Introduction to The Compleat Angler | Page 9

different ways. Christian bows beneath a burden of sin;
Piscator beneath a basket of trout. Let us be grateful for the diversities
of human nature, and the dissimilar paths which lead Piscator and
Christian alike to the City not built with hands. Both were seekers for a
City which to have sought through life, in patience, honesty, loyalty,
and love, is to have found it. Of Walton's book we may say:-
'Laudis amore tumes? Sunt certa piacula quae te Ter pure lecto poterunt
recreare libello.'

WALTON AS A BIOGRAPHER

It was probably by his Lives, rather than, in the first instance, by his
Angler, that Walton won the liking of Dr. Johnson, whence came his
literary resurrection. It is true that Moses Browne and Hawkins, both
friends of Johnson's, edited The Compleat Angler before 1775-1776,
when we find Dr. Home of Magdalene, Oxford, contemplating a
'benoted' edition of the Lives, by Johnson's advice. But the Walton of
the Lives is, rather than the Walton of the Angler, the man after
Johnson's own heart. The Angler is 'a picture of my own disposition' on
holidays. The Lives display the same disposition in serious moods, and
in face of the eternal problems of man's life in society. Johnson, we
know, was very fond of biography, had thought much on the subject,
and, as Boswell notes, 'varied from himself in talk,' when he discussed
the measure of truth permitted to biographers. 'If a man is to write a
Panegyrick, he may keep vices out of sight; but if he professes to write
a Life, he must represent it as it really was.' Peculiarities were not to be
concealed, he said, and his own were not veiled by Boswell. 'Nobody
can write the life of a man but those who have eat and drunk and lived
in social intercourse with him.' 'They only who live with a man can
write his life with any genuine exactness and discrimination; and few
people who have lived with a man know what to remark about him.'
Walton had lived much in the society of his subjects, Donne and
Wotton; with Sanderson he had a slighter acquaintance; George Herbert
he had only met; Hooker, of course, he had never seen in the flesh. It is
obvious to every reader that his biographies of Donne and Wotton are
his best. In Donne's Life he feels that he is writing of an English St.
Austin,--'for I think none was so like him before his conversion; none
so like St. Ambrose after it: and if his youth had the infirmities of the
one, his age had the excellencies of the other; the learning and holiness
of both.'
St. Augustine made free confession of his own infirmities of youth.
With great delicacy Walton lets Donne also confess himself, printing a
letter in which he declines to take Holy Orders, because his course of
life when very young had been too notorious. Delicacy and tact are as
notable in Walton's account of Donne's poverty, melancholy, and
conversion through the blessed means of gentle King Jamie. Walton
had an awful loyalty, a sincere reverence for the office of a king. But

wherever he introduces King James, either in his Donne or his Wotton,
you see a subdued version of the King James of The Fortunes of Nigel.
The pedantry, the good nature, the touchiness, the humour, the
nervousness, are all here. It only needs a touch of the king's broad
accent to set before us, as vividly as in Scott, the interviews with
Donne, and that singular scene when Wotton, disguised as Octavio
Baldi, deposits his long rapier at the door of his majesty's chamber.
Wotton, in Florence, was warned of a plot to murder James VI. The
duke gave him 'such Italian antidotes against poison as the Scots till
then had been strangers to': indeed, there is no antidote for a dirk, and
the Scots were not poisoners. Introduced by Lindsay as 'Octavio Baldi,'
Wotton found his nervous majesty accompanied by four Scottish
nobles. He spoke in Italian; then, drawing near, hastily whispered that
he was an Englishman, and prayed for a private interview. This, by
some art, he obtained, delivered his antidotes, and, when James
succeeded Elizabeth, rose to high favour. Izaak's suppressed humour
makes it plain that Wotton had acted the scene for him, from the
moment of leaving the long rapier at the door. Again, telling how
Wotton, in his peaceful hours as Provost of Eton, intended to write a
Life of Luther, he says that King Charles diverted him from his purpose
to attempting a History of England 'by a persuasive loving violence (to
which may be added a promise of 500 pounds a year).' He likes these
parenthetic touches, as in his description of Donne, 'always preaching
to himself,