Backlog Studies

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BACKLOG STUDIES

By Charles Dudley 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, which is deep, and nearly three feet wide, has a broad
hearthstone in front of it, where the live coals tumble down, and a
pair of gigantic brass andirons. The brasses are burnished, and
shine cheerfully in the firelight, and on either side stand tall
shovel and tongs, like sentries, mounted in brass. The tongs, like
the two-handed sword of Bruce, cannot be wielded by puny people. We
burn in it hickory wood, cut long. We like the smell of this
aromatic forest timber, and its clear flame. The birch is also a
sweet wood for the hearth, with a sort of spiritual flame and an even
temper,--no snappishness. Some prefer the elm, which holds fire so
well; and I have a neighbor who uses nothing but apple-tree wood,--a
solid, family sort of wood, fragrant also, and full of delightful
suggestions. But few people can afford to burn up their fruit trees.
I should as soon think of lighting the fire with sweet-oil that comes
in those graceful wicker-bound flasks from Naples, or with manuscript
sermons, which, however, do not burn well, be they never so dry, not
half so well as printed editorials.

Few people know how to make a wood-fire, but everybody thinks he or
she does. You want, first, a large backlog, which does not rest on
the andirons. This will keep your fire forward, radiate heat all
day, and late in the evening fall into a ruin of glowing coals, like
the last days of a good man, whose life is the richest and most
beneficent at the close, when the flames of passion and the sap of
youth are burned out, and there only remain the solid, bright
elements of character. Then you want a forestick on the andirons;
and upon these build the fire of lighter stuff. In this way you have
at once a cheerful blaze, and the fire gradually eats into the solid
mass, sinking down with increasing fervor; coals drop below, and
delicate tongues of flame sport along the beautiful grain of the
forestick. There are people who kindle a fire underneath. But these
are conceited people, who are wedded to their own way. I suppose an
accomplished incendiary always starts a fire in the attic, if he can.
I am not an incendiary, but I hate bigotry. I don't call those
incendiaries very good Christians who, when they set fire to the
martyrs, touched off the fagots at the bottom, so as to make them go
slow. Besides, knowledge works down easier than it does up.
Education must proceed from the more enlightened down to the more
ignorant strata. If you want better common schools, raise the
standard of the colleges, and so on. Build your fire on top. Let
your light shine. I have seen people build a fire under a balky
horse; but he wouldn't go, he'd be a horse-martyr first. A fire
kindled under one never did him any good. Of course you can make a
fire on the hearth by kindling it underneath, but that does not make
it right. I want my hearthfire to be an emblem of the best things.



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.