a blasting sneer has stricken me from time to time, to the effect that i believe in the fireside woman. for that matter, in the present season, i believe very much in the fireside man. but the very word selected for this withering insinuation shows the shallowness of the philosophy which prompts it. surely there could not be a more stunted stupidity than the suggestion that a thing must be mild and monotonous because it has to do with fire. why should the woman be tame because she is nearest to the wildest thing in the world? it is much more absurd to say it is prosaic to live by the fireside, than to say it is prosaic to live upon the edge of a precipice. it is tenable that some people would be prosaic anywhere; but it is not the fault of the precipice. it would sound paradoxical even in a fairy-tale to say that a princess was always yawning with ennui because she was introduced to a golden griffin or a crimson dragon; and in the round of daily fact, fire is about the nearest thing to a dragon that we know. those who cannot get a fairy-tale out of the fire will not get it out of anything else. it may be affirmed, with fair certainty, that the people who talk most scornfully about the fireside woman do not get it at all, and do not wish her to get it at all. herein lies all the absurdity of the alternatives to domesticity paraded by our progressive friends.
i am not speaking, of course, of work that must be done, especially in abnormal times; i am speaking of the psychology of tedium and of the romance of life. it is apparently demanded that the fire should be concealed in the entrails of an engine; that it should work through a labyrinth of bolts and bars; that it should litter around it numberless dreary offices, and leave behind it a train of indirect and mechanical servants, each further than the last from the least faint vibration of the original energy. then, if in some outlying shed a woman has to stand counting tickets, or tying up parcels from morning till night, that woman is supposed to be free. she has burst the fetters. she is living her own life. but there is supposed to be nothing but dullness for the woman who is face to face with that elemental fury which drives and fashions the whole. there is nothing poetical (as compared with the tickets and labels) in the woman who repeats the primordial adventure of prometheus. and there is nothing artistic (as compared with the shed) about the terrestrial light which turns the greyest room to gold; which reclothes the woman’s raggedest children round the hearth with the colours of a company of fra angelico, so that the mere reflections of the flame can conquer the solid hues of drab and dust, and all her household is clothed with scarlet.
the fire is in this, perhaps, the finest and simplest symbol of a truth persistently misunderstood. these elementary things, the land, the roof, the family, may seem mean and miserable; and in a cynical civilization very probably will seem mean and miserable. but the things themselves are not mean or miserable; and any reformer who says they are is not only taking hold of the stick by the wrong end, he is cutting off the branch by which he is hanging. the stamp of social failure is not that men have these simple things, but, rather, that they do not have them; or even when they do, do not know that they have them. if the fireside woman is dull, it is because she never looks at the fire. it is because she is not, in the wise and philosophical sense, enough of a fire-worshipper. and she lacks this faculty because the whole drift of the modern world discourages that creative concentration, that intensive cultivation of the fancy, which filled the lives of our fathers with crowds of little household gods, and which created all the lesser and lighter sanctities that surround christmas.
amid the wild and wandering adventures of the fireside are some which made possible the very scientific progress which is prone to carp at it. the engine, of which i spoke recently, was (we have all been told) suggested because james watt looked at the kettle. i will not conceal a suspicion that our society might have evolved better if he had looked at the fire. i mean, of course, if he had not only looked at it, but seen it, which is not always the same thing. if he had seen what there is to be seen, he might possibly have done many things. he might, for instance, have revived the trade guilds of glasgow, which failed to grasp his discovery; he might have taught them to take hold of the new energy and turn it towards democracy, instead of going off and handing over his invention to the capitalists. for the defect which betrayed all watt’s school and generation, full as it was of a virile and thrifty radicalism, was precisely that it did not draw from these primal sources of piety and poetry. it was not sufficiently religious, and, therefore, not sufficiently domestic; and the rich rode it down at last. for the hearth is the only possible altar of insurrection, as even the pagans knew; from that fire alone are taken the flaming brands which can really lay waste the wicked cities. the truth can be told well enough by saying that james watt would not really have comprehended the word christmas; and would have been much annoyed if told to consider the yule log instead of the kettle. he was the fireside man; but he was not domestic enough to be dangerous. for it is the domestic man and not the wild man, just as it is the domestic dog and not the wild dog, who really fights with thieves and dies at his post. there has not been a genuine popular war in england since the war of wat tyler, and the origin of that, it will be remembered, was strictly domestic. it was so domestic that it would not happen at all in the modern world: wat tyler would simply be automatically shot into prison for resisting a rational and necessary scientific inspection. it was the growth of an unhuman and unhomelike philosophy that made all the difference between the wat of the fourteenth century and the watt of the nineteenth. and the spirit of real democracy will not re-emerge until it rises from the fireside and comes forth in the red reality of fire; the giant of christmas brandishing the yule log for a club.
but there is another feature in the flaming hearth which illustrates its natural kinship with christmas. it is a place, as christmas is a time; and these vivid limitations are vital to man as a mystic. it is not merely that the idea of everything being in its right place makes all the difference between a fire in a house and a house on fire. it is that the fireplace is a frame; and it is the frame that creates the picture. by being tied to a special spot the sacred dragon becomes more powerful and, in the high imaginative sense, more free. this is that link between hearths and altars which the heathen felt, and of which i have already spoken. if the household be the heart of politics, the fire is the heart of the household; and the vital organ is spread equally everywhere only in the very low organisms. the universe of the mere universalist is one of the very low organisms. the theosophic generalizations about nirvana and the all may be compared to the american fashion of abolishing the fireplace altogether and heating the whole house artificially to the same temperature—a depressing habit. i can imagine that a system of hot-water pipes might satisfy a pantheist; the notion suggests a rather dreary parody of pan and his pipes. i can imagine that a buddhist might want his whole house warmed like the palm-house at kew; but, i think, a limited and localized fire will always be as much associated with christians as it has always been associated with christmas.
shakespeare, himself like a large and liberal fire round which winter tales are told, has hit the mark in this matter exactly, as it concerns the poet or maker of fictive things. shakespeare does not say that the poet loses himself in the all, that he dissipates concrete things into a cloudy twilight, that he turns this home of ours into a vista or any vaguer thing. he says the exact opposite. it is “a local habitation and a name” that the poet gives to what would otherwise be nothing. this seeming narrowness which men complain of in the altar and the hearth is as broad as shakespeare and the whole human imagination, and should command the respect even of those who think the cult of christmas really is all imagination. even those who can only regard the great story of bethlehem as a fairy-tale told by the fire will yet agree that such narrowness is the first artistic necessity even of a good fairy-tale. but there are others who think, at least, that their thought strikes deeper and pierces to a more subtle truth in the mind. there are others for whom all our fairy-tales, and even all our appetite for fairy-tales, draw their fire from one central fairy-tale, as all forgeries draw their significance from a signature. they believe that this fable is a fact, and that the other fables cannot really be appreciated even as fables until we know it is a fact. for them, personality is a step beyond universality; one might almost call it an escape from universality. and what they follow is as much something more than pantheism as a flame is something more than a temperature. for them, god is not bound down and limited by being merely everything; he is also at liberty to be something. and for them christmas will always deal with a reality exactly as shakespeare’s poetry deals with an unreality; it will give, not to airy nothing, but to the enormous and overwhelming everything, a local habitation and a name.
