CHARLES KINGSLEY AS A W FISHERMAN. WHEN men opened their newspapers one cheerless morning of January 1875, and then said to each other with bated. breath, as if they had lost a personal friend, "Kingsley is dead," it was impossible to avoid dwelling a minute or two on his character. Immense energy and boundless enthusiasm for whatever interested his mind seemed his leading characteristics. As the parish priest, the novelist, the poet, and the sportsman these tendencies were conspicuous. Nothing came within his ken, whether matters of observation or speculation, without the eager mind fastening upon it, fancy investing it with bright colours, and all its relations with kindred thoughts or phenomena being carefully gathered up. Then, a fascinating style, which exactly reflected the enthusiastic nature of his mind, brought his conclusions before men in a manner which they could not but admire, if they were fain at times to hesitate before drawing the same inferences as the writer who so charmed their sober judgment. The logic of the affections, indeed, was more potent in Charles Kingsley's mental operations than that of pure thought. Hence his abstract speculations were of much less value than those subjects round which the play of imagination and the light of an enthusiastic conviction could flash. His writings on fishing were eminently of this latter character. He threw himself into this delightful recreation with ardour; and the world at large, which hangs over his novels, is probably indebted to the trout-stream, and the quiet hours there spent, even more than the angler, charming as is every word which Kingsley wrote on fishing. It will probably please many readers of his widow's interesting biography of her husband, if the scattered notices of Kingsley's sport and his numerous and characteristic remarks on points so dear to fishermen be gathered together. With the addition of his admirable "Chalk Stream Studies," it will then be easy to estimate Kingsley as a fisherman. In this character he is certainly not amenable to Mr. Justin McCarthy's charge of having dabbled in too many subjects to excel in any. As an angler, Kingsley was unrivalled. In angling, as in most other subjects, the child is father of the man, and many a trout must Kingsley have secured in the North Devon streams beside which he passed some of his early days, and which he was ever delighted to revisit in after-years. The first glimpse, however, which Mrs. Kingsley gives of him shows him engaged at Shelford, near Cambridge, where he writes to his father. that he hooked a very large trout, which, after being played for threequarters of an hour, "grubbed the hook out of his mouth after all." In March 1844 we find him in Wilts, fishing at a place redolent with many fragrant memories to a lover of Walton's books. "Conceive my pleasure," he breaks out, " at finding myself in Bemerton, George Herbert's parish, and seeing his house and church, and fishing in the very meadows where he and Dr. Donne and Iz. Walton may have fished before me. I killed several trout and a brace of grayling, a fish quite new to me, smelling just like cucumbers." A trip to his beloved North Devon gives us several pictures of his piscatorial ardour. "In the Torridge," he writes, "caught my basket full, and among them one 2 lbs. !! Never was such a trout seen in Clovelly before." And again he records of the same river," Caught 1 dozen; very bright sun, which was against me." Fishing was the only recreation he allowed himself during his early life at Eversley, and many scattered notices in his letters, too minute to be here reproduced, show how eagerly he pursued it and what a charm a new stream possessed for him, as it does for all observant anglers. In 1849 he took another trip to Devon, and writes to his wife from Dartmoor, "Starting out to fish down to Drew's Teignton, the old Druids' sacred place, to see logan stones and cromlechs. Yesterday was the most charming solitary day I ever spent in my life; scenery more lovely than tongue can tell" (he had been fishing all day on the moor); "it brought out of me the following bit of poetry, with many happy tears." We shall make no apology for quoting the lines, instinct as they are with the quintessence of Kingsley's genius, whether as a poet or an admirer of nature. The critical reader will notice in them the apt fusion of ideas which might have been cvolved by Wordsworth with the far-reaching hopes and fears of a later transcendentalism. Indeed, these verses might serve as the keynote of all the writer's poetry and philosophy. They exactly show his mental attitude in the presence of nature and the manner in which he was wont to wed the deepest longings with her beauty. Poet. I cannot tell what you say, green leaves, But I know that there is a spirit in you, I cannot tell what ye say, rosy rocks, But I know that there is a spirit in you, I cannot tell what ye say, brown streams, But I know in you, too, a spirit doth live, The Word's Answer. Oh, rose is the colour of love and youth, The earth is fruitful and faithful and young, And her bridal morn shall rise ere long, And you shall know what the rocks and the streams And the laughing green woods say. In 1851, he seems to have found fishing days contracting into afternoons or evenings, as many another angler finds when the duties of a busy life increase. He was wont now merely to throw his fly for an hour or two over the little stream which bounded the parish of Eversley during his afternoon's walk. The same year produced a very characteristic letter to his friend Mr. T. Hughes. If it may be taken as a sample of the multifariousness of his daily employments, and the nervous energy with which he would throw himself into each task, no one need wonder that the keen sword so soon wore out the scabbard. "I have had a sorter kinder sample day. Up at 5, to see a dying man; ought to have been up at 2, but Ben King, the rat-catcher, who came to call me, was taken nervous!! and didn't make row enough; was from 5.30 to 6.30 with the most dreadful case of agony-insensible to me, but not to his pain. Came home, got a wash and a pipe, and again to him at 8. . . . Prayed the commendatory prayers over him and started for the river. Fished all the morning in a roaring N.E. gale, with the dreadful agonized face between me and the river, pondering on the mystery. Killed 8 on March brown' and 'governor' by drowning the flies and taking 'em out gently to see if aught was there, which is the only dodge in a north-easter. Clouds burn up at 1 P.M., I put on a minnow and VOL, CCXLIX, NO. 1800, X X kill 3 more. My 11 weighed altogether 4 lbs., 3 to the lb.; not good, considering that I had passed many a 2-lb. fish, I know." How often are anglers caught in a thunder-storm and in what danger are they near trees and running water, the best possible conductors! The thoughts that must in such a storm have filled many a fisherman's mind with awe, who silently kept them to himself, are laid bare in the next extract of the same year, while Kingsley was fishing during a severe thunder-storm on the lake at Bramshill. “I am not ashamed to say that I prayed a great deal during the storm, for we were in a very dangerous place in an island under high trees, and it seemed dreadful" (he is writing to his wife) "never to see you again." In August 1851 a comic element occurs in Kingsley's fishing annals. He was fishing near Trêves, was taken to that town under arrest, and spent a night in prison, "among fleas and felons, on the bare floor." He is not by any means the only Englishman who has got into trouble by fishing in continental waters. To be sure, he was taken for a political enemy, an emissary of Mazzini; while at the present day ardent English anglers compromise themselves by fishing without special permission and the like. But the unpleasant result is much the same in either case. To this period belongs a graphic sketch which Mr. Martineau has given of Kingsley's study. It is curious to see how the piscatorial tastes of its owner predominated; and no more pleasant study, it may be added, could be conceived for an angler and literary man. Many a one has cause to remember that study, its lattice window (in later years altered to a bay), its great heavy door studded with large projecting nails, opening upon the garden; its brick floor covered with matting; its shelves of heavy old folios, with a fishing rod, or landing net, or insect net leaning against them; on the table books, writing materials, sermons, manuscripts, proofs, letters, reels, feathers, fishing flies, clay-pipes, tobacco. On the mat, perhaps— the brown eyes set in thick yellow hair, and gently agitated tail, asking indulgence for the intrusion-a long-bodied, short-legged Dandie Dinmont Scotch terrier; wisest, handsomest, most faithful, most memorable of its race." "Fishing," indeed, the owner of this delightful room might well write to a friend, "is par excellence the parson's sport." And here is his own account in playful hexameters of a day's fishing in May 1852. I and my gardener, George, and my little whelps, Maurice and Dandie, After a burning day and the last batch of May-flies just rising. Well; I fished two or three shallows, and never a fish would look at me. In the next month despondency seizes him at his continued want of success in fishing. Such a feeling is what might be expected in the case of so enthusiastic a temperament. Where another man would persevere, or lay aside his rod for a time, until his nerves were less tightly strung, or natural conditions more favourable, Kingsley is dispirited, and a slight trace of bitterness, very alien to his usual mood, may be traced in the letter which he wrote concerning his ill luck to Mr. Ludlow. The very fact that the fisherman takes the disappointment so seriously proves how closely fishing in its highest aspects touched Kingsley's heart. "I had my usual luck yesterday morning, killed little fish and lost a huge one. . . . God is the Giver. I have not had a decent day's fishing for four years; to such poor half-brutes asfrom whom you can expect nothing better, God gives those enjoyments which they are capable of thanking Him for-that even so He may lift their hearts to Him; while to such as us He denies them, because we have been given other and higher things. My luck has been absurdly bad; I was allowed extraordinary success for three years, till I was acknowledged the best fisherman in the neighbourhood, and since then I can catch nothing." Something of the same feeling which inspired these sorrowful words may have actuated the American angler-moralist, Thoreau, whose sentiments form so curious a parallel in many points that it is worth while quoting them for those who are not acquainted with the charm of his writings. "I have found repeatedly in late years that I cannot fish without falling a little in self-respect. I have skill at it, and, like many of my fellows, a certain instinct for it which revives from time to time, but always when I have done I feel that it would have been better if I had not fished. I think that I do not mistake. It is a faint intimation, yet so are the first streaks of morning. There is unquestionably this instinct in me which belongs to the lower orders of creation; yet with every year I am less a fisherman, though without more humanity or even wisdom." 1 How different were the two 1 Walden, p. 230, |