The Confessions of a Sentimentalist

SHALL WE HUNT AND FISH?

BY HENRY BRADFORD WASHBURN

As a point of departure, listen to a quotation from Dr. Henry van Dyke: —

“Chrr! sings the reel. The line tightens. The little rod firmly gripped in my hands bends into a bow of beauty, and a hundred feet behind us a splendid silver salmon leaps into the air.¹ ‘ What is it ? ’ cries the gypsy, ‘a fish ?’ It is a fish, indeed, a noble ouananiche, and well hooked. Now if the gulls were here who grab little fish suddenly and never give them a chance; and if the mealymouthed sentimentalists were here, who like their fish slowly strangled to death in nets, they should see a fairer method of angling.

“The weight of the fish is twenty times that of the rod against which he matches himself. The tiny hook is caught painlessly in the gristle of his jaws. The line is long and light. He has the whole lake to play in, and he uses almost all of it, running, leaping, sounding the deep water, turning suddenly to get a slack line. The gypsy, tremendously excited, manages the boat with perfect skill, rowing this way and that way, advancing or backing water to meet the tactics of the fish, and doing the most important part of the work.

“After half an hour the ouananiche begins to grow tired and can be reeled in near to the boat. We can see him distinctly as he gleams in the dark water. It is time to think of landing him. Then we remember with a flash of despair that we have no landing-net! To lift him from the water by this line would break it in an instant. There is not a foot of the rocky shore smooth enough to beach him on. Our caps are far too small to use as a net for such a fish. What to do? We must row around with him gently and quietly for another ten minutes, until he is quite weary and tame. Now let me draw him softly toward the boat, slip my fingers under his gills to give a firm hold, and lift him quickly over the gunwale before he can gasp or kick. A tap on the head with the empty rod-case, — there he is, — the prettiest land-locked salmon that I ever saw, plump, round, perfectly shaped and colored, and just six and a half pounds in weight, the record fish of Jordan Pond.” ²

A good description! A fine, a stirring description! A masterly record of a masterly feat! It makes the blood tingle; it makes the lover of the rushing torrent, of the still, deep mountain lake and of the crisp, clear, northern days, impatient with the city streets, with his desk, his papers, and his problems; it whets his hunger and thirst for a holiday, and for more life in God’s magnificent out-ofdoors; it makes him slightly irritated with the winter, when perforce he must abandon nature to itself, and leaves him but to dream of the days when the warm sun shall have drawn the ice from the lakes and when the released waters go tumbling down to the sea.

And yet why is it that there are some whom the description cannot allure to spend their hours of recreation in a kindred manner ? Why is it that while each and every element of the narrative makes us thrill with longing for the open, the story as a whole arouses in a few a feeling akin to repulsion ? Why is it that some at least would have enjoyed rather the picture of the lake in the wood, girt with yellow shore line and the green and gray of timber, the surface ruffled here and there by the gulls taking their afternoon bath, the concentric circles telling of the trout just nosing the air to snare the unsuspecting insect or to touch the mystery of a world unlike their own, the sudden rush, leap and plunge, the flash of color, “ russet and silver flecked with black,” of the ouananiche rising from the deep waters he loves so well and like lightning returning thither ? Why is it that some would rather allow these incidents to touch the imagination and to stimulate it to follow the living activities of nature, than win their exhilaration at the expense of suffering ? Why is it that day by day the numbers seem to increase of those yielding to mercy rather than to the instinct of the chase, and of those who rejoice when they are persecuted with such an epithet as mealy-mouthed sentimentalist ?

I confess that such is my reaction, that I must count myself among the mealymouthed sentimentalists. But confession is not always either heart-cleaning or mind-cleaning. Along with it there must run a justification which at least palliates the offense in the sight of the one who acknowledges his fault. And how can the sentimentalist sanction his aversion to those forms of sport that entail the suffering of fish and bird and beast ?

The sentimentalist has first to acknowledge that a radical change in his feeling toward animate nature has been worked since the days of boyhood, and naturally he hopes that the transformation of sentiment is not a sign of atavism but rather one of deepening sympathy. The days are still fresh in mind when, armed with the sling, he relieved his hunter’s instinct by plunging into the woods of summer, there to listen for the birds, then to find, and then to kill; or into the woods of winter, there to build his hut and kindle his fire, and then to follow the trail of the rabbit and to set his snare. He can almost breathe the air, feel the yielding of the turf, and hear the ripple of the brook as he lay in the long grass in the meadows near Wachusett and drew the trout from the pools beneath the banks. He can recall with that delicious accompaniment of wellearned meat — the watering mouth — the spectacle of eleven five-inch beauties, fried in crumbs, the product of his own first gamy angling. And he can remember, O! so vividly, with what ardor he searched the old files of the Youth’s Companion and scanned the new copies as they came in week by week, so that he might not lose one story of the hunter and the trapper, and with what care he laid aside one dime every seven days that he might buy Forest and Stream, and in imagination go afield with those more fortunate than he, to flush and to bag the plover, the quail, the woodcock, and the partridge. The sentimentalist remembers the days of his youth and all their natural delights.

But he can also recall traces, intimations, as Wordsworth would call them, of a nature hardly partaking of the same world. He can distinguish a remnant of pity in his reaction after peppering a young robin with sling-shot; he can at this moment remember the burning shame that consumed him when his first bird tumbled to the ground at his feet, and what a bitter meal it made. He can refresh the sensation, hardly perceptible in those eager and impatient days, of recoil at the apparent suffering of the fish being taken from the hook. These the sentimentalist can remember — the first stirrings of a changing sentiment, the beginnings of a different mood.

And now he has to confess that the former things have passed away, and that these intimations of aversion to recreation that entails distress have developed into a natural recoil at the sight of any suffering and into a keen delight at the thought or sight of fish or bird or beast enjoying natural freedom. The leisurely trout napping in the stone-bottomed pool of the Catskill brook now afford the sentimentalist keener pleasure than he can get from stirring them to life, to action, and to death, by the skillful cast of the silver doctor, the brown hackle, and the Parmachenee belle. Even to sit and watch the government fish in the national aquarium, to see them tumble over one another, rush at one another with open mouth, and nip one another harmlessly like puppies at play stirs the sentimentalist’s affection for nature more sensitively than the fight for liberty made by his record bass of Lake Dunmore. The covey of partridges well up near the summit of Whiteface, so like the autumn leaves over which they leisurely walked away, so free, so proud, so beautiful, never suggested the shot-gun, but gave another pleasure untinged with the element of injury. Just to find them at home, just to know where they love to live, just to retain the peaceful picture, suffices the sentimentalist. The bull moose standing in the long grass on the banks of Soper Deadwater, thirty miles from the nearest town and train, in the wilderness he loves, with no companions but the otter, the kingfisher, and the bear, unconscious of the intruder, undisturbed by the crack of the rifle, yields a rapture that might lose its charm if death were to follow and the head and antlers be taken out into civilization.

But confession must be made that the feeling transcends that of mere preference and becomes that of positive aversion to the processes and the results of sportsmanship entailing death. However skillful the method and however masterful the result, the effect is one of pain on him who either reads or watches. Not even Walton, the dean of anglers, can convert the sentimentalist to forgetfulness of agony by the art with which he impaled his bait: — “Put your hook in him a little below the middle; having done so draw your worm above the arming of your hook; but note that at the entering of your hook, it must not be at the head-end of the worm, but at the tailend of him, that the point of your hook may come out at toward the head-end, and, having drawn him above the arming of your hook, then put the point of the hook again into the very head of the worm, till it come near to the place where the point of the hook first came out; and then draw back that of the worm that was above the shank or arming of your hook and so fish with it. And if you mean to fish with two worms, then put the second on before you turn back the hook’s head of the first worm.” ³ Truly if art could compel to imitation, the sentimentalist would spend his leisure hours at baiting. But the effect is not what Walton wished. The sentimentalist acknowledges the art, but wishes it might have been turned to morals rather than misery. He recalls how certain inquisitors baited the rack that they might dexterously lure the thoughtful within their toils. He recognizes a resemblance; the means seem justified by the end. The sentimentalist has been brought up to believe there is something faulty in this theory, and that it applies to sport as well as to the Counter-Reformation. Neither can the virile enthusiasm of Kingsley offer the soporific to the sentimentalist’s natural attitude. The splendid whirlwind of Kingsley’s passion for exciting angling — the consciousness that he could kill an amount of fish perfectly frightful, that he had had magnificent sport, five salmon killed (biggest seven pounds) and another huge fellow running right away to sea, carrying Kingsley after him waist-deep in water, and lost, after running two hundred yards, by fouling a ship’s hawser; nothing like it, excitement maddening, exertion very severe — such magnificent spirit rather defeats the purpose of its description, for the sentimentalist finds himself at the other end of the line watching the bewildering drama there taking place. Nor can the same devoted hunter singing to the hounds as they course the weakening stag — “ Chime, ye dappled darlings ” ⁴ — recall the sentimentalist to a kindred mood. He forgets the horsemen ; he forgets the exhilaration of the chase; he cannot stop to admire the skill of the riders and the strength and agility of the horses, or the native art of the dogs. His heart is with the stag, hunted, wearied, despairing, sure to lose in the unfair game. Yes, it is a feeling of positive aversion to sportsmanship entailing either misery or death of which the sentimentalist is conscious.

And the supplementary witness that so he feels is his quick and sensitive reaction upon the sentiments of those who recoil from agony and whose delight in animate nature is won entirely apart from pain. The chance acquaintance who said that he could no longer believe that it was right to kill for pleasure; the friend who recently confessed that he had never enjoyed angling since he had watched the trout living as they love to live; the present Lord Coleridge allowing that he might be classed among the sentimentalists, acknowledging his inability to convey his sentiment to another, and yet telling his hunt-loving countrymen that the chase of the wild red stag on Exmoor had spoiled the bright October day for him, that the mood of the hunters had reminded him of the down-turned thumbs in ancient Rome, — these incidents, recently called to the sentimentalist’s attention, convince him that he is among those whose feeling is strong if not positively missionary. To these he adds his sympathetic response to those whose love of animate nature is apparently boundless. The attempt of the hunter,⁵ without his rifle, to find the band of several hundred elk on the broad, treeless hillside, to creep up to them, and to eat his lunch under their very noses, and his success in the difficult exploit, pleases and contents the sentimentalist through and through, in spite of Gallagher’s dictum that you might as well kill a feller as scare him to death. The Sunday afternoon recreation of the master fisherman ⁶ sitting on the deck of his “ horse-yacht,” Watching six huge salmon moving slowly from side to side, or lying motionless like gray shadows, with nothing to break the silence except the thin, clear whistle of the white-throated sparrow far back in the woods; noticing that every now and then one of the salmon in the pool would lazily roll out of the water, or spring high into the air and fall back with a heavy splash; questioning what makes the salmon leap, whether pain or pleasure, whether to escape the attack of other fish, or to shake off a parasite that clings to them, or to practice jumping so that they can ascend the falls when they reach them, or simply and solely the exuberant gladness and joy of living, — this strikes a responsive chord within the heart and mind. These—the haters of destruction and the lovers of life —confirm the sentimentalist’s opinion that he is hopelessly on their side and is desperately contented with himself and with his point of view.

And yet he chafes a little bit under the epithet. Sentimentalist, some call him : mealy-mouthed sentimentalist, others; others still, “ logical vegetarian of the flabbiest Hindoo type.” ⁷ Not even oxeyed Hera, or the arrow-shooting Artemis, or Apollo the Sender of Missiles (just to cling to epithets of the chase) was more richly blessed with descriptive titles; and surely all must have some meaning. To paraphrase, it must be that the sentimentalist, is a man doomed forever to lack rugged manliness; his pursuits in the open must be those that tend toward physical and mental weakness. He must be one who personifies a lower rather than a higher stage of evolution; all he says and does must bear the marks of a being socially useless. He must be one whose mental processes are altogether distorted; his view-point of life must be rather a curio. These are but paraphrases or connotations of “ sentimentalist ” and its allied epithets. And of course this analysis of feeling, this dissection of the living brain, must touch the so-called sentimentalist to the quick, for in theory at least he likes to think that he may be virile and rugged: that there may be some marks of progress that announce the acquisition of qualities higher than instinct; even that he may have discovered a truth which Christianity itself must one day emphasize but which today is largely unperceived. Let the sentimentalist ask if these accusations are just; let him suggest some of the marks of so-called sentimentality, allowing them to bear their own witness to character.

To say that the chase and other openair pursuits entailing misery and death are necessary to a wholesome-minded, healthy-bodied, and positive-actioned race, — in other words, that just those pursuits that the sentimentalist cannot enjoy are indispensable, may be a statement somewhat limited in its validity. It is equivalent to saying that only hunting and fishing can induce one to leave the sedentary life for the fields, the woods, and the mountains, and that life in the open alone can give these qualities. It is an assertion which the sentimentalist ventures to think may be paralleled, to its own soul’s health, with another, the purpose of which would be to show that there are many kinds of love of the wilds, many inducements drawing one thither, and many effects of value to men from such contact with nature. There is, for example, the love of the wild flower: it is a passion that will elicit manhood, if manhood be known by the marks of indifference to physical fatigue and continued disappointment, and by perseverance through swamp and thicket. There is the love of the highlands: it is a passion that will draw a man irresistibly from his books or business: it calls for strength of heart and limb and steadiness of head ; the man without the spirit of a victor would better not engage in the pastime of mountain-climbing. There is the love of the woods: it is a passion that stirs with subtle power; to yield to it and to enjoy the real woods is to welcome a test of manhood —• superiority to wind and weather, a consciousness of mastery in woodcraft and watermanship, independence of all conditions that make for ease of living. Thoreau plunged into the depths of the northern wilderness because of his love of plant and shrub and tree and mountain; and to say that he might have made a hunter but for his transcendentalism and anæmic condition is simply to beg the whole question. Tyndall was the first of all men to ascend the Weisshorn; not even the chamoishunter had preceded Tyndall, Leslie Stephen, and Whymper in their unprecedented feats of daring. The Workmans, husband and wife, have probably encamped higher than any living man or woman, — upwards of twenty-one thousand feet in the Himalayas, — and have shown a superiority to conditions almost beyond the belief of man. And yet the sentimentalist has not heard that they passed their days of training with either rifle or rod, or that they needed to buttress their wills with the sight of bloodshed. Like the melancholy Thompson, who seeks his solace in strange quarters, the sentimentalist ponders these thoughts, and they comfort him, for he finds an opening for his theory that a man may be a man and yet very tenderhearted. On even cursory examination of the facts he finds himself a member of a very respectable company — men who have really made contributions to the world’s progress.

However, the sentimentalist would not lay too much stress on this aspect of his defense, for he thinks, perhaps wrongly, that there may be some other qualities needed in modern life besides those hardy virtues born of the chase and even of the more merciful enjoyment of nature. His somewhat brief experience has led him to prize quite as highly the associations that lead to tenderness and consideration. These of course he knows can be cultivated and enriched in the hardy out-of-door life; he at once acknowledges his debt to the deep woods for what they have taught him of the nature and the need of animal life. And yet he knows many people, strong and tender, whose consideration for others has been then contribution to society, who have recoiled from the occupations of either the hunter or the fisherman, and yet have infused splendid virility into all about them. He feels that there is manhood in the abstinence from pain-giving processes; he discovers militant character in the endurance of suffering and misunderstanding and in the monotonous application to unstimulating drudgery. The sentimentalist has watched the process of man-making for some time now, and he has noticed some excellent product from this latter guild of craftsmen. He inclines to the belief that men are at present swept away by the strong current of confidence in the man of exploits as the only positive contributor to life and progress.

But the sentimentalist ventures to think that his sentiment is due to causes deeper than mere emotion, that it is a consequence of forces that have been at work throughout the ages. To borrow a line of argument from the psychologists, he inclines to the theory that his present frame of mind is due to the higher instinct of sympathy inhibiting the lower hunting instinct; or, to be more careful in the use of words, the lower forms of the hunting instinct, for it may have its high and socially necessary manifestation. The sentimentalist perceives resemblances between the modern methods of the chase and the primitive reactions on beast or man wanted either for food or revenge. Under a very different guise he recognizes “ the ape and tiger.” The passion to pursue; the unchecked desire to catch and to kill; the madness consequent upon the sight of blood; the more subtle and unaccountable delight in capture and torture, — these are not without their modern and human counterparts. The boy harassing the cat over fences and through alleys; the guide who grasps his shot-gun as soon as he espies the osprey; the rector watching the Spanish bullfight, at first nauseated and then fascinated; the angler playing with the tarpon throughout the day, — these seem to the sentimentalist to bear the marks of kinship with primitive traits. The art may differ, but the stimuli and the reactions are the same. And the sentimentalist cannot but think that they are survivals of a cruder period of life, much of which has been allowed to drop back into the past through the influence of sympathy.

Ability to feel the other fellow’s suffering, to share his point of view, — sympathy, in a word, — has long since protected man, the domestic animals, and many of the birds; the altruistic imagination has become keen enough to shrink from the sight and the thought of any agony inflicted upon them; it is slowly closing in on the wild and interesting fauna of our own fields and woods; the sentimentalist has seen men eager for the safety of the tiger. May he not then prophesy that the day is coming when sympathy shall hold within its protecting influence the moose and the cold-blooded, insentient-jawed ouananiche ? The sentimentalist likes to think that recoil from sport entailing even so slight a thing as discomfort is merely a consequence of that highly desirable social commodity, the sympathetic imagination. Such a consummation seems within the logic of progressive sympathy. The sentimentalist even becomes a little conceited; perhaps he is a bit of a prophet; he is close to the evolutionary current. Occasionally he sits on the evolutionary bank to sun himself and to watch the interesting objects floating by. And he sees things that amuse and impress him. It is strange what things will float! There goes snuff just around the bend with the plug dancing along behind it, and is not that the cigarette struggling in the rapids, with cigar and pipe in the still water just above, unconscious of their baleful destiny ? Yes, and there go and here come the ornaments: far down stream the nose-ring and the toe-bell once worn in Malay-land and Banbury; far up the stream the bracelet and ear-ring worn in Boston — all slipping down swiftly into the sea of disuse. Stranger still, here are passing quickly by the ungoverned animal instincts: there frets and fumes passion untouched with love, there tumbles helplessly along anger untinged with righteousness; and here comes the instinct of the chase, unsoftened by sympathy, speeding at a splendid rate; soon it will be abreast and by; but no, there it is sucked into an eddy, going round and round right at the feet of the sentimentalist. But its pause is only for a moment; anger was just pulled out of that eddy; give the stream a chance.

The sentimentalist perceives that he is waxing bold and dogmatic, that he is evincing those very characteristics that some say the man of rod and gun alone can cultivate and master. Consequently he would like to make this essay a little longer and say one or two more things in defense of his confession. He would like to suggest that the sentimentalist is not only an example of high moral evolution, but that he may be the highest type of sportsman and the only consistent Christian. From his point of view the sportsman is the man who not only loves the rivers, meadows, and woods, and all that is therein, but who is also a devotee of fair play. Now the sentimentalist may be dull, but he openly confesses that he can see nothing fair in the methods of the modern hunter or fisherman. The sentimentalist has been within twenty feet of a bull moose; he has also cast the line over the trout at Roach Pond inlet and under the shadow of Katahdin. He cannot understand how fair play enters into a contest between the brain of a moose and that of the hunter, when the latter, if he be at all skilled in woodcraft, knows where the beast may be found, how to approach unscented, how to get the animal at his mercy, and how to bring him down at long range. Let the hunter say what he will of the skill incident to the hunt, the fact remains that the contest is between an animal and a man, with the consequent modicum of chance for the former. Neither can the sentimentalist recognize the ear-marks of sportsmanship in the catching of trout. The rod is of fiveounce weight, to be sure, but it has a reel and a woven silk line; the hook is not a vulgar, heavy, uncovered gaff, to be sure, but it is a triumph of skill in deceit, accommodating its lures to the season of year and the appetite of the fish, Added to this, the haunts of the trout are known and the times of day when he wall rise. And add to this also the fact that the mind of man is pitted against the fish’s instinct of self-preservation. Let the line be never so fragile and the rod never so light; in comparison with them, let the trout be large, let him have the whole lake to play in, and the chances still seem on the side of the angler. Against the trout stands the man who knows his ways and comes prepared for just such fish as he. The sentimentalist is conceited enough to believe that he is a better sportsman than the well-accoutred hunter or fisherman, for he must show a skill equal if not superior to that shown by these, and in addition he refrains from the unequal life-and-death contest.

It is bolder still to say that the sentimentalist is the only consistent Christian, that he is the one man who has reached that point where he dislikes all things that entail suffering or the curtailing of natural freedom, the man who cannot add to the total of necessary pain the agony incident to sport. He is neither a vegetarian nor an enthusiast against natural-history collections. He likes his meat, provided it be well larded and hidden in bread sauce, and he will kill it if he find himself impelled to do so by hunger. He enjoys his Friday dinner provided it be broiled and garnished, and he will fish for it if he must. But he cannot enjoy the processes. He cannot, find his incentive to pleasure in the obvious need of food. Although he dislikes the stuffed animals of the museums, he sees their necessity, and if worst comes to worst will collect and present his specimens. But no one must expect him to delight in the details of capture. Consciousness of utility cannot generate glee. The sentimentalist has reached that condition in which he likes to see all things enjoying their freedom and in which it is a pain for him to curtail it in any way. It may not cause the fish the slightest particle of physical suffering to strike and to become fixed on the hook, nor may it experience any physical agony in its long fight for freedom. This, however, is not the vital matter for the sentimentalist. He knows that he cannot enjoy the obvious discomfort of the fish. It is not a question of blood alone or of pain alone; it is rather a matter of the sentimentalist’s character, — a character so constituted that he takes pleasure in the discomfort of an animal no more than in that of a man. And this, he cannot but feel, is merely the logic of Christian sentiment.

The sentimentalist sometimes wonders why Christianity as it obtains today does not emphasize more fully the mood of mercy toward the animal world; he thinks that possibly this logical extension of the mood of mercy must be the gift of the Christianized Orient where now it is covered with superstition. At any rate he is confident that the spirit of the traditions of St. Francis is right and the foreshadowing of the days to come — that there is a mysterious bond of union between man and the weaker beings, that the gospel of love may yet protect the dwellers in stream and wood from all but necessary sacrifice, the sacrifice in which all must share. And he is glad to think that he can take his yearly journey into the wilderness, that he can slip down the rivers, encamp on the shores of the lakes, penetrate into the woods, climb the mountains, to enjoy the freedom, to live close to the mystery of nature, to see the wild beasts and birds at home. He is glad to think that he may come out of the wilderness again able to say that the sum of suffering is no greater because of his pleasure. He delights to think that the young moose still feeds by Soper Stream and that the trout still play in Katahdin Brook. And he cannot but feel that this sentiment will make none the less a man of him, and possibly that it partakes a little of the nature of Him whose character was tender and strong.