Lochs and Loch Fishing

PART II. PRACTICAL LOCH FISHING. CHAPTER XIV. The Evolution of Loch Fishing : A History of Negatives. Herodotus with that charmingly simple faith in human credulity, which always distinguishes the true historian, describes in a certain part of his marvellous work a primitive, but none the less perfect, kind of fly- fishing practised in the remote period with which he is dealing by certain of the dwellers in that land of marvels—Africa. On translating, whether by the aid of a crib or otherwise, this portion of the works of the father of history, the average schoolboy who' knows anything about rods, other than the kind advertised by Solomon, permits him- self the luxury of a chuckley and if a rude boy puts his tongue in his cheek, raises the digital finger of his right hand tO' his nose and by an exercise of his comparative faculties, that does him more credit than the facial and manual exercises first mentioned, dubs Herodotus the father, not merely of history, but of the fish story. Though this mention of fly-fishing by Herodotus may thus make the unskilful laugh, it has the effect of making the judicious think. The result of such con- templation usually is that Herodotus is hailed as a sort of Darwin of historical evolution, or in other words, as a very keen observer who' has noted many things that might have escaped the eye of one less richly endowed with what we now-a-days term the journalistic insight and intuition. Herodotus may not have seen all he says he saw, but seeing something resembling what he described, he grasped intuitively what the Scottish pundits would have termed, its " infinite potentiality " and evolved from his inner consciousness with the aid of a prophetic eye playing on a few isolated facts the theory and practice of fly-fishing as time was destined tO' perfect it* This dipping intO' the future a good deal further than the average * Other and equally ancient authorities could be quoted to the same effect—dubious save by implication. 136 PRACTICAL LOCH FISHING. human eye can see is no doubt a characteristic of all writers capable of grasping the infinite posse that is in every esse, and on the same principle it is highly probable that when Watt kept his eye on the lifting lid of the kettle, he saw not a little iron vessel in sore travail, wrestling with the giant force that was within it, but thousands of tall chimneys belching the black wealth of smoke, trains annihilitating dis- tance in every land, steamers ploughing every sea, and this great giant made the slavish minister of man's will. The ancient legend of the genie confined in pots only, I suppose, tells the same lesson when one comes to comprehend its true inwardness. There is, however, a reverse side to the picture of great men con- templating the future with the eye that can read the potentialities of the apparently little facts of the present. Great men, and little men who are their feeble imitators, are equally apt to read the past in the light of the knowledge of the present, and hence to produce such a priori history which, if interesting reading is obviously to a very large extent a fine example of the greatest of all assumptions or in other words, of the speculative inference. We admit and accept as true history that which is the result of comparative method of inquiry. If, for example, comparative philology shows by an analysis of the root ideas of certain words that a people, whose story is otherwise lost in the mists of a hoary antiquity, were a pastoral people, we accept that evidence, in the absence of more direct proof, as sufficiently convincing to make the inference possible, and perhaps probable. If some enterprising antiquary—and one word of a dead language is, we know, sufficient to cause a " rise " of antiquaries, dis- covers a milk pail amongst the regions which the alleged pastoral people are said tO' have inhabited, then we sup the lacteal fluid from it with " Aiken Drum's lang ladle," and the comparative method of en- quiry sets all the purely a priori gentlemen by the ears and registers a very great triumph indeed. Still when all is said that can be said, there is just as much vulgar incredulity in this world as vulgar credulity, and the number of people who' stand, doubt and examine would, if marshalled in battalions, probably form as large, if not a larger army, than would those persons of simple faith who accept the marvellous with all the avidity with which tarn trout take the fly, simply because it is the marvellous and appeals tO' that deep-seated love of the sensa- THE EVOLUTION OF LOCH FLSHING. I37- tional and the unusual which is one of the mysterious weaknesses of human nature, largely taken advantage of by the American press. Nevertheless, to hark back tO' Herodotus, the fact that he mentions fly fishing at all i^ a great fact, which not only speaks aloud for the antiquity of the practice if not the art of fly fishing, but also largely justifies those a priori writers to whom I have already referred. Of these writers the chief is Scott. The fact is interesting because in the endeavour—and I admit that my researches have been both hastily conducted and mostly on the surface of the wonder^l land of literature—to trace the history of loch fishing in books, the earliest recorded reference which I found occurs in the " Fair Maid of Perth." Now Scott we know was not an angler ; the fact is writ large in those few passages in his works in which he refers to angling. For example he makes Darsie Latimer use a plum- met to sound the depths of a stream—a thing no- Scottish angler ever does—^and enables the trusty henchman of Vich Ian Vohr to take a sea-trout in a Perthshire lake—a triumph no angler would accord even to such " a pretty man.'' These and many other angling solecisms in his works might, it is true, be pardoned ini any other writer than one who- lived in that chosen home of the angler, the region where the silver Tweed ever makes gladsome music in the ear, who- wandered in the romantic valley of the Yarrow and stood by the shores of lone St. Mary's lake with his great contemporaries that were anglers, who saw the chain of lochs that grace the Trossachs as we have never seen them, who could remember to record in the finest war poem in our language that the leaping trout of Loch Achray " lay still," before the pealing of the banner cry of hell, and who stood upon the shores of Loch Coruisk, when the proud Queen of Wilderness could still remember the rude homage of Cormac Doil, and yet failed to chronicle in lofty rhyme the fish that peopled its virgin waters. But if Scott were' ^ot an angler, he was assuredly a great antiquary, steeped to his very- fingers in the legend that is history, the history that is romance of those deserts his magic wand has made blossom- like the rose. We may rest assured, therefore, that if Scott made Simon Glover angle in Loch Tay and fish that lake from a boat, he did so because he had some solid' ground for believing that in the days of the good King Robert, lake fishing was actually a sport—^primitive no doubt, but still a sport—as. well as one of the many means whereby the hunter of the day in the wid- " 338 PRACTICAL LOCH FISHING. est sense of the term, supplied by the family or tribal larder.* JBy parity of reasoning, if he fails to enter into details and to chronicle the lures used or describe the flies, it is probably because he would have felt precisely the same lack of confidence, had he been •compelled to describe the lures employed by and the general modus operandi of the loch fisher of his own day, or even of the Tweedside angler with whom he must constantly have been rubbing shoulders. It is instructive at this point to note, if the comparison of very small with very great things be permissible, that writers, who are at least sufficiently devoted to angling to know something of its mysteries, would certainly not have failed to chronicle the angling methods of Simon Glover in Loch Tay in the fourteenth century—an age when the sword was ostensibly mightier than the pen, and the spear was more often grasped than the rod, whose history is written in blood and whose monuments are forgotten graves. So to chronicle the methods employed and the lures used might, it is true, have involved the writers in a priori and speculative angling history. On the other hand it is not improbable that angling intuition, which I take it is in this connection the re-building of the past by the light of the present, might have enabled a writer blessed with a little imagination—^that best of handkerchiefs in a game of blind man's buff with the facts of history—^to fashion a nar- rative of such plausible probability that, in the lack of proof to^ the con- trary, it would secure a ready acceptance by the credulous half, or -whatever be the proportion, of the world. For example, a few years ago I attempted in a small story called " The Angler Hermit " to fill in some of the blanks left by Scott in the picture of Simon Glover fishing in the virgin waters of Loch Tay.

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