SOPHISTRY OF ANGLERS. – IZAAK WALTON
Many brave and good men have been anglers, as well as many men of a different description; but their goodness would have been complete, and their bravery of a more generous sort, had they possessed self-denial enough to look the argument in the face, and abstained from procuring themselves pleasure at the expense of a needless infliction. The charge is not answered by the favorite retorts about effeminacy, God's providence, neighbors' faults, and doing "no worse." They are simple beggings of the question. I am not aware that anglers, or sportsmen in general, are braver than the ordinary run of mankind. Sure I am that a great fuss is made if they hurt their fingers; much more if they lie gasping, like fish, on the ground. I am equally sure that many a man who would not hurt a fly is as brave as they are; and as to the reference to God's providence, it is an edge-tool that might have been turned against themselves by any body who chose to pitch them into the river, or knock out their brains. They may lament, if they please, that they should be forced to think of pain and evil at all; but the lamentation would not be very magnanimous under any circumstances; and it is idle, considering that the manifest ordination and progress of things demand that such thoughts be encountered. The question still returns: Why do they seek amusement in sufferings which are unnecessary and avoidable? and till they honestly and thoroughly answer this question, they must be content to be looked upon as disingenuous reasoners, who are determined to retain a selfish pleasure.
As to old Izaak Walton, who is put forward as a substitute for argument on this question, and whose sole merits consisted in his having a taste for nature and his being a respectable citizen, the trumping him up into an authority and a kind of saint is a burlesque. He was a writer of conventionalities; who, having comfortably feathered his nest, as he thought, both in this world and in the world to come, concluded he had nothing more to do than to amuse himself by putting worms on a hook, and fish into his stomach, and so go to heaven, chuckling and singing psalms. There would be something in such a man and in his book, offensive to a real piety, if that piety did not regard whatever has happened in the world, great and small, with an eye that makes the best of what is perplexing, and trusts to eventual good out of the worst. Walton was not the hearty and thorough advocate of nature he is supposed to have been. There would have been something to say for him on that score, had he looked upon the sum of evil as a thing not to be diminished. But he shared the opinions of the most commonplace believers in sin and trouble, and only congratulated himself on being exempt from their consequences. The overweening old man found himself comfortably off somehow; and it is good that he did. It is a comfort to all of us, wise or foolish. But to reverence him is a jest. You might as well make a god of an otter. Mr. Wordsworth, because of the servitor manners of Walton and his biographies of divines (all anglers), wrote an idle line about his "meekness" and his "heavenly memory." When this is quoted by the gentle brethren, it will be as well if they add to it another passage from the same poet, which returns to the only point at issue, and upsets the old gentleman altogether Mr. Wordsworth's admonition to us is,
"Never to link our pastime, or our pride,
With suffering to the meanest thing that lives."
It was formerly thought effeminate not to hunt Jews; then not to roast heretics; then not to bait bears and bulls; then not to fight cocks, and to throw sticks at them. All these evidences of manhood became gradually looked upon as no such evidences at all, but things fit only for manhood to renounce; yet the battles of Waterloo and of Sobraon have been won, and Englishmen are not a jot the less brave all over the world. Probably they are braver, that is to say, more deliberately brave, more serenely valiant; also more merciful to the helpless, and that is the crown of valor.
It was during my infancy, if I am not mistaken, that there lived at Hampstead (a very unfit place for such a resident), a man whose name I suppress lest there should be possessors of it surviving, and who was a famous cock-fighter. He was rich and idle, and therefore had no bounds to set to the unhappy passions that raged within him. It is related of this man, that, having lost a bet on a favorite bird, he tied the noble animal to a spit in his kitchen before the fire, and notwithstanding the screams of the sufferer and the indignant cries of the beholders, whose interference he wildly resisted with the poker, actually persisted in keeping it there burning, till he fell down in his fury and died.
Let us hope he was mad. What, indeed, is more probable? It is always a great good, when the crimes of a fellow-creature can be traced to madness; to some fault of the temperament or organization; some "jangle of the sweet bells;" some overbalance in the desired equipoise of the faculties, originating, perhaps in accident or misfortune. It does not subject us the more to their results. On the contrary, it sets us on our guard against them. And, meantime, it diminishes one of the saddest, most injurious, and most preposterous notions of human ignorance – the belief in the wickedness of our kind.
But I have said enough of these barbarous customs.
GLOBES, AND HOW THEY ARE MADE
One of the most remarkable of self-educated men, James Ferguson, when a poor agricultural laborer, constructed a globe. A friend had made him a present of "Gordon's Geographical Grammar," which, he says, "at that time was to me a great treasure. There is no figure of a globe in it, although it contains a tolerable description of the globes and their use. From this description I made a globe in three weeks, at my father's, having turned the ball thereof out of a piece of wood; which ball I covered with paper, and delineated a map of the world upon it, made the meridian ring and horizon of wood, covered them with paper, and graduated them; and was happy to find that by my globe (which was the first I ever saw) I could solve the problems."
"But," he adds, "this was not likely to afford me bread."
In a few years this ingenious man discovered the conditions upon which he could earn his bread, by a skill which did not suffer under the competition of united labor. He had made also a wooden clock. He carried about his globe and his clock, and "began to pick up some money about the country" by cleaning clocks. He became a skilled clock-cleaner. For six-and-twenty years afterward he earned his bread as an artist. He then became a scientific lecturer, and in connection with his pursuits, was also a globe maker. His name may be seen upon old globes, associated with that of Senex. The demand for globes must have been then very small, but Ferguson had learned that cheapness is produced by labor-saving contrivances. A pretty instrument for graduating lines upon the meridian ring, once belonging to Ferguson, is in use at this hour in the manufactory of Messrs. Malby and Son. The poor lad "who made a globe in three weeks" finally won the honors and riches that were due to his genius and industry. But he would never have earned a living in the continuance of his first attempt to turn a ball out of a piece of wood, cover it with paper, and draw a map of the world upon it. The nicest application of his individual skill, and the most careful employment of his scientific knowledge, would have been wasted upon those portions of the work in which the continued application of common routine labor is the most efficient instrument of production.
Let us contrast the successive steps of Ferguson's first experiment in globe-making with the processes of a globe manufactory.
A globe is not made of "a ball turned out of a piece of wood." If a solid ball of large dimensions were so turned, it would be too heavy for ordinary use. Erasmus said of one of the books of Thomas Aquinas, "No man can carry it about, much less get it into his head;" and so would it be said of a solid globe. If it were made of hollow wood, it would warp and split at the junction of its parts. A globe is made of paper and plaster. It is a beautiful combination of solidity and lightness. It is perfectly balanced upon its axis. It retains its form under every variety of temperature. Time affects it less than most other works of art. It is as durable as a Scagliola column.
A globe may not, at first sight, appear a cheap production. It is not, of necessity, a low-priced production, and yet it is essentially cheap; for nearly all the principles of manufacture that are conditions of cheapness are exhibited in the various stages of its construction. There are only four globe-makers in England, and one in Scotland. The annual sale of globes is only about a thousand pair. The price of a pair of globes varies from six shillings to fifty pounds. But from the smallest 2-inch, to the largest 36-inch globe, a systematic process