To many of us plain bread-and-butter persons, praise of open fires sometimes seems a little too warm and comfortable—too smugly contemplative. We like open fires. We would have them in every room in the house except the kitchen and bath-room—and perhaps in the bath-room, where we could hang our towels from the mantelpiece (as gallant practical gentlemen, now some centuries dead, named it by hanging up their wet mantles), and let them warm while we were taking our baths. We go as far as any in regarding the open fire as a welcoming host in the hall, an undisturbing companion in the library, an encourager of digestion in the dining-room, an enlivener in the living-room, and a good-night thought of hospitality in the guest-chamber. But we cannot follow the essayist who speaks scornfully of hot-water pipes. 'From the security of ambush,' says he, 'they merely heat, and heat whose source is invisible is not to be coveted at all.'
Oh, merely heat! The blithe gentleman betrays himself out of his own ink-well. He may have forgotten it,—very likely somebody else takes care of it,—but there is a furnace in his cellar. Does he, we ask him seriously, covet the reciprocal affection of some beloved woman—start as angrily as he may at our suggestion of any comparison between her and a hot-water pipe—only when he can see her? Or, supposing him a confirmed woman-hater, does he repudiate underwear?
He brushes aside the questions. 'With a fire in one's bedroom,' says he, 'sleep comes witchingly.'
'Unless,' say we, 'a spark or coal jumps out on the rug and starts to set the bedroom afire. Better,' say we, pursuing the subject in our heavy way, 'a Philistine in bed than a fellow of fine taste stamping out a live coal with his bare feet.'
And so we thank the thoughtful host who safely and sanely screens the open fire in his guest-chamber; but fie, fie upon him if he has decoratively arranged on our temporary hearth Wood without Kindlings!
If you give it half a chance, my friend, this 'joy perpetual,' as you call it, will eat you up.
And yet we agree with anybody that nothing else in the house has appealed so long and so universally to the imagination of man. It began before houses. Remote and little in the far perspective of time, we see a distant and awful-looking relative, whom we blush to acknowledge, kindling his fire; and that fire, open as all outdoors, was the seed and beginning of domestic living. With it, the Objectionable Ancestor learned to cook, and in this way differentiated himself from the beasts. Kindling it, he learned to swear, and differentiated himself further. Thinking about it, his dull but promising mind conceived the advantage of having somebody else to kindle it; so he caught an awful-looking woman, and instituted the family circle. Soon, I fancy, he acquired the habit of sitting beside his fire when he should have been doing something more active; but a million years must pass before he was presentable, and another million before he had coat-tails, and could stand in front of it, spreading them like a peacock in the pride of his achievement—a Captain Bonavita turning his back on the lion. I would have you note, for what it may be worth, that praise of open fires has always been masculine rather than feminine.
Nowadays, I judge, many of his descendants find the open fire much like a little movie theatre in the home. Under the proscenium arch of the fireplace the flames supply actors and scenery, and the show goes on indefinitely. It is better than a movie, for it has color, and lacks the agonizing facial contortions and interpolated text: 'Even a Princess is just a girl—at Coney Island'; 'It is like the nobility of your true heart, old friend, but I cannot accept the heroic sacrifice.'
Sometimes it is useful. An author sits by the fire, and smokes; and soon the puppets of his next romance obligingly appear and act a chapter for him. To-morrow he will dictate that chapter to his pretty stenographer. Sometimes it is consoling. A lover sits by the fire and smokes; presently he sees his love in the flames, and sighs—as Shakespeare would say—like a furnace. Sometimes it doesn't work. I sit by the fire, and smoke; and I see nothing but fire and smoke.
It is a pleasant place to sit—and yet how rapidly and unanimously, when coal came into use, and stoves came on the market, did people stop sitting, and brick up their fireplaces! They had no time for essays, but praise of stoves ascended wherever the wonderful things were available. A new world was born: stoves! kitchen ranges! furnaces! hot-water pipes! heat all over the house!—invisible, to be sure, but nobody seemed to worry about that. And out went the open fire—to be lit again later, but never again as a cooker of food and a warmer of the whole house. It came back to be sat by.