pound, the Eden used to yield baskets as good as those which will be made in Hampshire this month or next. These remarks, it will be understood, are impartial. They are intended not to depreciate the South-of-England streams but to make it clear that streams elsewhere are not sufficiently valued. While trout-fishing within easy reach of London costs much, troutfishing in many other places costs nothing or very little, and therefore has never been esteemed as it is now, when there is a possibility of the privilege being withdrawn. Practically every county in the kingdom will ere long become as attractive as Hampshire if what is happening arouses anglers generally to interest in the management of streams. It is clear that the first measure of reform must be the imposition of a rule that the taking of immature trout shall be an offence disqualifying the person guilty from exercise of the privilege. Besides being no more than the owners of fisheries are entitled to stipulate, this would be a self-denying ordinance easily borne. It would mean light baskets this season and the next; but it would assure heavy baskets three years hence and every season after. If trout under three quarters of a pound are saved now, fish of this weight will by that time be as plentiful as fish of three ounces are at present. Does not the prospect warrant the sacrifice? The sale of brown trout captured under the privilege should be forbidden. The suggestion is not invalidated by the fact that tenants of grouse-moors sell some of their spoils. The cases are not analogous. The lessee of a grouse-moor is under contract to kill no more when he has bagged birds to a certain number, leaving the stock sufficient; if the grouse to which he is entitled are more than he himself can use, there is no reason why he should not turn the excess to pecuniary account. A man fishing under privilege is in a different position. It may be that he pays nothing to the owner; it may be that he pays a small sum, contribution to a fund for the protection of the stream. In either case, as the owner does not profit in a pecuniary sense from granting the privilege, it is manifest that the beneficiary accepts the privilege on the understanding that it is to be used in pleasure only, not for sordid gain. Every large town has a ready market for brown trout; this is known to have greatly encouraged improper methods of fishing on streams open to the public. The traffic, of course, must cease if the fisheries are to be redeemed. Whatever may be thought of the Times theory that the possessor of an article has an inalienable right to trade with it, our reasoning in the matter of brown trout caught under privilege seems irrefragable. Obviously it is open to the owner of a stream, whether a private person or the Crown, to say to the public, 'Yes, I will allow you to fish, for the pleasure of the pastime; but I will not allow you to fish with intention to make a pecuniary profit.' A concession of privilege involving property is not analogous to a concession of political power. It is not accompanied by the implicit sanction of a larger claim. In connection with the Tweedside episode, proposals for drastic reforms have already been bruited abroad. It has been suggested that anglers on streams open under privilege to the public should be forbidden to use any other lure than fly. This shows excessive solicitude. In Hampshire, it is true, there is an unwritten law that fly alone is permissible, and even that the fly must float; but this is a needless safeguard on any ordinary stream. Trout are amazingly prolific. A year's progeny of a single pair are more, when three seasons old, than a score of expert anglers could catch in a month. When it is mentioned that a well-stocked stream, such as the Test, is estimated to have 25,000 trout to the mile, anyone can perceive that there is no likelihood of the waters ever being seriously injured by fair methods of angling. A worm in a summer flood, which Tweedside in its new zeal speaks of banning, cannot, on reflection, be considered an unfair lure. What, on the average, is the total time of floods in summer? It is not more than two weeks. It is not more than the period of the Mayfly, which, far from being a season of abstinence, is even in Hampshire rejoiced in as the bravest fortnight of the year. Now, the Mayfly is just as deadly as the worm; yet it has never been seriously suggested that those who use it in the region where the management of trout-streams is best understood take more trout than the stocks can afford. In short, there is no need for a vogue of dilettantism in the sport. On the trout-streams everywhere all will yet be well if, besides seeing to the enforcement of current laws, owners and the privileged public agree to use the waters for pleasure only, and to take effective measures against the slaughter of immature fish. Oakbank, Aberfeldy, Perthshire. W. EARL HODGSON. A PLEA FOR THE POPULAR IN LITERATURE READERS of foreign books upon English literature must surely have been struck by the conspicuous place which, in most of them, is assigned to Byron. In the volume by Professor Brandes,' which deals with Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Coleridge, Scott, Landor, Moore, as well as the lesser stars of the early nineteenth century, one hundred and fifty pages out of three hundred and fifty are occupied with Byron. To this foreign critic, Byron is the true 'passionate personality' of the English movement, the man who was in the main stream of the world's thought, and who is the final expression of the British poetic spirit of this period. In his closing summary he tells us that, while Wordsworth, Scott, Keats, Shelley, and Coleridge were all in their different degrees limited and provincial, Byron broke all bounds and flooded the world with his song. What language! What tones breaking the death-like silence of oppressed Europe! The political air rang with the shrill notes; for no word uttered by Lord Byron fell unheard to the ground. The legions of the fugitives, the banished, the oppressed, the conspirators of every nation, kept their eyes fixed on the one man who, amidst the universal debasement of intelligences and characters to a low standard, stood upright, beautiful as Apollo, brave as an Achilles, prouder than all the kings of Europe together.2 Taine is no less enthusiastic. Byron is to him' the greatest and most English' of the men of his time-' so great and so English that from him alone we shall learn more truths of his country and his age than from all the rest together.' 'Into what mediocrity and platitude,' he cries, sinks the Faust of Goethe compared with Byron's Manfred! Here are judgments which in certain striking respects run counter to modern criticism in this country. If one must not say that Byron is under a cloud, he is at all events counted to be one of the faultiest of great poets, and many modern writers speak of his vehement and ill-balanced opinions as fatal or, at least, a serious drawback to the true spirit of poetry. These foreign critics, however, sweep aside mere literary criticism and apply a test of character 'Naturalism in England. English translation (Heinemann). 2 Ibid. p. 356. and energy which not only puts Byron at the head of the English movement, but makes him a supreme leader of European thought. Which of these judgments is more likely to stand the test of time need not be discussed at this moment. But the fact that foreign writers of eminence take this exalted view of Byron's place in literature, and take it by appealing to the substance of his poetry, surely suggests certain reflections on the literature and criticism of our own day. For it is precisely these qualities that Taine and Brandes find so admirable in Byron which have for some years past been in disrepute among English writers. No one in these days 'breaks the silence with shrill notes which make the air ring.' The modern man of letters, on the contrary, is at special pains to disclaim the idea that he has a mission in life or anything momentous to say which is not already familiar to the man in the street. Moralising, we are perpetually told, is fatal to literature, as of course it is, if by moralising we mean the dull and unskilful hammering of the commonplace. The axiom, however, takes on a meaning which actually shuts off the literary artist from the greater matters of life and conduct. Books on style proceed from beginning to end on the assumption that the literary art consists wholly in the right choice of words and their scholarly arrangement in graceful patterns. And being thus preoccupied with word-craft, a great many modern writers find it easier to write good sentences than good chapters or good books. They lack what Frenchmen call the esprit de suite, that grasp of the whole and sense of orderly development which belong to the great theme in the hands of the master. The critic, meanwhile, judges not of what is said, but of how it is said, and is even apt to take the narrowest view of this accomplishment. It follows almost inevitably from this conception of the writer's art that the great mass of the public become estranged from literature. In these days we have writers with immense circulations whom the literary people declare to be of no account, and literary people of high accomplishment whom the great public refuses to consider. A small minority speak habitually of the literary art as if it were a secret process which is hidden from their neighbours, and their neighbours retaliate by showing complete indifference to what this minority calls literature. That this gulf must necessarily be fixed between the few and the many in their appreciation of literature, and that the common people must demand common things while the men of letters cultivate subtleties and delicacies which the great majority cannot appreciate, is an assumption so frequently made that it has come to be regarded as an axiom of criticism; and the writings of the elect are full of lamentation and woe at the alleged narrowing of the circle in which their refined wares find acceptance. And yet, if one looks back on the history of literature, it is an assumption for which there is very little warrant; so little, indeed, that to insist on it seems, if one may judge from the past, to be the note of an inferior school, and not, as so many writers appear to take for granted, of the great schools-a note of Euphuism rather than of Elizabethanism. Judged by its power of surviving, Euphuism has no advantage over the most popular method in authorship. The stylists of the year before last are in the same grave with the popular novelists whom they despised, and the critic of to-day scarcely troubles even to drop a tear over them. For though style is, as Stevenson truly said, a great antiseptic, it can only do its work if there is a body worth preserving, and then it acts silently and imperceptibly. Of course, it is true that the mass of people look first to the thing said rather than to the manner in which it is said; but it is a mistake to suppose that the manner does not make its appeal to the reader because he is unable to analyse its virtues. Style in its perfection is like the sword in the Arabian Nights, which decapitated its victim, and left him unaware of what had happened, till he shook his head, and it rolled on to the floor. So far then, as it depends upon style, the virtue of being above the heads of the people belongs not to the best, but only to the secondbest literature. With that reservation we may concede it. If a writer cannot ascend to the heights, it is well for him not to descend to the depths, but to work on the middle plane where he may make a cultivated appeal to the people of culture. Here he may legitimately rely on accomplishments which will be 'caviare to the general' who have been educated in the various kinds of public schools; here, too, he may give himself reasonable airs of superiority over lower mortals who frankly bid for the largest circulation with wares that are wholly commercial. Genius, however, is not limited by these conditions. The appeal which genius makes to the heart and imagination may carry it to vast masses of people who have no opinion at all about the literary form that it uses. And for this reason, an exaggerated concern with the mechanism of literature is almost invariably a sign of the absence of genius, though it may also very well be the sign of a high degree of accomplishment. The rise and fall of English literature in the nineteenth century brings this home to us. Glancing back over those years we find at the beginning of them a whole school of writers in revolt against the stylistic conception of writing-Wordsworth, in particular, asserting that there is no such thing as a literary language as distinguished from ordinary speech, and carrying his theory to excess in a studied, and occasionally somewhat ridiculous homeliness of speech. The mark of this school is what Professor Brandes calls its naturalism,' that is, its contact with nature and human nature as opposed to the formalism of its predecessors. Yet this school, without any laboured pursuit of style, did, as a matter of fact, achieve the highest form of expression, as in Keats and Shelley, and Wordsworth himself. Descend 6 |