CHAP. IV-Prophecy & Research. T HERE is something humiliating to the pride of men in the society of fishes. You elaborate a theory and they take a Puck-like delight in demolishing it. You forecast a day of failure because chill wind, low clear water, falling barometer, fainting thermometer, and, indeed, everything is against you. Nevertheless to keep tryst, or out of sheer perversity, you persist. Then they take up Clough's dying tale, "If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars," and the basket plumps to cracking point. Next week, the skies are grey, the air still; every instrument in the house unites in a cheerful chorus "Go up to Ramoth Gilead and prosper;" old anglers congratulate you as you meet them upon the road; your baits and tackle were never better; the stream is exactly as it was on your most memorable ventures; and yet you come home almost inclined to forswear angling and to live among carnivor ous mammals for the rest of your days. You try the pools, the fibrous fringes of willows and alder bushes, the fertile eddy, the concave bank, the sloping pyramids. Not a fish is to be seen or heard. You sit You sit upon a gate to eat your lunch and meditate. Conditions favour their change of place, you say. Of course they will be on grounds that were hardly wet a fortnight ago. New countries are open to them and there is nothing to scare them back to-day into their Cities of Refuge. Fresh woods and pastures new have attracted them. With diligence and change of baits you explore, most cautiously and with humble creepings: but there is none to answer, and you go home light in all but heart, to seek for explanations that will not come, for laws that will encompass such wilfulness. In such moments, as a last straw upon your hump, if you read Dr. John Walcot's poem to a "Fish of the Brooke" you will be in a fitting mood to enter sympathetically into the mind of its author. He was a most disagreeable man, and his tenderness to the fish, about whose domestic and other life he is brutally ignorant, is rather an affectation. His real motive is dislike of his brother man, whom he is accustomed to deal with scornfully and vituperatively. But here is his poem, for which Mr. Locker Lampson must be thanked. He has embalmed it in his Lyra Elegantissima. "Why flyest thou away with fear? Trust me there's naught of danger near. Enjoy thy stream, O harmless fish: Attempts a wretch, to pull thee out, (Dr. John Walcot, 1738). I tried this poem on a meditative brother angler, (whom I call Karteros), after a most propitious, but utterly disappointing day, and rounded it in his ear, hoping to lash his gentle spirit into some impatience. Alas! the plan failed utterly. Then I tried a torrent of agnosticism, piscatorial, not theological agnosticism. "There are no laws which determine biting," I said, said, "at least none which can be discovered by the most observant man, however long he looks. Have we not exhausted every possible theory, and found each to be ridiculously inadequate? We have caught, in bitter north winds, in falling temperatures, with cones hoisted, in clear streams, low water, and with inefficient baits, and now, when everything promised triumph, we have got absolutely nothing, and lost two lines, and five hooks beside. Knowledge is impossible." "Come, come," he answered, "you cannot confine the argument to fishes, though they will do for an instance. Will you please answer me this from Lucretius? It saps your whole position. "Denique nil sciri siquis putat id quoque nescit an sciri possit, quoniam nil scire fatetur. Nunc igitur contra mittam contendere causam qui capite ipse sua in statuit vestigia sese.* *Again, if a man believe that nothing is known, he knows not whether even this can be known, since he admits he knows nothing. I will therefore decline to argue the case against him who places himself with his head where his feet should be. -De Rerum Naturæ, Lib. iv. 469. "A fine author, Lucretius! Do you know his lines at the end of the third book, about the unrest of the Pagan world? Matthew Arnold has put them into melodious verse in his Obermann once more. But let that pass. I do not see what one gets by a petulant agnosticism, because phenomena are hard to account for, and because there is always a mysterious fraction, which reminds us that 'laws,' as we call them, never quite and exactly fit the facts. I take it, this is because of the oneness of the world, and we cannot isolate fishing, say from theology, medical jurisprudence, or the languages of Central America, and know it apart, as it were. Fishing phenomena, are, like other phenomena, only moments of the Infinite, ways by which great spiritual things come to us, sub specie causarum. Whatever appears in Time is to be thought about under the guise of cause and effect. I rather suspect that the cause of our ill-luck to-day was quite a simple one. The willows were being pollarded, for at least a mile above us, probably more, and the branches were quite thick, both in the stream and above the weir. Willow bark, as old Parkinson will tell you, is very astringent, and has a great effect |