Introduction to The Compleat Angler | Page 9

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, like an angel from a cloud,--BUT IN NONE.' Again, of a commendation of one of his heroes he says, 'it is a known truth,--though it be in verse.'
A memory of the days when Izaak was an amorist, and shone in love ditties, appears thus. He is speaking of Donne:-
'Love is a flattering mischief . . . a passion that carries us to commit errors with as much ease as whirlwinds remove feathers.'
'The tears of lovers, or beauty dressed in sadness, are observed to have in them a charming sadness, and to become very often too strong to be resisted.'
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