Introduction to the Compleat Angler

To him, if we may say so, it was easy to be saved, while Bunyan, a greater humorist, could be saved only in following a path that skirted madness, and ‘as by fire.’ To Bunyan, Walton would have seemed a figure like his own Ignorance; a pilgrim who never stuck in the Slough of Despond, nor met Apollyon in the Valley of the Shadow, nor was captive in Doubting Castle, nor stoned in Vanity Fair. And of Bunyan, Walton would have said that he was among those Nonconformists who ‘might be sincere, well-meaning men, whose indiscreet zeal might be so like charity, as thereby to cover a multitude of errors.’ To Walton there seemed spiritual solace in remembering ‘that we have comforted and been helpful to a dejected or distressed family.’ Bunyan would have regarded this belief as a heresy, and (theoretically) charitable deeds ‘as filthy rags.’ Differently constituted, these excellent men accepted religion in different ways. Christian bows beneath a burden of sin; Piscator beneath a basket of trout. Let us be grateful for the diversities of human nature, and the dissimilar paths which lead Piscator and Christian alike to the City not built with hands. Both were seekers for a City which to have sought through life, in patience, honesty, loyalty, and love, is to have found it. Of Walton’s book we may say: —

‘Laudis amore tumes? Sunt certa piacula quae teTer pure lecto poterunt recreare libello.’

WALTON AS A BIOGRAPHER

It was probably by his Lives, rather than, in the first instance, by his Angler, that Walton won the liking of Dr. Johnson, whence came his literary resurrection. It is true that Moses Browne and Hawkins, both friends of Johnson’s, edited The Compleat Angler before 1775-1776, when we find Dr. Home of Magdalene, Oxford, contemplating a ‘benoted’ edition of the Lives, by Johnson’s advice. But the Walton of the Lives is, rather than the Walton of the Angler, the man after Johnson’s own heart. The Angler is ‘a picture of my own disposition’ on holidays. The Lives display the same disposition in serious moods, and in face of the eternal problems of man’s life in society. Johnson, we know, was very fond of biography, had thought much on the subject, and, as Boswell notes, ‘varied from himself in talk,’ when he discussed the measure of truth permitted to biographers. ‘If a man is to write a Panegyrick, he may keep vices out of sight; but if he professes to write a Life, he must represent it as it really was.’ Peculiarities were not to be concealed, he said, and his own were not veiled by Boswell. ‘Nobody can write the life of a man but those who have eat and drunk and lived in social intercourse with him.’ ‘They only who live with a man can write his life with any genuine exactness and discrimination; and few people who have lived with a man know what to remark about him.’ Walton had lived much in the society of his subjects, Donne and Wotton; with Sanderson he had a slighter acquaintance; George Herbert he had only met; Hooker, of course, he had never seen in the flesh. It is obvious to every reader that his biographies of Donne and Wotton are his best. In Donne’s Life he feels that he is writing of an English St. Austin, – ‘for I think none was so like him before his conversion; none so like St. Ambrose after it: and if his youth had the infirmities of the one, his age had the excellencies of the other; the learning and holiness of both.’

St. Augustine made free confession of his own infirmities of youth. With great delicacy Walton lets Donne also confess himself, printing a letter in which he declines to take Holy Orders, because his course of life when very young had been too notorious. Delicacy and tact are as notable in Walton’s account of Donne’s poverty, melancholy, and conversion through the blessed means of gentle King Jamie. Walton had an awful loyalty, a sincere reverence for the office of a king. But wherever he introduces King James, either in his Donne or his Wotton, you see a subdued version of the King James of The Fortunes of Nigel. The pedantry, the good nature, the touchiness, the humour, the nervousness, are all here. It only needs a touch of the king’s broad accent to set before us, as vividly as in Scott, the interviews with Donne, and that singular scene when Wotton, disguised as Octavio Baldi, deposits his long rapier at the door of his majesty’s chamber. Wotton, in Florence, was warned of a plot to murder James VI. The duke gave him ‘such Italian antidotes against poison as the Scots till then had been strangers to’: indeed, there is no antidote for a dirk, and the Scots were not poisoners. Introduced by Lindsay as ‘Octavio Baldi,’ Wotton found his nervous majesty accompanied by four Scottish nobles. He spoke in Italian; then, drawing near, hastily whispered that he was an Englishman, and prayed for a private interview. This, by some art, he obtained, delivered his antidotes, and, when James succeeded Elizabeth, rose to high favour. Izaak’s suppressed humour makes it plain that Wotton had acted the scene for him, from the moment of leaving the long rapier at the door. Again, telling how Wotton, in his peaceful hours as Provost of Eton, intended to write a Life of Luther, he says that King Charles diverted him from his purpose to attempting a History of England ‘by a persuasive loving violence (to which may be added a promise of £500 a year).’ He likes these parenthetic touches, as in his description of Donne, ‘always preaching to himself, like an angel from a cloud, —but in none.’ Again, of a commendation of one of his heroes he says, ‘it is a known truth, – though it be in verse.’

A memory of the days when Izaak was an amorist, and shone in love ditties, appears thus. He is speaking of Donne: —

‘Love is a flattering mischief.. a passion that carries us to commit errors with as much ease as whirlwinds remove feathers.’

‘The tears of lovers, or beauty dressed in sadness, are observed to have in them a charming sadness, and to become very often too strong to be resisted.’

These are examples of Walton’s sympathy: his power of portrait-drawing is especially attested by his study of Donne, as the young gallant and poet, the unhappy lover, the man of state out of place and neglected; the heavily burdened father, the conscientious scholar, the charming yet ascetic preacher and divine, the saint who, dying, makes himself in his own shroud, an emblem of mortality.

As an example of Walton’s style, take the famous vision of Dr. Donne in Paris. He had left his wife expecting her confinement: —

‘Two days after their arrival there, Mr. Donne was left alone in that room in which Sir Robert and he, and some other friends, had dined together. To this place Sir Robert returned within half an hour, and as he left, so he found Mr. Donne alone, but in such an ecstacy, and so altered as to his looks, as amazed Sir Robert to behold him; insomuch that he earnestly desired Mr. Donne to declare what had befallen him in the short time of his absence. To which Mr. Donne was not able to make a present answer: but, after a long and perplexed pause, did at last say, “I have seen a dreadful vision since I saw you: I have seen my dear wife pass twice by me through this room, with her hair hanging about her shoulders, and a dead child in her arms; this I have seen since I saw you.” To which Sir Robert replied, “Sure, sir, you have slept since I saw you; and this is the result of some melancholy dream, which I desire you to forget, for you are now awake.” To which Mr. Donne’s reply was, “I cannot be surer that I now live than that I have not slept since I saw you: and I am as sure that at her second appearing she stopped, and looked me in the face, and vanished.. ” And upon examination, the abortion proved to be the same day, and about the very hour, that Mr. Donne affirmed he saw her pass by him in his chamber.

‘.. And though it is most certain that two lutes, being both strung and tuned to an equal pitch, and then one played upon, the other, that is not touched, being laid upon a table at a fit distance, will (like an echo to a trumpet) warble a faint audible harmony in answer to the same tune; yet many will not believe there is any such thing as a sympathy of souls, and I am well pleased that every reader do enjoy his own opinion.. ’

He then appeals to authority, as of Brutus, St. Monica, Saul, St. Peter: —

‘More observations of this nature, and inferences from them, might be made to gain the relation a firmer belief; but I forbear: lest I, that intended to be but a relator, may be thought to be an engaged person for the proving what was related to me… by one who had it from Dr. Donne.’

Walpole was no Boswell; worthy Boswell would have cross-examined Dr. Donne himself.

Of dreams he writes: —

‘Common dreams are but a senseless paraphrase on our waking thoughts, or of the business of the day past, or are the result of our over engaged affections when we betake ourselves to rest.’.. Yet ‘Almighty God (though the causes of dreams be often unknown) hath even in these latter times also, by a certain illumination of the soul in sleep, discovered many things that human wisdom could not foresee.’

Walton is often charged with superstition, and the enlightened editor of the eighteenth century excised all the scene of Mrs. Donne’s wraith as too absurd. But Walton is a very fair witness. Donne, a man of imagination, was, he tells us, in a perturbed anxiety about Mrs. Donne. The event was after dinner. The story is, by Walton’s admission, at second hand. Thus, in the language of the learned in such matters, the tale is ‘not evidential.’ Walton explains it, if true, as a result of ‘sympathy of souls’ – what is now called telepathy. But he is content that every man should have his own opinion. In the same way he writes of the seers in the Wotton family: ‘God did seem to speak to many of this family’ (the Wottons) ‘in dreams,’ and Thomas Wotton’s dreams ‘did usually prove true, both in foretelling things to come, and discovering things past.’ Thus he dreamed that five townsmen and poor scholars were robbing the University chest at Oxford. He mentioned this in a letter to his son at Oxford, and the letter, arriving just after the robbery, led to the discovery of the culprits. Yet Walton states the causes and nature of dreams in general with perfect sobriety and clearness. His tales of this sort were much to Johnson’s mind, as to Southey’s. But Walton cannot fairly be called ‘superstitious,’ granting the age in which he lived. Visions like Dr. Donne’s still excite curious comment.

To that cruel superstition of his age, witchcraft, I think there is no allusion in Walton. Almost as uncanny, however, is his account of Donne’s preparation for death

‘Several charcoal fires being first made in his large study, he brought with him into that place his winding-sheet in his hand, and having put off all his clothes, had this sheet put on him, and so tied with knots at his head and feet, and his hands so placed as dead bodies are usually fitted, to be shrouded and put into their coffin or grave. Upon this urn he thus stood, with his eyes shut, and with so much of the sheet turned aside as might show his lean, pale, and death-like face, which was purposely turned towards the east, from which he expected the second coming of his and our Saviour Jesus. In this posture he was drawn at his just height, and, when the picture was fully finished, he caused it to be set by his bedside, where it continued, and became his hourly object till death.’

Thus Donne made ready to meet the common fate: —

‘That body, which once was a temple of the Holy Ghost, is now become a small quantity of Christian ashes. But I shall see it reanimated.’

This is the very voice of Faith. Walton was, indeed, an assured believer, and to his mind, the world offered no insoluble problem. But we may say of him, in the words of a poet whom he quotes: —

‘Many a oneOwes to his country his religion;And in another would as strongly growHad but his nurse or mother taught him so.’

In his account of Donne’s early theological studies of the differences between Rome and Anglicanism, it is manifest that Izaak thinks these differences matters of no great moment. They are not for simple men to solve: Donne has taken that trouble for him; besides, he is an Englishman, and

‘Owes to his country his religion.’

He will be no Covenanter, and writes with disgust of an intruded Scots minister, whose first action was to cut down the ancient yews in the churchyard. Izaak’s religion, and all his life, were rooted in the past, like the yew-tree. He is what he calls ‘the passive peaceable Protestant.’ ‘The common people in this nation,’ he writes, ‘think they are not wise unless they be busy about what they understand not, and especially about religion’; as Bunyan was busy at that very moment. In Walton’s opinion, the plain facts of religion, and of consequent morality, are visible as the sun at noonday. The vexed questions are for the learned, and are solved variously by them. A man must follow authority, as he finds it established in his own country, unless he has the learning and genius of a Donne. To these, or equivalents for these in a special privy inspiration, ‘the common people’ of his day, and ever since Elizabeth’s day, were pretending. This was the inevitable result of the translation of the Bible into English. Walton quotes with approval a remark of a witty Italian on a populace which was universally occupied with Free-will and Predestination. The fruits Walton saw, in preaching Corporals, Antinomian Trusty Tompkinses, Quakers who ran about naked, barking, Presbyterians who cut down old yew-trees, and a Parliament of Saints. Walton took no kind of joy in the general emancipation of the human spirit. The clergy, he confessed, were not what he wished them to be, but they were better than Quakers, naked and ululant. To love God and his neighbour, and to honour the king, was Walton’s unperplexed religion. Happily he was saved from the view of the errors and the fall of James II., a king whom it was not easy to honour. His social philosophy was one of established rank, tempered by equity and Christian charity. If anything moves his tranquil spirit, it is the remorseless greed of him who takes his fellow-servant by the throat and exacts the uttermost penny. How Sanderson saved a poor farmer from the greed of an extortionate landlord, Walton tells in his Life of the prelate, adding this reflection: —

‘It may be noted that in this age there are a sort of people so unlike the God of mercy, so void of the bowels of pity, that they love only themselves and their children; love them so as not to be concerned whether the rest of mankind waste their days in sorrow or shame; people that are cursed with riches, and a mistake that nothing but riches can make them and theirs happy.’

Thus Walton appears, this is ‘the picture of his own disposition,’ in the Lives. He is a kind of antithesis to John Knox. Men like Walton are not to be approached for new ‘ideas.’ They will never make a new world at a blow: they will never enable us to understand, but they can teach us to endure, and even to enjoy, the world. Their example is alluring: —

‘Even the ashes of the justSmell sweet, and blossom in the dust.’

THE COMPLEAT ANGLER

Franck, as we saw, called Walton ‘a plagiary.’ He was a plagiary in the same sense as Virgil and Lord Tennyson and Robert Burns, and, indeed, Homer, and all poets. The Compleat Angler, the father of so many books, is the child of a few. Walton not only adopts the opinions and advice of the authors whom he cites, but also follows the manner, to a certain extent, of authors whom he does not quote. His very exordium, his key-note, echoes (as Sir Harris Nicolas observes) the opening of A Treatise of the Nature of God (London, 1599). The Treatise starts with a conversation between a gentleman and a scholar: it commences: —

Gent. Well overtaken, sir!

Scholar. You are welcome, gentleman.

A more important source is The Treatyse of Fysshynge wyth an Angle, commonly attributed to Dame Juliana Barnes (printed at Westminster, 1496). A manuscript, probably of 1430-1450, has been published by Mr. Satchell (London, 1883). This book may be a translation of an unknown French original. It opens: —

‘Soloman in hys paraboles seith that a glad spirit maket a flowryng age. That ys to sey, a feyre age and a longe’ (like Walton’s own), ‘and sith hyt ys so I aske this question, wyche bynne the menys and cause to reduce a man to a mery spryte.’ The angler ‘schall have hys holsom walke and mery at hys owne ease, and also many a sweyt eayr of divers erbis and flowres that schall make hym ryght hongre and well disposed in hys body. He schall heyr the melodies melodious of the ermony of byrde: he schall se also the yong swannes and signetes folowing ther eyrours, duckes, cootes, herons, and many other fowlys with ther brodys, wyche me semyt better then all the noyse of houndes, and blastes of hornes and other gamys that fawkners or hunters can make, and yf the angler take the fyssche, hardly then ys ther no man meryer then he in his sprites.’

This is the very ‘sprite’ of Walton; this has that vernal and matutinal air of opening European literature, full of birds’ music, and redolent of dawn. This is the note to which the age following Walton would not listen.

In matter of fact, again, Izaak follows the ancient Treatise. We know his jury of twelve flies: the Treatise says: —

‘These ben the xij flyes wyth whyche ye shall angle to the trought and graylling, and dubbe like as ye shall now here me tell.

‘Marche. The donne fly, the body of the donne woll, and the wyngis of the pertryche. Another donne flye, the body of blacke woll, the wyngis of the blackyst drake; and the lay under the wynge and under the tayle.’

Walton has: —

‘The first is the dun fly in March: the body is made of dun wool, the wings of the partridge’s feathers. The second is another dun fly: the body of black wool; and the wings made of the black drake’s feathers, and of the feathers under his tail.’

Again, the Treatise has: —

Auguste. The drake fly. The body of black wull and lappyd abowte wyth blacke sylke: winges of the mayle of the blacke drake wyth a blacke heed.’

Walton has: —

‘The twelfth is the dark drake-fly, good in August: the body made with black wool, lapt about with black silk, his wings are made with the mail of the black drake, with a black head.’

This is word for word a transcript of the fifteenth century Treatise. But Izaak cites, not the ancient Treatise, but Mr. Thomas Barker. 6 Barker, in fact, gives many more, and more variegated flies than Izaak offers in the jury of twelve which he rendered, from the old Treatise, into modern English. Sir Harris Nicolas says that the jury is from Leonard Mascall’s Booke of Fishing with Hooke and Line (London, 1609), but Mascall merely stole from the fifteenth-century book. In Cotton’s practice, and that of The Angler’s Vade Mecum (1681), flies were as numerous as among ourselves, and had, in many cases, the same names. Walton absurdly bids us ‘let no part of the line touch the water, but the fly only.’ Barker says, ‘Let the fly light first into the water.’ Both men insist on fishing down stream, which is, of course, the opposite of the true art, for fish lie with their heads up stream, and trout are best approached from behind. Cotton admits of fishing both up and down, as the wind and stream may serve: and, of course, in heavy water, in Scotland, this is all very well. But none of the old anglers, to my knowledge, was a dry-fly fisher, and Izaak was no fly-fisher at all. He took what he said from Mascall, who took it from the old Treatise, in which, it is probable, Walton read, and followed the pleasant and to him congenial spirit of the mediæval angler. All these writers tooled with huge rods, fifteen or eighteen feet in length, and Izaak had apparently never used a reel. For salmon, he says, ‘some use a wheel about the middle of their rods or near their hand, which is to be observed better by seeing one of them, than by a large demonstration of words.’

Mr. Westwood has made a catalogue of books cited by Walton in his Compleat Angler. There is Ælian (who makes the first known reference to fly-fishing); Aldrovandus, De Piscibus (1638); Dubravius, De Piscibus (1559); and the English translation (1599) Gerard’s Herball (1633); Gesner, De Piscibus (s. a.) and Historia Naturalis (1558); Phil. Holland’s Pliny (1601); Rondelet, De Piscibus Marines (1554); Silvianus Aquatilium Historiæ (1554): these nearly exhaust Walton’s supply of authorities in natural history. He was devoted, as we saw, to authority, and had a childlike faith in the fantastic theories which date from Pliny. ‘Pliny hath an opinion that many flies have their birth, or being, from a dew that in the spring falls upon the leaves of trees.’ It is a pious opinion! Izaak is hardly so superstitious as the author of The Angler’s Vade Mecum. I cannot imagine him taking ‘Man’s fat and cat’s fat, of each half an ounce, mummy finely powdered, three drains,’ and a number of other abominations, to ‘make an Oyntment according to Art, and when you Angle, anoint 8 inches of the line next the Hook therewith.’ Or, ‘Take the Bones and Scull of a Dead-man, at the opening of a Grave, and beat the same into Pouder, and put of this Pouder in the Moss wherein you keep your Worms, —but others like Grave Earth as well.’ No doubt grave earth is quite as efficacious.

These remarks show how Izaak was equipped in books and in practical information: it follows that his book is to be read, not for instruction, but for human pleasure.

So much for what Walton owed to others. For all the rest, for what has made him the favourite of schoolboys and sages, of poets and philosophers, he is indebted to none but his Maker and his genius. That he was a lover of Montaigne we know; and, had Montaigne been a fisher, he might have written somewhat like Izaak, but without the piety, the perfume, and the charm. There are authors whose living voices, if we know them in the flesh, we seem to hear in our ears as we peruse their works. Of such was Mr. Jowett, sometime Master of Balliol College, a good man, now with God. It has ever seemed to me that friends of Walton must thus have heard his voice as they read him, and that it reaches us too, though faintly. Indeed, we have here ‘a kind of picture of his own disposition,’ as he tells us Piscator is the Walton whom honest Nat. and R. Roe and Sir Henry Wotton knew on fishing-days. The book is a set of confessions, without their commonly morbid turn. ‘I write not for money, but for pleasure,’ he says; methinks he drove no hard bargain with good Richard Marriott, nor was careful and troubled about royalties on his eighteenpenny book. He regards scoffers as ‘an abomination to mankind,’ for indeed even Dr. Johnson, who, a century later, set Moses Browne on reprinting The Compleat Angler, broke his jest on our suffering tribe. ‘Many grave, serious men pity anglers,’ says Auceps, and Venator styles them ‘patient men,’ as surely they have great need to be. For our toil, like that of the husbandman, hangs on the weather that Heaven sends, and on the flies that have their birth or being from a kind of dew, and on the inscrutable caprice of fish; also, in England, on the miller, who giveth or withholdeth at his pleasure the very water that is our element. The inquiring rustic who shambles up erect when we are lying low among the reeds, even he disposes of our fortunes, with whom, as with all men, we must be patient, dwelling ever —

‘With close-lipped Patience for our only friend,Sad Patience, too near neighbour of Despair.’

O the tangles, more than Gordian, of gut on a windy day! O bitter east wind that bloweth down stream! O the young ducks that, swimming between us and the trout, contend with him for the blue duns in their season! O the hay grass behind us that entangles the hook! O the rocky wall that breaks it, the boughs that catch it; the drought that leaves the salmon-stream dry, the floods that fill it with turbid, impossible waters! Alas for the knot that breaks, and for the iron that bends; for the lost landing-net, and the gillie with the gaff that scrapes the fish! Izaak believed that fish could hear; if they can, their vocabulary must be full of strange oaths, for all anglers are not patient men. A malison on the trout that ‘bulge’ and ‘tail,’ on the salmon that ‘jiggers,’ or sulks, or lightly gambols over and under the line. These things, and many more, we anglers endure meekly, being patient men, and a light world fleers at us for our very virtue.