第42章

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.Iheard 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 Ihave 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