The Complete Writings of Charles Dudley Warner Volume 1

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II

It must be confessed that a wood-fire needs as much tending as a pair
of twins. To say nothing of fiery projectiles sent into the room,
even by the best wood, from the explosion of gases confined in its
cells, the brands are continually dropping down, and coals are being
scattered over the hearth. However much a careful housewife, who
thinks more of neatness than enjoyment, may dislike this, it is one
of the chief delights of a wood-fire. I would as soon have an
Englishman without side-whiskers as a fire without a big backlog; and
I would rather have no fire than one that required no tending,--one
of dead wood that could not sing again the imprisoned songs of the
forest, or give out in brilliant scintillations the sunshine it
absorbed in its growth. Flame is an ethereal sprite, and the spice
of danger in it gives zest to the care of the hearth-fire. Nothing
is so beautiful as springing, changing flame,--it was the last freak
of the Gothic architecture men to represent the fronts of elaborate
edifices of stone as on fire, by the kindling flamboyant devices. A
fireplace is, besides, a private laboratory, where one can witness
the most brilliant chemical experiments, minor conflagrations only
wanting the grandeur of cities on fire. It is a vulgar notion that a
fire is only for heat. A chief value of it is, however, to look at.
It is a picture, framed between the jambs. You have nothing on your
walls, by the best masters (the poor masters are not, however,
represented), that is really so fascinating, so spiritual. Speaking
like an upholsterer, it furnishes the room. And it is never twice
the same. In this respect it is like the landscape-view through a
window, always seen in a new light, color, or condition. The
fireplace is a window into the most charming world I ever had a
glimpse of.

Yet direct heat is an agreeable sensation. I am not scientific
enough to despise it, and have no taste for a winter residence on
Mount Washington, where the thermometer cannot be kept comfortable
even by boiling. They say that they say in Boston that there is a
satisfaction in being well dressed which religion cannot give. There
is certainly a satisfaction in the direct radiance of a hickory fire
which is not to be found in the fieriest blasts of a furnace. The
hot air of a furnace is a sirocco; the heat of a wood-fire is only
intense sunshine, like that bottled in Lacrimae Christi. Besides
this, the eye is delighted, the sense of smell is regaled by the
fragrant decomposition, and the ear is pleased with the hissing,
crackling, and singing,--a liberation of so many out-door noises.
Some people like the sound of bubbling in a boiling pot, or the
fizzing of a frying-spider. But there is nothing gross in the
animated crackling of sticks of wood blazing on the earth, not even
if chestnuts are roasting in the ashes. All the senses are
ministered to, and the imagination is left as free as the leaping
tongues of flame.

The attention which a wood-fire demands is one of its best
recommendations. We value little that which costs us no trouble to
maintain. If we had to keep the sun kindled up and going by private
corporate action, or act of Congress, and to be taxed for the support
of customs officers of solar heat, we should prize it more than we
do. Not that I should like to look upon the sun as a job, and have
the proper regulation of its temperature get into politics, where we
already have so much combustible stuff; but we take it quite too much
as a matter of course, and, having it free, do not reckon it among
the reasons for gratitude. Many people shut it out of their houses
as if it were an enemy, watch its descent upon the carpet as if it
were only a thief of color, and plant trees to shut it away from the
mouldering house. All the animals know better than this, as well as
the more simple races of men; the old women of the southern Italian
coasts sit all day in the sun and ply the distaff, as grateful as the
sociable hens on the south side of a New England barn; the slow
tortoise likes to take the sun upon his sloping back, soaking in
color that shall make him immortal when the imperishable part of him
is cut up into shell ornaments. The capacity of a cat to absorb
sunshine is only equaled by that of an Arab or an Ethiopian. They
are not afraid of injuring their complexions.

White must be the color of civilization; it has so many natural
disadvantages. But this is politics. I was about to say that,
however it may be with sunshine, one is always grateful for his
wood-fire, because he does not maintain it without some cost.

Yet I cannot but confess to a difference between sunlight and the
light of a wood-fire. The sunshine is entirely untamed. Where it
rages most freely it tends to evoke the brilliancy rather than the
harmonious satisfactions of nature. The monstrous growths and the
flaming colors of the tropics contrast with our more subdued
loveliness of foliage and bloom. The birds of the middle region
dazzle with their contrasts of plumage, and their voices are for
screaming rather than singing. I presume the new experiments in
sound would project a macaw's voice in very tangled and inharmonious
lines of light. I suspect that the fiercest sunlight puts people, as
well as animals and vegetables, on extremes in all ways. A wood-fire
on the hearth is a kindler of the domestic virtues. It brings in
cheerfulness, and a family center, and, besides, it is artistic.
I should like to know if an artist could ever represent on canvas a
happy family gathered round a hole in the floor called a register.
Given a fireplace, and a tolerable artist could almost create a
pleasant family round it. But what could he conjure out of a
register? If there was any virtue among our ancestors,--and they
labored under a great many disadvantages, and had few of the aids
which we have to excellence of life,--I am convinced they drew it
mostly from the fireside. If it was difficult to read the eleven
commandments by the light of a pine-knot, it was not difficult to get
the sweet spirit of them from the countenance of the serene mother
knitting in the chimney-corner.

III

When the fire is made, you want to sit in front of it and grow genial
in its effulgence. I have never been upon a throne,--except in
moments of a traveler's curiosity, about as long as a South American
dictator remains on one,--but I have no idea that it compares, for
pleasantness, with a seat before a wood-fire. A whole leisure day
before you, a good novel in hand, and the backlog only just beginning
to kindle, with uncounted hours of comfort in it, has life anything
more delicious? For "novel" you can substitute "Calvin's
Institutes," if you wish to be virtuous as well as happy. Even
Calvin would melt before a wood-fire. A great snowstorm, visible on
three sides of your wide-windowed room, loading the evergreens, blown
in fine powder from the great chestnut-tops, piled up in ever
accumulating masses, covering the paths, the shrubbery, the hedges,
drifting and clinging in fantastic deposits, deepening your sense of
security, and taking away the sin of idleness by making it a
necessity, this is an excellent ground to your day by the fire.

To deliberately sit down in the morning to read a novel, to enjoy
yourself, is this not, in New England (I am told they don't read much
in other parts of the country), the sin of sins? Have you any right
to read, especially novels, until you have exhausted the best part of
the day in some employment that is called practical? Have you any
right to enjoy yourself at all until the fag-end of the day, when you
are tired and incapable of enjoying yourself? I am aware that this
is the practice, if not the theory, of our society,--to postpone the
delights of social intercourse until after dark, and rather late at
night, when body and mind are both weary with the exertions of
business, and when we can give to what is the most delightful and
profitable thing in life, social and intellectual society, only the
weariness of dull brains and over-tired muscles. No wonder we take
our amusements sadly, and that so many people find dinners heavy and
parties stupid. Our economy leaves no place for amusements; we
merely add them to the burden of a life already full. The world is
still a little off the track as to what is really useful.

I confess that the morning is a very good time to read a novel, or
anything else which is good and requires a fresh mind; and I take it
that nothing is worth reading that does not require an alert mind.
I suppose it is necessary that business should be transacted; though
the amount of business that does not contribute to anybody's comfort
or improvement suggests the query whether it is not overdone. I know
that unremitting attention to business is the price of success, but
I don't know what success is. There is a man, whom we all know, who
built a house that cost a quarter of a million of dollars, and
furnished it for another like sum, who does not know anything more
about architecture, or painting, or books, or history, than he cares
for the rights of those who have not so much money as he has. I
heard him once, in a foreign gallery, say to his wife, as they stood
in front of a famous picture by Rubens: "That is the Rape of the
Sardines!" What a cheerful world it would be if everybody was as
successful as that man! While I am reading my book by the fire, and
taking an active part in important transactions that may be a good
deal better than real, let me be thankful that a great many men are
profitably employed in offices and bureaus and country stores in
keeping up the gossip and endless exchange of opinions among mankind,
so much of which is made to appear to the women at home as
"business." I find that there is a sort of busy idleness among men in
this world that is not held in disrepute. When the time comes that I
have to prove my right to vote, with women, I trust that it will be
remembered in my favor that I made this admission. If it is true, as
a witty conservative once said to me, that we never shall have peace
in this country until we elect a colored woman president, I desire to
be rectus in curia early.

IV

The fireplace, as we said, is a window through which we look out upon
other scenes. We like to read of the small, bare room, with
cobwebbed ceiling and narrow window, in which the poor child of
genius sits with his magical pen, the master of a realm of beauty and
enchantment. I think the open fire does not kindle the imagination
so much as it awakens the memory; one sees the past in its crumbling
embers and ashy grayness, rather than the future. People become
reminiscent and even sentimental in front of it. They used to become
something else in those good old days when it was thought best to
heat the poker red hot before plunging it into the mugs of flip.
This heating of the poker has been disapproved of late years, but I
do not know on what grounds; if one is to drink bitters and gins and
the like, such as I understand as good people as clergymen and women
take in private, and by advice, I do not know why one should not make
them palatable and heat them with his own poker. Cold whiskey out of
a bottle, taken as a prescription six times a day on the sly, is n't
my idea of virtue any more than the social ancestral glass, sizzling
wickedly with the hot iron. Names are so confusing in this world;
but things are apt to remain pretty much the same, whatever we call
them.

Perhaps as you look into the fireplace it widens and grows deep and
cavernous. The back and the jambs are built up of great stones, not
always smoothly laid, with jutting ledges upon which ashes are apt to
lie. The hearthstone is an enormous block of trap rock, with a
surface not perfectly even, but a capital place to crack butternuts
on. Over the fire swings an iron crane, with a row of pot-hooks of
all lengths hanging from it. It swings out when the housewife wants
to hang on the tea-kettle, and it is strong enough to support a row
of pots, or a mammoth caldron kettle on occasion. What a jolly sight
is this fireplace when the pots and kettles in a row are all boiling
and bubbling over the flame, and a roasting spit is turning in front!
It makes a person as hungry as one of Scott's novels. But the
brilliant sight is in the frosty morning, about daylight, when the
fire is made. The coals are raked open, the split sticks are piled
up in openwork criss-crossing, as high as the crane; and when the
flame catches hold and roars up through the interstices, it is like
an out-of-door bonfire. Wood enough is consumed in that morning
sacrifice to cook the food of a Parisian family for a year. How it
roars up the wide chimney, sending into the air the signal smoke and
sparks which announce to the farming neighbors another day cheerfully
begun! The sleepiest boy in the world would get up in his red
flannel nightgown to see such a fire lighted, even if he dropped to
sleep again in his chair before the ruddy blaze. Then it is that the
house, which has shrunk and creaked all night in the pinching cold of
winter, begins to glow again and come to life. The thick frost melts
little by little on the small window-panes, and it is seen that the
gray dawn is breaking over the leagues of pallid snow. It is time to
blow out the candle, which has lost all its cheerfulness in the light
of day. The morning romance is over; the family is astir; and member
after member appears with the morning yawn, to stand before the
crackling, fierce conflagration. The daily round begins. The most
hateful employment ever invented for mortal man presents itself: the
"chores" are to be done. The boy who expects every morning to open
into a new world finds that to-day is like yesterday, but he believes
to-morrow will be different. And yet enough for him, for the day, is
the wading in the snowdrifts, or the sliding on the diamond-sparkling
crust. Happy, too, is he, when the storm rages, and the snow is
piled high against the windows, if he can sit in the warm chimney-
corner and read about Burgoyne, and General Fraser, and Miss McCrea,
midwinter marches through the wilderness, surprises of wigwams, and
the stirring ballad, say, of the Battle of the Kegs:--

"Come, gallants, attend and list a friend
Thrill forth harmonious ditty;
While I shall tell what late befell
At Philadelphia city."

I should like to know what heroism a boy in an old New England
farmhouse--rough-nursed by nature, and fed on the traditions of the
old wars did not aspire to. "John," says the mother, "You'll burn
your head to a crisp in that heat." But John does not hear; he is
storming the Plains of Abraham just now. "Johnny, dear, bring in a
stick of wood." How can Johnny bring in wood when he is in that
defile with Braddock, and the Indians are popping at him from behind
every tree? There is something about a boy that I like, after all.

The fire rests upon the broad hearth; the hearth rests upon a great
substruction of stone, and the substruction rests upon the cellar.
What supports the cellar I never knew, but the cellar supports the
family. The cellar is the foundation of domestic comfort. Into its
dark, cavernous recesses the child's imagination fearfully goes.
Bogies guard the bins of choicest apples. I know not what comical
sprites sit astride the cider-barrels ranged along the walls. The
feeble flicker of the tallow-candle does not at all dispel, but
creates, illusions, and magnifies all the rich possibilities of this
underground treasure-house. When the cellar-door is opened, and the
boy begins to descend into the thick darkness, it is always with a
heart-beat as of one started upon some adventure. Who can forget the
smell that comes through the opened door;--a mingling of fresh earth,
fruit exhaling delicious aroma, kitchen vegetables, the mouldy odor
of barrels, a sort of ancestral air,--as if a door had been opened
into an old romance. Do you like it? Not much. But then I would
not exchange the remembrance of it for a good many odors and perfumes
that I do like.

It is time to punch the backlog and put on a new forestick.

SECOND STUDY

I

The log was white birch. The beautiful satin bark at once kindled
into a soft, pure, but brilliant flame, something like that of
naphtha. There is no other wood flame so rich, and it leaps up in a
joyous, spiritual way, as if glad to burn for the sake of burning.
Burning like a clear oil, it has none of the heaviness and fatness of
the pine and the balsam. Woodsmen are at a loss to account for its
intense and yet chaste flame, since the bark has no oily appearance.
The heat from it is fierce, and the light dazzling. It flares up
eagerly like young love, and then dies away; the wood does not keep
up the promise of the bark. The woodsmen, it is proper to say, have
not considered it in its relation to young love. In the remote
settlements the pine-knot is still the torch of courtship; it endures
to sit up by. The birch-bark has alliances with the world of
sentiment and of letters. The most poetical reputation of the North
American Indian floats in a canoe made of it; his picture-writing was
inscribed on it. It is the paper that nature furnishes for lovers in
the wilderness, who are enabled to convey a delicate sentiment by its
use, which is expressed neither in their ideas nor chirography. It
is inadequate for legal parchment, but does very well for deeds of
love, which are not meant usually to give a perfect title. With
care, it may be split into sheets as thin as the Chinese paper. It
is so beautiful to handle that it is a pity civilization cannot make
more use of it. But fancy articles manufactured from it are very
much like all ornamental work made of nature's perishable seeds,
leaves, cones, and dry twigs,--exquisite while the pretty fingers are
fashioning it, but soon growing shabby and cheap to the eye. And yet
there is a pathos in "dried things," whether they are displayed as
ornaments in some secluded home, or hidden religiously in bureau
drawers where profane eyes cannot see how white ties are growing
yellow and ink is fading from treasured letters, amid a faint and
discouraging perfume of ancient rose-leaves.

The birch log holds out very well while it is green, but has not
substance enough for a backlog when dry. Seasoning green timber or
men is always an experiment. A man may do very well in a simple, let
us say, country or backwoods line of life, who would come to nothing
in a more complicated civilization. City life is a severe trial.
One man is struck with a dry-rot; another develops season-cracks;
another shrinks and swells with every change of circumstance.
Prosperity is said to be more trying than adversity, a theory which
most people are willing to accept without trial; but few men stand
the drying out of the natural sap of their greenness in the
artificial heat of city life. This, be it noticed, is nothing
against the drying and seasoning process; character must be put into
the crucible some time, and why not in this world? A man who cannot
stand seasoning will not have a high market value in any part of the
universe. It is creditable to the race, that so many men and women
bravely jump into the furnace of prosperity and expose themselves to
the drying influences of city life.

The first fire that is lighted on the hearth in the autumn seems to
bring out the cold weather. Deceived by the placid appearance of the
dying year, the softness of the sky, and the warm color of the
foliage, we have been shivering about for days without exactly
comprehending what was the matter. The open fire at once sets up a
standard of comparison. We find that the advance guards of winter
are besieging the house. The cold rushes in at every crack of door
and window, apparently signaled by the flame to invade the house and
fill it with chilly drafts and sarcasms on what we call the temperate
zone. It needs a roaring fire to beat back the enemy; a feeble one
is only an invitation to the most insulting demonstrations. Our
pious New England ancestors were philosophers in their way. It was
not simply owing to grace that they sat for hours in their barnlike
meeting-houses during the winter Sundays, the thermometer many
degrees below freezing, with no fire, except the zeal in their own
hearts,--a congregation of red noses and bright eyes. It was no
wonder that the minister in the pulpit warmed up to his subject,
cried aloud, used hot words, spoke a good deal of the hot place and
the Person whose presence was a burning shame, hammered the desk as
if he expected to drive his text through a two-inch plank, and heated
himself by all allowable ecclesiastical gymnastics. A few of their
followers in our day seem to forget that our modern churches are
heated by furnaces and supplied with gas. In the old days it would
have been thought unphilosophic as well as effeminate to warm the
meeting-houses artificially. In one house I knew, at least, when it
was proposed to introduce a stove to take a little of the chill from
the Sunday services, the deacons protested against the innovation.
They said that the stove might benefit those who sat close to it, but
it would drive all the cold air to the other parts of the church, and
freeze the people to death; it was cold enough now around the edges.
Blessed days of ignorance and upright living! Sturdy men who served
God by resolutely sitting out the icy hours of service, amid the
rattling of windows and the carousal of winter in the high, windswept
galleries! Patient women, waiting in the chilly house for
consumption to pick out his victims, and replace the color of youth
and the flush of devotion with the hectic of disease! At least, you
did not doze and droop in our over-heated edifices, and die of
vitiated air and disregard of the simplest conditions of organized
life. It is fortunate that each generation does not comprehend its
own ignorance. We are thus enabled to call our ancestors barbarous.
It is something also that each age has its choice of the death it
will die. Our generation is most ingenious. From our public
assembly-rooms and houses we have almost succeeded in excluding pure
air. It took the race ages to build dwellings that would keep out
rain; it has taken longer to build houses air-tight, but we are on
the eve of success. We are only foiled by the ill-fitting, insincere
work of the builders, who build for a day, and charge for all time.

II

When the fire on the hearth has blazed up and then settled into
steady radiance, talk begins. There is no place like the chimney-
corner for confidences; for picking up the clews of an old
friendship; for taking note where one's self has drifted, by
comparing ideas and prejudices with the intimate friend of years ago,
whose course in life has lain apart from yours. No stranger puzzles
you so much as the once close friend, with whose thinking and
associates you have for years been unfamiliar. Life has come to mean
this and that to you; you have fallen into certain habits of thought;
for you the world has progressed in this or that direction; of
certain results you feel very sure; you have fallen into harmony with
your surroundings; you meet day after day people interested in the
things that interest you; you are not in the least opinionated, it is
simply your good fortune to look upon the affairs of the world from
the right point of view. When you last saw your friend,--less than a
year after you left college,--he was the most sensible and agreeable
of men; he had no heterodox notions; he agreed with you; you could
even tell what sort of a wife he would select, and if you could do
that, you held the key to his life.

Well, Herbert came to visit me the other day from the antipodes. And
here he sits by the fireplace. I cannot think of any one I would
rather see there, except perhaps Thackery; or, for entertainment,
Boswell; or old, Pepys; or one of the people who was left out of the
Ark. They were talking one foggy London night at Hazlitt's about
whom they would most like to have seen, when Charles Lamb startled
the company by declaring that he would rather have seen Judas
Iscariot than any other person who had lived on the earth. For
myself, I would rather have seen Lamb himself once, than to have
lived with Judas. Herbert, to my great delight, has not changed; I
should know him anywhere,--the same serious, contemplative face, with
lurking humor at the corners of the mouth,--the same cheery laugh and
clear, distinct enunciation as of old. There is nothing so winning
as a good voice. To see Herbert again, unchanged in all outward
essentials, is not only gratifying, but valuable as a testimony to
nature's success in holding on to a personal identity, through the
entire change of matter that has been constantly taking place for so
many years. I know very well there is here no part of the Herbert
whose hand I had shaken at the Commencement parting; but it is an
astonishing reproduction of him,--a material likeness; and now for
the spiritual.

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