Prose Idylls, New and Old
by Charles Kingsley · English · Gutenberg #7032 · 429,382 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Prose Idylls, New and Old
Author: Charles Kingsley
Release date: December 1, 2004 [eBook #7032]
Most recently updated: November 5, 2014
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/7032
Credits: Transcribed from the 1882 Macmillan and Co. edition by David Price
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PROSE IDYLLS, NEW AND OLD ***
Transcribed from the 1882 Macmillan and Co. edition by David Price, email
ccx074@pglaf.org
[Picture: Eversley Rectory]
PROSE IDYLLS,
NEW AND OLD.
* * * * *
BY
REV. CHARLES KINGSLEY,
CANON OF WESTMINSTER.
[Picture: Drawing of bird on branch, singing]
_NEW EDITION_.
* * * * *
London:
MACMILLAN AND CO.
1882.
_The Right of Translation and Reproduction is Reserved_.
CONTENTS.
PAGE
I.
‘A Charm of Birds’ 1
II.
Chalk-Stream Studies 27
III.
The Fens 93
IV.
My Winter-Garden 133
V.
From Ocean to Sea 175
VI.
North Devon 223
I.
‘_A CHARM OF BIRDS_.’ {1}
IS it merely a fancy that we English, the educated people among us at
least, are losing that love for spring which among our old forefathers
rose almost to worship? That the perpetual miracle of the budding leaves
and the returning song-birds awakes no longer in us the astonishment
which it awoke yearly among the dwellers in the old world, when the sun
was a god who was sick to death each winter, and returned in spring to
life and health, and glory; when the death of Adonis, at the autumnal
equinox, was wept over by the Syrian women, and the death of Baldur, in
the colder north, by all living things, even to the dripping trees, and
the rocks furrowed by the autumn rains; when Freya, the goddess of youth
and love, went forth over the earth each spring, while the flowers broke
forth under her tread over the brown moors, and the birds welcomed her
with song; when, according to Olaus Magnus, the Goths and South Swedes
had, on the return of spring, a mock battle between summer and winter,
and welcomed the returning splendour of the sun with dancing and mutual
feasting, rejoicing that a better season for fishing and hunting was
approaching? To those simpler children of a simpler age, in more direct
contact with the daily and yearly facts of Nature, and more dependent on
them for their bodily food and life, winter and spring were the two great
facts of existence; the symbols, the one of death, the other of life; and
the battle between the two—the battle of the sun with darkness, of winter
with spring, of death with life, of bereavement with love—lay at the root
of all their myths and all their creeds. Surely a change has come over
our fancies. The seasons are little to us now. We are nearly as
comfortable in winter as in summer, or in spring. Nay, we have begun, of
late, to grumble at the two latter as much as at the former, and talk
(and not without excuse at times) of ‘the treacherous month of May,’ and
of ‘summer having set in with its usual severity.’ We work for the most
part in cities and towns, and the seasons pass by us unheeded. May and
June are spent by most educated people anywhere rather than among birds
and flowers. They do not escape into the country till the elm hedges are
growing black, and the song-birds silent, and the hay cut, and all the
virgin bloom of the country has passed into a sober and matronly
ripeness—if not into the sere and yellow leaf. Our very landscape
painters, till Creswick arose and recalled to their minds the fact that
trees were sometimes green, were wont to paint few but brown autumnal
scenes. As for the song of birds, of which in the middle age no poet
could say enough, our modern poets seem to be forgetting that birds ever
sing.
It was not so of old. The climate, perhaps, was more severe than now;
the transition from winter to spring more sudden, like that of
Scandinavia now. Clearage of forests and drainage of land have equalized
our seasons, or rather made them more uncertain. More broken winters are
followed by more broken springs; and May-day is no longer a marked point
to be kept as a festival by all childlike hearts. The merry month of May
is merry only in stage songs. The May garlands and dances are all but
gone: the borrowed plate, and the milkmaids who borrowed it, gone
utterly. No more does Mrs. Pepys go to ‘lie at Woolwich, in order to a
little ayre and to gather May-dew’ for her complexion, by Mrs. Turner’s
advice. The Maypole is gone likewise; and never more shall the puritan
soul of a Stubbs be aroused in indignation at seeing ‘against Maie, every
parish, towne, and village assemble themselves together, both men, women,
and children, olde and young, all indifferently, and goe into the woodes
and groves, hilles and mountaines, where they spend the night in pastyme,
and in the morning they returne, bringing with them birch bowes and
braunches of trees to deck their assembly withal. . . . They have twentie
or fourtie yoke of oxen, every oxe having a sweete nosegay of flowers
tyed on the tippe of his hornes, and these draw home this Maypole (this
stincking idol rather) which is covered all over with flowers and
hearbes, with two or three hundred men, women, and children following it
with great devotion. . . And then they fall to banquet and feast, daunce
and leap about it, as the heathen people did at the dedication of their
idolles, whereof this is a perfect pattern, or the thing itself.’
This, and much more, says poor Stubbs, in his ‘Anatomie of Abuses,’ and
had, no doubt, good reason enough for his virtuous indignation at May-day
scandals. But people may be made dull without being made good; and the
direct and only effect of putting down May games and such like was to cut
off the dwellers in towns from all healthy communion with Nature, and
leave them to mere sottishness and brutality.
Yet perhaps the May games died out, partly because the feelings which had
given rise to them died out before improved personal comforts. Of old,
men and women fared hardly, and slept cold; and were thankful to Almighty
God for every beam of sunshine which roused them out of their long
hybernation; thankful for every flower and every bird which reminded them
that joy was stronger than sorrow, and life than death. With the spring
came not only labour, but enjoyment:
‘In the spring, the young man’s fancy lightly turned to thoughts of
love,’
as lads and lasses, who had been pining for each other by their winter
firesides, met again, like Daphnis and Chloe, by shaugh and lea; and
learnt to sing from the songs of birds, and to be faithful from their
faithfulness.
Then went out troops of fair damsels to seek spring garlands in the
forest, as Scheffel has lately sung once more in his ‘Frau Aventiure;’
and, while the dead leaves rattled beneath their feet, hymned ‘La Regine
Avrillouse’ to the music of some Minnesinger, whose song was as the song
of birds; to whom the birds were friends, fellow-lovers, teachers,
mirrors of all which he felt within himself of joyful and tender, true
and pure; friends to be fed hereafter (as Walther von der Vogelweide had
them fed) with crumbs upon his grave.
True melody, it must be remembered, is unknown, at least at present, in
the tropics, and peculiar to the races of those temperate climes, into
which the song-birds come in spring. It is hard to say why. Exquisite
songsters, and those, strangely, of an European type, may be heard
anywhere in tropical American forests: but native races whose hearts
their song can touch, are either extinct or yet to come. Some of the old
German Minnelieder, on the other hand, seem actually copied from the
songs of birds. ‘Tanderadei’ does not merely ask the nightingale to tell
no tales; it repeats, in its cadences, the nightingale’s song, as the old
Minnesinger heard it when he nestled beneath the lime-tree with his love.
They are often almost as inarticulate, these old singers, as the birds
from whom they copied their notes; the thinnest chain of thought links
together some bird-like refrain: but they make up for their want of logic
and reflection by the depth of their passion, the perfectness of their
harmony with nature. The inspired Swabian, wandering in the pine-forest,
listens to the blackbird’s voice till it becomes his own voice; and he
breaks out, with the very carol of the blackbird
‘Vogele im Tannenwald pfeifet so hell.
Pfeifet de Wald aus und ein, wo wird mein Schätze sein?
Vogele im Tannenwald pfeitet so hell.’
And he has nothing more to say. That is his whole soul for the time
being; and, like a bird, he sings it over and over again, and never
tires.
Another, a Nieder-Rheinischer, watches the moon rise over the Löwenburg,
and thinks upon his love within the castle hall, till he breaks out in a
strange, sad, tender melody—not without stateliness and manly confidence
in himself and in his beloved—in the true strain of the nightingale:
‘Verstohlen geht der Mond auf,
Blau, blau, Blümelein,
Durch Silberwölkchen führt sein Lauf.
Rosen im Thal, Mädel im Saal, O schönste Rosa!
* * *
Und siehst du mich,
Und siehst du sie,
Blau, blau, Blümelein,
Zwei treu’re Herzen sah’st du nie;
Rosen im Thal u. s. w.’
There is little sense in the words, doubtless, according to our modern
notions of poetry; but they are like enough to the long, plaintive notes
of the nightingale to say all that the poet has to say, again and again
through all his stanzas.
Thus the birds were, to the mediæval singers, their orchestra, or rather
their chorus; from the birds they caught their melodies; the sounds which
the birds gave them they rendered into words.
And the same bird keynote surely is to be traced in the early English and
Scotch songs and ballads, with their often meaningless refrains, sung for
the mere pleasure of singing:
‘Binnorie, O Binnorie.
Or—
‘With a hey lillelu and a how lo lan,
And the birk and the broom blooms bonnie.’
Or—
‘She sat down below a thorn,
Fine flowers in the valley,
And there has she her sweet babe born,
And the green leaves they grow rarely.’
Or even those ‘fal-la-las,’ and other nonsense refrains, which, if they
were not meant to imitate bird-notes, for what were they meant?
In the old ballads, too, one may hear the bird keynote. He who wrote
(and a great rhymer he was)
‘As I was walking all alane,
I heard twa corbies making a mane,’
had surely the ‘mane’ of the ‘corbies’ in his ears before it shaped
itself into words in his mind: and he had listened to many a ‘woodwele’
who first thrummed on harp, or fiddled on crowd, how—
‘In summer, when the shawes be shene,
And leaves be large and long,
It is full merry in fair forest
To hear the fowlés’ song.
‘The wood-wele sang, and wolde not cease,
Sitting upon the spray;
So loud, it wakened Robin Hood
In the greenwood where he lay.’
And Shakespeare—are not his scraps of song saturated with these same
bird-notes? ‘Where the bee sucks,’ ‘When daisies pied,’ ‘Under the
greenwood tree,’ ‘It was a lover and his lass,’ ‘When daffodils begin to
peer,’ ‘Ye spotted snakes,’ have all a ring in them which was caught not
in the roar of London, or the babble of the Globe theatre, but in the
woods of Charlecote, and along the banks of Avon, from
‘The ouzel-cock so black of hue,
With orange-tawny bill;
The throstle with his note so true:
The wren with little quill;
The finch, the sparrow, and the lark,
The plain-song cuckoo gray’—
and all the rest of the birds of the air.
Why is it, again, that so few of our modern songs are truly songful, and
fit to be set to music? Is it not that the writers of them—persons often
of much taste and poetic imagination—have gone for their inspiration to
the intellect, rather than to the ear? That (as Shelley does by the
skylark, and Wordsworth by the cuckoo), instead of trying to sing like
the birds, they only think and talk about the birds, and therefore,
however beautiful and true the thoughts and words may be, they are not
song? Surely they have not, like the mediæval songsters, studied the
speech of the birds, the primæval teachers of melody; nor even melodies
already extant, round which, as round a framework of pure music, their
thoughts and images might crystallize themselves, certain thereby of
becoming musical likewise. The best modern song writers, Burns and
Moore, were inspired by their old national airs; and followed them, Moore
at least, with a reverent fidelity, which has had its full reward. They
wrote words to music and not, as modern poets are wont, wrote the words
first, and left others to set music to the words. They were right; and
we are wrong. As long as song is to be the expression of pure emotion,
so long it must take its key from music,—which is already pure emotion,
untranslated into the grosser medium of thought and speech—often (as in
the case of Mendelssohn’s Songs without Words) not to be translated into
it at all.
And so it may be, that in some simpler age, poets may go back, like the
old Minnesingers, to the birds of the forest, and learn of them to sing.
And little do most of them know how much there is to learn; what variety
of character, as well as variety of emotion, may be distinguished by the
practised ear, in a ‘charm of birds’ (to use the old southern phrase),
from the wild cry of the missel-thrush, ringing from afar in the first
bright days of March, a passage of one or two bars repeated three or four
times, and then another and another, clear and sweet, and yet defiant—for
the great ‘stormcock’ loves to sing when rain and wind is coming on, and
faces the elements as boldly as he faces hawk and crow—down to the
delicate warble of the wren, who slips out of his hole in the brown bank,
where he has huddled through the frost with wife and children, all folded
in each other’s arms like human beings, for the sake of warmth,—which,
alas! does not always suffice; for many a lump of wrens may be found,
frozen and shrivelled, after a severe winter. Yet even he, sitting at
his house-door in the low sunlight, says grace for all mercies (as a
little child once worded it) in a song so rapid, so shrill, so loud, and
yet so delicately modulated, that you wonder at the amount of soul within
that tiny body; and then stops suddenly, as a child who has said its
lesson, or got to the end of the sermon, gives a self-satisfied flirt of
his tail, and goes in again to sleep.
Character? I know not how much variety of character there may be between
birds of the same species but between species and species the variety is
endless, and is shown—as I fondly believe—in the difference of their
notes. Each has its own speech, inarticulate, expressing not thought but
hereditary feeling; save a few birds who, like those little dumb
darlings, the spotted flycatchers, seem to have absolutely nothing to
say, and accordingly have the wit to hold their tongues; and devote the
whole of their small intellect to sitting on the iron rails, flitting off
them a yard or two to catch a butterfly in air, and flitting back with it
to their nest.
But listen to the charm of birds in any sequestered woodland, on a bright
forenoon in June. As you try to disentangle the medley of sounds, the
first, perhaps, which will strike your ear will be the loud, harsh,
monotonous, flippant song of the chaffinch; and the metallic clinking of
two or three sorts of titmice. But above the tree-tops, rising,
hovering, sinking, the woodlark is fluting, tender and low. Above the
pastures outside the skylark sings—as he alone can sing; and close by,
from the hollies rings out the blackbird’s tenor—rollicking, audacious,
humorous, all but articulate. From the tree above him rises the treble
of the thrush, pure as the song of angels: more pure, perhaps, in tone,
though neither so varied nor so rich, as the song of the nightingale.
And there, in the next holly, is the nightingale himself: now croaking
like a frog; now talking aside to his wife on the nest below; and now
bursting out into that song, or cycle of songs, in which if any man finds
sorrow, he himself surely finds none. All the morning he will sing; and
again at evening, till the small hours, and the chill before the dawn:
but if his voice sounds melancholy at night, heard all alone, or only
mocked by the ambitious black-cap, it sounds in the bright morning that
which it is, the fulness of joy and love. Milton’s
‘Sweet bird, that shun’st the noise of folly,
Most musical, most melancholy,’
is untrue to fact. So far from shunning the noise of folly, the
nightingale sings as boldly as anywhere close to a stage-coach road, or a
public path, as anyone will testify who recollects the ‘Wrangler’s Walk’
from Cambridge to Trumpington forty years ago, when the covert, which has
now become hollow and shelterless, held, at every twenty yards, an
unabashed and jubilant nightingale.
Coleridge surely was not far wrong when he guessed that—
‘Some night-wandering man, whose heart was pierced
With the remembrance of a grievous wrong,
Or slow distemper, or neglected love
(And so, poor wretch, filled all things with himself,
And made all gentle sounds tell back the tale
Of his own sorrow)—he, and such as he,
First named these sounds a melancholy strain,
And many a poet echoes the conceit.’
That the old Greek poets were right, and had some grounds for the myth of
Philomela, I do not dispute; though Sophocles, speaking of the
nightingales of Colonos, certainly does not represent them as lamenting.
The Elizabethan poets, however, when they talked of Philomel, ‘her breast
against a thorn,’ were unaware that they and the Greeks were talking of
two different birds; that our English Lusciola Luscinia is not Lusciola
Philomela, one of the various birds called Bulbul in the East. The true
Philomel hardly enters Venetia, hardly crosses the Swiss Alps, ventures
not into the Rhineland and Denmark, but penetrates (strangely enough)
further into South Sweden than our own Luscinia: ranging meanwhile over
all Central Europe, Persia, and the East, even to Egypt. Whether his
song be really sad, let those who have heard him say. But as for our own
Luscinia, who winters not in Egypt and Arabia, but in Morocco and
Algeria, the only note of his which can be mistaken for sorrow, is rather
one of too great joy; that cry, which is his highest feat of art; which
he cannot utter when he first comes to our shores, but practises
carefully, slowly, gradually, till he has it perfect by the beginning of
June; that cry, long, repeated, loudening and sharpening in the intensity
of rising passion, till it stops suddenly, exhausted at the point where
pleasure, from very keenness, turns to pain; and—
‘In the topmost height of joy
His passion clasps a secret grief.’
How different in character from his song is that of the gallant little
black-cap in the tree above him. A gentleman he is of a most ancient
house, perhaps the oldest of European singing birds. How perfect must
have been the special organization which has spread seemingly without
need of alteration or improvement, from Norway to the Cape of Good Hope,
from Japan to the Azores. How many ages must have passed since his
forefathers first got their black caps. And how intense and fruitful
must have been the original vitality which, after so many generations,
can still fill that little body with so strong a soul, and make him sing
as Milton’s new-created birds sang to Milton’s Eve in Milton’s Paradise.
Sweet he is, and various, rich, and strong, beyond all English warblers,
save the nightingale: but his speciality is his force, his rush, his
overflow, not so much of love as of happiness. The spirit carries him
away. He riots up and down the gamut till he cannot stop himself; his
notes tumble over each other; he chuckles, laughs, shrieks with delight,
throws back his head, droops his tail, sets up his back, and sings with
every fibre of his body: and yet he never forgets his good manners. He
is never coarse, never harsh, for a single note. Always graceful, always
sweet, he keeps perfect delicacy in his most utter carelessness.
And why should we overlook, common though he be, yon hedge-sparrow, who
is singing so modestly, and yet so firmly and so true? Or cock-robin
himself, who is here, as everywhere, honest, self-confident, and
cheerful? Most people are not aware, one sometimes fancies, how fine a
singer is cock-robin now in the spring-time, when his song is drowned by,
or at least confounded with, a dozen other songs. We know him and love
him best in winter, when he takes up (as he does sometimes in cold wet
summer days) that sudden wistful warble, struggling to be happy, half in
vain, which surely contradicts Coleridge’s verse:—
‘In Nature there is nothing melancholy.’
But he who will listen carefully to the robin’s breeding song on a bright
day in May, will agree, I think, that he is no mean musician; and that
for force, variety and character of melody, he is surpassed only by
black-cap, thrush, and nightingale.
And what is that song, sudden, loud, sweet, yet faltering, as if half
ashamed? Is it the willow wren or the garden warbler? The two birds,
though very remotely allied to each other, are so alike in voice, that it
is often difficult to distinguish them, unless we attend carefully to the
expression. For the garden warbler, beginning in high and loud notes,
runs down in cadence, lower and softer, till joy seems conquered by very
weariness; while the willow wren, with a sudden outbreak of cheerfulness,
though not quite sure (it is impossible to describe bird-songs without
attributing to the birds human passions and frailties) that he is not
doing a silly thing, struggles on to the end of his story with a
hesitating hilarity, in feeble imitation of the black-cap’s bacchanalian
dactyls.
And now, again—is it true that
‘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.
To name them:—
1. The caperer.
2. The March-brown.
3. The governor.
4. The black alder.
And two or three large palmers, red, grizzled, and coch-a-bonddhu, each
with a tuft of red floss silk at the tail. These are enough to show
sport from March to October; and also like enough to certain natural
flies to satisfy the somewhat dull memory of a trout.
But beyond this list there is little use in roaming, as far as my
experience goes. A yellow dun kills sometimes marvellously on
chalk-streams, and always upon rocky ones. A Turkey-brown ephemera, the
wing made of the bright brown tail of the cock partridge, will, even just
after the May-fly is off, show good sport in the forenoon, when he is on
the water; and so will in the evening the claret spinner, to which he
turns. Excellent patterns of these flies may be found in Ronalds: but,
after all, they are uncertain flies; and, as Harry Verney used to say,
‘they casualty flies be all havers;’ which sentence the reader, if he
understands good Wessex, can doubtless translate for himself.
And there are evenings on which the fish take greedily small transparent
ephemeræ. But, did you ever see large fish rise at these ephemeræ? And
even if you did, can you imitate the natural fly? And after all, would
it not be waste of time? For the experience of many good fishers is,
that trout rise at these delicate duns, black gnats, and other
microscopic trash, simply _faute de mieux_. They are hungry, as trout
are six days in the week, just at sunset. A supper they must have, and
they take what comes; but if you can give them anything better than the
minute fairy, compact of equal parts of glass and wind, which naturalists
call an Ephemera or Bætis, it will be most thankfully received, if there
be ripple enough on the water (which there seldom is on a fine evening)
to hide the line: and even though the water be still, take boldly your
caperer or your white moth (either of them ten times as large as what the
trout are rising at), hurl it boldly into a likely place, and let it lie
quiet and sink, not attempting to draw or work it; and if you do not
catch anything by that means, comfort yourself with the thought that
there are others who can.
And now to go through our list, beginning with—
1. The caperer.
This perhaps is the best of all flies; it is certainly the one which will
kill earliest and latest in the year; and though I would hardly go as far
as a friend of mine, who boasts of never fishing with anything else, I
believe it will, from March to October, take more trout, and possibly
more grayling, than any other fly. Its basis is the woodcock wing; red
hackle legs, which should be long and pale; and a thin mohair body, of
different shades of red-brown, from a dark claret to a pale sandy. It
may thus, tied of different sizes, do duty for half-a-dozen of the
commonest flies; for the early claret (red-brown of Ronalds; a Nemoura,
according to him), which is the first spring-fly; for the red spinner, or
perfect form of the March-brown ephemera; for the soldier, the
soft-winged reddish beetle which haunts the umbelliferous flowers, and
being as soft in spirit as in flesh, perpetually falls into the water,
and comes to grief therein; and last but not least, for the true
caperers, or whole tribe of Phryganidæ, of which a sketch was given just
now. As a copy of them, the body should be of a pale red brown, all but
sandy (but never snuff-coloured, as shop-girls often tie it), and its
best hour is always in the evening. It kills well when fish are gorged
with their morning meal of green drakes; and after the green drake is
off, it is almost the only fly at which large trout care to look; a fact
not to be wondered at when one considers that nearly two hundred species
of English Phryganidæ have been already described, and that at least half
of them are of the fawn-tint of the caperer. Under the title of
flame-brown, cinnamon, or red-hackle and rail’s wing, a similar fly kills
well in Ireland, and in Scotland also; and is sometimes the best
sea-trout fly which can be laid on the water. Let this suffice for the
caperer.
2. Of the March-brown ephemera there is little to be said, save to
notice Ronalds’ and Ephemera’s excellent description, and Ephemera’s good
hint of fishing with more than one March-brown at once, viz., with a
sandy-bodied male, and a greenish-bodied female. The fly is a worthy
fly, and being easily imitated, gives great sport, in number rather than
in size; for when the March-brown is out, the two or three pound fish are
seldom on the move, preferring leeches, tom-toddies, and caddis-bait in
the nether deeps, to slim ephemeræ at the top; and if you should (as you
may) get hold of a big fish on the fly, ‘you’d best hit him in again,’ as
we say in Wessex; for he will be, like the Ancient Mariner—
‘Long, and lank, and brown,
As is the ribbed sea-sand.’
3. The ‘governor.’—In most sandy banks, and dry poor lawns, will be
found numberless burrows of ground bees who have a great trick of
tumbling into the water. Perhaps, like the honey bee, they are thirsty
souls, and must needs go down to the river and drink; perhaps, like the
honey bee, they rise into the air with some difficulty, and so in
crossing a stream are apt to strike the further bank, and fall in. Be
that as it may, an imitation of these little ground bees is a deadly fly
the whole year round; and if worked within six inches of the shore, will
sometimes fill a basket when there is not a fly on the water or a fish
rising. There are those who never put up a cast of flies without one;
and those, too, who have killed large salmon on him in the north of
Scotland, when the streams are low.
His tie is simple enough. A pale partridge or woodcock wing, short red
hackle legs, a peacock-herl body, and a tail—on which too much artistic
skill can hardly be expended—of yellow floss silk, and gold twist or
tinsel. The orange-tailed governors ‘of ye shops,’ as the old drug-books
would say, are all ‘havers;’ for the proper colour is a honey yellow.
The mystery of this all-conquering tail seems to be, that it represents
the yellow pollen, or ‘bee bread’ in the thighs or abdomen of the bee;
whereof the bright colour, and perhaps the strong musky flavour, makes
him an attractive and savoury morsel. Be that as it may, there is no
better rule for a chalk stream than this—when you don’t know what to fish
with, try the governor.
4. The black alder (_Sialis nigra_, or _Lutaria_).
What shall be said, or not be said, of this queen of flies? And what of
Ephemera, who never mentions her? His alder fly is—I know not what;
certainly not that black alder, shorm fly, Lord Stowell’s fly, or
hunch-back, which kills the monsters of the deep, surpassed only by the
green drake for one fortnight; but surpassing him in this, that she will
kill on till September, from that happy day on which
‘You find her out on every stalk
Whene’er you take a river walk,
When swifts at eve begin to hawk.’
O thou beloved member of the brute creation! Songs have been written in
praise of thee; statues would ere now have been erected to thee, had that
hunch back and those flabby wings of thine been ‘susceptible of artistic
treatment.’ But ugly thou art in the eyes of the uninitiated vulgar; a
little stumpy old maid toddling about the world in a black bonnet and a
brown cloak, laughed at by naughty boys, but doing good wherever thou
comest, and leaving sweet memories behind thee; so sweet that the trout
will rise at the ghost or sham of thee, for pure love of thy past
kindnesses to them, months after thou hast departed from this sublunary
sphere. What hours of bliss do I not owe to thee! How have I seen, in
the rich meads of Wey, after picking out wretched quarter-pounders all
the morning on March-brown and red-hackle, the great trout rush from
every hover to welcome thy first appearance among the sedges and
buttercups! How often, late in August, on Thames, on Test, on Loddon
heads, have I seen the three and four pound fish prefer thy dead image to
any live reality. Have I not seen poor old Si. Wilder, king of Thames
fishermen (now gone home to his rest), shaking his huge sides with
delight over thy mighty deeds, as his fourteen-inch whiskers fluttered in
the breeze like the horsetail standard of some great Bashaw, while
crystal Thames murmured over the white flints on Monkey Island shallow,
and the soft breeze sighed in the colossal poplar spires, and the great
trout rose and rose, and would not cease, at thee, my alder-fly? Have I
not seen, after a day in which the earth below was iron, and the heavens
above as brass, as the three-pounders would have thee, and thee alone, in
the purple August dusk, old Moody’s red face grow redder with excitement,
half proud at having advised me to ‘put on’ thee, half fearful lest we
should catch all my lady’s pet trout in one evening? Beloved alder-fly!
would that I could give thee a soul (if indeed thou hast not one already,
thou, and all things which live), and make thee happy in all æons to
come! But as it is, such immortality as I can I bestow on thee here, in
small return for all the pleasant days thou hast bestowed on me.
Bah! I am becoming poetical; let us think how to tie an alder-fly.
The common tie is good enough. A brown mallard, or dark hen-pheasant
tail for wing, a black hackle for legs, and the necessary peacock-herl
body. A better still is that of Jones Jones Beddgelert, the famous
fishing clerk of Snowdonia, who makes the wing of dappled peacock-hen,
and puts the black hackle on before the wings, in order to give the
peculiar hunch-backed shape of the natural fly. Many a good fish has
this tie killed. But the best pattern of all is tied from the mottled
wing-feather of an Indian bustard; generally used, when it can be
obtained, only for salmon flies. The brown and fawn check pattern of
this feather seems to be peculiarly tempting to trout, especially to the
large trout of Thames; and in every river where I have tried the alder, I
have found the bustard wing _facile princeps_ among all patterns of the
fly.
Of palmers (the hairy caterpillars) are many sorts. Ephemera gives by
far the best list yet published. Ronalds has also three good ones, but
whether they are really taken by trout instead of the particular natural
insects which he mentions, is not very certain. The little
coch-a-bonddhu palmer, so killing upon moor streams, may probably be
taken for young larvæ of the fox and oak-egger moths, abundant on all
moors, upon trefoils, and other common plants; but the lowland
caterpillars are so abundant and so various in colour that trout must be
good entomologists to distinguish them. Some distinction they certainly
make; for one palmer will kill where another does not: but this depends a
good deal on the colour of the water; the red palmer, being easily seen,
will kill almost anywhere and any when, simply because it is easily seen;
and both the grizzle and brown palmer may be made to kill by adding to
the tail a tuft of red floss silk; for red, it would seem, has the same
exciting effect on fish which it has upon many quadrupeds, possibly
because it is the colour of flesh. The mackerel will often run greedily
at a strip of scarlet cloth; and the most killing pike-fly I ever used
had a body made of remnants of the huntsman’s new ‘pink.’ Still, there
are local palmers. On Thames, for instance, I have seldom failed with
the grizzled palmer, while the brown has seldom succeeded, and the
usually infallible red never. There is one more palmer worth trying,
which Scotsmen, I believe, call the Royal Charlie; a coch-a-bonddhu or
furnace hackle, over a body of gold-coloured floss silk, ribbed with
broad gold tinsel. Both in Devonshire and in Hampshire this will kill
great quantities of fish, wherever furzy or otherwise wild banks or
oak-woods afford food for the oak-egger and fox moths, which children
call ‘Devil’s Gold Rings,’ and Scotsmen ‘Hairy Oubits.’
Two hints more about palmers. They must not be worked on the top of the
water, but used as stretchers, and allowed to sink as living caterpillars
do; and next, they can hardly be too large or rough, provided that you
have skill enough to get them into the water without a splash. I have
killed well on Thames with one full three inches long, armed of course
with two small hooks. With palmers—and perhaps with all baits—the rule
is, the bigger the bait the bigger the fish. A large fish does not care
to move except for a good mouthful. The best pike-fisher I know prefers
a half-pound chub when he goes after one of his fifteen-pound jack; and
the largest pike I ever ran—and lost, alas!—who seemed of any weight
above twenty pounds, was hooked on a live white fish of full
three-quarters of a pound. Still, no good angler will despise the minute
North-country flies. In Yorkshire they are said to kill the large chalk
trout of Driffield as well as the small limestone and grit fish of
Craven; if so, the gentlemen of the Driffield Club, who are said to think
nothing of killing three-pound fish on midge flies and cobweb tackle,
must be (as canny Yorkshiremen are likely enough to be) the best anglers
in England.
In one spot only in Yorkshire, as far as I know, do our large chalk flies
kill: namely, in the lofty limestone tarn of Malham. There palmers,
caperers, and rough black flies, of the largest Thames and Kennet sizes,
seem the only attractive baits: and for this reason, that they are the
flies of the place. The cinnamon Phryganea comes up abundantly from
among the stones; and the large peat moss to the west of the tarn
abounds, as usual, in house-flies and bluebottles, and in the
caterpillars of the fox and oak-egger moths: another proof that the most
attractive flies are imitations of the real insects. On the other hand,
there are said to be times when midges, and nothing else, will rise fish
on some chalk streams. The delicate black hackle which Mr. Stewart
praises so highly (and which should always be tied on a square sneck-bend
hook) will kill in June and July; and on the Itchen, at Winchester,
hardly any flies but small ones are used after the green drake is off.
But there is one sad objection against these said midges—what becomes of
your fish when hooked on one in a stream full of weeds (as all chalk
streams are after June), save
‘One struggle more, and I am free
From pangs which rend my heart in twain’?
Winchester fishers have confessed to me that they lose three good fish
out of every four in such cases; and as it seems pretty clear that chalk
fish approve of no medium between very large flies and very small ones, I
advise the young angler, whose temper is not yet schooled into perfect
resignation, to spare his own feelings by fishing with a single large
fly—say the governor in the forenoon, the caperer in the evening,
regardless of the clearness of the water. I have seen flies large enough
for April, raise fish excellently in Test and other clear streams in July
and August; and, what is more, drag them up out of the weeds and into the
landing-net, where midges would have lost them in the first scuffle.
So much for our leading chalk flies; all copies of live insects. Of the
entomology of mountain streams little as yet is known: but a few
scattered hints may suffice to show that in them, as well as in the chalk
rivers, a little natural science might help the angler.
The well-known fact that smaller flies are required on the moors than in
the lowlands, is easily explained by the fact that poorer soils and
swifter streams produce smaller insects. The large Phryganeæ, or true
caperers, whose caddis-baits love still pools and stagnant ditches, are
there rare; and the office of water-scavenger is fulfilled by the
Rhyacophiles (torrent-lovers) and Hydropsyches, whose tiny pebble-houses
are fixed to the stones to resist the violence of the summer floods. In
and out of them the tiny larva runs to find food, making in addition, in
some species, galleries of earth along the surface of the stones, in
which he takes his walks abroad in full security. In any of the brown
rivulets of Windsor forest, towards the middle of summer, the
pebble-houses of these little creatures may be seen in millions, studding
every stone. To the Hydropsyches (species _montana_? or _variegata_? of
Pictet) belongs that curious little Welsh fly, known in Snowdon by the
name of the Gwynnant, whose tesselated wing is best imitated by brown
mallard feather, and who so swarms in the lower lakes of Snowdon, that it
is often necessary to use three of them on the line at once, all other
flies being useless. It is perhaps the abundance of these tesselated
Hydropsyches which makes the mallard wing the most useful in mountain
districts, as the abundance of the fawn and grey Phryganidæ in the south
of England makes the woodcock wing justly the favourite. The
Rhyacophiles, on the other hand, are mostly of a shining soot-grey, or
almost black. These may be seen buzzing in hundreds over the pools on a
wet evening, and with them the sooty Mystacides, called silverhorns in
Scotland, from their antennæ, which are of preposterous length, and
ringed prettily enough with black and white. These delicate fairies make
moveable cases, or rather pipes, of the finest sand, generally curved,
and resembling in shape the Dentalium shell. Guarded by these, they hang
in myriads on the smooth ledges of rock, where the water runs gently a
few inches deep. These are abundant everywhere: but I never saw so many
of them as in the exquisite Cother brook, near Middleham, in Yorkshire.
In that delicious glen, while wading up beneath the ash-fringed crags of
limestone, out of which the great ring ouzel (too wild, it seemed, to be
afraid of man) hopped down fearlessly to feed upon the strand, or past
flower-banks where the golden globe-flower, and the great blue geranium,
and the giant campanula bloomed beneath the white tassels of the
bird-cherry, I could not tread upon the limestone slabs without crushing
at every step hundreds of the delicate Mystacide tubes, which literally
paved the shallow edge of the stream, and which would have been
metamorphosed in due time into small sooty moth-like fairies, best
represented, I should say, by the soft black-hackle which Mr. Stewart
recommends as the most deadly of North-country flies. Not to these,
however, but to the Phryganeæ (who, when sticks and pebbles fail, often
make their tubes of sand, e.g. _P. flava_), should I refer the red-cow
fly, which is almost the only autumn killer in the Dartmoor streams. A
red cowhair body and a woodcock wing is his type, and let those who want
West-country trout remember him.
Another fly, common on some rocky streams, but more scarce in the chalk,
is the ‘Yellow Sally,’ which entomologists, with truer appreciation of
its colour, call _Chrysoperla viridis_. It may be bought at the shops;
at least a yellow something of that name, but bearing no more resemblance
to the delicate yellow-green natural fly, with its warm grey wings, than
a Pre-Raphaelite portrait to the human being for whom it is meant.
Copied, like most trout flies, from some traditional copy by the hands of
Cockney maidens, who never saw a fly in their lives, the mistake of a
mistake, a sham raised to its tenth power, it stands a signal proof that
anglers will never get good flies till they learn a little entomology
themselves, and then teach it to the tackle makers. But if it cannot be
bought, it can at least be made; and I should advise everyone who fishes
rocky streams in May and June, to dye for himself some hackles of a
brilliant greenish-yellow, and in the most burning sunshine, when fish
seem inclined to rise at no fly whatsoever, examine the boulders for the
Chrysoperla, who runs over them, her wings laid flat on her back, her
yellow legs moving as rapidly as a forest-fly’s; try to imitate her, and
use her on the stream, or on the nearest lake. Certain it is that in
Snowdon this fly and the Gwynnant Hydropsyche will fill a creel in the
most burning north-easter, when all other flies are useless; a sufficient
disproof of the Scotch theory—that fish do not prefer the fly which is on
the water. {74}
Another disproof may be found in the ‘fern web,’ ‘bracken clock’ of
Scotland; the tiny cockchafer, with brown wing-cases and dark-green
thorax, which abounds in some years in the hay-meadows, on the fern, or
on the heads of umbelliferous flowers. The famous Loch-Awe fly,
described as an alder-fly with a rail’s wing, seems to be nothing but
this fat little worthy: but the best plan is to make the wings, either
buzz or hackle, of the bright neck-feather of the cock pheasant, thus
gaining the metallic lustre of the beetle tribe. Tied thus, either in
Devonshire or Snowdon, few flies surpass him when he is out. His fatness
proves an attraction which the largest fish cannot resist.
The Ephemeræ, too, are far more important in rapid and rocky streams than
in the deeper, stiller waters of the south. It is worth while for a good
fish to rise at them there; the more luxurious chalk trout will seldom
waste himself upon them, unless he be lying in shallow water, and has but
to move a few inches upward.
But these Ephemeræ, like all other naiads, want working out. The species
which Mr. Ronalds gives, are most of them, by his own confession, very
uncertain. Of the Phryganidæ he seems to know little or nothing,
mentioning but two species out of the two hundred which are said to
inhabit Britain; and his land flies and beetles are in several cases
quite wrongly named. However, the professed entomologists know but
little of the mountain flies; and the angler who would help to work them
out would confer a benefit on science, as well as on the ‘gentle craft.’
As yet the only approach to such a good work which I know of, is a little
book on the trout flies of Ripon, with excellent engravings of the
natural fly. The author’s name is not given; but the book may be got at
Ripon, and most valuable it must be to any North-country fisherman.
But come, we must not waste our time in talk, for here is a cloud over
the sun, and plenty more coming up behind, before a ruffling south-west
breeze, as Shelley has it—
‘Calling white clouds like flocks to feed in air.’
Let us up and onward to that long still reach, which is now curling up
fast before the breeze; there are large fish to be taken, one or two at
least, even before the fly comes on. You need not change your flies; the
cast which you have on—governor, and black alder—will take, if anything
will. Only do not waste your time and muscle, as you are beginning to
do, by hurling your flies wildly into the middle of the stream, on the
chance of a fish being there. Fish are there, no doubt, but not feeding
ones. They are sailing about and enjoying the warmth; but nothing more.
If you want to find the hungry fish and to kill them, you must stand well
back from the bank—or kneel down, if you are really in earnest about
sport; and throw within a foot of the shore, above you or below (but if
possible above), with a line short enough to manage easily; by which I
mean short enough to enable you to lift your flies out of the water at
each throw without hooking them in the docks and comfrey which grow along
the brink. You must learn to raise your hand at the end of each throw,
and lift the flies clean over the land-weeds: or you will lose time, and
frighten all the fish, by crawling to the bank to unhook them. Believe
me, one of the commonest mistakes into which young anglers fall is that
of fishing in ‘skipjack broad;’ in plain English, in mid-stream, where
few fish, and those little ones, are to be caught. Those who wish for
large fish work close under the banks, and seldom take a mid-stream cast,
unless they see a fish rise there.
The reason of this is simple. Walking up the Strand in search of a
dinner, a reasonable man will keep to the trottoir, and look in at the
windows close to him, instead of parading up the mid-street. And even so
do all wise and ancient trout. The banks are their shops; and thither
they go for their dinners, driving their poor little children tyrannously
out into the mid-river to fare as hap may hap. Over these children the
tyro wastes his time, flogging the stream across and across for weary
hours, while the big papas and mammas are comfortably under the bank,
close at his feet, grubbing about the sides for water crickets, and not
refusing at times a leech or a young crayfish, but perfectly ready to
take a fly if you offer one large and tempting enough. They do but act
on experience. All the largest surface-food—beetles, bees, and
palmers—comes off the shore; and all the caperers and alders, after
emerging from their pupa-cases, swim to the shore in order to change into
the perfect insect in the open air. The perfect insects haunt sunny
sedges and tree-stems—whence the one is often called the sedge, the other
the alder-fly—and from thence drop into the trouts’ mouths; and within
six inches of the bank will the good angler work, all the more sedulously
and even hopefully if he sees no fish rising. I have known good men say
that they had rather _not_ see fish on the rise, if the day be good; that
they can get surer sport, and are less troubled with small fish, by
making them rise; and certain it is, that a day when the fish are rising
all over the stream is generally one of disappointment.
Another advantage of bank fishing is, that the fish sees the fly only for
a moment. He has no long gaze at it, as it comes to him across the
water. It either drops exactly over his nose, or sweeps down the stream
straight upon him. He expects it to escape on shore the next moment, and
chops at it fiercely and hastily, instead of following and examining.
Add to this the fact that when he is under the bank there is far less
chance of his seeing you; and duly considering these things, you will
throw away no more time in drawing, at least in chalk-streams, flies over
the watery wastes, to be snapped at now and then by herring-sized
pinkeens. In rocky streams, where the quantity of bank food is far
smaller, this rule will perhaps not hold good; though who knows not that
his best fish are generally taken under some tree from which the little
caterpillars, having determined on slow and deliberate suicide are
letting themselves down gently by a silken thread into the mouth of the
spotted monarch, who has but to sail about and about, and pick them up
one by one as they touch the stream?—A sight which makes one think—as
does a herd of swine crunching acorns, each one of which might have
become a ‘builder oak’—how Nature is never more magnificent than in her
waste.
The next mistake, natural enough to the laziness of fallen man, is that
of fishing down-stream, and not up. What Mr. Stewart says on this point
should be read by every tyro. By fishing up-stream, even against the
wind, he will on an average kill twice as many trout as when fishing
down. If trout are out and feeding on the shallows, up or down will
simply make the difference of fish or no fish; and even in deeps, where
the difference in the chance of not being seen is not so great, many more
fish will be hooked by the man who fishes up-stream, simply because when
he strikes he pulls the hook into the trout’s mouth instead of out of it.
But he who would obey Mr. Stewart in fishing up-stream must obey him also
in discarding his light London rod, which is in three cases out of four
as weak and ‘floppy’ in the middle as a waggon whip, and get to himself a
stiff and powerful rod, strong enough to spin a minnow; whereby he will
obtain, after some weeks of aching muscles, two good things—a fore-arm
fit for a sculptor’s model, and trout hooked and killed, instead of
pricked and lost.
Killed, as well as hooked; for how large trout are to be killed in a
weedy chalk-stream without a stiff rod which will take them down, is a
question yet unsolved. Even the merest Cockney will know, if he thinks,
that weeds float with their points down-stream; and that therefore if a
fish is to be brought through them without entangling, he must be
‘combed’ through them in the same direction. But how is this to be done,
if a fish be hooked below you on a weak rod? With a strong rod indeed
you can, at the chance of tearing out the hook, keep him by main force on
the top of the water, till you have run past him and below him,
shortening your line anyhow in loops—there is no time to wind it up with
the reel—and then do what you might have done comfortably at first had
you been fishing up—viz., bring him down-stream, and let the water run
through his gills, and drown him. But with a weak rod—Alas for the tyro!
He catches one glimpse of a silver side plunging into the depths; he
finds his rod double in his hand; he finds fish and flies stop suddenly
somewhere; he rushes down to the spot, sees weeds waving around his line,
and guesses from what he feels and sees that the fish is grubbing
up-stream through them, five feet under water. He tugs downwards and
backwards, but too late; the drop-fly is fast wrapt in Ceratophyllum and
Glyceria, Callitriche and Potamogeton, and half-a-dozen more horrid
things with long names and longer stems; and what remains but the fate of
Campbell’s Lord Ullin?—
‘The waters wild went o’er his child,
And he was left lamenting.’
Unless, in fact, large fish can be got rapidly down-stream, the chance of
killing them is very small; and therefore the man who fishes a
willow-fringed brook downward, is worthy of no crown but Ophelia’s,
besides being likely enough, if he attempt to get down to his fish, to
share her fate. The best fisherman, however, will come to shame in
streams bordered by pollard willows, and among queer nooks, which can be
only fished down-stream. I saw, but the other day, a fish hooked
cleverly enough, by throwing to an inch where he ought to have been, and
indeed was, and from the only point whence the throw could be made. Out
of the water he came, head and tail, the moment he felt the hook, and
showed a fair side over two pounds weight . . . . and then? Instead of
running away, he ran right at the fisherman, for reasons which were but
too patent. Between man and fish were ten yards of shallow, then a deep
weedy shelf, and then the hole which was his house. And for that weedy
shelf the spotted monarch made, knowing that there he could drag himself
clear of the fly, as perhaps he had done more than once before.
What was to be done? Take him down-stream through the weed? Alas, on
the man’s left hand an old pollard leant into the water, barring all
downward movement. Jump in and run round? He had rather to run back
from the bank, from fear of a loose line; the fish was coming at him so
fast that there was no time to wind up. Safe into the weeds hurls the
fish; the man, as soon as he finds the fish stop, jumps in mid-leg deep,
and staggers up to him, in hopes of clearing; finds the dropper fast in
the weeds, and the stretcher, which had been in the fish’s mouth,
wantoning somewhere in the depths—_Quid plura_? Let us draw a veil over
that man’s return to shore.
No mortal skill could have killed that fish. Mortal luck (which is
sometimes, as most statesmen know, very great) might have done it, if the
fish had been irretrievably fast hooked; as, per contra, I once saw a
fish of nearly four pounds hooked just above an alder bush, on the same
bank as the angler. The stream was swift: there was a great weed-bed
above; the man had but about ten feet square of swift water to kill the
trout in. Not a foot down-stream could he take him; in fact, he had to
pull him hard up-stream to keep him out of his hover in the alder roots.
Three times that fish leapt into the air nearly a yard high; and yet, so
merciful is luck, and so firmly was he hooked, in five breathless minutes
he was in the landing-net; and when he was there and safe ashore, just of
the shape and colour of a silver spoon, his captor lay down panting upon
the bank, and with Sir Hugh Evans, manifested ‘a great disposition to
cry.’ But it was a beautiful sight. A sharper round between man and
fish never saw I fought in Merry England.
I saw once, however, a cleverer, though not a more dashing feat. A handy
little fellow (I wonder where he is now?) hooked a trout of nearly three
pounds with his dropper, and at the same moment a post with his
stretcher. What was to be done? To keep the fish pulling on him, and
not on the post. And that, being favoured by standing on a four-foot
bank, he did so well that he tired out the fish in some six feet square
of water, stopping him and turning him beautifully whenever he tried to
run, till I could get in to him with the landing-net. That was
five-and-thirty years since. If the little man has progressed in his
fishing as he ought, he should be now one of the finest anglers in
England.
* * * * *
So. Thanks to bank fishing, we have, you see, landed three or four more
good fish in the last two hours—And! What is here? An ugly two-pound
chub, Chevin, ‘Echevin,’ or Alderman, as the French call him. How is
this, keeper? I thought you allowed no such vermin in this water?
The keeper answers, with a grunt, that ‘they allow themselves. That
there always were chub hereabouts, and always will be; for the more he
takes out with the net, the more come next day.’
Probably. No nets will exterminate these spawn-eating, fry-eating,
all-eating pests, who devour the little trout, and starve the large ones,
and, at the first sign of the net, fly to hover among the most tangled
roots. There they lie, as close as rats in a bank, and work themselves
the farther in the more they are splashed and poked by the poles of the
beaters. But the fly, well used, will—if not exterminate them—still thin
them down greatly; and very good sport they give, in my opinion, in spite
of the contempt in which they are commonly held, as chicken-hearted fish,
who show no fight. True; but their very cowardice makes them the more
difficult to catch; for no fish must you keep more out of sight, and
further off. The very shadow of the line (not to mention that of the
rod) sends them flying to hover; and they rise so cautiously and quietly,
that they give excellent lessons in patience and nerve to a beginner. If
the fly is dragged along the surface, or jerked suddenly from them, they
flee from it in terror; and when they do, after due deliberation, take it
in, their rise is so quiet, that you can seldom tell whether your fish
weighs half a pound or four pounds and a half—unless you, like most
beginners, attempt to show your quickness by that most useless exertion,
a violent strike. Then, the snapping of your footlink, or—just as
likely—of the top of your rod, makes you fully aware, if not of the
pluck, at least of the brute strength, of the burly alderman of the
waters. No fish, therefore, will better teach the beginner the good old
lesson, ‘not to frighten a fish before you have tired him.’
For flies—chub will rise greedily at any large palmers, the larger and
rougher the better. A red and a grizzled hackle will always take them;
but the best fly of all is an imitation of the black beetle—the
‘undertaker’ of the London shops. He, too, can hardly be too large, and
should be made of a fat body of black wool, with the metallic black
feather of a cock’s tail wrapped loosely over it. A still better wing is
one of the neck feathers of any metallic-plumed bird, e.g., _Phlogophorus
Impeyanus_, the Menaul Pheasant, laid flat and whole on the back, to
imitate the wing-shells of the beetle, the legs being represented by any
loose black feathers—(not hackles, which are too fine.) Tied thus, it
will kill not only every chub in a pool (if you give the survivors a
quarter of an hour wherein to recover from their horror at their last
friend’s fate), but also, here and there, very large trout.
Another slur upon the noble sport of chub fishing is the fact of his not
being worth eating—a fact which, in the true sportsman’s eyes, will go
for nothing. But though the man who can buy fresh soles and salmon may
despise chub, there are those who do not. True, you may make a most
accurate imitation of him by taking one of Palmer’s patent candles, wick
and all, stuffing it with needles and split bristles, and then stewing
the same in ditch-water. Nevertheless, strange to say, the agricultural
stomach digests chub; and if, after having filled your creel, or three
creels (as you may too often), with them, you will distribute them on
your way home to all the old women you meet, you will make many poor
souls happy, after having saved the lives of many trout.
But here we come to a strip of thick cover, part of our Squire’s home
preserves, which it is impossible to fish, so closely do the boughs cover
the water. We will walk on through it towards the hall, and there
get—what we begin sorely to need—something to eat. It will be of little
use fishing for some time to come; for these hot hours of the afternoon,
from three till six, are generally the ‘deadest time’ of the whole day.
And now, when we have struggled in imagination through the last bit of
copse, and tumbled over the palings into the lawn, we shall see a scene
quite as lovely, if you will believe it, as any alp on earth.
What shall we see, as we look across the broad, still, clear river, where
the great dark trout sail to and fro lazily in the sun? For having
free-warren of our fancy and our paper, we may see what we choose.
White chalk-fields above, quivering hazy in the heat. A park full of
merry haymakers; gay red and blue waggons; stalwart horses switching off
the flies; dark avenues of tall elms; groups of abele, ‘tossing their
whispering silver to the sun;’ and amid them the house. What manner of
house shall it be? Tudor or Elizabethan, with oriels, mullioned windows,
gables, and turrets of strange shape? No: that is commonplace.
Everybody builds Tudor houses now. Our house shall smack of Inigo Jones
or Christopher Wren; a great square red-brick mass, made light and
cheerful though, by quoins and windows of white Sarsden stone; with
high-peaked French roofs, broken by louvres and dormers, haunted by a
thousand swallows and starlings. Old walled gardens, gay with flowers,
shall stretch right and left. Clipt yew alleys shall wander away into
mysterious glooms: and out of their black arches shall come tripping
children, like white fairies, to laugh and talk with the girl who lies
dreaming and reading in the hammock there, beneath the black velvet
canopy of the great cedar-tree, like some fair Tropic flower hanging from
its boughs. Then they shall wander down across the smooth-shorn lawn,
where the purple rhododendrons hang double, bush and image, over the
water’s edge, and call to us across the stream, ‘What sport?’ and the old
Squire shall beckon the keeper over the long stone bridge, and return
with him bringing luncheon and good ale; and we will sit down, and eat
and drink among the burdock leaves, and then watch the quiet house, and
lawn, and flowers, and fair human creatures, and shining water, all
sleeping breathless in the glorious light beneath the glorious blue, till
we doze off, lulled by the murmur of a thousand insects, and the rich
minstrelsy of nightingale and black-cap, thrush and dove.
Peaceful, graceful, complete English country life and country houses;
everywhere finish and polish; Nature perfected by the wealth and art of
peaceful centuries! Why should I exchange you, even for the sight of all
the Alps, for bad roads, bad carriages, bad inns, bad food, bad washing,
bad beds, and fleas, fleas, fleas?
Let that last thought be enough. There may be follies, there may be
sorrows, there may be sins—though I know there are no very heavy ones—in
that fine old house opposite: but thanks to the genius of my native land,
there are at least no fleas.
Think of that, wandering friend; and of this also, that you will find
your warm bath ready when you go to bed to-night, and your cold one when
you rise to-morrow morning; and in content and thankfulness, stay in
England, and be clean.
* * * *
Here, then, let us lounge a full two hours, too comfortable and too tired
to care for fishing, till the hall-bell rings for that dinner which we as
good anglers will despise. Then we will make our way to the broad
reaches above the house. The evening breeze should be ruffling them
gallantly; and see, the fly is getting up. Countless thousands are
rising off the grass, and flickering to and fro above the stream. Stand
still a moment, and you will hear the air full of the soft rustle of
innumerable wings. Hundreds more, even more delicate and gauzy, are
rising through the water, and floating helplessly along the surface, as
Aphrodite may have done when she rose in the Ægean, half frightened at
the sight of the new upper world. And, see, the great trout are moving
everywhere. Fish too large and well fed to care for the fly at any other
season, who have been lounging among the weeds all day and snapping at
passing minnows, have come to the surface; and are feeding steadily,
splashing five or six times in succession, and then going down awhile to
bolt their mouthful of victims; while here and there a heavy silent swirl
tells of a fly taken before it has reached the surface, untimely slain
before it has seen the day.
Now—put your Green-drake on; and throw, regardless of bank-fishing or any
other rule, wherever you see a fish rise. Do not work your flies in the
least, but let them float down over the fish, or sink if they will; he is
more likely to take them under water than on the top. And mind this
rule: be patient with your fish; and do not fancy that because he does
not rise to you the first or the tenth time, therefore he will not rise
at all. He may have filled his mouth and gone down to gorge; and when he
comes up again, if your fly be the first which he meets, he will probably
seize it greedily, and all the more so if it be under water, so seeming
drowned and helpless. Besides, a fish seldom rises twice exactly in the
same place, unless he be lying between two weeds, or in the corner of an
eddy. His small wits, when he is feeding in the open, seem to hint to
him that after having found a fly in one place he must move a foot or two
on to find another; and therefore it may be some time before your turn
comes, and your fly passes just over his nose; which if it do not do, he
certainly will not, amid such an abundance, go out of his way for it. In
the meanwhile your footlink will very probably have hit him over the
back, or run foul of his nose, in which case you will not catch him at
all. A painful fact for you; but if you could catch every fish you saw,
where would be the trout for next season?
Put on a dropper of some kind, say a caperer, as a second chance. I
almost prefer the dark claret-spinner, with which I have killed very
large fish alternately with the green-drake, even when it was quite dark;
and for your stretcher, of course a green-drake.
For a blustering evening like this your drake can hardly be too large or
too rough; in brighter and stiller weather the fish often prefer a fly
half the size of the natural one. Only bear in mind that the most
tempting form among these millions of drakes is that one whose wings are
very little coloured at all, of a pale greenish yellow; whose body is
straw-coloured, and his head, thorax, and legs, spotted with dark
brown—best represented by a pheasant or coch-a-bonddhu hackle.
The best imitation of this, or of any drake, which I have ever seen, is
one by Mr. Macgowan, whilome of Ballyshannon, now of No. 7,
Bruton-street, Berkeley-square, whose drakes, known by a waxy body of
some mysterious material, do surpass those of all other men, and should
be known and honoured far and wide. But failing them, you may do well
with a drake which is ribbed through the whole length with red hackle
over a straw-coloured body. A North-countryman would laugh at it, and
ask us how we fancy that fish will mistake for that delicate waxy fly a
heavy rough palmer, made heavier and rougher by two thick tufts of yellow
mallard wing: but if he will fish therewith, he will catch trout; and
mighty ones they will be. I have found, again and again, this drake, in
which the hackle is ribbed all down the body, beat a bare-bodied one in
the ratio of three fish to one. The reason is difficult to guess.
Perhaps the shining transparent hackle gives the fly more of the waxy
look of the natural insect; or perhaps the ‘buzzly’ look of the fly
causes the fish to mistake it for one half emerged from its pupa case,
fluttering, entangled, and helpless. But whatever be the cause, I am
sure of the fact. Now—silence and sport for the next three hours.
* * * * *
There! All things must end. It is so dark that I have been fishing for
the last five minutes without any end fly; and we have lost our two last
fish simply by not being able to guide them into the net. But what an
evening’s sport we have had! Beside several over a pound which I have
thrown in (I trust you have been generous and done likewise), there are
six fish averaging two pounds apiece; and what is the weight of that
monster with whom I saw you wrestling dimly through the dusk, your legs
stuck knee-deep in a mudbank, your head embowered in nettles, while the
keeper waltzed round you, roaring mere incoherencies?—four pounds full.
Now, is there any sherry left in the flask? No. Then we will give the
keeper five shillings; he is well worth his pay; and then drag our weary
limbs towards the hall to bath, supper, and bed; while you confess, I
trust, that you may get noble sport, hard exercise, and lovely scenery,
without going sixty miles from London town.
III.
_THE FENS_.
A CERTAIN sadness is pardonable to one who watches the destruction of a
grand natural phenomenon, even though its destruction bring blessings to
the human race. Reason and conscience tell us, that it is right and good
that the Great Fen should have become, instead of a waste and howling
wilderness, a garden of the Lord, where
‘All the land in flowery squares,
Beneath a broad and equal-blowing wind,
Smells of the coming summer.’
And yet the fancy may linger, without blame, over the shining meres, the
golden reed-beds, the countless water-fowl, the strange and gaudy
insects, the wild nature, the mystery, the majesty—for mystery and
majesty there were—which haunted the deep fens for many a hundred years.
Little thinks the Scotsman, whirled down by the Great Northern Railway
from Peterborough to Huntingdon, what a grand place, even twenty years
ago, was that Holme and Whittlesea, which is now but a black, unsightly,
steaming flat, from which the meres and reed-beds of the old world are
gone, while the corn and roots of the new world have not as yet taken
their place.
But grand enough it was, that black ugly place, when backed by Caistor
Hanglands and Holme Wood, and the patches of the primæval forest; while
dark-green alders, and pale-green reeds, stretched for miles round the
broad lagoon, where the coot clanked, and the bittern boomed, and the
sedge-bird, not content with its own sweet song, mocked the notes of all
the birds around; while high overhead hung, motionless, hawk beyond hawk,
buzzard beyond buzzard, kite beyond kite, as far as eye could see. Far
off, upon the silver mere, would rise a puff of smoke from a punt,
invisible from its flatness and its white paint. Then down the wind came
the boom of the great stanchion-gun; and after that sound another sound,
louder as it neared; a cry as of all the bells of Cambridge, and all the
hounds of Cottesmore; and overhead rushed and whirled the skein of
terrified wild-fowl, screaming, piping, clacking, croaking, filling the
air with the hoarse rattle of their wings, while clear above all sounded
the wild whistle of the curlew, and the trumpet note of the great wild
swan.
They are all gone now. No longer do the ruffs trample the sedge into a
hard floor in their fighting-rings, while the sober reeves stand round,
admiring the tournament of their lovers, gay with ears and tippets, no
two of them alike. Gone are ruffs and reeves, spoonbills, bitterns,
avosets; the very snipe, one hears, disdains to breed. Gone, too, not
only from Whittlesea but from the whole world, is that most exquisite of
English butterflies, _Lycæna dispar_—the great copper; and many a curious
insect more. Ah, well, at least we shall have wheat and mutton instead,
and no more typhus and ague; and, it is to be hoped, no more
brandy-drinking and opium-eating; and children will live and not die.
For it was a hard place to live in, the old Fen; a place wherein one
heard of ‘unexampled instances of longevity,’ for the same reason that
one hears of them in savage tribes—that few lived to old age at all, save
those iron constitutions which nothing could break down.
And now, when the bold Fen-men, who had been fighting water by the help
of wind, have given up the more capricious element for that more
manageable servant fire; have replaced their wind-mills by steam-engines,
which will work in all weathers; and have pumped the whole fen dry—even
too dry, as the last hot summer proved; when the only bit of the primæval
wilderness left, as far as I know, is 200 acres of sweet sedge and
_Lastræa thelypteris_ in Wicken Fen: there can be no harm in lingering
awhile over the past, and telling of what the Great Fen was, and how it
came to be that great flat which reaches (roughly speaking) from
Cambridge to Peterborough on the south-west side, to Lynn and Tattershall
on the north-east, some forty miles and more each way.
To do that rightly, and describe how the Fen came to be, one must go
back, it seems to me, to an age before all history; an age which cannot
be measured by years or centuries; an age shrouded in mystery, and to be
spoken of only in guesses. To assert anything positively concerning that
age, or ages, would be to show the rashness of ignorance. ‘I think that
I believe,’ ‘I have good reason to suspect,’ ‘I seem to see,’ are the
strongest forms of speech which ought to be used over a matter so vast
and as yet so little elaborated.
‘I seem to see,’ then, an epoch after those strata were laid down with
which geology generally deals; after the Kimmeridge clay, Oxford clay,
and Gault clay, which form the impervious bedding of the fens, with their
intermediate beds of coral-rag and green sand, had been deposited; after
the chalk had been laid on the top of them, at the bottom of some ancient
ocean; after (and what a gulf of time is implied in that last ‘after!’)
the boulder-clay (coeval probably with the ‘till’ of Scotland) had been
spread out in the ‘age of ice’ on top of all; after the whole had been
upheaved out of the sea, and stood about the same level as it stands now:
but before the great valley of the Cam had been scooped out, and the
strata were still continuous, some 200 feet above Cambridge and its
colleges, from the top of the Gog-magogs to the top of Madingley Rise.
In those ages—while the valleys of the Cam, the Ouse, the Nene, the
Welland, the Glen, and the Witham were sawing themselves out by no
violent convulsions, but simply, as I believe, by the same slow action of
rain and rivers by which they are sawing backward into the land even
now—I ‘seem to see’ a time when the Straits of Dover did not exist—a time
when a great part of the German Ocean was dry land. Through it, into a
great estuary between North Britain and Norway, flowed together all the
rivers of north-eastern Europe—Elbe, Weser, Rhine, Scheldt, Seine,
Thames, and all the rivers of east England, as far north as the Humber.
And if a reason be required for so daring a theory—first started, if I
recollect right, by the late lamented Edward Forbes—a sufficient one may
be found in one look over a bridge, in any river of the East of England.
There we see various species of Cyprinidæ, ‘rough’ or ‘white’ fish—roach,
dace, chub, bream, and so forth, and with them their natural attendant
and devourer, the pike.
Now these fish belong almost exclusively to the same system of
rivers—those of north-east Europe. They attain their highest development
in the great lakes of Sweden. Westward of the Straits of Dover they are
not indigenous. They may be found in the streams of south and western
England; but in every case, I believe, they have been introduced either
by birds or by men. From some now submerged ‘centre of creation’ (to use
poor Edward Forbes’s formula) they must have spread into the rivers where
they are now found; and spread by fresh water, and not by salt, which
would destroy them in a single tide.
Again, there lingers in the Cam, and a few other rivers of north-eastern
Europe, that curious fish the eel-pout or ‘burbot’ (_Molva lota_). Now
he is utterly distinct from any other fresh-water fish of Europe. His
nearest ally is the ling (_Molva vulgaris_); a deep-sea fish, even as his
ancestors have been. Originally a deep-sea form, he has found his way up
the rivers, even to Cambridge, and there remains. The rivers by which he
came up, the land through which he passed, ages and ages since, have been
all swept away; and he has never found his way back to his native
salt-water, but lives on in a strange land, degraded in form, dwindling
in numbers, and now fast dying out. The explanation may be strange: but
it is the only one which I can offer to explain the fact—which is itself
much more strange—of the burbot being found in the Fen rivers.
Another proof may be found in the presence of the edible frog of the
Continent at Foulmire, on the edge of the Cambridge Fans. It is a moot
point still with some, whether he was not put there by man. It is a
still stronger argument against his being indigenous, that he is never
mentioned as an article of food by the mediæval monks, who would have
known—Frenchmen, Italians, Germans, as many of them were—that he is as
dainty as ever was a spring chicken. But if he be indigenous, his
presence proves that once he could either hop across the Straits of
Dover, or swim across the German Ocean.
But there can be no doubt of the next proof—the presence in the Fens
(where he is now probably extinct) and in certain spots in East Anglia,
which I shall take care not to mention, of that exquisite little bird the
‘Bearded Tit’ (_Calamophilus biarmicus_). Tit he is none; rather, it is
said, a finch, but connected with no other English bird. His central
home is in the marshes of Russia and Prussia; his food the mollusks which
swarm among the reed-beds where he builds; and feeding on those from
reed-bed to reed bed, all across what was once the German Ocean, has come
the beautiful little bird with long tail, orange tawny plumage, and black
moustache, which might have been seen forty years ago in hundreds on ever
reed-rond of the Fen.
One more proof—for it is the heaping up of facts, each minute by itself,
which issues often in a sound and great result. In draining Wretham
Mere, in Norfolk, not so very far from the Fens, in the year 1856 there
were found embedded in the peat moss (which is not the Scotch and Western
_Sphagnum palustre_, but an altogether different moss, _Hypnum
fluitans_), remains of an ancient lake-dwelling, supported on piles. A
dwelling like those which have lately attracted so much notice in the
lakes of Switzerland: like those which the Dyaks make about the ports and
rivers of Borneo; dwellings invented, it seems to me, to enable the
inhabitants to escape not wild beasts only, but malaria and night frosts;
and, perched above the cold and poisonous fogs, to sleep, if not high and
dry, at least high and healthy.
In the bottom of this mere were found two shells of the fresh-water
tortoise, _Emys lutaria_, till then unknown in England.
These little animals, who may be seen in hundreds in the meres of eastern
Europe, sunning their backs on fallen logs, and diving into the water at
the sound of a footstep, are eaten largely in continental capitals (as is
their cousin the terrapin, _Emys picta_, in the Southern States). They
may be bought at Paris, at fashionable restaurants. Thither they may
have been sent from Vienna or Berlin; for in north France, Holland, and
north-west Germany they are unknown. A few specimens have been found
buried in peat in Sweden and Denmark; and there is a tale of a live one
having been found in the extreme south part of Sweden, some twenty years
ago. {103} Into Sweden, then, as into England, the little fresh-water
tortoise had wandered, as to an extreme limit, beyond which the change of
climate, and probably of food, killed him off.
But the emys which came to the Wretham bog must have had a long journey;
and a journey by fresh water too. Down Elbe or Weser he must have
floated, ice-packed, or swept away by flood, till somewhere off the
Doggerbank, in that great network of rivers which is now open sea, he or
his descendants turned up Ouse and Little Ouse, till they found a mere
like their old Prussian one, and there founded a tiny colony for a few
generations, till they were eaten up by the savages of the table
dwelling; or died out—as many a human family has died out—because they
found the world too hard.
And lastly, my friend Mr. Brady, well known to naturalists, has found
that many forms of Entomastraca are common to the estuaries of the east
of England and to those of Holland.
It was thus necessary, in order to account for the presence of some of
the common animals of the fen, to go back to an epoch of immense
remoteness.
And how was that great lowland swept away? Who can tell? Probably by no
violent convulsion. Slow upheavals, slow depressions, there may have
been—indeed must have been—as the sunken fir-forests of Brancaster, and
the raised beach of Hunstanton, on the extreme north-east corner of the
Wash, testify to this day. But the main agent of destruction has been,
doubtless, that same ever-gnawing sea-wash which devours still the soft
strata of the whole east coast of England, as far as Flamborough Head;
and that great scavenger, the tide-wave, which sweeps the fallen rubbish
out to sea twice in every twenty-four hours. Wave and tide by sea, rain
and river by land; these are God’s mighty mills in which He makes the old
world new. And as Longfellow says of moral things, so may we of
physical:—
‘Though the mills of God grind slowly, yet they grind exceeding
small.
Though He sit, end wait with patience, with exactness grinds He all.’
The lighter and more soluble particles, during that slow but vast
destruction which is going on still to this day, have been carried far
out to sea, and deposited as ooze. The heavier and coarser have been
left along the shores, as the gravels which fill the old estuaries of the
east of England.
From these gravels we can judge of the larger animals which dwelt in that
old world. About these lost lowlands wandered herds of the woolly
mammoth. _Elephas primigenius_, whose bones are common in certain
Cambridge gravels, whose teeth are brought up by dredgers, far out in the
German Ocean, off certain parts of the Norfolk coast. With them wandered
the woolly rhinoceros (_R. tichorhinus_), the hippopotamus, the lion—not
(according to some) to be distinguished from the recent lion of
Africa—the hyæna, the bear, the horse, the reindeer, and the musk ox; the
great Irish elk, whose vast horns are so well known in every museum of
northern Europe; and that mighty ox, the _Bos primigenius_, which still
lingered on the Continent in Cæsar’s time, as the urus, in magnitude less
only than the elephant,—and not to be confounded with the bison, a
relation of, if not identical with, the buffalo of North America,—which
still lingers, carefully preserved by the Czar, in the forests of
Lithuania.
The remains of this gigantic ox, be it remembered, are found throughout
Britain, and even into the Shetland Isles. Would that any gentleman who
may see these pages would take notice of the fact, that we have not (so I
am informed) in these islands a single perfect skeleton of _Bos
primigenius_; while the Museum of Copenhagen, to its honour, possesses
five or six from a much smaller field than is open to us; and be
public-spirited enough, the next time he hears of ox-bones, whether in
gravel or in peat (as he may in the draining of any northern moss), to
preserve them for the museum of his neighbourhood—or send them to
Cambridge.
But did all these animals exist at the same time? It is difficult to
say. The study of the different gravels is most intricate—almost a
special science in itself—in which but two or three men are adepts. It
is hard, at first sight, to believe that the hippopotamus could have been
the neighbour of the Arctic reindeer and musk ox: but that the woolly
mammoth not only may have been such, but was such, there can be no doubt.
His remains, imbedded in ice at the mouth of the great Siberian rivers,
with the wool, skin, and flesh (in some cases) still remaining on the
bones, prove him to have been fitted for a cold climate, and to have
browsed upon the scanty shrubs of Northern Asia. But, indeed, there is
no reason, _à priori_, why these huge mammals, now confined to hotter
countries, should not have once inhabited a colder region, or at least
have wandered northwards in whole herds in summer, to escape insects, and
find fresh food, and above all, water. The same is the case with the
lion, and other huge beasts of prey. The tiger of Hindostan ranges, at
least in summer, across the snows of the Himalaya, and throughout China.
Even at the river Amoor, where the winters are as severe as at St.
Petersburg, the tiger is an ordinary resident at all seasons. The lion
was, undoubtedly, an inhabitant of Thrace as late as the expedition of
Xerxes, whose camels they attacked; and the ‘Nemæan lion,’ and the other
lions which stand out in Grecian myth, as having been killed by Hercules
and the heroes, may have been the last remaining specimens of that _Felis
spelæa_ (undistinguishable, according to some, from the African lion),
whose bones are found in the gravels and the caverns of these isles.
And how long ago were those days of mammoths and reindeer, lions and
hyænas? We must talk not of days, but of ages; we know nothing of days
or years. As the late lamented Professor Sedgwick has well said:—
‘We allow that the great European oscillation, which ended in the
production of the drift (the boulder clay, or till), was effected during
a time of vast, but unknown length. And if we limit our inquiries, and
ask what was the interval of time between the newest bed of gravel near
Cambridge, and the oldest bed of bogland or silt in Cambridgeshire and
Norfolk, we are utterly at a loss for a definite answer. The interval of
time may have been very great. But we have no scale on which to measure
it.’
Let us suppose, then, the era of ‘gravels’ past; the valleys which open
into the fen sawn out by rivers to about their present depth. What was
the special cause of the fen itself? why did not the great lowland become
a fertile ‘carse’ of firm alluvial soil, like that of Stirling?
One reason is, that the carse of Stirling has been upheaved some twenty
feet, and thereby more or less drained, since the time of the Romans. A
fact patent and provable from Cramond (the old Roman port of Alaterna) up
to Blair Drummond above Stirling, where whales’ skeletons, and bone tools
by them, have been found in loam and peat, twenty feet above high-water
mark. The alluvium of the fens, on the other hand, has very probably
suffered a slight depression.
But the main reason is, that the silt brought down by the fen rivers
cannot, like that of the Forth and its neighbouring streams, get safe
away to sea. From Flamborough Head, in Yorkshire, all down the
Lincolnshire coast, the land is falling, falling for ever into the waves;
and swept southward by tide and current, the debris turns into the Wash
between Lincolnshire and Norfolk, there to repose, as in a quiet haven.
Hence that vast labyrinth of banks between Lynn and Wisbeach, of mud
inside, brought down by the fen rivers; but outside (contrary to the
usual rule) of shifting sand, which has come inward from the sea, and
prevents the mud’s escape—banks parted by narrow gullies, the delight of
the gunner with his punt, haunted by million wild-fowl in winter, and in
summer hazy steaming flats, beyond which the trees of Lincolnshire loom
up, raised by refraction far above the horizon, while the masts and sails
of distant vessels quiver, fantastically distorted and lengthened,
sometimes even inverted, by a refraction like that which plays such
tricks with ships and coasts in the Arctic seas. Along the top of the
mud banks lounge the long black rows of seals, undistinguishable from
their reflection in the still water below; distorted too, and magnified
to the size of elephants. Long lines of sea-pies wing their way along at
regular tide-hours, from or to the ocean. Now and then a skein of geese
paddle hastily out of sight round a mud-cape; or a brown robber gull
(generally Richardson’s _Skua_) raises a tumult of screams, by making a
raid upon a party of honest white gulls, to frighten them into vomiting
up their prey for his benefit; or a single cormorant flaps along, close
to the water, towards his fishing ground. Even the fish are shy of
haunting a bottom which shifts with every storm; and innumerable shrimps
are almost the only product of the shallow barren sea: beside, all is
silence and desolation, as of a world waiting to be made.
So strong is the barrier which these sea-borne sands oppose to the
river-borne ooze, that as soon as a seabank is built—as the projectors of
the ‘Victoria County’ have built them—across any part of the estuary, the
mud caught by it soon ‘warps’ the space within into firm and rich dry
land. But that same barrier, ere the fen was drained, backed up for ages
not only the silt, but the very water of the fens; and spread it inland
into a labyrinth of shifting streams, shallow meres, and vast peat bogs,
on those impervious clays which floor the fen. Each river contributed to
the formation of those bogs and meres, instead of draining them away;
repeating on a huge scale the process which may be seen in many a
highland strath, where the ground at the edge of the stream is firm and
high; the meadows near the hillfoot, a few hundred yards away, bogland
lower than the bank of the stream. For each flood deposits its silt upon
the immediate bank of the river, raising it year by year; till—as in the
case of the ‘Levée’ of the Mississippi, and probably of every one of the
old fen rivers—the stream runs at last between two natural dykes, at a
level considerably higher than that of the now swamped and undrainable
lands right and left of it.
If we add to this, a slope in the fen rivers so extraordinarily slight,
that the river at Cambridge is only thirteen and a half feet above the
mean sea level, five-and-thirty miles away, and that if the great
sea-sluice of Denver, the key of all the eastern fen, were washed away,
the tide would back up the Cam to within ten miles of Cambridge; if we
add again the rainfall upon that vast flat area, utterly unable to escape
through rivers which have enough to do to drain the hills around; it is
easy to understand how peat, the certain product of standing water, has
slowly overwhelmed the rich alluvium, fattened by the washing of those
phosphatic greensand beds, which (discovered by the science of the
lamented Professor Henslow) are now yielding round Cambridge supplies of
manure seemingly inexhaustible. Easy it is to understand how the
all-devouring, yet all-preserving peat-moss swallowed up gradually the
stately forests of fir and oak, ash and poplar, hazel and yew, which once
grew on that rank land; how trees, torn down by flood or storm, floated
and lodged in rafts, damming the waters back still more; how streams,
bewildered in the flats, changed their channels, mingling silt and sand
with the peat-moss; how Nature, left to herself, ran into wild riot and
chaos more and more; till the whole fen became one ‘Dismal Swamp,’ in
which the ‘Last of the English’ (like Dred in Mrs. Stowe’s tale) took
refuge from their tyrants, and lived, like him, a free and joyous life
awhile.
For there were islands, and are still, in that wide fen, which have
escaped the destroying deluge of peat-moss; outcrops of firm land, which
even in the Middle Age preserved the Fauna and Flora of the primæval
forest, haunted by the descendants of some at least of those wild beasts
which roamed on the older continent of the ‘gravel age.’ The
all-preserving peat, as well as the monkish records of the early Middle
Age, enable us to repeople, tolerably well, the primæval fen.
The gigantic ox, _Bos primigenius_, was still there, though there is no
record of him in monkish tales. But with him had appeared (not unknown
toward the end of the gravel age) another ox, smaller and with shorter
horns, _Bos longifrons_; which is held to be the ancestor of our own
domestic short-horns, and of the wild cattle still preserved at
Chillingham and at Cadzow. The reindeer had disappeared, almost or
altogether. The red deer, of a size beside which the largest Scotch stag
is puny, and even the great Carpathian stag inferior, abound; so does the
roe, so does the goat, which one is accustomed to look on as a mountain
animal. In the Woodwardian Museum there is a portion of a skull of an
ibex—probably _Capra sibirica_—which was found in the drift gravel at
Fulbourne. Wild sheep are unknown. The horse occurs in the peat; but
whether wild or tame, who can tell? Horses enough have been mired and
drowned since the Romans set foot on this island, to account for the
presence of horses’ skulls, without the hypothesis of wild herds, such as
doubtless existed in the gravel times. The wolf, of course, is common;
wild cat, marten, badger, and otter all would expect; but not so the
beaver, which nevertheless is abundant in the peat; and damage enough the
busy fellows must have done, cutting trees, damming streams, flooding
marshes, and like selfish speculators in all ages, sacrificing freely the
public interest to their own. Here and there are found the skulls of
bears, in one case that of a polar bear, ice-drifted; and one of a
walrus, probably washed in dead after a storm.
Beautiful, after their kind, were these fen-isles, in the eyes of the
monks who were the first settlers in the wilderness.
The author of the History of Ramsey grows enthusiastic, and, after the
manner of old monks, somewhat bombastic also, as he describes the lonely
isle which got its name from the solitary ram who had wandered thither,
either in some extreme drought or over the winter ice, and never able to
return, was found, fat beyond the wont of rams, feeding among the wild
deer. He tells of the stately ashes—most of them cut in his time, to
furnish mighty beams for the church roof; of the rich pastures painted
with all gay flowers in spring; of the ‘green crown’ of reed and alder
which girdled round the isle; of the fair wide mere with its ‘sandy
beach’ along the forest side: ‘a delight,’ he says, ‘to all who look
thereon.’
In like humour, William of Malmesbury, writing in the first half of the
twelfth century, speaks of Thorney Abbey and isle. ‘It represents,’ he
says, ‘a very Paradise, for that in pleasure and delight it resembles
heaven itself. These marshes abound in trees, whose length without a
knot doth emulate the stars. The plain there is as level as the sea,
which with green grass allures the eye, and so smooth that there is
nought to hinder him who runs through it. Neither is therein any waste
place for in some parts are apple trees, in other vines, which are either
spread on the ground or raised on poles. A mutual strife is there
between nature and art; so that what one produces not, the other
supplies. What shall I say of those fair buildings, which ’tis so
wonderful to see the ground among those fens upbear?’
But the most detailed picture of a fen-isle is that in the second part of
the Book of Ely; wherein a single knight of all the French army forces
his way into the isle of St. Etheldreda, and, hospitably entertained
there by Hereward and his English, is sent back safe to William the
Conqueror, to tell him of the strength of Ely isle.
He cannot praise enough—his speech may be mythical; but as written by
Richard of Ely, only one generation after, it must describe faithfully
what the place was like—the wonders of the isle: its soil the richest in
England, its pleasant pastures, its noble hunting-grounds, its store of
sheep and cattle (though its vines, he says, as a Frenchman had good
right to say, were not equally to be praised), its wide meres and bogs,
about it like a wall. In it was, to quote roughly, ‘abundance of tame
beasts and of wild stag, roe, and goat, in grove and marsh; martens, and
ermines, and fitchets, which in hard winter were caught in snares or
gins. But of the kind of fish and fowl which bred therein, what can I
say? In the pools around are netted eels innumerable, great water
wolves, and pickerel, perch, roach, burbot, lampreys, which the French
called sea-serpents; smelts, too; and the royal fish, the turbot [surely
a mistake for sturgeon], are said often to be taken. But of the birds
which haunt around, if you be not tired, as of the rest, we will expound.
Innumerable geese, gulls, coots, divers, water-crows, herons, ducks, of
which, when there is most plenty, in winter, or at moulting time, I have
seen hundreds taken at a time, by nets, springes, or birdlime,’ and so
forth till, as he assures William, the Frenchman may sit on Haddenham
field blockading Ely for seven years more, ‘ere they will make one
ploughman stop short in his furrow, one hunter cease to set his nets, or
one fowler to deceive the birds with springe and snare.’
And yet there was another side to the picture. Man lived hard in those
days, under dark skies, in houses—even the most luxurious of them—which
we should think, from draughts and darkness, unfit for felons’ cells.
Hardly they lived; and easily were they pleased, and thankful to God for
the least gleam of sunshine, the least patch of green, after the terrible
and long winters of the Middle Age. And ugly enough those winters must
have been, what with snow-storm and darkness, flood and ice, ague and
rheumatism; while through the long drear winter nights the whistle of the
wind and the wild cries of the water-fowl were translated into the howls
of witches and demons; and (as in St. Guthlac’s case) the delirious
fancies of marsh fever made fiends take hideous shapes before the inner
eye, and act fantastic horrors round the old fen-man’s bed of sedge.
The Romans seem to have done something toward the draining and embanking
of this dismal swamp. To them is attributed the car-dyke, or catch-water
drain, which runs for many miles from Peterborough northward into
Lincolnshire, cutting off the land waters which flow down from the wolds
above. To them, too, is to be attributed the old Roman bank, or
‘vallum,’ along the sea-face of the marshlands, marked to this day by the
names of Walsoken, Walton, and Walpoole. But the English invaders were
incapable of following out, even of preserving, any public works. Each
village was isolated by its own ‘march’ of forest; each yeoman all but
isolated by the ‘eaves-drip,’ or green lane round his farm. Each ‘cared
for his own things, and none for those of others;’ and gradually, during
the early Middle Age, the fen—save those old Roman villages—returned to
its primæval jungle, under the neglect of a race which caricatured local
self-government into public anarchy, and looked on every stranger as an
alien enemy, who might be lawfully slain, if he came through the forest
without calling aloud or blowing a horn. Till late years, the English
feeling against the stranger lasted harsh and strong. The farmer, strong
in his laws of settlement, tried at once to pass him into the next
parish. The labourer, not being versed in law, hove half a brick at him,
or hooted him through the town. It was in the fens, perhaps, that the
necessity of combined effort for fighting the brute powers of nature
first awakened public spirit, and associate labour, and the sense of a
common interest between men of different countries and races.
But the progress was very slow; and the first civilizers of the fen were
men who had nothing less in their minds than to conquer nature, or call
together round them communities of men. Hermits, driven by that passion
for isolated independence which is the mark of the Teutonic mind, fled
into the wilderness, where they might, if possible, be alone with God and
their own souls. Like St. Guthlac of Crowland, after wild fighting for
five-and-twenty years, they longed for peace and solitude; and from their
longing, carried out with that iron will which marked the mediæval man
for good or for evil, sprang a civilization of which they never dreamed.
Those who wish to understand the old fen life, should read Ingulf’s
‘History of Crowland’ (Mr. Bohn has published a good and cheap
translation), and initiate themselves into a state of society, a form of
thought, so utterly different from our own, that we seem to be reading of
the inhabitants of another planet. Most amusing and most human is old
Ingulf and his continuator, ‘Peter of Blois;’ and though their facts are
not to be depended on as having actually happened, they are still
instructive, as showing what might, or ought to have happened, in the
opinion of the men of old.
Even more naïve is the Anglo-Saxon life of St. Guthlac, written possibly
as early as the eighth century, and literally translated by Mr. Goodwin,
of Cambridge.
There we may read how the young warrior-noble, Guthlac (‘The
Battle-Play,’ the ‘Sport of War’), tired of slaying and sinning,
bethought him to fulfil the prodigies seen at his birth; how he wandered
into the fen, where one Tatwin (who after became a saint likewise) took
him in his canoe to a spot so lonely as to be almost unknown, buried in
reeds and alders; and among the trees, nought but an old ‘law,’ as the
Scots still call a mound, which men of old had broken into seeking for
treasure, and a little pond; and how he built himself a hermit’s cell
thereon, and saw visions and wrought miracles; and how men came to him,
as to a fakir or shaman of the East; notably one Beccel, who acted as his
servant; and how as Beccel was shaving the saint one day, there fell on
him a great temptation: Why should he not cut St. Guthlac’s throat, and
install himself in his cell, that he might have the honour and glory of
sainthood? But St. Guthlac perceived the inward temptation (which is
told with the naïve honesty of those half-savage times), and rebuked the
offender into confession, and all went well to the end.
There we may read, too, a detailed account of a Fauna now happily extinct
in the fens: of the creatures who used to hale St. Guthlac out of his
hut, drag him through the bogs, carry him aloft through frost and
fire—‘Develen and luther gostes’—such as tormented likewise St. Botolph
(from whom Botulfston=Boston, has its name), and who were supposed to
haunt the meres and fens, and to have an especial fondness for old
heathen barrows with their fancied treasure hoards; how they ‘filled the
house with their coming, and poured in on every side, from above, and
from beneath, and everywhere. They were in countenance horrible, and
they had great heads, and a long neck, and a lean visage; they were
filthy and squalid in their beards, and they had rough ears, and crooked
nebs, and fierce eyes, and foul mouths; and their teeth were like horses’
tusks; and their throats were filled with flame, and they were grating in
their voice; they had crooked shanks, and knees big and great behind, and
twisted toes, and cried hoarsely with their voices; and they came with
such immoderate noise and immense horror, that him thought all between
heaven and earth resounded with their voices. And they tugged and led
him out of the cot, and led him to the swart fen, and threw and sunk him
in the muddy waters. After that they brought him into the wild places of
the wilderness, among the thick beds of brambles, that all his body was
torn. After that they took him and beat him with iron whips; and after
that they brought him on their creaking wings between the cold regions of
the air.’
But there are gentler and more human touches in that old legend. You may
read in it, how all the wild birds of the fen came to St. Guthlac, and he
fed them after their kind. How the ravens tormented him, stealing
letters, gloves, and what not, from his visitors; and then, seized with
compunction at his reproofs, brought them back, or hanged them on the
reeds; and how, as Wilfrid, a holy visitant, was sitting with him,
discoursing of the contemplative life, two swallows came flying in, and
lifted up their song, sitting now on the saint’s hand, now on his
shoulder, now on his knee. And how, when Wilfrid wondered thereat,
Guthlac made answer, ‘Know you not that he who hath led his life
according to God’s will, to him the wild beasts and the wild birds draw
the more near.’
After fifteen years of such a life, in fever, agues, and starvation, no
wonder if St. Guthlac died. They buried him in a leaden coffin (a grand
and expensive luxury in the seventh century) which had been sent to him
during his life by a Saxon princess; and then, over his sacred and
wonder-working corpse, as over that of a Buddhist saint, there rose a
chapel, with a community of monks, companies of pilgrims who came to
worship, sick who came to be healed; till, at last, founded on great
piles driven into the bog, arose the lofty wooden Abbey of Crowland; in
its sanctuary of the four rivers, its dykes, parks, vineyards, orchards,
rich ploughlands, from which, in time of famine, the monks of Crowland
fed all people of the neighbouring fens; with its tower with seven bells,
which had not their like in England; its twelve altars rich with the
gifts of Danish Vikings and princes, and even with twelve white
bear-skins, the gift of Canute’s self; while all around were the cottages
of the corrodiers, or folk who, for a corrody, or life pittance from the
abbey, had given away their lands, to the wrong and detriment of their
heirs.
But within these four rivers, at least, was neither tyranny nor slavery.
Those who took refuge in St. Guthlac’s peace from cruel lords must keep
his peace toward each other, and earn their living like honest men, safe
while they did so; for between those four rivers St. Guthlac and his
abbot were the only lords, and neither summoner, nor sheriff of the king,
nor armed force of knight or earl, could enter ‘the inheritance of the
Lord, the soil of St. Mary and St. Bartholomew, the most holy sanctuary
of St. Guthlac and his monks; the minster free from worldly servitude;
the special almshouse of most illustrious kings; the sole refuge of
anyone in worldly tribulation; the perpetual abode of the saints; the
possession of religious men, specially set apart by the common council of
the realm; by reason of the frequent miracles of the holy confessor St.
Guthlac, an ever-fruitful mother of camphire in the vineyards of Engedi;
and by reason of the privileges granted by the kings, a city of grace and
safety to all who repent.’
Does not all this sound—as I said just now—like a voice from another
planet? It is all gone; and it was good and right that it should go when
it had done its work, and that the civilization of the fen should be
taken up and carried out by men like the good knight, Richard of Rulos,
who, two generations after the Conquest, marrying Hereward’s
granddaughter, and becoming Lord of Deeping (the deep meadow), thought
that he could do the same work from the hall of Bourne as the monks did
from their cloisters; got permission from the Crowland monks, for twenty
marks of silver, to drain as much as he could of the common marshes; and
then shut out the Welland by strong dykes, built cottages, marked out
gardens, and tilled fields, till ‘out of slough and bogs accursed, he
made a garden of pleasure.’
Yet one lasting work those monks of Crowland did, besides those firm
dykes and rich corn lands of the Porsand, which endure unto this day.
For within two generations of the Norman conquest, while the old wooden
abbey, destroyed by fire, was being replaced by that noble pile of stone
whose ruins are still standing, the French abbot of Crowland sent French
monks to open a school under the new French donjon, in the little Roman
town of Grante-brigge; whereby—so does all earnest work, however
mistaken, grow and spread in this world, infinitely and for ever—St.
Guthlac, by his canoe-voyage into Crowland Island, became the spiritual
father of the University of Cambridge in the old world; and therefore of
her noble daughter, the University of Cambridge, in the new world which
fen-men, sailing from Boston deeps, colonized and Christianized, 800
years after St. Guthlac’s death.
The drainage of the fens struggled on for these same 800 years slowly,
and often disastrously. Great mistakes were made; as when a certain
bishop, some 700 years ago, bethought him to make a cut from Littleport
drain to Rebeck (or Priests’-houses), and found, to his horror and that
of the fen-men, that he had let down upon Lynn the pent-up waters of the
whole higher bogs; that rivers were running backwards, brooks swelling to
estuaries, and the whole north-eastern fen ruinate, to be yet more
ruinate by banks confusedly thrown up in self-defence, till some order
was restored in 1332, and the fens prospered—such little of them as could
be drained at all—for nigh two hundred years. Honour, meanwhile, to
another prelate, good Bishop Morton, who cut the great learn from
Guyhirn—the last place at which one could see a standing gallows, and two
Irish reapers hanging in chains, having murdered the old witch of Guyhirn
for the sake of hidden treasure, which proved to be some thirty shillings
and a few silver spoons.
The belief is more general than well-founded that the drainage of the
fens retrograded on account of the dissolution of the monasteries. The
state of decay into which those institutions had already fallen, and
which alone made their dissolution possible, must have extended itself to
these fen-lands. No one can read the account of their debts, neglect,
malversation of funds, in the time of Henry VIII., without seeing that
the expensive works necessary to keep fen-lands dry must have suffered,
as did everything else belonging to the convents.
It was not till the middle or end of Elizabeth’s reign that the recovery
of these ‘drowned lands’ was proceeded with once more; and during the
first half of the seventeenth century there went on, more and more
rapidly, that great series of artificial works which, though often faulty
in principle, often unexpectedly disastrous in effect, have got the work
done, as all work is done in this world, not as well as it should have
been done, but at least done.
To comprehend those works would be impossible without maps and plans; to
take a lively interest in them impossible, likewise, save to an engineer
or a fen-man. Suffice it to say, that in the early part of the
seventeenth century we find a great company of adventurers—more than one
Cromwell among them, and Francis, the great and good Earl of Bedford, at
their head—trying to start a great scheme for draining the drowned
‘middle level’ east of the Isle of Ely. How they sent for Vermuyden, the
Dutchman, who had been draining in North Lincolnshire, about Goole and
Axholme Isle; how they got into his hands, and were ruined by him; how
Francis of Bedford had to sell valuable estates to pay his share; how the
fen-men looked on Francis of Bedford as their champion; how Charles I.
persecuted him meanly, though indeed Bedford had, in the matter of the
‘Lynn Law’ of 1630, given way, as desperate men are tempted to do, to
something like sharp practice unworthy of him; how Charles took the work
into his hands, and made a Government job of it; how Bedford died, and
the fen-men looked on him as a martyr; how Oliver Cromwell arose to
avenge the good earl, as his family had supported him in past times; how
Oliver St. John came to the help of the fen-men, and drew up the
so-called ‘Pretended Ordinance’ of 1649, which was a compromise between
Vermuyden and the adventurers, so able and useful that Charles II.’s
Government were content to call it ‘pretended’ and let it stand, because
it was actually draining the fens; and how Sir Cornelius Vermuyden, after
doing mighty works, and taking mighty moneys, died a beggar, writing
petitions which never got answered; how William, Earl of Bedford, added,
in 1649, to his father’s ‘old Bedford River’ that noble parallel river,
the Hundred foot, both rising high above the land between dykes and
‘washes,’ _i.e._ waste spaces right and left, to allow for flood water;
how the Great Bedford Rivers silted up the mouth of the Ouse, and backed
the floods up the Cam; how Denver sluice was built to keep them back; and
so forth,—all is written, or rather only half or quarter written, in the
histories of the fens.
Another matter equally, or even more important, is but half
written—indeed, only hinted at—the mixed population of the fens.
The sturdy old ‘Girvii,’ ‘Gyrwas,’ men of the ‘gyras’ or marshes, who in
Hereward’s time sang their three-man glees, ‘More Girviorum tripliciter
canentes,’ had been crossed with the blood of Scandinavian Vikings in
Canute’s conquest; crossed again with English refugees from all quarters
during the French conquest under William. After the St. Bartholomew they
received a fresh cross of Huguenot, fleeing from France—dark-haired,
fiery, earnest folk, whose names and physiognomies are said still to
remain about Wisbeach, Whittlesea, and Thorney. Then came Vermuyden’s
Dutchmen, leaving some of their blood behind them. After the battle of
Dunbar another cross came among them, of Scotch prisoners, who, employed
by Cromwell’s Government on the dykes, settled down among the fen-men to
this day. Within the memory of man, Scotchmen used to come down into the
fens every year, not merely for harvest, but to visit their expatriated
kinsmen.
To these successive immigrations of strong Puritan blood, more than even
the influence of the Cromwells and other Puritan gentlemen, we may
attribute that strong Calvinist element which has endured for now nigh
three centuries in the fen; and attribute, too, that sturdy independence
and self-help which drove them of old out of Boston town, to seek their
fortunes first in Holland, then in Massachusetts over sea. And that
sturdy independence and self-help is not gone. There still lives in them
some of the spirit of their mythic giant Hickafrid (the Hickathrift of
nursery rhymes), who, when the Marshland men (possibly the Romanized
inhabitants of the wall villages) quarrelled with him in the field, took
up the cart-axle for a club, smote them hip and thigh, and pastured his
cattle in their despite in the green cheese-fens of the Smeeth. No one
has ever seen a fen-bank break, without honouring the stern quiet temper
which there is in these men, when the north-easter is howling above, the
spring-tide roaring outside, the brimming tide-way lapping up to the
dyke-top, or flying over in sheets of spray; when round the one fatal
thread which is trickling over the dyke—or worse, through some forgotten
rat’s hole in its side—hundreds of men are clustered, without tumult,
without complaint, marshalled under their employers, fighting the brute
powers of nature, not for their employer’s sake alone, but for the sake
of their own year’s labour and their own year’s bread. The sheep have
been driven off the land below; the cattle stand ranged shivering on high
dykes inland; they will be saved in punts, if the worst befall. But a
hundred spades, wielded by practised hands, cannot stop that tiny
rat-hole. The trickle becomes a rush—the rush a roaring waterfall. The
dyke-top trembles—gives. The men make efforts, desperate, dangerous, as
of sailors in a wreck, with faggots, hurdles, sedge, turf: but the bank
will break; and slowly they draw off; sullen, but uncomplaining; beaten,
but not conquered. A new cry rises among them. Up, to save yonder
sluice; that will save yonder lode; that again yonder farm; that again
some other lode, some other farm, far back inland, but guessed at
instantly by men who have studied from their youth, as the necessity of
their existence, the labyrinthine drainage of lands which are all below
the water level, and where the inner lands, in many cases, are lower
still than those outside.
So they hurry away to the nearest farms; the teams are harnessed, the
waggons filled, and drawn down and emptied; the beer-cans go round
cheerily, and the men work with a sort of savage joy at being able to do
something, if not all, and stop the sluice on which so much depends. As
for the outer land, it is gone past hope; through the breach pours a
roaring salt cataract, digging out a hole on the inside of the bank,
which remains as a deep sullen pond for years to come. Hundreds,
thousands of pounds are lost already, past all hope. Be it so, then. At
the next neap, perhaps, they will be able to mend the dyke, and pump the
water out; and begin again, beaten but not conquered, the same
everlasting fight with wind and wave which their forefathers have waged
for now 800 years.
He who sees—as I have seen—a sight like that, will repine no more that
the primæval forest is cut down, the fair mere drained. For instead of
mammoth and urus, stag and goat, that fen feeds cattle many times more
numerous than all the wild venison of the primæval jungle; and produces
crops capable of nourishing a hundred times as many human beings; and
more—it produces men a hundred times as numerous as ever it produced
before; more healthy and long-lived—and if they will, more virtuous and
more happy—than ever was Girvian in his log-canoe, or holy hermit in his
cell. So we, who knew the deep fen, will breathe one sigh over the last
scrap of wilderness, and say no more; content to know that—
‘The old order changeth, yielding place to new,
And God fulfils himself in many ways,
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.’
IV.
MY WINTER GARDEN. {135}
SO, my friend: you ask me to tell you how I contrive to support this
monotonous country life; how, fond as I am of excitement, adventure,
society, scenery, art, literature, I go cheerfully through the daily
routine of a commonplace country profession, never requiring a six-weeks’
holiday; not caring to see the Continent, hardly even to spend a day in
London; having never yet actually got to Paris.
You wonder why I do not grow dull as those round me, whose talk is of
bullocks—as indeed mine is, often enough; why I am not by this time ‘all
over blue mould;’ why I have not been tempted to bury myself in my study,
and live a life of dreams among old books.
I will tell you. I am a minute philosopher: though one, thank Heaven, of
a different stamp from him whom the great Bishop Berkeley silenced—alas!
only for a while. I am possibly, after all, a man of small mind, content
with small pleasures. So much the better for me. Meanwhile, I can
understand your surprise, though you cannot understand my content. You
have played a greater game than mine; have lived a life, perhaps more fit
for an Englishman; certainly more in accordance with the taste of our
common fathers, the Vikings, and their patron Odin ‘the goer,’ father of
all them that go ahead. You have gone ahead, and over many lands; and I
reverence you for it, though I envy you not. You have commanded a
regiment—indeed an army, and ‘drank delight of battle with your peers;’
you have ruled provinces, and done justice and judgment, like a noble
Englishman as you are, old friend, among thousands who never knew before
what justice and judgment were. You have tasted (and you have deserved
to taste) the joy of old David’s psalm, when he has hunted down the last
of the robber lords of Palestine. You have seen ‘a people whom you have
not known, serve you. As soon as they heard of you, they obeyed you; but
the strange children dissembled with you:’ yet before you, too, ‘the
strange children failed, and trembled in their hill-forts.’
Noble work that was to do, and nobly you have done it; and I do not
wonder that to a man who has been set to such a task, and given power to
carry it through, all smaller work must seem paltry; that such a man’s
very amusements, in that grand Indian land, and that free adventurous
Indian life, exciting the imagination, calling out all the self-help and
daring of a man, should have been on a par with your work; that when you
go a sporting, you ask for no meaner preserve than the primæval forest,
no lower park wall than the snow-peaks of the Himalaya.
Yes; you have been a ‘burra Shikarree’ as well as a ‘burra Sahib.’ You
have played the great game in your work, and killed the great game in
your play. How many tons of mighty monsters have you done to death,
since we two were schoolboys together, five-and-twenty years ago? How
many starving villages have you fed with the flesh of elephant or
buffalo? How many have you delivered from man-eating tigers, or wary old
alligators, their craws full of poor girls’ bangles? Have you not been
charged by rhinoceroses, all but ript up by boars? Have you not seen
face to face Ovis Ammon himself, the giant mountain sheep—primæval
ancestor, perhaps, of all the flocks on earth? Your memories must be
like those of Theseus and Hercules, full of slain monsters. Your brains
must be one fossiliferous deposit, in which gaur and sambur, hog and
tiger, rhinoceros and elephant, lie heaped together, as the old
ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs are heaped in the lias rocks at Lyme. And
therefore I like to think of you. I try to picture your feelings to
myself. I spell over with my boy Mayne Reid’s amusing books, or the ‘Old
Forest Ranger,’ or Williams’s old ‘Tiger Book,’ with Howitt’s plates; and
try to realize the glory of a burra Shikarree: and as I read and imagine,
feel, with Sir Hugh Evans, ‘a great disposition to cry.’
For there were times, full many a year ago, when my brains were full of
bison and grizzly bear, mustang and big-horn, Blackfoot and Pawnee, and
hopes of wild adventure in the Far West, which I shall never see; for ere
I was three-and-twenty, I discovered, plainly enough, that my lot was to
stay at home and earn my bread in a very quiet way; that England was to
be henceforth my prison or my palace, as I should choose to make it: and
I have made it, by Heaven’s help, the latter.
I will confess to you, though, that in those first heats of youth, this
little England—or rather, this little patch of moor in which I have
struck roots as firm as the wild fir-trees do—looked at moments rather
like a prison than a palace; that my foolish young heart would sigh, ‘Oh!
that I had wings’—not as a dove, to fly home to its nest and croodle
there—but as an eagle, to swoop away over land and sea, in a rampant and
self-glorifying fashion, on which I now look back as altogether
unwholesome and undesirable. But the thirst for adventure and excitement
was strong in me, as perhaps it ought to be in all at twenty-one. Others
went out to see the glorious new worlds of the West, the glorious old
worlds of the East—why should not I? Others rambled over Alps and
Apennines, Italian picture-galleries and palaces, filling their minds
with fair memories—why should not I? Others discovered new wonders in
botany and zoology—why should not I? Others too, like you, fulfilled to
the utmost that strange lust after the burra shikar, which even now makes
my pulse throb as often as I see the stags’ heads in our friend A—’s
hall: why should not I? It is not learnt in a day, the golden lesson of
the Old Collect, to ‘love the thing which is commanded, and desire that
which is promised.’ Not in a day: but in fifteen years one can spell out
a little of its worth; and when one finds one’s self on the wrong side of
forty, and the first grey hairs begin to show on the temples, and one can
no longer jump as high as one’s third button—scarcely, alas! to any
button at all; and what with innumerable sprains, bruises, soakings, and
chillings, one’s lower limbs feel in a cold thaw much like an old
post-horse’s, why, one makes a virtue of necessity: and if one still
lusts after sights, takes the nearest, and looks for wonders, not in the
Himalayas or Lake Ngami, but in the turf on the lawn and the brook in the
park; and with good Alphonse Karr enjoys the macro-microcosm in one ‘Tour
autour de mon jardin.’
For there it is, friend, the whole infinite miracle of nature in every
tuft of grass, if we have only eyes to see it, and can disabuse our minds
of that tyrannous phantom of size. Only recollect that great and small
are but relative terms; that in truth nothing is great or small, save in
proportion to the quantity of creative thought which has been exercised
in making it; that the fly who basks upon one of the trilithons of
Stonehenge, is in truth infinitely greater than all Stonehenge together,
though he may measure the tenth of an inch, and the stone on which he
sits five-and-twenty feet. You differ from me? Be it so. Even if you
prove me wrong I will believe myself in the right: I cannot afford to do
otherwise. If you rob me of my faith in ‘minute philosophy,’ you rob me
of a continual source of content, surprise, delight.
So go your way and I mine, each working with all his might, and playing
with all his might, in his own place and way. Remember only, that though
I never can come round to your sphere, you must some day come round to
me, when wounds, or weariness, or merely, as I hope, a healthy old age,
shall shut you out for once and for all from burra shikar, whether human
or quadruped.—For you surely will not take to politics in your old age?
You will not surely live to solicit (as many a fine fellow, alas! did but
last year) the votes, not even of the people, but merely of the
snobocracy, on the ground of your having neither policy nor principles,
nor even opinions, upon any matter in heaven or earth?—Then in that day
will you be forced, my friend, to do what I have done this many a year;
to refrain your soul, and keep it low. You will see more and more the
depth of human ignorance, the vanity of human endeavours. You will feel
more and more that the world is going God’s way, and not yours, or mine,
or any man’s; and that if you have been allowed to do good work on earth,
that work is probably as different from what you fancy it as the tree is
from the seed whence it springs. You will grow content, therefore, not
to see the real fruit of your labours; because if you saw it you would
probably be frightened at it, and what is very good in the eyes of God
would not be very good in yours; content, also, to receive your
discharge, and work and fight no more, sure that God is working and
fighting, whether you are in hospital or in the field. And with this
growing sense of the pettiness of human struggles will grow on you a
respect for simple labours, a thankfulness for simple pleasures, a
sympathy with simple people, and possibly, my trusty friend, with me and
my little tours about that moorland which I call my winter-garden, and
which is to me as full of glory and of instruction as the Himalaya or the
Punjab are to you, and in which I contrive to find as much health and
amusement as I have time for—and who ought to have more?
I call the said garden mine, not because I own it in any legal sense (for
only in a few acres have I a life interest), but in that higher sense in
which ten thousand people can own the same thing, and yet no man’s right
interfere with another’s. To whom does the Apollo Belvedere belong, but
to all who have eyes to see its beauty? So does my winter-garden; and
therefore to me among the rest.
Besides (which is a gain to a poor man) my pleasure in it is a very cheap
one. So are all those of a minute philosopher, except his microscope.
But my winter-garden, which is far larger, at all events, than that
famous one at Chatsworth, costs me not one penny in keeping up. Poor,
did I call myself? Is it not true wealth to have all I want without
paying for it? Is it not true wealth, royal wealth, to have some twenty
gentlemen and noblemen, nay, even royal personages, planting and
improving for me? Is it not more than royal wealth to have sun and
frost, Gulf-stream and south-westers, laws of geology, phytology,
physiology, and other ologies—in a word, the whole universe and the
powers thereof, day and night, paving, planting, roofing, lighting,
colouring my winter-garden for me, without my even having the trouble to
rub a magic ring and tell the genii to go to work?
Yes. I am very rich, as every man may be who will. In the doings of our
little country neighbourhood I find tragedy and comedy, too fantastic,
sometimes too sad, to be written down. In the words of those whose talk
is of bullocks, I find the materials of all possible metaphysic, and long
weekly that I had time to work them out. In fifteen miles of moorland I
find the materials of all possible physical science, and long that I had
time to work out one smallest segment of that great sphere. How can I be
richer, if I have lying at my feet all day a thousand times more wealth
than I can use?
Some people—most people—in these run-about railway days, would complain
of such a life, in such a ‘narrow sphere,’ so they call it, as
monotonous. Very likely it is so. But is it to be complained of on that
account? Is monotony in itself an evil? Which is better, to know many
places ill, or to know one place well? Certainly—if a scientific habit
of mind be a gain—it is only by exhausting as far as possible the
significance of an individual phenomenon (is not that sentence a true
scientific one in its magniloquence?) that you can discover any glimpse
of the significance of the universal. Even men of boundless knowledge,
like Humboldt, must have had once their speciality, their pet subject, or
they would have, strictly speaking, no knowledge at all. The volcanoes
of Mexico, patiently and laboriously investigated in his youth, were to
Humboldt, possibly, the key of the whole Cosmos. I learn more, studying
over and over again the same Bagshot sand and gravel heaps, than I should
by roaming all Europe in search of new geologic wonders. Fifteen years
have I been puzzling at the same questions and have only guessed at a few
of the answers. What sawed out the edges of the moors into long narrow
banks of gravel? What cut them off all flat atop? What makes _Erica
Tetralix_ grow in one soil, and the bracken in another? How did three
species of Club-moss—one of them quite an Alpine one—get down here, all
the way from Wales perhaps, upon this isolated patch of gravel? Why did
that one patch of _Carex arenaria_ settle in the only square yard for
miles and miles which bore sufficient resemblance to its native sandhill
by the seashore, to make it comfortable? Why did _Myosurus minimus_,
which I had hunted for in vain for fourteen years, appear by dozens in
the fifteenth, upon a new-made bank, which had been for at least two
hundred years a farm-yard gateway? Why does it generally rain here from
the south-west, not when the barometer falls, but when it begins to rise
again? Why—why is everything, which lies under my feet all day long? I
don’t know; and you can’t tell me. And till I have found out, I cannot
complain of monotony, with still undiscovered puzzles waiting to be
explained, and so to create novelty at every turn.
Besides, monotony is pleasant in itself; morally pleasant, and morally
useful. Marriage is monotonous: but there is much, I trust, to be said
in favour of holy wedlock. Living in the same house is monotonous: but
three removes, say the wise, are as bad as a fire. Locomotion is
regarded as an evil by our Litany. The Litany, as usual, is right.
‘Those who travel by land or sea’ are to be objects of our pity and our
prayers; and I do pity them. I delight in that same monotony. It saves
curiosity, anxiety, excitement, disappointment, and a host of bad
passions. It gives a man the blessed, invigorating feeling that he is at
home; that he has roots, deep and wide, struck down into all he sees; and
that only The Being who will do nothing cruel or useless can tear them
up. It is pleasant to look down on the same parish day after day, and
say, I know all that lies beneath, and all beneath know me. If I want a
friend, I know where to find him; if I want work done, I know who will do
it. It is pleasant and good to see the same trees year after year; the
same birds coming back in spring to the same shrubs; the same banks
covered with the same flowers, and broken (if they be stiff ones) by the
same gaps. Pleasant and good it is to ride the same horse, to sit in the
same chair, to wear the same old coat. That man who offered twenty
pounds’ reward for a lost carpet-bag full of old boots was a sage, and I
wish I knew him. Why should one change one’s place, any more than one’s
wife or one’s children? Is a hermit-crab, slipping his tail out of one
strange shell into another, in the hopes of its fitting him a little
better, either a dignified, safe, or graceful animal? No; George Riddler
was a true philosopher.
‘Let vules go sarching vur and nigh,
We bides at Whum, my dog and I;’
and become there, not only wiser, but more charitable; for the oftener
one sees, the better one knows; and the better one knows, the more one
loves.
It is an easy philosophy; especially in the case of the horse, where a
man cannot afford more than one, as I cannot. To own a stud of horses,
after all, is not to own horses at all, but riding-machines. Your rich
man who rides Crimæa in the morning, Sir Guy in the afternoon, and Sultan
to-morrow, and something else the next day, may be a very gallant rider:
but it is a question whether he enjoys the pleasure which one horse gives
to the poor man who rides him day after day; one horse, who is not a
slave, but a friend; who has learnt all his tricks of voice, hand, heel,
and knows what his master wants, even without being told; who will bear
with his master’s infirmities, and feels secure that his master will bear
with his in turn.
Possibly, after all, the grapes are sour; and were one rich, one would do
even as the rich are wont to do: but still, I am a minute philosopher.
And therefore, this afternoon, after I have done the same work, visited
the same people, and said the same words to them, which I have done for
years past, and shall, I trust, for many a year to come, I shall go
wandering out into the same winter-garden on the same old mare; and think
the same thoughts, and see the same fir-trees, and meet perhaps the same
good fellows hunting of their fox, as I have done with full content this
many a year; and rejoice, as I said before, in my own boundless wealth,
who have the whole universe to look at, without being charged one penny
for the show.
As I have said, the grapes may be sour, and I enjoy the want of luxuries
only because I cannot get them; but if my self-deception be useful to me,
leave it alone.
No one is less inclined to depreciate that magnificent winter-garden at
the Crystal Palace: yet let me, if I choose, prefer my own; I argue that,
in the first place, it is far larger. You may drive, I hear, through the
grand one at Chatsworth for a quarter of a mile. You may ride through
mine for fifteen miles on end. I prefer, too, to any glass roof which
Sir Joseph Paxton ever planned, that dome above my head some three miles
high, of soft dappled grey and yellow cloud, through the vast
lattice-work whereof the blue sky peeps, and sheds down tender gleams on
yellow bogs, and softly rounded heather knolls, and pale chalk ranges
gleaming far away. But, above all, I glory in my evergreens. What
winter-garden can compare for them with mine? True, I have but four
kinds—Scotch fir, holly, furze, and the heath; and by way of relief to
them, only brows of brown fern, sheets of yellow bog-grass, and here and
there a leafless birch, whose purple tresses are even more lovely to my
eye than those fragrant green ones which she puts on in spring. Well: in
painting as in music, what effects are more grand than those produced by
the scientific combination, in endless new variety, of a few simple
elements? Enough for me is the one purple birch; the bright hollies
round its stem sparkling with scarlet beads; the furze-patch, rich with
its lacework of interwoven light and shade, tipped here and there with a
golden bud; the deep soft heather carpet, which invites you to lie down
and dream for hours; and behind all, the wall of red fir-stems, and the
dark fir-roof with its jagged edges a mile long, against the soft grey
sky.
An ugly, straight-edged, monotonous fir-plantation? Well, I like it,
outside and inside. I need no saw-edge of mountain peaks to stir up my
imagination with the sense of the sublime, while I can watch the saw-edge
of those fir peaks against the red sunset. They are my Alps; little ones
it may be: but after all, as I asked before, what is size? A phantom of
our brain; an optical delusion. Grandeur, if you will consider wisely,
consists in form, and not in size: and to the eye of the philosopher, the
curve drawn on a paper two inches long, is just as magnificent, just as
symbolic of divine mysteries and melodies, as when embodied in the span
of some cathedral roof. Have you eyes to see? Then lie down on the
grass, and look near enough to see something more of what is to be seen;
and you will find tropic jungles in every square foot of turf; mountain
cliffs and debacles at the mouth of every rabbit burrow: dark strids,
tremendous cataracts, ‘deep glooms and sudden glories,’ in every
foot-broad rill which wanders through the turf. All is there for you to
see, if you will but rid yourself of ‘that idol of space;’ and Nature, as
everyone will tell you who has seen dissected an insect under the
microscope, is as grand and graceful in her smallest as in her hugest
forms.
The March breeze is chilly: but I can be always warm if I like in my
winter-garden. I turn my horse’s head to the red wall of fir-stems, and
leap over the furze-grown bank into my cathedral, wherein if there be no
saints, there are likewise no priestcraft and no idols; but endless
vistas of smooth red green-veined shafts holding up the warm dark roof,
lessening away into endless gloom, paved with rich brown fir-needle—a
carpet at which Nature has been at work for forty years. Red shafts,
green roof, and here and there a pane of blue sky—neither Owen Jones nor
Willement can improve upon that ecclesiastical ornamentation,—while for
incense I have the fresh healthy turpentine fragrance, far sweeter to my
nostrils than the stifling narcotic odour which fills a Roman Catholic
cathedral. There is not a breath of air within: but the breeze sighs
over the roof above in a soft whisper. I shut my eyes and listen.
Surely that is the murmur of the summer sea upon the summer sands in
Devon far away. I hear the innumerable wavelets spend themselves gently
upon the shore, and die away to rise again. And with the innumerable
wave-sighs come innumerable memories, and faces which I shall never see
again upon this earth. I will not tell even you of that, old friend.
It has two notes, two keys rather, that Eolian-harp of fir-needles above
my head; according as the wind is east or west, the needles dry or wet.
This easterly key of to-day is shriller, more cheerful, warmer in sound,
though the day itself be colder: but grander still, as well as softer, is
the sad soughing key in which the south-west wind roars on, rain-laden,
over the forest, and calls me forth—being a minute philosopher—to catch
trout in the nearest chalk-stream.
The breeze is gone a while; and I am in perfect silence—a silence which
may be heard. Not a sound; and not a moving object; absolutely none.
The absence of animal life is solemn, startling. That ringdove, who was
cooing half a mile away, has hushed his moan; that flock of long-tailed
titmice, which were twinging and pecking about the fir-cones a few
minutes since, are gone: and now there is not even a gnat to quiver in
the slant sun-rays. Did a spider run over these dead leaves, I almost
fancy I could hear his footfall. The creaking of the saddle, the soft
step of the mare upon the fir-needles, jar my ears. I seem alone in a
dead world. A dead world: and yet so full of life, if I had eyes to see!
Above my head every fir-needle is breathing—breathing for ever; currents
unnumbered circulate in every bough, quickened by some undiscovered
miracle; around me every fir-stem is distilling strange juices, which no
laboratory of man can make; and where my dull eye sees only death, the
eye of God sees boundless life and motion, health and use.
Slowly I wander on beneath the warm roof of the winter-garden, and
meditate upon that one word—Life; and specially on all that Mr. Lewes has
written so well thereon—for instance—
‘We may consider Life itself as an ever-increasing identification
with Nature. The simple cell, from which the plant or animal arises,
must draw light and heat from the sun, nutriment from the surrounding
world, or else it will remain quiescent, not alive, though latent
with life; as the grains in the Egyptian tombs, which after lying
thousands of years in those sepulchres, are placed in the earth, and
smile forth as golden wheat. What we call growth, is it not a
perpetual absorption of Nature, the identification of the individual
with the universal? And may we not, in speculative moods, consider
Death as the grand impatience of the soul to free itself from the
circle of individual activity—the yearning of the creature to be
united with the Creator?
‘As with Life, so with knowledge, which is intellectual life. In the
early days of man’s history, Nature and her marvellous ongoings were
regarded with but a casual and careless eye, or else with the merest
wonder. It was late before profound and reverent study of her laws
could wean man from impatient speculations; and now, what is our
intellectual activity based on, except on the more thorough mental
absorption of Nature? When that absorption is completed, the mystic
drama will be sunny clear, and all Nature’s processes be visible to
man, as a Divine Effluence and Life.’
True: yet not all the truth. But who knows all the truth?
Not I. ‘We see through a glass darkly,’ said St. Paul of old; and what
is more, dazzle and weary our eyes, like clumsy microscopists, by looking
too long and earnestly through the imperfect and by no means achromatic
lens. Enough. I will think of something else. I will think of nothing
at all—
Stay. There was a sound at last; a light footfall.
A hare races towards us through the ferns, her great bright eyes full of
terror, her ears aloft to catch some sound behind. She sees us, turns
short, and vanishes into the gloom. The mare pricks up her ears too,
listens, and looks: but not the way the hare has gone. There is
something more coming; I can trust the finer sense of the horse, to which
(and no wonder) the Middle Age attributed the power of seeing ghosts and
fairies impalpable to man’s gross eyes. Beside, that hare was not
travelling in search of food. She was not loping along, looking around
her right and left; but galloping steadily. She has been frightened; she
has been put up: but what has put her up? And there, far away among the
fir-stems, rings the shriek of a startled blackbird. What has put him
up?
That, old mare, at sight whereof your wise eyes widen till they are ready
to burst, and your ears are first shot forward towards your nose, and
then laid back with vicious intent. Stand still, old woman! Do you
think still, after fifteen winters, that you can catch a fox?
A fox it is indeed; a great dog-fox, as red as the fir-stems between
which he glides. And yet his legs are black with fresh peat-stains. He
is a hunted fox: but he has not been up long.
The mare stands like a statue: but I can feel her trembling between my
knees. Positively he does not see us. He sits down in the middle of a
ride, turns his great ears right and left, and then scratches one of them
with his hind foot, seemingly to make it hear the better. Now he is up
again and on.
Beneath yon firs, some hundred yards away, standeth, or rather lieth, for
it is on dead flat ground, the famous castle of Malepartus, which beheld
the base murder of Lampe the hare, and many a seely soul beside. I know
it well; a patch of sand-heaps, mingled with great holes, amid the
twining fir-roots; ancient home of the last of the wild beasts. And
thither, unto Malepartus safe and strong, trots Reinecke, where he hopes
to be snug among the labyrinthine windings, and innumerable
starting-holes, as the old apologue has it, of his ballium, covert-way,
and donjon keep. Full blown in self-satisfaction he trots, lifting his
toes delicately, and carrying his brush aloft, as full of cunning and
conceit as that world-famous ancestor of his, whose deeds of unchivalry
were the delight, if not the model, of knight and kaiser, lady and
burgher, in the Middle Age.
Suddenly he halts at the great gate of Malepartus; examines it with his
nose; goes on to a postern; examines that also, and then another, and
another; while I perceive afar, projecting from every cave’s mouth, the
red and green end of a new fir-faggot. Ah, Reinecke! fallen is thy
conceit, and fallen thy tail therewith. Thou hast worse foes to deal
with than Bruin the bear, or Isegrim the wolf, or any foolish brute whom
thy great ancestor outwitted. Man the many-counselled has been
beforehand with thee; and the earths are stopped.
One moment he sits down to meditate, and scratches those trusty
counsellors, his ears, as if he would tear them off, ‘revolving swift
thoughts in a crafty mind.’
He has settled it now. He is up and off—and at what a pace! Out of the
way, Fauns and Hamadryads, if any be left in the forest. What a pace!
And with what a grace beside!
Oh Reinecke, beautiful thou art, of a surety, in spite of thy great
naughtiness. Art thou some fallen spirit, doomed to be hunted for thy
sins in this life, and in some future life rewarded for thy swiftness,
and grace, and cunning, by being made a very messenger of the immortals?
Who knows? Not I.
I am rising fast to Pistol’s vein. Shall I ejaculate? Shall I notify?
Shall I waken the echoes? Shall I break the grand silence by that scream
which the vulgar view-halloo call?
It is needless; for louder and louder every moment swells up a sound
which makes my heart leap into my mouth, and my mare into the air.
Music? Well-beloved soul of Hullah, would that thou wert here this day,
and not in St. Martin’s Hall, to hear that chorus, as it pours round the
fir-stems, rings against the roof above, shatters up into a hundred
echoes, till the air is live with sound! You love madrigals, and
whatever Weekes, or Wilbye, or Orlando Gibbons sang of old. So do I.
Theirs is music fit for men: worthy of the age of heroes, of Drake and
Raleigh, Spenser and Shakspeare: but oh that you could hear this
madrigal! If you must have ‘four parts,’ then there they are.
Deeped-mouthed bass, rolling along the ground; rich joyful tenor; wild
wistful alto; and leaping up here and there above the throng of sounds,
delicate treble shrieks and trills of trembling joy. I know not whether
you can fit it into your laws of music, any more than you can the song of
that Ariel sprite who dwells in the Eolian harp, or the roar of the waves
on the rock, or
‘Myriads of rivulets hurrying through the lawn,
And murmur of innumerable bees.’
But music it is. A madrigal? Rather a whole opera of Der
Freischutz—dæmoniac element and all—to judge by those red lips, fierce
eyes, wild, hungry voices; and such as should make Reinecke, had he
strong æsthetic sympathies, well content to be hunted from his cradle to
his grave, that such sweet sounds might by him enrich the air. Heroes of
old were glad to die, if but some ‘vates sacer’ would sing their fame in
worthy strains: and shalt not thou too be glad, Reinecke? Content
thyself with thy fate. Music soothes care; let it soothe thine, as thou
runnest for thy life; thou shalt have enough of it in the next hour. For
as the Etruscans (says Athenæus) were so luxurious that they used to flog
their slaves to the sound of the flute, so shall luxurious Chanter and
Challenger, Sweet-lips and Melody, eat thee to the sound of rich
organ-pipes, that so thou mayest,
‘Like that old fabled swan, in music die.’
And now appear, dim at first and distant, but brightening and nearing
fast, many a right good fellow and many a right good horse. I know three
out of four of them, their private histories, the private histories of
their horses: and could tell you many a good story of them: but shall
not, being an English gentleman, and not an America
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