Driving the Peloponnese in Greece some years ago, through the countryside of Arcadia — where myth and tradition locate the Golden Age of pastoral perfection — I looked everywhere for an Arcadian landscape where shepherds and shepherdesses might tend their flocks under endlessly blue skies, in endless leisure, along crystal brooks, singing their songs of love and peace, with strife and greed unknown, and every need effortlessly satisfied. But I could not find it.
In our terrible times, invited as we are to every tea party, we can’t but see the world through a different system of lenses from those of the pastoral. We think we see more clearly, if bitterly, and are disabused of Arcadian and Waltonian idealisms.
Thing is, I suspect that the poets of Arcadian perfection from Virgil to Walton himself knew well enough that the pastoral ideal of Greek myth and of rural Old England were just that: ideals only. But, then, an ideal is never only an ideal.
Ideals have life and energy of their own. They can live powerfully inside us. They can cause us to try to live in certain ways.
If Izaak Walton’s ideal or idea of pastoral angling on the Lea or on the Dove in Derbyshire never quite existed, it surely lived inside his head and heart as it can do in ours — if we can get it there.
How do we get it? I’ve not seen it for sale in any fly shop. We may, however, be able to catch it, like a virus, from another angler who has it, as that fellow Venator caught it from Walton himself in the Compleat Angler. Or maybe it will rub off from its archetypal memory in art of all kinds. Maybe we are smart enough to invent it for ourselves out of the combination of deep memory and experience. Perhaps we can dream it.
This idea, once locked in, completes us as angler — the compleat angler whom Walton called “contemplative.” After we have acquired every item of tackle, every angling skill imaginable, this idea, this ideal, calls us to try to live without greed and avarice, or morbid striving — a life in harmony with the ideal landscape of the stream itself. A place to be quiet and grateful — and, as Walton added, to “go a-angling,” and “study to be quiet.”
If this ideal were just that, only an ideal, a literary construct from the imaginatively engaged Walton, if it never did and never will precisely exist, if there are no landscapes of that perfection, if it was all a matter of Walton’s all-creating artistic and social dreaming, it was for him, nevertheless, an instrument of his moral and psychological salvation. How terribly urgent, then, it must it be for us now, in our awful predicament, to imagine that ideal as powerfully as we can, and act it out. We need rescue of some sort.