Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 63, No. 392, June, 1848

Canada will, ere long, if the present system be adhered to, follow the example of the West Indies; and having ceased, from the destruction of all its privileges, to have any interest in the maintenance of its connexion with Great Britain, it will take the first convenient opportunity to break it off. If we have lost our colonies, what security have we that they will not refuse to admit the stream of pauperism which now flows into them from the parent state: that they will not treat them as the fraternising French republicans did the British artisans, and send them all home? And even if they should still consent to receive them, what security should we have for the maintenance of export of the £16,000,000 of British manufactures which now go out to our colonies, if, like the Americans, they levy their whole revenue to maintain their independent government upon imports from this country? Recollect the exports to America, with 20,000,000 inhabitants, are not £10,000,000 annually, or 10s. a head; to Canada, with 1,900,000, about £3,800,000, or £2 a head; and to the West Indies, hitherto about £3,000,000 to 800,000 souls, or nearly £4 a head.

If the English like free-trade – if they are content to have their sovereigns by the million go out, as in 1847, to buy foreign grain, and foreign manufactures supplant British in all our staple branches of manufacture, by all means let them have it. Let them perpetuate the year 1847, with all its blessings, to all eternity. Free-trade is their own work; let them taste its fruits, and drain the cup they have selected to the dregs. But the colonies, be it recollected, had no hand in introducing that system. They were utterly and entirely disfranchised by the Reform Bill; schedules A and B cut up their representation by the roots. Free-trade was forced upon them by the representatives of Great Britain, not only without their concurrence, but in opposition to their most earnest remonstrances. Whatever may be said as to our present distress being the work of our own hands, and of our now reaping the fruits of the seed we have sown, that is wholly inapplicable to the colonies. Protection to their industry is what they have always prayed for; it is to them the condition of existence; it is the sole bond which unites them to the empire. Soon the bond and the connexion will be dissolved. And when dissolved, we shall have the woful reflection, – we shall incur the damning imputation with future times, that it was lost for no national or worthy object; from no foreign danger, or external catastrophe; but from the mere ascendency of interested legislation in the parent state: and that the greatest colonial empire that ever existed, that which had grown up during two centuries, and resisted the assaults of Napoleon in the plenitude of his power – was dissolved from the desire to maintain a principle which promised no greater benefit but, for a few years, to lower the price of sugar a penny a pound to the British consumers.

It is from measures such as we have now advocated, and from them alone, that we expect the extinction of the Chartist or household suffrage agitation, and the restoration of the wonted feelings of steady loyalty in the British nation. The subordinate matters, so much the objects of anxiety and care to the legislature, are not to be despised; but they will prove entirely nugatory, if measures such as these are not simultaneously and vigorously adopted. There is no way of really improving the condition of the working classes, but by augmenting the demand for labour. This is what they want; we never hear of them petitioning for wash-houses and cold baths, or a health-of-towns bill: it is a "fair day's wage for a fair day's work" which they always desire. Rely upon it, they are right. By all means give them wash-houses and cold baths; broad streets and common sewers; airy rooms and moderately sized houses; but recollect, if you do not give them work at the same time, it will all prove nugatory. Lodge them all by a miracle, or a successful revolution, in Buckingham Palace and Stafford House to-morrow, and in a week, if you do not give them the means of earning good wages, they will be as filthy, squalid, and diseased as ever. Thirty families will be located in the grand saloon; twenty-five in the green library; forty or fifty starving Irishmen will be comfortably lodged on the great stair. Typhus will spread, sedition will be hatched, treason prepared in the royal palaces, as well as in St Giles, or Manchester. There was not a more depraved or miserable set in Paris than the seven or eight hundred persons who squatted down in the Tuileries after the late revolution, and were only dislodged by bringing up artillery. Restore protection to colonial industry; relieve the great works in progress throughout the empire; engage in a great system of government emigration; give the country a currency adequate to its necessities, and commensurate to its transactions; and you may bid defiance to Chartist agitation, and drain off, if you cannot extirpate, the stream of Irish pauperism and treason.

STODDART AND ANGLING

11We do not lose a moment – we take the earliest opportunity – to thank Mr Stoddart for his book. Well, this is a cool piece of effrontery! So say some flippant folks, who fancy themselves abreast of the literature of the day, and in whose arid waste of mind, as in the desert, one may pick up now and then a few dates. They are so kind as to remind us that Mr Stoddart's book was published early in the spring of 1847. Apart altogether from our perfect knowledge of the time of the publication, we fling back the charge of effrontery with imperturbable contempt. The spring of 1847! There never was any such season. Who saw the glimpses of its smiles? who heard the chirping of its songs? who smelt its perfume? who felt its refreshing airs? who nibbled its green shoots? None of the human senses recognised its presence, or acknowledged its influence. Notorious it is that a tiny urchin in an infant school, whose little teeth had been previously knocking together in its head in shivering concussion for a month, refused, when brought up to the mellifluous passage, to perpetrate the vernal invocation of Mr James Thomson; and equally defying the allurements or the terrors – the sugar-cane or the birch-rod – the moral or the physical force of tuition, pronounced with Denmanic emphasis any allusion to "etherial mildness," or "showers of roses," even in the month of May 1847, to be a delusion, a mockery, and a snare. He never angled who speaks of the spring of 1847. The gentle craft perished for a while beneath the obdurate inclemency of the weather, and the ceaseless floods of snow-water, which polluted every lucid stream into "gruel thick and slab." We do not pretend to remember when the cloud and the tempest passed away; at all events, it was too late for angling purposes. In breezy, ay in stormy days, there are many bold and happy hits to be made by the cunning hand; but the zany, who throws his line in the teeth of a perpetual tornado, will catch, of course, nothing except what the indignant lexicographer has placed at the extremity farthest from the worm. Besides, there are those, including our author, who think that angling is a bilateral pastime. It is a part of their creed, (which we may look into hereafter,) that the silly fishes enjoy the fun of being captured, and often chuckle audibly on being "encreeled" by a triumphant artist like Mr Stoddart. And lordly salmon, or gentlemanlike trout, may probably dislike, as much as their adversary, an excess of piercing winds and dirty waters. In short, it was thoroughly understood, in the beginning of 1847, by the fisher and the fished, that the atmosphere was too preposterously rude to deserve encouragement at the hands or fins of either party. The temporary cessation of hostilities was accordingly complete. What could we do?

Little difficulty, to be sure, there was in finding pretexts daily for putting up the rod in the dining-room four or five times in the course of the forenoon, and executing, without line, a phantom cast of unerring accuracy across the table diagonally into an imaginary eddy rippling and softly gurgling on the floor round several bottles of Alsop's pale ale, linking sometimes, in our mood of finest frenzy, such preprandial dexterity, with the apparition in the same locality, at a later hour, of a cod's head and shoulders, not without oyster sauce. The music of the reel was also occasionally stirred by the supposititious tugs of a voracious gillaroo, (which is by far the dreadfullest fish of which we any where read,) enacted for the nonce by the same curly scion of truth who disdained to lend himself, in the miscalled spring of 1847, to the untruthful sycophancy of the bard of Ednam. The very fact, however, of its being "our young barbarian at play," and not a gillaroo in earnest, who was thus —

"Untwisting all the chains that tie

The hidden soul of harmony,"

carried the sound of the whirring thread to our ears "with a difference." The glancing armoury of the fishing-book, meriting better than Hector's helmet did the untranslatable epithet of Homeric monotony, was over and over again paraded and arranged, disordered and re-classified, extricated and intermingled, from pocket to pocket, until each particular hook in the pools and currents of our fancy became prospectively commemorative of multitudinous massacres, "making the green one red." But the basket or the bag, (and we prefer the latter,) would have felt, in the mean time, heavier under the burden of a single minnow than it ever did feel beneath the possible pressure of shoals of contingent bull-trouts. The experiment of wading through the house in enormous India-rubber boots, taking four steps at once in coming down stairs, and jumping suddenly from chairs upon the carpet, for the purpose of persuading ourselves that we were getting into deep water, afforded but a very transitory hallucination. The act of jerking at dinner a young turkey, with a gaff, from a remote dish, to our plate, did not elicit the general acknowledgment of its graceful precision which we had anticipated; while an excellent and polished steel-yard, with which, in the absence of a salmon, we had been practising in the kitchen on a casual leg of mutton, having dazzled, perhaps, the eye of the butcher's boy, and being forgotten by us for a brief hour or so, has been, "like the lost Pleiad, seen no more below." During such moments, the memory even of delectable old Isaac was losing a little of its perennial fragrance – the reminiscences of all kinds of fishes were beginning to stink in the nostrils. "Who comes here? – A grenadier;" and in walked "The Angler's Companion to the Lochs and Rivers of Scotland, by Thomas Tod Stoddart."

Ordinary mortals, to whom, as to Peter Bell, yellow primroses are simply yellow primroses, might instantly, upon getting the book, open it, read it, and be delighted with it. But we sat for six weeks gazing at the volume without daring or wishing to lay a finger upon it. There was a great deal for us to think about before spreading our sails for another voyage with an old companion. The fact is, that we were humming, after our own fashion, one of Mr Stoddart's angling songs at the moment when his new work was placed before us, Now, these songs were not published yesterday; and many a time and oft out of them had we amused ourselves by forming the liveliest picture of the angler's life, pursuits, meditations, and emotions. From his being up with the sweet thrushes to meet "the morn upon the lea," till "homeward from the stream he turns," we followed him in Stoddart's musical track. His call to "bring him osier, line, and reel" – his scrutiny of the airs and clouds of heaven – his communings with bird and bee, flower and fay – his welcome to the cuckoo – his blessing of the "spring-tide bland" – his entreaty to the winds to waken —

"For the low welcome sound of their wandering wings" —

his repose and summer trance, "beneath a willow wide" – his pensive musings, and comments, shaped by the enchanting realities around him, or by the pleasant shadows of his own memory and fancy – his feats of guile and skill – his patience and his toil – the excitement of his suspense – the exultation of his victory, and the joyousness and harmony which round his well-spent day, – all were represented and embodied in numbers than which none more melodious, heartier, or happier ever strengthened and gladdened, by stream or board, the disciples of Cotton and Walton. We paused before unfolding a new book; and then we read it thoroughly from beginning to end, without missing any word.

But time brings with it many vicissitudes. Winter, when nobody but a Stoddart fishes; swarms of European revolutions, which keep every thing, including fishing-rods, out of joint; and again, in this present 1848, a terrible spring-tide, which, standing sentinel at our doors with the keenness of a sword and the strength of a portcullis, has forbidden any body to think of fishing this year till June; – these things have inevitably, forcibly, and wisely obliged us to be silent. We take the earliest opportunity to thank Mr Stoddart for his book.

"Who is the happy warrior?" appears to us to be an interrogatory as nearly as possible destitute of all meaning. But upon the double hypothesis that it may have some meaning, and that we can paint in fresco, such a question might suggest an idea that the felicitous gentleman for whom the poet asks would be best pictured as Julius Caesar in the act of correcting the proof-sheets of his Commentaries. To do good and great actions is agreeable, but dangerous; to write well and nobly of the great and good things we have done is also agreeable, but troublesome; but when the danger and the trouble are both past and gone, to read what we have well written of what we have well done, with the conviction that an endless posterity will read it after us with pleasure and approbation, must be, we shall venture to imagine, most prodigiously agreeable to any respectable individual, whether he is actually a soldier, having purchased his commission at a heavy regulation price, or whether he is only provisionally obnoxious to be balloted for militia service, or accidentally liable to be called out, with a curse and a cutlet in his month, for the guerilla warfare of a special constable. We avow for ourselves, without a blush, that we are only one of those who may become warriors hereafter by statutory or municipal contingency. As yet we have not served in any campaign. On one occasion, indeed, the housemaid discovered, at early dawn, sprouting from the key-hole of the door, a notice, by which we were hastily summoned to quell a dreadful tumult at nine o'clock the night before. Late as the summons came, on reading it a thrill of posthumous glory permeated our frame; nor, when perusing in the newspapers at breakfast the eloquent recognition by the public authorities of the services of other special constables, could we repress the riotous throbbings of martial spirit and martial sympathy within us, as being one who, though de facto inert in dressing-gown and slippers, was entitled de jure, as the notice testified, to be active with badge and baton. We severely reprimanded, of course, the housemaid for bringing into the house stray bits of paper, which might have wrapped up most deleterious combustibles. She promised to be more cautious in future; and it has so happened that the magistrates have never taken practical advantage of our vigilant anxiety to protect the tranquillity of the city. But we are well aware that it has ever been exactly with a corresponding spirit that we have studied the Gallic battles and campaigns of the great Roman, where we have been free alike from the risk of fighting, and the botheration of writing. Our impression is, therefore, on the whole, exceedingly strong that the happy warrior may be more faithfully portrayed by ourselves than by Cæsar.

According to these principles of interpretation, let us inquire, who is the happy angler? To such a question any body who, in the former case, prefers Cæsar's claim to ours, will not fail to reply by bawling out the name of Stoddart. The parallel is a very good one. There is nothing in the science of angling theoretically of which Mr Stoddart is ignorant; there is nothing in the art of angling practically which Mr Stoddart has not tried with his own hand. He has been writing the annals of a laborious, persevering, incessant, and successful experience. He tells others what they may do, by showing them vividly and precisely what he has himself done. It is the record of a conqueror whose career exhibits occurrences so numerous, various, and striking, that the simple narrative of events teaches general principles; the mere accumulation of facts causes theory to vegetate – the movements which lead to victory on a particular occasion are adopted as laws to regulate subsequent operations in similar circumstances; the strategy of the emergency is accepted as universally normal. In a history so instructive, there must necessarily be a remarkable amount of patience and zeal, assiduity and skill, quick apprehension, and sagacious reflection. And where, as in the present instance, it happens that all this information is communicated with healthy racy vigour, and picturesque effect of language, while a dewy freshness of enthusiasm exhilarates the whole composition, it is not surely very surprising that, comfortably pendulous in our rocking-chair, conscious of never having encountered a billionth part of the fatigues undergone by Mr Stoddart, and possessing, in the manageable volume in our hand, a complete repertory of the fruits of the toil, experience, and judgment of that "admirable Triton," we should thus complacently believe that we are the happy angler – leaving it of course to Mr Stoddart, if he likes, to be a Julius Cæsar.

From the frontispiece we start, and after perambulating the book, to the frontispiece we return. "A day's fishing" will then be wondrously intelligible, and ought to be regarded with an angler's love, and an angler's pride. The picture from which the engraving is taken has been long familiar to us. Who painted it? At the left-hand corner of the plate the artist's name is legible enough; but there is much more, besides the name, printed in sympathetic ink which is visible only to the eye of the initiated. A word in thine ear, gentlest of piscatorial readers! The skill of the pencil is the animated reflection of the skill of the fishing rod. Nothing finny has the painter drawn which the angler has not killed. On the canvass his faithful brush has placed nothing which his success as an angler has not enabled him to observe for himself, to mark, and to daguerreotype in his inmost soul. No graceful outline has he traced; no gorgeous bulk has he stretched out in massive breadth or wavy length; no small head has he delicately curved; no, flood of light has he poured on gleaming panoply of interwoven scales of gold and silver; no shifting ray of exquisite colour has he caught in the very instant of brilliant evanescence; no purple spot or crimson star has he made to shine with distinctive brightness on the flank; no aureate or orange tint has he permitted to fade away along the body into pearly whiteness; no fin quivers; no tail curls; 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!