But whether the Sinitic Pantheon lacked or held a deity of fishermen, it was reserved for Hsü, the hero of one of the stories in Liao Chai Chih I, to summon from the vasty deep and hold in willing peonage a piscatorial power all his own.[1154]
This djin of the water was both recognisant and static—no twelve-day banquets speeded him to Æthiopia—and far more instant in service than Hermes or Aphrodite, as Heliodorus and other epigrammatists plainly prove. Not infrequent must have been the occasions when Greek and Roman fishermen returning, despite their sacrificial offerings, with empty creels, met the taunt,
“They’re gods: perchance they sleep, Cry out, and know what prayers are worth, Thou dust and earth.”
Had the fishermen of the Dodekanese and of Italy, following the example of Hsü, poured oblations of the wine of the islands, or deprompted the old Falernian, perhaps the deities of their craft, who oft-times must have jibbed at repeated hecatombs of fish, even if “spiced,” and at the sight of the Olympian box-rooms littered with cobbled cobbles and torn tackle, would have been more regular in attendance and more prompt in aid.
The story runs that “every night, when Hsü fared forth to fish, he would carry some wine with him, and drink and fish by turns, always taking care to pour out a libation on the ground, accompanied by the invocation, ‘Drink, too, ye drowned spirits of the River!’ Such was his regular custom: and it was noticeable that, even on occasions when others caught naught, he always got a full basket.”
The means by which this success was attained and other pleasant details are set forth fully in that delightful book by Professor Giles, Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio.[1155] Suffice it, however, here to recount that one drowned Spirit of the River, the genius of Hsü’s beat, touched, perhaps even affected, by the alcoholic libation, at first invisibly, afterwards openly glided down stream, quietly drove the lower reaches, and shepherded the fishes towards our angler’s bait.
Like his Chinese brother, the British angler, when he goes a-fishing, carries a flask: unlike him, he does not, and cannot, unless he have the grand accommodation of a Loch Leven boatman thirty years ago, “drink and fish by equal turns.” Even if the difficulty of equal drinking turn by turn on the part of the sportsman and sprite be overcome, it is doubtful whether a British angler, however adaptive and alert to learn, can in these days ensure a full creel by adopting Hsü’s tip, having regard to the scanty stock and prohibitive price of whisky. Whether in the near or even far future the recipe can be thoroughly tested lies on the niggard lap of the Board of Control.
“Oh! never fly conceals a hook Fish say, in the Eternal Brook, But more than mundane weeds are there, And mud, celestially fair; Fat caterpillars drift around, And Paradisal grubs are found; Unfading moths, immortal flies, And the worm that never dies. And in that Heaven of all their wish, There shall be no more land, say fish.” Rupert Brooke.