Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 63, No. 392, June, 1848. Various
no gill is muddy red; no eye is lustreless, – without or beyond the bidding, the teaching, the guarantee, and express image of nature. Pity it is that we should not feel at liberty to say a word or two of other matters – of a happy temper, which has cheered us with its mellow sunshine on many a raw and cloudy day; or of a richly-stored mind, which, when fish were sulky, has often made the lagging hours spin on with jocund speed. Almost, under this hot bright sky, we are tempted, unbidden, to enter the studio, and ask to share with yon sequestered stags the shelter of the favourite pines. But we dare not; for we know the man as well as the artist and angler. We know both the anglers. It is, in sooth, fitting that Giles should illustrate Stoddart.
Is not angling cruel? Now, before attempting any responsive observation, be so good as to read the following impetuous passage: —
"Is it not, for instance, in the attitude of hope that the angler stands, while in the act of heaving out his flies over some favourite cast? Of hope increased, when he beholds, feeding within reach of his line, the monarch of the stream? But now, mark him! He has dropt the hook cautiously and skilfully just above the indicated spot; the fish, scarcely breaking the surface, has seized it. A fast, firm hold it has, but the tackle is fine, and the trout strong and active. Look! how the expression of his features is undergoing a change. There is still hope, but mingled with it are traces of anxiety – of fear itself. His attitudes, too, are those of a troubled and distempered man. Ha! all is well. The worst is over. The strong push for liberty has been made, and failed. Desperate as that summerset was, it has proved unsuccessful. The tackle – knot and barb – is sufficient. Look now at the angler. Hope with him is stronger than anxiety, and joy too beams forth under his eyelids; for lo! the fish is showing symptoms of distress. No longer it threatens to exhaust the winch-line; no longer it combats with the rapids; no more it strives, with frantic fling or wily plunge, to disengage the hook. It has lost all heart – almost all energy. The fins, paralysed and powerless, are unable for their task. So far from regulating its movements, they cannot even sustain the balance of the fish. Helpless and hopeless it is drawn ashore, upturning, in the act of submission, its starred and gleamy flanks. The countenance of the captor – his movements, (they are those which the soul dictates,) are all joyous and self-congratulatory. But the emotion, strongly depicted though it be, is short-lived. It gives way successively to the feelings of admiration and pity – of admiration, as excited on contemplating the almost incomparable beauty of the captive, its breadth and depth, the harmony of its proportions, as well as the richness and variety of its colours; of pity, as called forth in accordance with our nature, – an unconscious, uncontrollable emotion, which operates with subduing effect on the triumph of the moment.
"And now, in their turn, content and thankfulness reign in the heart and develop themselves on the countenance of the angler; now haply he is impressed with feelings of adoring solemnity, stirred up by some scene of unlooked-for grandeur, or the transit of some sublime phenomenon. I say nothing of the feelings of disappointment, anger, envy, and jealousy, which sometimes find their way into the bosom, and are portrayed on the features even of the worthiest and best-tempered of our craft. Too naturally they spring up and blend themselves with our better nature; yet well it is that they take no hold on the heart – scorching, it may be true, but not consuming its day of happiness.
"Hence it is, from the very variety of emotions which successively occupy the mind, from their blendings and transitions, that angling derives its pleasures; hence it holds precedence as a sport with men of thoughtful and ideal temperament; hence poets, sculptors, and philosophers – the sons and worshippers of genius – have entered, heart and hand, into its pursuit. Therefore it was that Thomson, Burns, Scott, and Hogg, and, in our present day, Wilson and Wordsworth, exchanged eagerly the gray-goose quill and the companionship of books, for the taper wand and the discourse, older than Homer's measures, of streams and cataracts. Therefore it was that Paley left his meditative home, and Davy his tests and crucibles, and Chantrey his moulds, models, and chisel-work, – each and all to rejoice and renovate themselves; to gather new thoughts and energies, a fresh heart and vigorous hand, in the exercise of that pastime which is teeming with philosophy."
Mr Stoddart blinks our problem altogether. Fish, it will be noticed, are treated, firstly, as bits of cork, and, secondly, as lumps of lead. But the bad example of all the great men before or since Agamemnon will not lessen the cruelty, if it be cruelty, of dragging a large fish or a little fish out of its "native element" forcibly, and against its will. Obliging a fish to come out of the water when it has not the slightest wish to be a fish out of water, has an apparent resemblance to the ejecting of a human being unseasonably from his bed who has made up his mind to prosecute a steady snooze for the next three hours. The absence or presence of a little bodily suffering in the process of ejection, has really nothing to do with the merits of the abstract question. A man who is jerked out of bed by a string tied to his toe must endure an uncomfortable twinge. But the votary of Morpheus may be induced to change his quarters quite as effectually by painlessly removing beyond his reach the blankets and the sheets. It is not the application of positive compulsion to the person, but the disturbance of existing comfort in his present condition, which may be pain, and hardship, and cruelty. In point of fact, it is nothing of the sort, because the analogy, as stated, is entirely fallacious. The true analog is to be stated thus: Any body who, being already in bed, and therefore legitimately somniferous, happens to overhear us in the next room loudly declaring our intention of beginning forthwith a supper of savoury and palatable dishes, and who, thereupon, greedily shakes off his incipient torpidity, and rushes into the apartment in order to share the banquet, but finds no supper, and ourselves laughing at his credulity, has no right at all to assert that he has been subjected to hardships or treated with cruelty. He left his proper sphere, and was punished for his eccentricity. How is a fish that lives in the water entitled to snap at a fly that lives out of the water? But then the fly goes into the water. Very well: but if the fish comes up into the air, as it does, to bite at a fly, which is a denizen of the air, it is just that a fly, when it goes down into the water, should indulge in a reciprocal bite at a fish, which is a denizen of the waters. And if flies cannot bite for themselves, it is a noble thing in man to bite for them. All the fish encreeled by all the human fishers of every year make but a molehill to the mountain of flies butchered and gorged by a single trout in a month. Heliogabalus was temperate, Nero was merciful, when compared with a gillaroo. And as for a Pike!
Let us listen to Stoddart on pikes. It is proper, perhaps, to mention that we are legally informed that the "open and advised speaking" of our author about pikes is very constitutional, although very marvellous. It pleases him now to buffet these freshwater sharks with extremely hard words. Yet have we seen his nerves more fluttered by a dead pike, surreptitiously introduced into his nocturnal couch at Tibbie's – whom mortals, we believe, call Mrs Richardson, and whose green rural hostelry, on the margin of St Mary's Loch, is the sweet and loved haunt of every true brother of the craft – than ever was the heart of fisherman when a twenty-pounder has darted off like an express locomotive towards the foaming and rocky cataract. What horrid shriek is that, making night hideous? With bursts of laughter at this moment returns the scene when that grim visitor murdered the first efforts of the weary angler to woo repose, as his naked feet came into unexpected contact with the slimy mail of the water-pirate. Such recollections are part and parcel of the many hundred things which make the fisher's life a happy one. We shall hear, therefore, Mr Stoddart avenging himself on all pikes, dead or living, not excluding an incidental foray against eels; which latter are not surely, while they live, loveable.
"No one that ever felt the first attack of a pike at the gorge-bait can easily forget it. It is not, as might be supposed from the character of the fish, a bold, eager, voracious grasp; quite the contrary, it is a slow calculating grip. There is nothing about it dashing or at all violent; no stirring of the fins – no lashing of the tail – no expressed fury or revenge. The whole is mouth-work; calm, deliberate, bone-crashing, deadly mouth-work. You think at the moment you hear the action – the clanging action – of the fish's jaw-bones; and such jaw-bones, so powerful, so terrific! You think you hear the compressing, the racking of the victim betwixt them. The sensation is pleasurable to the angler as an avenger. Who among our gentle craft ever pitied a pike? I can fancy one lamenting over a salmon or star-stoled trout or playful minnow; nay, I have heard of those who, on being bereft of a pet gold-fish, actually wept; but a pike! itself unpitying, unsparing, who would pity? –