CHAPTER XII
APOLOGIA
Having read through the foregoing pages, I am (indeed, I could hardly fail to be) conscious that I have written dogmatically, that I have used the first person singular with some freedom—more freedom than I had supposed. But I am not going to change it. What I had to say, stretched over a period of years, has been too strong for me. I wanted to elaborate a system, and all I have done is to tell my personal experiences in search of a system. If I have written positively, I would not have it supposed that I claim to be a master of angling, or that I do not incur by the water-side my full share—perhaps more than my full share—of mistakes, tangles, bungles, disasters. But, for all that, I claim to be entitled to speak positively of the things which I have tried and tested for myself and know of my own knowledge. No man can really know either these same things or any other things by reading them in a book or by accepting them upon any authority, whether it be that of Mr. F. M. Halford or another.
Nothing presents itself to any two minds in an identical light. We all see the multicoloured facets of truth from a different angle. No experience is the same to two diverse idiosyncrasies, and the only help which the writing of a book of this kind can be to others is, not in the laying down of rules, not in the preaching or advocating of systems, not in teaching that which the writer has beaten out by his own experience, but in hints which start or help trains of observation or inquiry in the reader’s mind, so as to stimulate him to work out, and prove, by personal thought and experiment, to make his own, the conclusions which his own personality is capable of drawing from the test.
In this way only is progress possible. In this, and in doing something to assure that, in the new learning and in the new systems which come along, that which is of value in the systems of the past shall not be forgotten, but shall be transmuted to the uses of the present and the future, is all the justification I can plead for the foregoing pages.
In giving records of my own experience by the water-side rather than in laying down a system, I am not asking others to do as I do because I say it, or to accept anything from me. I would have no weight allowed by any man to tradition or authority until it is proved by himself; no man’s words accepted as final because they are his; everything questioned, tested, and brought to the dock of practical experience. If I have ventured, indirectly, to preach at all, the sum of my preaching is not a system, a method, but an attitude of mind—the importance of being earnest, the power of faith, the observant eye, the unfettered judgment, independence of tradition, and, above all, the inquiring mind.
With these words I commit my pages to the judgment or kindness of my brother anglers with a cordial
“TIGHT LINES.”
EXPLICIT.
BILLING AND SONS, LTD., PRINTERS, GUILDFORD.
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TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
● Typos fixed; non-standard spelling and dialect retained. ● Enclosed italics font in _underscores_. ● Enclosed blackletter font in =equals=.