But the canty hearth where cronies meet,
An’ the darling o’ our e’e—
That makes to us a warl complete—
O the Ingle-Side for me!
Old Song.
Who does not remember this glorious old song, with its simple melody, and well-managed accompaniments that seem to chime in with every word uttered by the singer, not only upholding him in his sentiment, and illustrating his positions by all kinds of impressive flourishes, but absolutely chuckling and caracoling over the unanswerable nature of the argument? If ever accompaniment expressed a positive certainty that the words of a song were the truest words in the world, it is this very accompaniment. It takes it for granted that nobody will dispute its opinion. It is as dogmatic as Aristotle, or Bob Hobbes, but yet, unlike them in some respects, it seems always to know pretty well what it is talking about. The truth is, that there are few persons who can remain altogether unconvinced by its illustrations, or at least who can remain unpersuaded by its ingenious manner of setting them forth. We say its illustrations, for any one with half an eye can perceive that the “music is married to the immortal verse,” and that the twain are one. We speak of them conjointly when we maintain the force of the song’s illustrations. What indeed can be more forcibly “put,” as the lawyers say, (and sometimes the rhetoricians,) than the points of its thesis? What can be more slyly seducing—what can be more apt to take a body unawares than allusions to “canty hearths where cronies meet, an’ the darlins o’ our e’e?” To be sure, the case might have been better made out if the “morning bleeze” had been kept out of sight, or slurred over as a thing of no moment. Neither was it judicious to dwell upon the “flowery lea,” or the “bonny bee,” or the little “birds in the tree,” and that sort of thing. The song might have taken a hint, too, from our engraving, and said a word about a girl with blue eyes (we presume they are blue,) and auburn hair, (we know it is auburn,) and another little girl and a little boy, both with clean faces, and a dog looking wise at one side of the ingle, with a tabby cat at the other, watching chesnuts in the act of being roasted, and congratulating herself that no fabulous monkey is present to make use of her fair hand as a cat’s paw. All this the song might have forcibly introduced—but we presume it did its best, and we are obliged to it.
Still, we are not convinced. We were never convinced of anything in our lives, and never intend to be convinced, for excellent reasons. It is said there were once seven wise men—a matter which may be very well doubted. But, admitting this point, it was of course one of the seven who first promulgated the fact that every question has two sides. Late discoveries have assured us that it would be no question at all if it had not. Some questions, indeed, are trigonal, or quadrigonal, or pentagonal, or sexagonal, or septagonal, or octagonal, or nonagonal. Some even are polygonal, while others have an infinity of sides like the mathematical circle, and thus there is found to be no end to them at all, as is the case with the ordinary circle which every body understands. These latter are questions about Tariffs, and Boundary Lines, and National Banks, questions of privilege and drivel-ege, and Congressional questions of order and disorder, with other matters of that kind. Most queries, however, appear at first glance to have no more than two sides; and it is only when we get hard and fast in the middle of an argument respecting them, so that it is as wrong to go back as it is preposterous to go forward, that we perceive each of the two sides which had appeared to a cursory view so staid and so definite, branching off, like gamblers at Vingt Un, into an infinitesimal series of little divisions, each as distinct and each as perverse as the original ones. For this reason and others (reasons are as plenty as blackberries, John Falstaff to the contrary notwithstanding) for this reason and a thousand others, we keep clear of all argumentative discourses, as it is impossible to say when or where they may end. By keeping clear of them, we mean to say that we never indulge in them ourselves. Yet we like them very well in other people. Nothing amuses us more, for instance, than a young man who fancies himself a genius in the logical line, and who will take it upon himself, at a moment’s warning, to demonstrate that two and three blue beans do not make five. We could listen to him by the hour; and when at length he comes to find out that the blue-bean question, pretty much like all other questions, is one of the polygonal species with infinitesimal sides, we hardly know a more interesting object than he becomes, especially if you have not been so impolite as to interrupt him, and he has had all the discourse to himself.
Our retiring habits, in this particular, being thus understood, it will be seen at once that we have no design of arguing the point with the Old Song which we have quoted at the head of this paper. We cannot undertake to support the pretensions of the “flowery lea” against those of the “chimney corner.” In the case of hill-side versus ingle-side we beg leave to keep aloof. We do not say with the blue-bean gentlemen that there is much to be said on both sides of the question; for the truth is we perceive at a glance that the subject has a wonderful variety of aspects, each highly important and interesting, and upon every one of which we could preach a very excellent sermon if occasion required. At a first view there is only the ordinary double-sided question, whether the ingle-side be preferable to the hill-side, or the hill-side to the ingle. But then we have at once in continuation, the concomitant sub-queries whether the hill-side be a hill-side of donkey-thistle or of purple heather—whether there be sheep on it or snakes—whether it be winter or summer—whether it be a rainy day or a sun-shiny one—whether the ingle be smoky or not smoky—whether, in the latter case, we choose to be cured like bacon or be left uncured—whether wood or coal be burnt, and whether, if coal, you have any tendency to what Dr. Blunderbuzzard calls pulmonary phthisis.
Now each of these sub-queries involves a point of especial importance, and each of these points must be definitely settled, before we begin to make up our minds on the main one, and the worst of it is that each of these points, too, may be subdivided into I cannot tell how many others, all equally momentous, if not more so, and every one of them to be fully discussed and permanently decided upon, before we can do anything at all towards drawing a judicious conclusion. So that in the end we lose both our way, and our labor, and are forced, in respect to the matter of this song, to fall back upon one of those very rare questions which have really but two sides, and base our final decision upon that. This question is simply whether the lady who sings the song, be pretty or ugly. The only difficulty about this mode of forming an opinion is that the opinion itself is apt to have something of a variable character—but then it would be no fashionable opinion if it had not.
At present we decide against the lea and give judgment for “The Fireside.”