Angling in the Pool of Oblivion

I

OF all forms of sport, angling is the most esoteric. Well does Walton call it the contemplative man’s recreation. The angler is not only contemplative himself, but he is the cause of contemplation in other men. To a super-contemplator, sitting on a breezy hilltop, he is the subject of curious speculation. There he is in a superlatively damp place, surrounded by pestering mosquitoes, waiting for an accident that may not happen. Nothing that he can do seems to accelerate the crisis. No tempting variety of bait can ensure success against the procrastination of the slow, unwilling trout. Nor does he know that the trout is there. This may be his day out.

Wherein is the joy of this long trial of predatory patience? Why should a man spend the best part of a spring day dangling an unavailing hook over an unresponsive pool? Where is the sport?

To such a question the cheerful angler, returning with an empty basket, deigns no reply. He has the inner satisfaction that comes from an eventless day well spent. He believes in the values of what the sagacious Bismarck called ‘the imponderables.’ There are no scales in the fish market that could weigh the trout he was angling for. He does not believe that the pool was untenanted. He has been trying his wits against the Fabian tactics of a shrewd old antagonist. To-morrow he will try again. Hope deferred does not make the heart sick. It affords a healthy satisfaction.

This is the kind of pleasure some of us get in angling in that dark pool of oblivion that is called the Past. Our ordinary experience is with our contemporaries, but sometimes we like to wander off and try our luck in antiquity.

We pore over an ancient book, and for a long time nothing happens. The words arrange themselves according to the pattern of our own day. We discover facts, but they are dead facts. And then something happens. There is a sudden pull as of a living thing struggling in its own element. It is alive and fighting. There is a thrill that rewards us for our hours of watchful waiting. There is a swift motion beneath the surface, which is communicated to us and becomes a part of our present experience. Something that happened long ago is happening again in our consciousness.

There is a sense of immediateness, as if the barriers of time were suddenly removed. We are not looking back at the Past — we are looking around at what is passing. It is all present to us. It is a momentary glimpse of a living reality; we must be quick about it or it is gone. The word ‘moment’ means movement. The present is that instant of time when everything is presented to us as moving rapidly before us. The procession is passing our house, and the band begins to play.

This experience is something different from the knowledge of what is called ‘History.’ It is not so much historic as subhistoric. The contemplative man uses history as an angler would use a motor car to take him swiftly over the state road to a point, in the woods where he leaves the highway to plunge joyfully into the wilderness, where he can loiter and enjoy himself in his own way. He is not interested just now in the course of events or the sweep of great causes; he is not curious of the grandiose things which are matters of careful record, but of the forgotten emotions of half-forgotten people. Suddenly someone who had been a mere name becomes a real person and is caught in the act of doing something interesting.

That is the way we like to feel. We have the sense of being a part of the performance.

I do not agree with the dictum of Mr. Henry Ford that ‘history is bunk.’ But the historian will be the first to admit that history as set down in a book is not what many people think it is. It is not a record of all the important things that happened during a particular period. It is an arrangement of selected facts, and the historian is responsible for the selection.

He may do his best to rid his mind of prejudice. But he has an ineradicable prejudice in favor of intelligibility. He tries to set down the facts in such a way that their relations may be readily understood. They are marshaled in an orderly fashion. Unfortunately that is not. the way they happened. So for the sake of an intelligible narrative he must eliminate those happenings that were irrelevant, confusing, and incoherent.

His history must be the history of something and not of everything. In spite of himself he must select his facts. He is the potter with power over his clay. Some facts and persons he chooses for vessels of honor and some for vessels of dishonor. The clay cannot say to the potter, ‘Why hast thou made me thus?' A history book is a manufactured article. It is assembled and put together by competent workmen, like a Ford car. It is made to go, and if it won’t go it is scrapped.

The historian deals with great masses and long periods of time, and he is apt to ignore the fortunes of the little people. The individual is but an atom. Still, the atom exists as well as a planet, and an atom can get along without a planet easier than a planet can get along without its atoms. The saucy little atom, with its galaxy of electrons revolving within it, is imperturbable. Its atomic weight is what it is, and its attractions and repulsions are all its own. It will join huge and temporary aggregations of matter, but always on its own terms, and with reservations. Secure in its littleness it says to the big Universe, ‘I stand for the self-determination of atoms. Thus far thou shalt go and no farther. No more pushing, no more crowding. I require but little space, but that space is my own and I propose to fill it.’

The idiosyncrasies of atoms are not to be despised. The historian describes epoch-making events and is apt to take for granted that the people who were participants or eyewitnesses were as much impressed by them as he was. But how could they, poor fellows, be expected to know which events were to have historical importance and which not? There are any number of events which promise to be epochmaking that turn out to be false alarms. Whose fault is it? The event, in bridal array, starts at the church door, waiting to be joined to the new epoch. The fickle epoch delays his coming, and finally weds another event.

II

' It is one of the bad effects of living in one’s own time,’ wrote Horace Walpole in 1759, ‘that one never knows the truth about it till one is dead.’ Future generations, he said, would take it for granted that everybody at that time was absorbed in the fortunes of Frederick the Great and the world-wide war. But they were n’t.

‘A war that reaches from Muscovy to Alsace and from Madras to California don’t produce an article half as long as Mr. Johnson’s riding three horses at once. Europe is a dull, insignificant subject to one who knows little and cares less about Europe. Even the King of Prussia, except on post days, does n’t occupy a quarter of an inch in my memory. He must kill a hundred thousand men once a fortnight to put me in mind of him. Heroes who do so much in a book, and seem so active to posterity, lie fallow a long time to their contemporaries. And how it would humble a great prince who expects to occupy the whole stage to hear an idle man in his easy-chair cry, “Well, why don’t the King of Prussia do something?”’

Even amid events of the most tremendous importance the trivial has a way of taking the centre of the stage and holding it for its brief moment.

In the supreme crisis of the World War, Sir Edward Grey, Mr. Balfour, and Mr. Lloyd George hurried across the Channel to consult with the French Government. What were their thoughts as they returned? One of them repeats their conversation. Sir Edward Grey: ‘I could not help thinking of mines all the way over.’ Mr. Lloyd George (wearily): ‘ Oh, I was feeling too bad to think of mines.’ Mr. Balfour (with convincing emphasis): ‘I longed for a mine.’ This is not the pattern that the historian chooses, but it is the stuff that human life is made of. In the stream of consciousness all manner of things float by. Most of the little things are forgotten, but when they are accidentally called to memory they enable us to reproduce a scene, and give it reality. They give just the touch of incoherence that makes it akin to our daily experience. We feel that we have an instantaneous view, a picture that has not been retouched.

The Apostolic times seem far away, and Saint Paul is an heroic figure moving rapidly through the ancient Roman Empire. I see him through the mists of time. But I ask myself how I should have reacted to his presence. Were I among those who listened to him, should I be astonished at his doctrine? Should I reject it or enthusiastically accept it? What I do not consider is that my reactions would largely depend upon circumstances.

I take up the book of the Acts of the Apostles. ‘We sailed away from Philippi . . . and came unto them to Troas in five days; where we tarried seven days. And upon the first day of the week, when we were gathered together to break bread, Paul discoursed with them . . . and prolonged his speech until midnight. And there were many lights in the upper chamber, where we were gathered together.’

Now I can feel that I am a part of the company. We all came to hear Paul. But the plain fact is that he has been preaching too long. It is midnight and the room is crowded, and there are too many lights.

Then when he goes on, unconscious of the passage of time, our attention is distracted. ‘And there sat in the window a certain young man named Eutychus, borne down with deep sleep; and as Paul discoursed yet longer, being borne down by his sleep he fell down from the third story.’

We who are there have our minds distracted. When we look up and see the young man, in his precarious situation, beginning to nod, our attention turns away from the Apostle. All our sympathies are with Eutychus. The secondary figure takes the first place in our consciousness. The chances are that when afterward our friends begin to discuss their favorite preachers, and one says, ‘I am of Paul,’ and another, ‘I am of Apollos,’ we take the part of the brilliant Greek orator.¹ This is only because we heard Apollos under more favorable circumcumstances.

These discrepancies of judgment are the very essence of contemporaneousness. We appeal to Posterity to reduce everything to certainty. But Posterity is somewhat absent-minded, and is likely to confuse its own troubles with those of the generation it is judging. It is enlightening to see things while they are happening. Always there is a mixed multitude watching the mixed happenings with mixed emotions or with no emotions at all. There are those who take sides fiercely and those who take sides mildly and those who look on with bovine incuriosity. They are never all excited at the same time or over the same thing.

In the last great battle of Armageddon there will doubtless be noncombatants strolling over the field asking languidly, ‘What is all this about?’ It was so in the first battle of Armageddon, described so vividly by Deborah, the prophetess: ‘The kings came and fought; then fought the kings of Canaan in Taanach by the waters of Megiddo.’

There was no lack of martial ardor. ‘Zebulun and Naphtali were a people that jeoparded their lives unto the death in the high places of the field. . . . The stars in their courses fought against Sisera.’ There was much shouting of the captains, and ‘then were the horsehoofs broken by the means of the prancings, the prancings of their mighty ones.’

But the enthusiasm was not universal. The tribe of Reuben looked on with indifference, being chiefly interested in the wool industry. Reuben, ‘why abodest thou among the sheepfolds, to hear the bleatings of the flocks?’

Why indeed? I should like to interview an honest Reubenite, and discover why he preferred to hear the bleatings of his flocks rather than the noise of the battle.

‘Gilead abode beyond Jordan: and why did Dan remain in ships? Asher continued on the sea shore.’ And these were the people of Meroz, who, in spite of the bitterest invectives hurled at them, insisted on preserving a benevolent neutrality.

It would appear that at the battle of Megiddo, in that far-off time, there were all sorts of people, and they reacted to the questions of the hour in all sorts of ways. There were pacifists, militarists, profiteers, pro-Canaanites, agriculturists, and imperturbable seafaring folk, while above all was heard the shrill voice of an emancipated woman.

‘Awake, awake, Deborah: awake, awake.’ She was awake, and she succeeded in awaking some, but not all. There was a great difference of opinion. To some the battle was the most important in all history; to others it was a regrettable interruption to trade.

III

When we are traveling rapidly through a foreign country we see crowds and classes, and when by chance we are introduced to individuals we treat them as types. We unconsciously multiply them and draw conclusions as to the group to which they belong. Only when we have been long enough in one spot to feel at home do we see particular persons clearly differentiated.

Wordsworth complained that Scott in one of his novels misquoted his lines on Yarrow. ‘He makes me write:—

Wordsworth had written ‘still St. Mary’s lake’ and wished to emphasize its stillness. ‘Never could I have written “swans” in the plural. There was one swan and only one, and that is the reason I recorded the Swan and the Shadow. Had there been many swans I would have said nothing about them.’

This is something to be remembered by those who are dealing with the literature of a former age. When we discover a lifelike individual it is better to see him as he is without jumping at the conclusion that there were vast multitudes just like him. Perhaps he was an exception. Why not enjoy him as he is? There are times when one swan vividly seen makes a deeper impression on the imagination than a dozen swans accurately counted. And the same thing may be said of geese.

In Ben Jonson’s Volpone, or the Fox, we come across Lady Would-Be, who with her husband, Sir Politick WouldBe, is on her Italian journey. She is a very advanced lady, with a great contempt for all conventions and taboos. She is anxious that everyone shall know how sophisticated she is. She has arrived in the advance guard of the intellectuals.

As for poetry, she dotes on it. All the poets are at her tongue’s end.

But chiefly she admires the poet who ‘has so modern and facile a vein, fitting the time. . . . Dante is hard, and few can understand him. But for a desperate wit there’s Aretine. Only his pictures are a little obscene.’

Lady Would-Be plunges at once from the latest poetry into the latest philosophical speculation, choosing by preference to dwell on those things which ‘overwhelm the judgment, cloud the understanding,’ and finally ‘assassinate our knowledge.’

Poor old Volpone cries, ‘ Some power, some fate, some fortune, rescue me.’ Now if one were writing an historical thesis Lady Would-Be might be taken as a type of early seventeenthcentury culture. It would be safer to say she was a character that amused Ben Jonson. If Ben Jonson were alive to-day he might find the same kind of amusement, if he knew where to look for it.

IV

I take up a history of the Protestant Reformation. I get a general idea of the course of events. I read of the dissolution of the monasteries, the new learning, and all that. But how did people feel when all these changes were going on ?

Then I take up Stow’s Survey of London in the time of Queen Elizabeth. I am taking a walk with an amiable and intelligent gentleman whose only intent is to show me the interesting sights before it is too late. For London is in a state of transition.

Once London was full of springs and brooks. ‘There were wells, sweet and wholesome, frequented by scholars and youths of the city on summer evenings when they walked forth to take the air.’ There was Clerkenwell, ‘where the parish clerks used to assemble and play some large history out of Holy Scripture.’ That has all passed away—more’s the pity! The parish clerks no longer assemble to play some large Scriptural drama. The new theatre is changing all that.

‘Once the wall of the city was all about furnished with towers and bulwarks in due distance one from the other.’ But all this picturesqueness is being rapidly destroyed by the march of improvement.

I begin to feel differently about Elizabethan London. I feel its ruthless modernism and realism in contrast with the picturesque past. That is the way the Elizabethans felt.

Stow begins to talk about education as any gentleman of mature years would speak. In these days there are a great many educational fads, and the schools are being revolutionized, but for all their pretentiousness it is a question whether they make better scholars than they did when he was a boy. As for the disputing of the scholars according to the rules of logic, that has been discontinued. ‘I myself in my youth have yearly seen, on the eve of St. Bartholomew, the scholars of divers grammar schools repair unto the Church in Smithfield, where upon a bank boarded about, under a tree, some one scholar both stepped up and there opposed and answered till he were by some better scholar overcome and put down, and then the newcomer, taking his place, did like as the first, and in the end the best opposers and answerers had rewards, which I observed not but that it made good schoolmasters and good scholars.’

Now I get a glimpse of the way in which people actually felt when the new learning was crowding out the mediæval scholasticism. It was not a matter that interested only the great scholastics we read about. It was a matter which affected every school and the proud parents whose sons got prizes in those exciting contests which were conducted like our old-fashioned spelling bees. If I had in my youth stood up under a tree on St. Bartholomew’s eve and astonished the whole village by my precocity, and had been the last on that glorious day to be argued down, I would not listen to the radicals who were trying to introduce a newfangled intelligence test. Wait till these educators produce scholars of the old type — which they never did.

We take a walk through a large street recently replenished with comely buildings and go out to the Whitechapel region. Stow calls attention to the fact that Whitechapel is not what it used to be. It is becoming sophisticated. We pass the new church of St. Botolph. ‘The parishioners being of late years mightily increased, the church is pestered to find seats for them.’

To get into the country, let us take Hog Lane. ‘This Hog Lane, within these forty years, had on both sides fair hedgerows of elm trees, with bridges and easy stiles to pass over into pleasant fields very commodious for citizens to walk in, and shoot, and refresh their spirits in the sweet and wholesome air, but now is turned into a continual building of garden houses and small cottages, bowling alleys, and suchlike, as far as Whitechapel.’

In this region that is now being built up Stow can remember rural delights that are no more. ‘There was a farm at which I myself in my youth fetched many a halfpenny worth of milk and never less than three ale pints for a halfpenny in the summer, nor less than one ale quart for a halfpenny in winter, always hot from the kine, as the same was milked and strained. One Trollop and afterwards Goodman were the farmers there, and had thirty or forty kine to the pail.’

Now Trollop and Goodman are not historical characters, but they are very real persons to me, which is more than can be said of many who had greater names. I can see their burly figures at milking time. I sympathize with Stow in thinking that it was a pity that when the elder Goodman died his son did not follow in his ways and keep the thirty cows and sell milk to thirsty pedestrians at three pints for a halfpenny. Instead of which young Goodman, when he came into possession, yielded to the prevailing fever for real-estate speculation. He subdivided his farm into city lots and thereafter, says Stow, instead of being an honest yeoman, moved into the city and lived like a prince.

That sort of thing I see to be happening all the time. And the worst of it is that nobody knows how to stop it.

When I walk about with Stow and see all the fine old abbeys dismantled, and think of the way the fair old elm trees in Whitechapel have been cut down, and think how much better a man old Goodman was than his popinjay of a son, I begin to feel reactionary. Three or four hundred years from now there may be historians who will take it all coolly, but they won’t know what we know.

Stow takes me by the Priory of the Holy Trinity, which was scrapped. It was Sir Thomas Audley who did it. He sold the bells for what they would fetch, which was n’t much. Then he offered the priory church and steeple to whoever would take it down, but no man would take the offer! Stow remembers when this sort of thing was going on all over London. ‘At that time any man in the city could have a cartload of hard stone brought to his doors for sixpence or sevenpence with the carriage.’

We come in our walk to the old church of St. Andrew Undershaft, on Cornhill. Stow explains the name. There was an immense timber shaft or pole which every May Day was set up in front of the church, and when it was thus placed it was higher than the church steeple. Chaucer had written of the great shaft in Cornhill, testifying of the ancient union of mirth and religion. It had not been raised since 1517, but it rested on six hooks till the third year of King Edward VI, ‘when Sir Stephen, curate of St. Katharine’s, preaching at Paul’s Cross, said this shaft was an idol.’ Sir Stephen cried out against the name of the church. That was the kind of man he was. ‘He would have fish days any day but Friday, and Lent at any time except between Shrovetide and Easter. . . .

‘I have ofttimes seen this man, forsaking his pulpit in the said church, preach under a high elm tree in the midst of the churchyard, and entering the church, forsaking the altar, sing Mass in English on the tomb of the dead toward the north. I heard his sermon on Paul’s Cross, and I saw the effect that followed; for in the afternoon of that present Sunday the neighbors and tenants over whose doors the said shaft had lain, after they had dined to make themselves strong, raising the shaft from the hooks on which it had rested two and twenty years, they sawed it in pieces, every man taking his share. Thus was that idol, as they termed it, mangled and afterwards burned.’

When I watch the proceedings and remember how Chaucer had chuckled over the thought that the May pole was higher than the church steeple, I have a dislike for thin-lipped, sourfaced Sir Stephen. Why could n’t he leave our May pole alone? Why was n’t St. Andrew Undershaft a good enough name for our church? Our fathers saw no harm in it. And then to think that those hypocrites sawed the May pole up and carried it to their own homes! If they had made a jolly bonfire in the street and danced around it we could have forgiven them. But the pious rogues carried their sticks to their own fireplaces, where they could show their hatred of idolatry and save their fuel bills at the same time.

V

When I read of the religious persecutions of those days I find it hard to realize what they were like to the people who engaged in them. I think of one side as habitual martyrs and the other side as habitual persecutors. I do not take into account the fact that these parts were changed with the utmost alacrity.

But one day I drop in at the trial of Bishop Hugh Latimer in the reign of Queen Mary. It is all so different from what I had expected. It is n’t a criminal trial. It is a spiritual tournament, a grammatical exercise, and a revival of religion, all in one.

I see the old Bishop ‘ holding his hat in his hand, having a kerchief on his head, and upon it a nightcap or two, and a great cap with two broad flaps to button under the chin, wearing an old threadbare Bristol frieze gown, girded to his body with a penny leather girdle, from which hanged by a long string of leather his Testament and his spectacles, which were without a case.’

He has just come from his prison and is weak physically, but he has the fighting spirit. He is a knight, lance in hand, ready for all comers. There is a sharp clash of texts.

WESTON. ‘Where do you find that a woman should receive the sacrament ?’

LATIMER. ‘ Will you give me leave to turn to my book? I find it in the eleventh chapter to the Corinthians. I trow these be the words. Probet autem seipsum homo. I pray you, good master, what gender is homo?’

Immediately the assembly is in an uproar. Weston, Cole, Harpsfield, and Feekenham begin to shout their answers. Latin grammar was a live subject in those days, and angry passions were aroused. Weston cries, ‘Marry, it is common gender.’ Feckenham asserts, ‘It is probet seipsum, indeed, and therefore it importeth the masculine gender.’

In the first round Latimer has the best of it. Weston finds a new passage of Scripture and begins the battle anew.

‘ “ I will be at host with you anon ”! When Christ was at his supper none were with him but the Apostles. Ergo — he meant no woman.’

LATIMER. ‘In the twelve Apostles was represented the whole Church; in which you will grant both men and women to be. Well, remember that you cannot find that a woman may receive by Scripture.’

I can hear a deep voice crying, ‘Master opponent, fall to it!’ In those days pugnacity and piety were not strangers. Latimer is plucky, but he is an old man, and when he is pushed too far he admits his weakened powers.

LATIMER. ‘Disputation requireth a good memory. My memory is clean gone and marvelously weakened, and none the better, I wis, for the prison.’

WESTON. ‘How long have you been in prison?’

LATIMER. ‘These three quarters of this year.’

WESTON. ‘I was in prison six years.’

Our preconceived ideas of persecutor and martyr do not cover this situation. Weston is as proud of his six years in prison for conscience’ sake as a soldier would be of the battles he had fought. These men understood each other. They were of the same bulldog breed. Our doctrine of toleration would have seemed to them to be very flabby.

When he comes again before the commissioners, Latimer asks, ‘Will your lordship give me leave to speak a word or two?’

BISHOP OF LINCOLN. ‘Yes, Master Latimer, so that you use a modest kind of talk without railing or taunts.'

Latimer expounds his faith and ends with ‘Now I trust, my lord, that I do not rail yet.’

BISHOP OF LINCOLN. ‘No, Master Latimer, your talk is more like taunts than railing. What was that book you blame so much?’

LATIMER. ‘It is by one which is Bishop of Gloucester, whom I never knew, neither did I at any time see him, to my knowledge.’

‘With that the people laughed, because the Bishop of Gloucester sat there in commission.'

Then the Bishop of Gloucester stood up and said it was his book.

LATIMER. ‘Was it yours, my lord? Indeed I knew not your lordship, neither did I ever see you before, neither yet see you now through the brightness of the sun shining betwixt you and me.’

‘Then they all laughed again.’ The Bishop of Lincoln commanded silence.

Then they all laughed again! This was not the Spanish Inquisition. The laughter was the laughter of sixteenthcentury Englishmen who were accustomed to give and receive hard blows. When they had laughed for a moment they would take up the cudgels again. To-morrow would be a time for grim tragedy; to-day they would fight the good fight.

VI

In the preceding reign, a Protestant statesman was asked to fulfill engagements made by King Henry VIII. He answered bluntly: ‘That was made by the King of England who now dead is to the King of France who now dead is. Then was then, and now is now.’

That is the practical man’s dictum. Then was then and now is now, ‘and never the twain shall meet.’ What happened then is nothing to us. What happens now will be nothing to those who come after us. But the contemplative man is not satisfied with this bleak view of Time. Now is now; but he is interested in thinking about how our now will appear to our successors. What is there that will be found to have permanent interest? How will our fashions appear when they have become old-fashioned? Which of our institutions have survival value? He is accustomed to project his thoughts into the future and to think of now as if it were then.

In like manner he takes delight in sudden glimpses into the life of other days. He does not conceive of that life as altogether outside his personal experience. There is for him a dramatic revival of old comedies and tragedies. They have been enacted before, but it is his privilege to see them presented again on the stage of his imagination. Perhaps some of the actors will be more kindly received and more fully appreciated than on their first appearance.

To help us to reset the stage, to recall the actors, to turn on the lights, and to enjoy the play — this is the aim of a liberal education.

But after all, every man must be his own stage manager.