Backlog Studies | Page 4

Warner

FIRST STUDY
I
The fire on the hearth has almost gone out in New England; the hearth
has gone out; the family has lost its center; age ceases to be respected;
sex is only distinguished by a difference between millinery bills and
tailors' bills; there is no more toast-and-cider; the young are not
allowed to eat mince-pies at ten o'clock at night; half a cheese is no
longer set to toast before the fire; you scarcely ever see in front of the
coals a row of roasting apples, which a bright little girl, with many a
dive and start, shielding her sunny face from the fire with one hand,
turns from time to time; scarce are the gray-haired sires who strop their
razors on the family Bible, and doze in the chimney-corner. A good
many things have gone out with the fire on the hearth.
I do not mean to say that public and private morality have vanished
with the hearth. A good degree of purity and considerable happiness are
possible with grates and blowers; it is a day of trial, when we are all
passing through a fiery furnace, and very likely we shall be purified as
we are dried up and wasted away. Of course the family is gone, as an
institution, though there still are attempts to bring up a family round a
"register." But you might just as well try to bring it up by hand, as
without the rallying-point of a hearthstone. Are there any homesteads
nowadays? Do people hesitate to change houses any more than they do
to change their clothes? People hire houses as they would a masquerade
costume, liking, sometimes, to appear for a year in a little fictitious
stone-front splendor above their means. Thus it happens that so many
people live in houses that do not fit them. I should almost as soon think
of wearing another person's clothes as his house; unless I could let it
out and take it in until it fitted, and somehow expressed my own
character and taste. But we have fallen into the days of conformity. It is
no wonder that people constantly go into their neighbors' houses by
mistake, just as, in spite of the Maine law, they wear away each other's
hats from an evening party. It has almost come to this, that you might
as well be anybody else as yourself.
Am I mistaken in supposing that this is owing to the discontinuance of
big chimneys, with wide fireplaces in them? How can a person be
attached to a house that has no center of attraction, no soul in it, in the
visible form of a glowing fire, and a warm chimney, like the heart in

the body? When you think of the old homestead, if you ever do, your
thoughts go straight to the wide chimney and its burning logs. No
wonder that you are ready to move from one fireplaceless house into
another. But you have something just as good, you say. Yes, I have
heard of it. This age, which imitates everything, even to the virtues of
our ancestors, has invented a fireplace, with artificial, iron, or
composition logs in it, hacked and painted, in which gas is burned, so
that it has the appearance of a wood-fire. This seems to me blasphemy.
Do you think a cat would lie down before it? Can you poke it? If you
can't poke it, it is a fraud. To poke a wood-fire is more solid enjoyment
than almost anything else in the world. The crowning human virtue in a
man is to let his wife poke the fire. I do not know how any virtue
whatever is possible over an imitation gas-log. What a sense of
insincerity the family must have, if they indulge in the hypocrisy of
gathering about it. With this center of untruthfulness, what must the life
in the family be? Perhaps the father will be living at the rate of ten
thousand a year on a salary of four thousand; perhaps the mother, more
beautiful and younger than her beautified daughters, will rouge;
perhaps the young ladies will make wax-work. A cynic might suggest
as the motto of modern life this simple legend,--"just as good as the
real." But I am not a cynic, and I hope for the rekindling of wood-fires,
and a return of the beautiful home light from them. If a wood-fire is a
luxury, it is cheaper than many in which we indulge without thought,
and cheaper than the visits of a doctor, made necessary by the want of
ventilation of the house. Not that I have anything against doctors; I
only wish, after they have been to see us in a way that seems so
friendly, they had nothing against us.
My fireplace,