Some eminent Victorians: Personal recollections in the world of art and letters

by J. Comyns Carr

The tears rolled down his cheeks as he told the story, and we paused in our talk as we trudged along the sun-lit road. Then out of the silence came this further utterance:

“I buried him,” he faltered, “at the foot of the apple-tree”—and then another pause, and then the final words—“an’ there would be a rare crop of apples on the tree the year, for there’s naething for an apple-tree like a dead dog.”

This anecdote has always seemed to me characteristic of the Highland nature where poetry and prose lie closely side by side, and where the simple mind that holds them both is quite unconscious of any shock of feeling in the rapid transition from one to the other.

In this respect I think they show a close resemblance to the peasants of Northern Italy, in whom there is this same frank avowal of swiftly changing feeling; and neither in the one nor in the other does there seem to occur the need, always felt by the Englishman, of forming a bridge of sentiment from the world of fact to the world of passion.

A great race are these Highland gillies, claiming and according equality even in a calling in which they are very conscious of their superiority; never lacking in courtesy, and yet yielding with a certain proud independence all deference that is rightly due to the temporary relation of master and servant. In their speech they are sometimes curiously felicitous, and, using our English language as in a sense a strange tongue, they sometimes exhibit, for that reason, a purity and delicacy in the selection of words that a native can hardly command.

There was a very pretty phrase used by an old peasant at Killin with whom I was chatting one evening outside his cottage door. A pretty girl passed along on the other side of the road, and, wishing to be as Scotch as I could in order to ingratiate myself with the old man, who was vastly entertaining in his stories of the village, I said, “That’s a bonny lassie!” to which he replied, “Ay, sir, she is, but I’m thinking maybe she’s just bonnier than she’s better.” How much more delicate in its inference, how much milder in its condemnation, than our crude statement, “She’s no better than she should be!”

In those earlier times the “dry fly” as a lure for trout was scarcely known, and even to this day it is regarded with undisguised scepticism by the majority of Scotch gillies. It is not many years ago that I astonished an expert in the older fashion by its successful application on a little loch on the hills above Glenmuick, where I was staying with Lord Glenesk. We had ridden for five or six miles to reach our fishing-ground, and when we arrived it seemed as though we had come upon a fruitless errand—there was not a ripple upon the water and not a rise to be seen. The gillie who was with me scanned the surface of the lake with a melancholy eye. Towards evening, however, the fish began to move, and as sunset approached they were feeding eagerly. But the absence of any breeze rendered casting with the wet fly a barren toil. It was then that I drew from my case a large alder dressed as a floating fly. When I showed it to the gillie his contempt was unconcealed. “What sort of an animal might that be?” he inquired, and when I explained its uses to him, he turned his face towards the sunset with a look of patient and pitying toleration, merely remarking for my comfort that I “might just as well throw my bonnet into the loch.” But his scorn quickly changed to wonder as fish after fish was drawn to the bank, and when we parted at the close of the day he somewhat sheepishly entreated me to leave him as a legacy one or two specimens of those same “animals.”

I had a somewhat similar experience in Switzerland a few years later. The little crater lakes on the summit of the Gothard Pass are well stocked with trout, and the landlord of the hotel where we lunched advised me to accept the services of the chef, who was reckoned locally a very mighty exponent of the piscatorial art. But when my comrade observed my methods and noted the results, he very speedily returned to his kitchen: “Oh! là, là ça, vous savez, je ne comprends pas du tout. Bon jour, monsieur,” and so we parted.

I think every sportsman-born has in him something of the poacher. Certainly one of the keenest and most skilful fishermen of my acquaintance has made confession to me of occasional lapses into the most illicit practices when fairer means had failed. In our earlier essays among the hills of Westmoreland and Cumberland my brother and I were frankly unscrupulous, in so far at least as our limited skill permitted. There was a little pool in the hills above Thirlemere called Harrop Tarn which was so completely surrounded by a quaking morass that fishing from the bank was almost impossible. And yet we contrived to extract many a good trout from that same tarn by the poachers’ device of cross-lining. Joining our casts together, we were able, by letting out the line from either rod, to reach the very centre of the sheet of water, and when a fish was hooked we reeled in and drew him to the one little bit of firm land on one side or the other where he could be safely brought to the basket.

I knew nothing of the literature of the art when I first learned to fish at the age of twelve, and it has often amazed me since to note what wondrous feats of skill can be performed—in books. How to cast in the teeth of a facing wind, how to avoid the sagging of the line in a swift stream, how to clear a spreading bush immediately behind you—there are exact and precise receipts for all these accomplishments, but they do not always serve you by the water-side. There was a time when the written record of such triumphs of skill made me feel that I scarcely deserved to rank as a fisherman at all, but it has been my fortune occasionally to see some of these bookmade anglers at their work, and the result in nearly every case has been to restore to me a measure of self-esteem.