, like him, build for some mysterious reason domed nests
upon the ground, are stout, and busy, and numerous, and thriving
everywhere. And what he has gone through may be too much for the poor
wood wren’s nerves; and he gives way; while willow wren, black-cap,
nightingale, who have gone by the same road and suffered the same
dangers, have stoutness of heart enough to throw off the past, and give
themselves up to present pleasure. Why not?—who knows? There is labour,
danger, bereavement, death in nature; and why should not some, at least,
of the so-called dumb things know it, and grieve at it as well as we?
Why not?—Unless we yield to the assumption (for it is nothing more) that
these birds act by some unknown thing called instinct, as it might be
called _x_ or _y_; and are, in fact, just like the singing birds which
spring out of snuff-boxes, only so much better made, that they can eat,
grow, and propagate their species. The imputation of acting by instinct
cuts both ways. We, too, are creatures of instinct. We breathe and eat
by instinct: but we talk and build houses by reason. And so may the
birds. It is more philosophical, surely, to attribute actions in them to
the same causes to which we attribute them (from experience) in
ourselves. ‘But if so,’ some will say, ‘birds must have souls.’ We must
define what our own souls are, before we can define what kind of soul or
no-soul a bird may or may not have. The truth is, that we want to set up
some ‘dignity of human nature;’ some innate superiority to the animals,
on which we may pride ourselves as our own possession, and not return
thanks with fear and trembling for it, as the special gift of Almighty
God. So we have given the poor animals over to the mechanical
philosophy, and allowed them to be considered as only mere cunningly
devised pieces of watch-work, if philosophy would only spare us, and our
fine human souls, of which we are so proud, though they are doing all the
wrong and folly they can from one week’s end to the other. And now our
self-conceit has brought its own Nemesis; the mechanical philosophy is
turning on us, and saying, ‘The bird’s “nature” and your “human nature”
differ only in degree, but not in kind. If they are machines, so are
you. They have no souls, you confess. You have none either.’
But there are those who neither yield to the mechanical philosophy nor
desire to stifle it. While it is honest and industrious, as it is now,
it can do nought but good, because it can do nought but discover facts.
It will only help to divide the light from the darkness, truth from
dreams, health from disease. Let it claim for itself all that it can
prove to be of the flesh, fleshly. That which is spiritual will stand
out more clearly as of the Spirit. Let it thrust scalpel and microscope
into the most sacred penetralia of brain and nerve. It will only find
everywhere beneath brain and beneath nerve, that substance and form which
is not matter nor phenomenon, but the Divine cause thereof; and while it
helps, with ruthless but wholesome severity, to purge our minds from
idols of the cave and idols of the fane, it will leave untouched, more
clearly defined, and therefore more sacred and important than ever—
‘Those first affections,
Those shadowy recollections,
Which, be they what they may,
Are yet the fountain light of all our day,
Are yet the master light of all our seeing;
Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make
Our noisy years seem moments in the being
Of the eternal silence; truths that wake
To perish never;
Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavour,
Nor man nor boy,
Nor all that is at enmity with joy,
Can utterly abolish or destroy.
* * * * *
Then sing, ye birds, sing out with joyous sound,
as the poet-philosopher bids you. Victorious analysis will neither
abolish you, nor the miraculous and unfathomable in you and in your song,
which has stirred the hearts of poets since first man was man. And if
anyone shall hint to us that we and the birds may have sprung originally
from the same type; that the difference between our intellect and theirs
is one of degree, and not of kind, we may believe or doubt: but in either
case we shall not be greatly moved. ‘So much the better for the birds,’
we will say, ‘and none the worse for us. You raise the birds towards us:
but you do not lower us towards them. What we are, we are by the grace
of God. Our own powers and the burden of them we know full well. It
does not lessen their dignity or their beauty in our eyes to hear that
the birds of the air partake, even a little, of the same gifts of God as
we. Of old said St. Guthlac in Crowland, as the swallows sat upon his
knee, “He who leads his life according to the will of God, to him the
wild deer and the wild birds draw more near;” and this new theory of
yours may prove St. Guthlac right. St. Francis, too—he called the birds
his brothers. Whether he was correct, either theologically or
zoologically, he was plainly free from that fear of being mistaken for an
ape, which haunts so many in these modern times. Perfectly sure that he
himself was a spiritual being, he thought it at least possible that birds
might be spiritual beings likewise, incarnate like himself in mortal
flesh; and saw no degradation to the dignity of human nature in claiming
kindred lovingly with creatures so beautiful, so wonderful, who (as he
fancied in his old-fashioned way) praised God in the forest, even as
angels did in heaven. In a word, the saint, though he was an ascetic,
and certainly no man of science, was yet a poet, and somewhat of a
philosopher; and would have possibly—so do extremes meet—have hailed as
orthodox, while we hail as truly scientific, Wordsworth’s great saying—
‘Therefore am I still
A lover of the meadows and the woods
And mountains; and of all that we behold
From this green earth; of all the mighty world
Of eye and ear—both what they half create,
And what perceive; well pleased to recognize
In Nature and the language of the sense,
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
Of all my moral being.’
II.
_CHALK-STREAM STUDIES_. {29}
FISHING is generally associated in men’s minds with wild mountain
scenery; if not with the alps and cataracts of Norway, still with the
moors and lochs of Scotland, or at least with the rocky rivers, the
wooded crags, the crumbling abbeys of Yorkshire, Derbyshire, Hereford, or
the Lowlands. And it cannot be denied that much of the charm which
angling exercises over cultivated minds, is due to the beauty and novelty
of the landscapes which surround him; to the sense of freedom, the
exhilarating upland air. Who would prefer the certainty of taking trout
out of some sluggish preserve, to the chance of a brace out of Edno or
Llyn Dulyn? The pleasure lies not in the prize itself, but in the pains
which it has cost; in the upward climbs through the dark plantations,
beside the rock-walled stream; the tramp over the upland pastures, one
gay flower-bed of blue and purple butter-wort; the steady breathless
climb up the crags, which looked but one mile from you when you started,
so clear against the sky stood out every knoll and slab; the first stars
of the white saxifrage, golden-eyed, blood-bedropt, as if a fairy had
pricked her finger in the cup, which shine upon some green cushion of wet
moss, in a dripping crack of the cliff; the first grey tufts of the
Alpine club-moss, the first shrub of crowberry, or sea-green rose-root,
with its strange fleshy stems and leaves, which mark the
two-thousand-feet-line, and the beginning of the Alpine world; the
scramble over the arid waves of the porphyry sea aloft, as you beat round
and round like a weary pointer dog in search of the hidden lake; the last
despairing crawl to the summit of the Syenite pyramid on Moel Meirch; the
hasty gaze around, far away into the green vale of Ffestiniog, and over
wooded flats, and long silver river-reaches, and yellow sands, and blue
sea flecked with flying clouds, and isles and capes, and wildernesses of
mountain peaks, east, west, south, and north; one glance at the purple
gulf out of which Snowdon rises, thence only seen in full majesty from
base to peak: and then the joyful run, springing over bank and boulder,
to the sad tarn beneath your feet: the loosening of the limbs, as you
toss yourself, bathed in perspiration, on the turf; the almost awed pause
as you recollect that you are alone on the mountain-tops, by the side of
the desolate pool, out of all hope of speech or help of man; and, if you
break your leg among those rocks, may lie there till the ravens pick your
bones; the anxious glance round the lake to see if the fish are moving;
the still more anxious glance through your book to guess what they will
choose to take; what extravagant bundle of red, blue, and yellow
feathers, like no insect save perhaps some jewelled monster from Amboyna
or Brazil—may tempt those sulkiest and most capricious of trout to cease
for once their life-long business of picking leeches from among those
Syenite cubes which will twist your ankles and break your shins for the
next three hours. What matter (to a minute philosopher, at least) if,
after two hours of such enjoyment as that, he goes down again into the
world of man with empty creel, or with a dozen pounders and two-pounders,
shorter, gamer, and redder-fleshed than ever came out of Thames or
Kennet? What matter? If he has not caught them, he might have caught
them; he has been catching them in imagination all the way up; and if he
be a minute philosopher, he holds that there is no falser proverb than
that devil’s beatitude—‘Blessed is he who expecteth nothing, for he shall
not be disappointed.’
Say, rather, Blessed is he who expecteth everything, for he enjoys
everything once at least: and if it falls out true, twice also.
Yes. Pleasant enough is mountain fishing. But there is one objection
against it, that it is hard work to get to it; and that the angler, often
enough half-tired before he arrives at his stream or lake, has left for
his day’s work only the lees of his nervous energy.
Another objection, more important perhaps to a minute philosopher than to
the multitude, is, that there is in mountain-fishing an element of
excitement: an element which is wholesome enough at times for every one;
most wholesome at all times for the man pent up in London air and London
work; but which takes away from the angler’s most delicate enjoyment,
that dreamy contemplative repose, broken by just enough amusement to keep
his body active, while his mind is quietly taking in every sight and
sound of nature. Let the Londoner have his six weeks every year among
crag and heather, and return with lungs expanded and muscles braced to
his nine months’ prison. The countryman, who needs no such change of air
and scene, will prefer more homelike, though more homely, pleasures.
Dearer than wild cataracts or Alpine glens are the still hidden streams
which Bewick has immortalized in his vignettes, and Creswick in his
pictures; the long glassy shallow, paved with yellow gravel, where he
wades up between low walls of fern-fringed rock, beneath nut, and oak,
and alder, to the low bar over which the stream comes swirling and
dimpling, as the water-ouzel flits piping before him, and the murmur of
the ringdove comes soft and sleepy through the wood. There, as he wades,
he sees a hundred sights and hears a hundred tones, which are hidden from
the traveller on the dusty highway above. The traveller fancies that he
has seen the country. So he has; the outside of it, at least: but the
angler only sees the inside. The angler only is brought close face to
face with the flower, and bird, and insect life of the rich river banks,
the only part of the landscape where the hand of man has never
interfered, and the only part in general which never feels the drought of
summer, ‘the trees planted by the waterside whose leaf shall not wither.’
Pleasant are those hidden waterways: but yet are they the more pleasant
because the hand of man has not interfered with them?
It is a question, and one which the older one grows the less one is
inclined to answer in the affirmative. The older one grows, the more
there grows on one the sense of waste and incompleteness in all scenery
where man has not fulfilled the commission of Eden, ‘to dress it and to
keep it;’ and with that, a sense of loneliness which makes one long for
home, and cultivation, and the speech of fellow men.
Surely the influence of mountain scenery is exaggerated now-a-days. In
spite of the reverend name of Wordsworth (whose poetry, be it remembered,
too often wants that element of hardihood and manliness which is supposed
to be the birthright of mountaineers), one cannot help, as a lowlander,
hoping that there is a little truth in the threnodes of a certain peevish
friend who literally hates a mountain, and justifies his hatred in this
fashion:—
‘I do hate mountains. I would not live among them for ten thousand a
year. If they look like paradise for three months in the summer, they
are a veritable inferno for the other nine; and I should like to condemn
my mountain-worshipping friends to pass a whole year under the shadow of
Snowdon, with that great black head of his shutting out the sunlight,
staring down into their garden, overlooking all they do in the most
impertinent way, sneezing and spitting at them with rain, hail, snow, and
bitter freezing blasts, even in the hottest sunshine. A mountain? He is
a great stupid giant, with a perpetual cold in his head, whose highest
ambition is to give you one also. As for his beauty, no natural object
has so little of its own; he owes it to the earthquakes that reared him
up, to the rains and storms which have furrowed him, to every gleam and
cloud which pass over him. In himself he is a mere helpless stone-heap.
Our old Scandinavian forefathers were right when they held the mountain
Yotuns to be helpless pudding-headed giants, the sport of gods and men:
and their English descendant, in spite of all his second-hand sentiment,
holds the same opinion at his heart; for his first instinct, jolly honest
fellow that he is, on seeing a snow alp, is to scramble up it and smoke
his cigar upon the top. And this great stupid braggart, pretending to be
a personage and an entity, which, like Pope’s monument on Fish-street
hill,
“Like a tall bully, lifts the head and lies,”
I am called upon now-a-days to worship, as my better, my teacher. Shall
I, the son of Odin and Thor, worship Hrymir the frost giant, and his cows
the waterfalls? Shall I bow down to the stock of a stone? My better? I
have done an honest thing or two in my life, but I never saw a mountain
do one yet. As for his superiority to me, in what does it consist? His
strength? If he be stronger than I, let him cut stones out of my ribs,
as I can out of his. His size? Am I to respect a mountain the more for
being 10,000 feet high? As well ask me to respect Daniel Lambert for
weighing five-and-twenty stone. His cunning construction? There is not
a child which plays at his foot, not an insect which basks on his crags,
which is not more fearfully and wonderfully made; while as for his
grandeur of form, any college youth who scrambles up him, peel him out of
his shooting jacket and trousers, is a hundred times more beautiful, and
more grand too, by all laws of art. But so it is. In our prurient
prudery, we have got to despise the human, and therefore the truly
divine, element in art, and look for inspiration, not to living men and
women, but to leaves and straws, stocks and stones. It is an idolatry
baser than that of the old Canaanites; for they had the courage to go up
to the mountain tops, and thence worship the host of heaven: but we are
to stay at the bottom, and worship the mountains themselves. Byron began
the folly with his misanthropic “Childe Harold.” Sermons in stones? I
don’t believe in them. I have seen a better sermon in an old peasant
woman’s face than in all the Alps and Apennines of Europe. Did you ever
see any one who was the better for mountains? Have the Alps made * * * a
whit honester, or * * * a whit more good-natured, or Lady * * * a whit
cleverer? Do they alter one hair’s breadth for the better the characters
of the ten thousand male and female noodles who travel forth to stare at
them every year? Do mountains make them lofty-minded and
generous-hearted? No. Cælum, non animum mutant, qui trans mare currunt.
Don’t talk to me of the moral and physical superiority of mountain races,
for I tell you it is a dream. Civilization, art, poetry, belong to the
lowlands. Are the English mountaineers, pray, or the French, or the
Germans? Were the Egyptians mountaineers, or the Romans, or the
Assyrians, as soon as they became a people? The Greeks lived among
mountains, but they took care to inhabit the plains; and it was the sea
and not the hills which made them the people which they were. Does
Scotland owe her life to the highlander, or to the lowlander? If you
want an experimentum crucis, there is one. As for poetry, will you
mention to me one mountain race which has written great poetry? You will
quote the Hebrews. I answer that the life of Palestine always kept to
the comparatively low lands to the west of Jordan, while the barbarous
mountaineers of the eastern range never did anything,—had but one Elijah
to show among them. Shakspeare never saw a hill higher than Malvern
Beacon; and yet I suppose you will call him a poet? Mountaineers look
well enough at a distance; seen close at hand you find their chief
distinctions to be starvation and ignorance, fleas and goitre, with an
utter unconsciousness—unless travellers put it into their heads—of the
“soul-elevating glories” by which they have been surrounded all their
lives.’
He was gently reminded of the existence of the Tyrolese.
‘You may just as wisely remind me of the Circassians. What can prove my
theory more completely than the fact that in them you have the two finest
races of the world, utterly unable to do anything for humanity, utterly
unable to develop themselves, because, to their eternal misfortune, they
have got caged among those abominable stoneheaps, and have not yet been
able to escape?’
It was suggested that if mountain races were generally inferior ones, it
was because they were the remnants of conquered tribes driven up into the
highlands by invaders.
‘And what does that prove but that the stronger and cunninger races
instinctively seize the lowlands, because they half know (and Providence
knows altogether) that there alone they can become nations, and fulfil
the primæval mission—to replenish the earth and subdue it? No, no, my
good sir. Mountains are very well when they are doing their only
duty—that of making rain and soil for the lowlands: but as for this
newfangled admiration of them, it is a proof that our senses are dulled
by luxury and books, and that we require to excite our palled organ of
marvellousness by signs and wonders, æsthetic brandy and cayenne. No. I
have remarked often that the most unimaginative people, who can see no
beauty in a cultivated English field or in the features of a new-born
babe, are the loudest ravers about glorious sunsets and Alpine panoramas;
just as the man with no music in his soul, to whom a fugue of Sebastian
Bach, or one of Mendelssohn’s Songs without Words, means nothing, and is
nothing thinks a monster concert of drums and trumpets uncommonly fine.’
This is certainly a sufficiently one-sided diatribe. Still it is
one-sided: and we have heard so much of the other side of late, that it
may be worth while to give this side also a fair and patient hearing.
At least he who writes wishes that it may have a fair hearing. He has a
sort of sympathy with Lord Macaulay’s traveller of a hundred and fifty
years since, who amid the ‘horrible desolation’ of the Scotch highlands,
sighs for ‘the true mountain scenery of Richmond-hill.’ The most
beautiful landscape he has ever seen, or cares to see, is the vale of
Thames from Taplow or from Cliefden, looking down towards Windsor, and up
toward Reading; to him Bramshill, looking out far and wide over the rich
lowland from its eyrie of dark pines, or Littlecote nestling between
deer-spotted upland and rich water-meadow, is a finer sight than any
robber castle of the Rhine. He would not complain, of course, were
either of the views backed, like those glorious ones of Turin or Venice,
by the white saw-edge of the distant Alps: but chiefly because the
perpetual sight of that Alp-wall would increase the sense of home, of
guarded security, which not the mountain, but the sea, or the very
thought of the sea, gives to all true Englishmen.
Let others therefore (to come back to angling) tell of moor and loch.
But let it be always remembered that the men who have told of them best
have not been mountaineers, but lowlanders who carried up to the mountain
the taste and knowledge which they had gained below. Let them remember
that the great Sutherlandshire sportsman and sporting writer, the late
Mr. St. John, was once a fine gentleman about town; that Christopher
North was an Edinburgh Professor, a man of city learning and city
cultivation; and, as one more plea for our cockney chalk-streams of the
south, that Mr. Scrope (who passed many pleasant years respected and
beloved by Kennet side, with Purdy at his heels) enjoyed, they say, the
killing of a Littlecote trout as heartily as he did that of a Tweed
salmon.
Come, then, you who want pleasant fishing-days without the waste of time
and trouble and expense involved in two hundred miles of railway journey,
and perhaps fifty more of highland road; and try what you can see and do
among the fish not sixty miles from town. Come to pleasant country inns,
where you can always get a good dinner; or, better still, to pleasant
country houses, where you can always get good society; to rivers which
will always fish, brimfull in the longest droughts of summer, instead of
being, as those mountain ones are, very like a turnpike-road for three
weeks, and then like bottled porter for three days; to streams on which
you have strong south-west breezes for a week together on a clear fishing
water, instead of having, as on those mountain ones, foul rain spate as
long as the wind is south-west, and clearing water when the wind chops up
to the north, and the chill blast of ‘Clarus Aquio’ sends all the fish
shivering to the bottom; streams, in a word, where you may kill fish (and
large ones) four days out of five from April to October, instead of
having, as you will most probably in the mountain, just one day’s sport
in the whole of your month’s holiday. Deluded friend, who suffered in
Scotland last year a month of Tantalus his torments, furnished by art and
nature with rods, flies, whisky, scenery, keepers, salmon innumerable,
and all that man can want, except water to fish in; and who returned,
having hooked accidentally by the tail one salmon—which broke all and
ween to sea—why did you not stay at home and take your two-pounders and
three-pounders out of the quiet chalk brook which never sank an inch
through all that drought, so deep in the caverns of the hills are hidden
its mysterious wells? Truly, wise men bide at home, with George Riddler,
while ‘a fool’s eyes are in the ends of the earth.’
Repent, then; and come with me, at least in fancy, at six o’clock upon
some breezy morning in June, not by roaring railway nor by smoking
steamer, but in the cosy four-wheel, along brown heather moors, down into
green clay woodlands, over white chalk downs, past Roman camps and
scattered blocks of Sarsden stone, till we descend into the long green
vale where, among groves of poplar and abele, winds silver Whit. Come
and breakfast at the neat white inn, of yore a posting-house of fame.
The stables are now turned into cottages; and instead of a dozen spruce
ostlers and helpers, the last of the postboys totters sadly about the
yard and looks up eagerly at the rare sight of a horse to feed. But the
house keeps up enough of its ancient virtue to give us a breakfast worthy
of Pantagruel’s self; and after it, while we are looking out our flies,
you can go and chat with the old postboy, and hear his tales, told with a
sort of chivalrous pride, of the noble lords and fair ladies before whom
he has ridden in the good old times gone by—even, so he darkly hints,
before ‘His Royal Highness the Prince’ himself. Poor old fellow, he
recollects not, and he need not recollect, that these great
posting-houses were centres of corruption, from whence the newest vices
of the metropolis were poured into the too-willing ears of village lads
and lasses; and that not even the New Poor Law itself has done more for
the morality of the South of England than the substitution of the rail
for coaches.
Now we will walk down through the meadows some half mile,
While all the land in flowery squares,
Beneath a broad and equal-blowing wind
Smells of the coming summer,’
to a scene which, as we may find its antitype anywhere for miles round,
we may boldly invent for ourselves.
A red brick mill (not new red brick, of course) shall hum for ever below
giant poplar-spires, which bend and shiver in the steady breeze. On its
lawn laburnums shall feather down like dropping wells of gold, and from
under them the stream shall hurry leaping and laughing into the light,
and spread at our feet into a broad bright shallow, in which the kine are
standing knee-deep already: a hint, alas! that the day means heat. And
there, to the initiated eye, is another and a darker hint of glaring
skies, perspiring limbs, and empty creels. Small fish are dimpling in
the central eddies: but here, in six inches of water, on the very edge of
the ford road, great tails and back-fins are showing above the surface,
and swirling suddenly among the tufts of grass, sure sign that the large
fish are picking up a minnow-breakfast at the same time that they warm
their backs, and do not mean to look at a fly for many an hour to come.
Yet courage; for on the rail of yonder wooden bridge sits, chatting with
a sun-browned nymph, her bonnet pushed over her face, her hayrake in her
hand, a river-god in coat of velveteen, elbow on knee and pipe in mouth,
who, rising when he sees us, lifts his wide-awake, and halloas back a
roar of comfort to our mystic adjuration,—
‘Keeper! Is the fly up?’
‘Mortial strong last night, gentlemen.’
Wherewith he shall lounge up to us, landing-net in hand, and we will
wander up stream and away.
We will wander—for though the sun be bright, here are good fish to be
picked out of sharps and stop-holes—into the water-tables, ridged up
centuries since into furrows forty feet broad and five feet high, over
which the crystal water sparkles among the roots of the rich grass, and
hurries down innumerable drains to find its parent stream between tufts
of great blue geranium, and spires of purple loosestrife, and the
delicate white and pink comfrey-bells, and the avens—fairest and most
modest of all the waterside nymphs, who hangs her head all day long in
pretty shame, with a soft blush upon her tawny check. But at the mouth
of each of those drains, if we can get our flies in, and keep ourselves
unseen, we will have one cast at least. For at each of them, in some
sharp-rippling spot, lies a great trout or two, waiting for beetle,
caterpillar, and whatsoever else may be washed from among the long grass
above. Thence, and from brimming feeders, which slip along, weed-choked,
under white hawthorn hedges, and beneath the great roots of oak and elm,
shall we pick out full many a goodly trout. There, in yon stop-hole
underneath that tree, not ten feet broad or twenty long, where just
enough water trickles through the hatches to make a ripple, are a brace
of noble fish, no doubt; and one of them you may be sure of, if you will
go the proper way to work, and fish scientifically with the brace of
flies I have put on for you—a governor and a black alder. In the first
place, you must throw up into the little pool, not down. If you throw
down, they will see you in an instant; and besides, you will never get
your fly close under the shade of the brickwork, where alone you have a
chance. What use in throwing into the still shallow tail, shining like
oil in the full glare of the sun?
‘But I cannot get below the pool without—’
Without crawling through that stiff stubbed hedge, well set with trees,
and leaping that ten-foot feeder afterwards. Very well. It is this sort
of thing which makes the stay-at-home cultivated chalk-fishing as much
harder work than mountain angling, as a gallop over a stiffly enclosed
country is harder than one over an open moor. You can do it or not, as
you like: but if you wish to catch large trout on a bright day, I should
advise you to employ the only method yet discovered.
There—you are through; and the keeper shall hand you your rod. You have
torn your trousers, and got a couple of thorns in your shins. The one
can be mended, the other pulled out. Now, jump the feeder. There is no
run to it, so—you have jumped in. Never mind: but keep the point of your
rod up. You are at least saved the lingering torture of getting wet inch
by inch; and as for cold water hurting any one—Credat Judæus.
Now make a circuit through the meadow forty yards away. Stoop down when
you are on the ridge of each table. A trout may be basking at the lower
end of the pool, who will see you, rush up, and tell all his neighbours.
Take off that absurd black chimney-pot, which you are wearing, I suppose,
for the same reason as Homer’s heroes wore their koruthous and phalerous,
to make yourself look taller and more terrible to your foes. Crawl up on
three legs; and when you are in position, kneel down. So.
Shorten your line all you can—you cannot fish with too short a line
up-stream; and throw, not into the oil-basin near you, but right up into
the darkest corner. Make your fly strike the brickwork and drop in.—So?
No rise? Then don’t work or draw it, or your deceit is discovered
instantly. Lift it out, and repeat the throw.
What? You have hooked your fly in the hatches? Very good. Pull at it
till the casting-line breaks; put on a fresh one, and to work again.
There! you have him. Don’t rise! fight him kneeling; hold him hard, and
give him no line, but shorten up anyhow. Tear and haul him down to you
before he can make to his home, while the keeper runs round with the net
. . . There, he is on shore. Two pounds, good weight. Creep back more
cautiously than ever, and try again. . . . There. A second fish, over a
pound weight. Now we will go and recover the flies off the hatches; and
you will agree that there is more cunning, more science, and therefore
more pleasant excitement, in ‘foxing’ a great fish out of a stop-hole,
than in whipping far and wide over an open stream, where a half-pounder
is a wonder and a triumph. As for physical exertion, you will be able to
compute for yourself how much your back, knees, and fore-arm will ache by
nine o’clock to-night, after some ten hours of this scrambling,
splashing, leaping, and kneeling upon a hot June day. This item in the
day’s work will of course be put to the side of loss or of gain,
according to your temperament: but it will cure you of an inclination to
laugh at us Wessex chalk-fishers as Cockneys.
So we will wander up the streams, taking a fish here and a fish there,
till—Really it is very hot. We have the whole day before us; the fly
will not be up till five o’clock at least; and then the real fishing will
begin. Why tire ourselves beforehand? The squire will send us luncheon
in the afternoon, and after that expect us to fish as long as we can see,
and come up to the hall to sleep, regardless of the ceremony of dressing.
For is not the green drake on? And while he reigns, all hours, meals,
decencies, and respectabilities must yield to his caprice. See, here he
sits, or rather tens of thousands of him, one on each stalk of
grass—green drake, yellow drake, brown drake, white drake, each with his
gauzy wings folded over his back, waiting for some unknown change of
temperature, or something else, in the afternoon, to wake him from his
sleep, and send him fluttering over the stream; while overhead the black
drake, who has changed his skin and reproduced his species, dances in the
sunshine, empty, hard, and happy, like Festus Bailey’s Great Black Crow,
who all his life sings ‘Ho, ho, ho,’
‘For no one will eat him,’ he well doth know.
However, as we have insides, and he has actually none, and what is more
strange, not even a mouth wherewith to fill the said insides, we had
better copy his brothers and sisters below whose insides are still left,
and settle with them upon the grass awhile beneath you goodly elm.
Comfort yourself with a glass of sherry and a biscuit, and give the
keeper one, and likewise a cigar. He will value it at five times its
worth, not merely for the pleasure of it, but because it raises him in
the social scale. ‘Any cad,’ so he holds, ‘smokes pipes; but a good
cigar is the mark of the quality,’ and of them who ‘keep company with the
quality,’ as keepers do. He puts it in his hat-crown, to smoke this
evening in presence of his compeers at the public-house, retires modestly
ten yards, lies down on his back in a dry feeder, under the shade of the
long grass, and instantly falls fast asleep. Poor fellow! he was up all
last night in the covers, and will be again to-night. Let him sleep
while he may, and we will chat over chalk-fishing.
The first thing, probably, on which you will be inclined to ask
questions, is the size of the fish in these streams. We have killed this
morning four fish averaging a pound weight each. All below that weight
we throw in, as is our rule here; but you may have remarked that none of
them exceeded half a pound; that they were almost all about herring size.
The smaller ones I believe to be year-old fish, hatched last spring
twelvemonth; the pound fish two-year-olds. At what rate these last would
have increased depends very much, I suspect, on their chance of food.
The limit of life and growth in cold-blooded animals seems to depend very
much on their amount of food. The boa, alligator, shark, pike, and I
suppose the trout also, will live to a great age, and attain an enormous
size, give them but range enough; and the only cause why there are trout
of ten pounds and more in the Thames lashers, while one of four pounds is
rare here, is simply that the Thames fish has more to eat. Here, were
the fish not sufficiently thinned out every year by anglers, they would
soon become large-headed, brown, and flabby, and cease to grow. Many a
good stream has been spoilt in this way, when a squire has unwisely
preferred quantity to quality of fish.
And if it be not the quantity of feed, I know no clear reason why chalk
and limestone trout should be so much larger and better flavoured than
any others. The cause is not the greater swiftness of the streams; for
(paradoxical as it may seem to many) a trout likes swift water no more
than a pike does, except when spawning or cleaning afterwards. At those
times his blood seems to require a very rapid oxygenation, and he goes to
the ‘sharps’ to obtain it: but when he is feeding and fattening, the
water cannot be too still for him. Streams which are rapid throughout
never produce large fish; and a hand-long trout transferred from his
native torrent to a still pond, will increase in size at a ten times
faster rate. In chalk streams the largest fish are found oftener in the
mill-heads than in the mill tails. It is a mistake, though a common one,
to fancy that the giant trout of the Thames lashers lie in swift water.
On the contrary, they lie in the very stillest spot of the whole pool,
which is just under the hatches. There the rush of the water shoots over
their heads, and they look up through it for every eatable which may be
swept down. At night they run down to the fan of the pool, to hunt
minnow round the shallows; but their home by day is the still deep; and
their preference of the lasher pool to the quiet water above is due
merely to the greater abundance of food. Chalk trout, then, are large
not merely because the water is swift.
Whether trout have not a specific fondness for lime; whether water of
some dozen degrees of hardness is not necessary for their development?
are questions which may be fairly asked. Yet is not the true reason
this; that the soil on the banks of a chalk or limestone stream is almost
always rich—red loam, carrying an abundant vegetation, and therefore an
abundant crop of animal life, both in and out of the water? The
countless insects which haunt a rich hay meadow, all know who have eyes
to see; and if they will look into the stream they will find that the
water-world is even richer than the air-world.
Every still spot in a chalk stream becomes so choked with weed as to
require moving at least thrice a year, to supply the mills with water.
Grass, milfoil, water crowfoot, hornwort, starwort, horsetail, and a
dozen other delicate plants, form one tangled forest, denser than those
of the Amazon, and more densely peopled likewise.
To this list will soon be added our Transatlantic curse, _Babingtonia
diabolica_, alias _Anacharis alsin astrum_. It has already ascended the
Thames as high as Reading; and a few years more, owing to the present
aqua-vivarium mania, will see it filling every mill-head in England, to
the torment of all millers. Young ladies are assured that the only plant
for their vivariums is a sprig of anacharis, for which they pay
sixpence—the market value being that of a wasp, flea, or other scourge of
the human race; and when the vivarium fails, its contents, Anacharis and
all, are tost into the nearest ditch; for which the said young lady ought
to be fined five pounds; and would be, if Governments governed. What an
‘if’.
But come; for the sun burns bright, and fishing is impossible: lie down
upon the bank, above this stop. There is a campshutting (a boarding in
English) on which you can put your elbows. Lie down on your face, and
look down through two or three feet of water clear as air into the water
forest where the great trout feed.
Here; look into this opening in the milfoil and crowfoot bed. Do you see
a grey film around that sprig? Examine it through the pocket lens. It
is a forest of glass bells, on branching stalks. They are Vorticellæ;
and every one of those bells, by the ciliary current on its rim, is
scavenging the water—till a tadpole comes by and scavenges it. How many
millions of living creatures are there on that one sprig? Look here!—a
brown polype, with long waving arms—a gigantic monster, actually a full
half-inch long. He is _Hydra fusca_, most famous, and earliest described
(I think by Trembley). Ere we go home I may show you perhaps _Hydra
viridis_, with long pea-green arms; and _rosea_, most beautiful in form
and colour of all the strange family. You see that lump, just where his
stalk joins his bell-head? That is a budding baby. Ignorant of the joys
and cares of wedlock, he increases by gemmation. See! here is another,
with a full-sized young one growing on his back. You may tear it off if
you will—he cares not. You may cut him into a dozen pieces, they say,
and each one will grow, as a potato does. I suppose, however, that he
also sends out of his mouth little free ova—medusoids—call them what you
will, swimming by ciliæ, which afterwards, unless the water beetles stop
them on the way, will settle down as stalked polypes, and in their turn
practise some mystery of Owenian parthenogenesis, or Steenstruppian
alternation of generations, in which all traditional distinctions of
plant and animal, male and female, are laughed to scorn by the
magnificent fecundity of the Divine imaginations.
That dusty cloud which shakes off in the water as you move the weed,
under the microscope would be one mass of exquisite forms—Desmidiæ and
Diatomaceæ, and what not? Instead of running over long names, take home
a little in a bottle, put it under your microscope, and if you think good
verify the species from Hassall, Ehrenberg, or other wise book; but
without doing that, one glance through the lens will show you why the
chalk trout grow fat.
Do they, then, eat these infusoria?
That is not clear. But minnows and small fry eat them by millions; and
so do tadpoles, and perhaps caddis baits and water crickets.
What are they?
Look on the soft muddy bottom. You see numberless bits of stick. Watch
awhile, and those sticks are alive, crawling and tumbling over each
other. The weed, too, is full of smaller ones. Those live sticks are
the larva-cases of the Caperers—Phryganeæ—of which one family nearly two
hundred species have been already found in Great Britain. Fish up one,
and you find, amid sticks and pebbles, a comfortable silk case, tenanted
by a goodly grub. Six legs he has, like all insects, and tufts of white
horns on each ring of his abdomen, which are his gills. A goodly pair of
jaws he has too, and does good service with them: for he is the great
water scavenger. Decaying vegetable matter is his food, and with those
jaws he will bark a dead stick as neatly as you will with a penknife.
But he does not refuse animal matter. A dead brother (his, not yours)
makes a savoury meal for him; and a party of those Vorticellæ would stand
a poor chance if he came across them. You may count these caddis baits
by hundreds of thousands; whether the trout eat them case and all, is a
question in these streams. In some rivers the trout do so; and what is
curious, during the spring, have a regular gizzard, a temporary
thickening of the coats of the stomach, to enable them to grind the
pebbly cases of the caddises. See! here is one whose house is closed at
both ends—‘grillé,’ as Pictet calls it, in his unrivalled monograph of
the Genevese Phryganeæ, on which he spent four years of untiring labour.
The grub has stopped the mouth of his case by an open network of silk,
defended by small pebbles, through which the water may pass freely, while
he changes into his nymph state. Open the case; you find within not a
grub, but a strange bird-beaked creature, with long legs and horns laid
flat by its sides, and miniature wings on its back. Observe that the
sides of the tail, and one pair of legs, are fringed with dark hairs.
After a fortnight’s rest in this prison this ‘nymph’ will gnaw her way
out and swim through the water on her back, by means of that fringed tail
and paddles, till she reaches the bank and the upper air. There, under
the genial light of day, her skin will burst, and a four-winged fly
emerge, to buzz over the water as a fawn-coloured Caperer—deadliest of
trout flies; if she be not snapped up beforehand under water by some
spotted monarch in search of supper.
But look again among this tangled mass of weed. Here are more larvæ of
water-flies. Some have the sides fringed with what look like paddles,
but are gills. Of these one part have whisks at the tail, and swim
freely. They will change into ephemeræ, cock-winged ‘duns,’ with long
whisked tails. The larvæ of the famous green drake (_Ephemera vulgata_)
are like these: but we shall not find them. They are all changed by now
into the perfect fly; and if not, they burrow about the banks, and haunt
the crayfish-holes, and are not easily found.
Some, again, have the gills on their sides larger and broader, and no
whisks at the tail. These are the larvæ of Sialis, the black alder, Lord
Stowell’s fly, shorm fly, hunch-back of the Welsh, with which we have
caught our best fish to-day.
And here is one of a delicate yellow-green, whose tail is furnished with
three broad paddle-blades. These, I believe, are gills again. The larva
is probably that of the Yellow Sally—_Chrysoperla viridis_—a famous fly
on hot days in May and June. Among the pebbles there, below the fall, we
should have found, a month since, a similar but much larger grub, with
two paddles at his tail. He is the ‘creeper’ of the northern streams,
and changes to the great crawling stone fly (May-fly of Tweed), _Perla
bicaudata_, an ugly creature, which runs on stones and posts, and kills
right well on stormy days, when he is beaten into the stream.
There. Now we have the larvæ of the four great trout-fly families,
Phryganeæ, Ephemeræ, Sialidæ, Perlidæ; so you have no excuse for
telling—as not only Cockneys, but really good sportsmen who write on
fishing, have done—such fibs as that the green drake comes out of a
caddis-bait, or giving such vague generalities as, ‘this fly comes from a
water-larva.’
These are, surely, in their imperfect and perfect states, food enough to
fatten many a good trout: but they are not all. See these transparent
brown snails, Limneæ and Succinæ, climbing about the posts; and these
other pretty ones, coil laid within coil as flat as a shilling,
Planorbis. Many a million of these do the trout pick off the weed day by
day; and no food, not even the leech, which swarms here, is more
fattening. The finest trout of the high Snowdon lakes feed almost
entirely on leech and snail—baits they have none—and fatten till they cut
as red as a salmon.
Look here too, once more. You see a grey moving cloud about that pebble
bed, and underneath that bank. It is a countless swarm of ‘sug,’ or
water-shrimp; a bad food, but devoured greedily by the great trout in
certain overstocked preserves.
Add to these plenty of minnow, stone-loach, and miller’s thumbs, a second
course of young crayfish, and for one gormandizing week of bliss,
thousands of the great green-drake fly: and you have food enough for a
stock of trout which surprise, by their size and number, an angler fresh
from the mountain districts of the north and west. To such a fisherman,
the tale of Mr. ** *, of Ramsbury, who is said to have killed in one day
in his own streams on Kennet, seventy-six trout, all above a pound,
sounds like a traveller’s imagination: yet the fact is, I believe,
accurately true.
This, however, is an extraordinary case upon an extraordinary stream. In
general, if a man shall bring home (beside small fish) a couple of brace
of from one to three pounds apiece, he may consider himself as a happy
man, and that the heavens have not shone, but frowned, upon him very
propitiously.
And now comes another and an important question. For which of all these
dainty eatables, if for any, do the trout take our flies? and from that
arises another. Why are the flies with which we have been fishing this
morning so large—of the size which is usually employed on a Scotch lake?
You are a North-country fisher, and are wont, upon your clear streams, to
fish with nothing but the smallest gnats. And yet our streams are as
clear as yours: what can be clearer?
Whether fish really mistake our artificial flies for different species of
natural ones, as Englishmen hold; or merely for something good to eat,
the colour whereof strikes their fancy, as Scotchmen think—a theory which
has been stated in detail, and with great semblance of truth, in Mr.
Stewart’s admirable ‘Practical Angler,’—is a matter about which much good
sense has been written on both sides.
Whosoever will, may find the great controversy fully discussed in the
pages of Ephemera. Perhaps (as in most cases) the truth lies between the
two extremes; at least, in a chalk-stream.
Ephemera’s list of flies may be very excellent, but it is about ten times
as long as would be required for any of our southern streams. Six or
seven sort of flies ought to suffice for any fisherman; if they will not
kill, the thing which will kill is yet to seek.