A Friend of mine making a list of the things needed for the cottage
that he had taken, put at the head "bellows." Then he thought for some
minutes, and was found merely to have added "tongs" and "poker." Then
he asked someone to finish it. A fire, indeed, furnishes. Nothing
else, not even a chair, is absolutely necessary; and it is difficult
for a fire to be too large. Some of the grates put into modern houses
by the jerry-builders would move an Elizabethan to tears, so petty and
mean are they, and so incapable of radiation. We English people would
suffer no loss in kindliness and tolerance were the inglenook restored
to our homes. The ingle humanises.
Although the father of the family no longer, as in ancient Greece,
performs on the hearth religious rites, yet it is still a sacred spot.
Lovers whisper there, and there friends exchange confidences. Husband
and wife face the fire hand in hand. The table is for wit and good
humour, the hearth is for something deeper and more personal. The
wisest counsels are offered beside the fire, the most loving sympathy
and comprehension are there made explicit. It is the scene of the best
dual companionship. The fire itself is a friend, having the prime
attribute--warmth. One of the most human passages of that most human
poem, _The Deserted Village_, tells how the wanderer was now and again
taken by the memory of the hearth of his distant home:--
"I still had hopes my latest hours to crown,
Amidst these humble bowers to lay me down ...
Around my fire an evening group to draw,
And tell of all I felt, and all I saw...."
Only by the fireside could a man so unbosom himself. A good fire
extracts one's best; it will not be resisted. FitzGerald's "Meadows in
Spring" contains some of the best fireside stanzas:--
"Then with an old friend
I talk of our youth--
How 'twas gladsome, but often
Foolish, forsooth:
But gladsome, gladsome!
Or to get merry
We sing some old rhyme,
That made the wood ring again
In summer time--
Sweet summer time!
Then we go to drinking,
Silent and snug;
Nothing passes between us
Save a brown jug--
Sometimes!
And sometimes a tear
Will rise in each eye,
Seeing the two old friends
So merrily--
So merrily!"
The hearth also is for ghost stories; indeed, a ghost story demands a
fire. If England were warmed wholly by hot-water pipes or gas stoves,
the Society for Psychical Research would be dissolved. Gas stoves are
poor comforters. They heat the room, it is true, but they do so after
a manner of their own, and there they stop. For encouragement, for
inspiration, you seek the gas stove in vain. Who could be witty, who
could be humane, before a gas stove? It does so little for the eye and
nothing for the imagination; its flame is so artificial and restricted
a thing, its glowing heart so shallow and ungenerous. It has no voice,
no personality, no surprises; it submits to the control of a gas
company, which, in its turn, is controlled by Parliament. Now, a fire
proper has nothing to do with Parliament. A fire proper has whims,
ambitions, and impulses unknown to gas-burners, undreamed of by
asbestos. Yet even the gas stove has advantages and merits when
compared with hot-water pipes. The gas stove at least offers a focus
for the eye, unworthy though it be; and you can make a semicircle of
good people before it. But with hot-water pipes not even that is
possible. From the security of ambush they merely heat, and heat whose
source is invisible is hardly to be coveted at all. Moreover, the heat
of hot-water pipes is but one remove from stuffiness.
Coals are a perpetual surprise, for no two consignments burn exactly
alike. There is one variety that does not burn--it explodes. This kind
comes mainly from the slate quarries, and, we must believe, reaches
the coal merchant by accident. Few accidents, however, occur so
frequently. Another variety, found in its greatest perfection in
railway waiting-rooms, does everything but emit heat. A third variety
jumps and burns the hearthrug. One can predicate nothing definite
concerning a new load of coal at any time, least of all if the
consignment was ordered to be "exactly like the last."
A true luxury is a fire in the bedroom. This is fire at its most
fanciful and mysterious. One lies in bed watching drowsily the play of
the flames, the flicker of the shadows. The light leaps up and hides
again, the room gradually becomes peopled with fantasies. Now and then
a coal drops and accentuates the silence. Movement with silence is one
of the curious influences that come to us: hence, perhaps, part of the
fascination of the cinematoscope, wherein trains rush into stations,
and streets are seen filled with hurrying people and bustling
vehicles, and yet there is no sound save the clicking of the
mechanism. With a fire in one's bedroom sleep comes witchingly.
Another luxury is reading by firelight, but this is less to the credit
of the fire than the book. An author must have us in no uncertain grip
when he can induce us to read him by a light so impermanent as that of
the elfish coal. Nearer and nearer to the page grows the bended head,
and nearer and nearer to the fire moves the book. Boys and girls love
to read lying full length on the hearthrug.
Some people maintain a fire from January to December; and, indeed, the
days on which a ruddy grate offends are very few. According to
Mortimer Collins, out of the three hundred and sixty-five days that
make up the year only on the odd five is a fire quite dispensable. A
perennial fire is, perhaps, luxury writ large. The very fact that
sunbeams falling on the coals dispirit them to greyness and
ineffectual pallor seems to prove that when the sun rides high it is
time to have done with fuel except in the kitchen or in the open air.
The fire in the open air is indeed joy perpetual, and there is no
surer way of renewing one's youth than by kindling and tending it,
whether it be a rubbish fire for potatoes, or an aromatic offering of
pine spindles and fir cones, or the scientific structure of the gipsy
to heat a tripod-swung kettle. The gipsy's fire is a work of art. "Two
short sticks were stuck in the ground, and a third across to them like
a triangle. Against this frame a number of the smallest and driest
stick were leaned, so that they made a tiny hut. Outside these there
was a second layer of longer sticks, all standing, or rather leaning,
against the first. If a stick is placed across, lying horizontally,
supposing it catches fire, it just burns through the middle and that
is all, the ends go out. If it is stood nearly upright, the flame
draws up to it; it is certain to catch, burns longer, and leaves a
good ember." So wrote one who knew--Richard Jefferies, in _Bevis_,
that epic of boyhood. Having built the fire, the next thing is to
light it. An old gipsy woman can light a fire in a gale, just as a
sailor can always light his pipe, even in the cave of Aeolus; but the
amateur is less dexterous. The smoke of the open-air fire is charged
with memory. One whiff of it, and for a swift moment we are in
sympathy with our remotest ancestors, and all that is elemental and
primitive in us is awakened.