28 April: Boreham on What Might Have Been

What Might Have Been
Humanity has no quality more attractive than its insistence on attributing superlative virtues to the unknown. The fish that gets away is invariably the finest piscatorial specimen with which the angler has had to do. The good man proudly displays the trophies that he has actually landed; but you instinctively feel that the recital of his adventures will not conclude until he has gone into raptures over the bite that came to nothing. The glorious creature escaped.

The cynic will sneer; it is the prerogative of cynics. Of a bite, however exciting, the cynic takes no cognisance at all. What on earth, he asks, is the good of a bite? A bite is neither fish, flesh, fowl, nor good red herring. A bite is of no use for breakfast, lunch, or dinner. Bites can neither be fried nor boiled, measured nor weighed. By this ill-tempered outburst the cynic only proves the essential superficiality of cynicism. The cynic does not know everything; he certainly does not know everything about fish. If he did, he would realise that a fish seldom looks as well on the bank, or in the boat, as it appears to the excited imagination of the angler when he first feels the flutter on the line. And the fish that gets away grows more and more handsome, and more and more delectable, as the hours and days go by.

The Finest Pictures Ever Painted
This propensity of ours to visualise something particularly enchanting in the unattained, represents a species of philosophic chivalry. It is a courtesy that we pay to the things that might have been. We cannot tell whether the felicities that never visited us were really great or small; so we gallantly accord them the benefit of the doubt. The geese that come waddling over the hill are geese, all of them, and as geese we write them down; but the geese that never come over the hill are swans, every one, and no swans that we have fed beside the lake glide hither and thither with such exquisite grace.

Here is a prospective bride whose bride-groom has been snatched from her just as the marriage bells were about to peal. The gallery of her feminine fancy is hung with the most idealistic paintings. The joyous wedding with its mingled nonsense and solemnity, its echoing laughter and its secret tears; the home of her dreams, with his chair of honour, almost like a throne, facing hers; his homecoming, evening by evening, the welcome she would give him; the children, too, the boys so handsome and the girls so fair! What art gallery in the world contains pictures so perfect? They represent our engaging human faculty of idealising the things of which destiny deprived us.

Golden Tomorrows Replace Yesterdays
And what of the parents who have lost a child? Are there no masterpieces adorning the inner sanctuary of these stricken souls? As we pass through these chambers of imagery, and view with reverence these delicately etched canvases, we behold the whole splendid career mapped out before us. These good people are decking with an aureole of splendour the invisible temples of the unrealised. It is an integral part of life's beneficent programme of consolation and compensation.

Everything depends upon the angler's mental attitude to the fish that escaped him. He may pack up his rod in disgust and angrily leave the river. Miss Havisham behaved in that way. Dickens tells how, jilted on her wedding day, she refused to remove her bridal attire, spending the rest of her life with the withered dress draping her withered form, and with the faded flowers crumbling in her bleaching hair. She allowed her loss to spoil her; those who saw her were appalled at the ghastly spectacle she presented.

Our pensive moods must not be allowed to last too long. The sensible sportsman argues that the fish that got away only proves that there are splendid specimens awaiting his conquest. At any cost, he must resist the temptation to be embittered by disappointment. Let him minimise the attractions of the fish that eluded him; let him magnify the value of those that await his cunning; and he will soon be rejoicing in triumphs that will force him to smile at the memory of the misfortunes which, at the time, he was inclined to exaggerate.

F W Boreham

Image: The Fish That Got Away