The Most Patient Art
707 THE MOST PATIENT ART ONE hesitates to assume that the reason why the "spokesman for the President" made his precipitate announcement that Herbert Hoover would not be Secretary of State...
...The real art of fishing, these days, survives under more leisurely and less smart climes...
...Had not Mr, Hoover declared, at the Chicago meeting of the Izaak Walton League, "that the increase of crime is due to a lack of those qualities of mind and character which impregnate the soul of every fisherman excepting those who get no bites...
...But what of it...
...Today the boy begins with a paragraph about amoebas...
...Where is the chub that used to sizzle in the skillet, the ferocious channel cat whose flanks were wont to be so savory when broiled after a treatment with butter and a dash of Scotch...
...However that may be, it is certainly true that the art of fishing, no less than the virtues of the fisherman, is passing...
...To the crowd of intent and rejoicing fishermen, patient diplomacy is sure to bring some reward...
...and what is even more noteworthy, the fish are deserving of sedulous effort...
...There still are such things, just as there are heirlooms and people who remember the difference between a buggy and a carriage...
...Why is there not a Will Hays for the realm of fish...
...All who have been in the habit of describing Frenchmen as volatile and unsedentary owe themselves a trip to Saint-Benoit...
...They can grasp Miltonic argument and Addisonian manners, but "Piscator" would have nothing intelligible to say to them...
...Hoover's advocacy of fishing as a force in the determination of character...
...The trout and herring over which the saint presides seldom have, it must be confessed, a monastic portliness: and the millimetre far too frequently designates their sorry longitude...
...To know its real blessedness, one must have hied to Saint-Benoit in the region of Poitou, for the annual opening of the fishing season...
...One ventures to suppose that the prevailing popular concept of fish is "filet of sole"—normally a gross violation of all culinary rules as well as of truth, and an insult to any respectable fish...
...Even the narratives to which the art has from time to time given rise have their importance as incentives to the imagination—far better ones, in all truth, than movies or radio tubes...
...This the equally patient housewife then transforms, with rites and a diligence known only to her tribe, into a dish which Walton would instantly have recognized as regal...
...Quite as impressive is the opening of the season at Echternach, in the sole remaining European Grand Duchy...
...707 THE MOST PATIENT ART ONE hesitates to assume that the reason why the "spokesman for the President" made his precipitate announcement that Herbert Hoover would not be Secretary of State was intimately bound up with the said Mr...
...And yet the art of angling supposes virtues of patience and sobriety, of gentleness and reserve of force until the critical moment, which may have impressed the administration as undesirable in one obliged to deal with so many irritating varieties of Bolshevism...
...but they are so distant that school anthologies rarely offer selections from the peerless Walton, lest the children find the matter too fantastic and strange...
...Why should the litany of piscatorial places be continued...
...The point is, after all, that the art of angling needs to be revived in the United States, for the entertainment, the instruction, the edification and the "gustatory pleasure" (as an old writer on the subject would have phrased it) of us all...
...The days when every normal lad made his first acquaintance with a biological specimen in the process of impaling wriggling "fishworms" has gone...
...and when he has advanced to that successful age where he may profitably forget everything he was taught, he buys high-priced tackle as he buys golfclubs, and proceeds to curse the trout as energetically as he denounces his mashie stroke...
Vol. 5 • May 1927 • No. 26
