Philosophy of Furniture

In the internal decoration, if not in the external architecture of
their residences, the English are supreme. The Italians have but little
sentiment beyond marbles and colours. In France, _meliora probant,
deteriora _sequuntur - the people are too much a race of gadabouts to
maintain those household proprieties of which, indeed, they have a
delicate appreciation, or at least the elements of a proper sense. The
Chinese and most of the eastern races have a warm but inappropriate fancy.
The Scotch are _poor _decorists. The Dutch have, perhaps, an indeterminate
idea that a curtain is not a cabbage. In Spain they are _all _curtains - a
nation of hangmen. The Russians do not furnish. The Hottentots and
Kickapoos are very well in their way. The Yankees alone are preposterous.

How this happens, it is not difficult to see. We have no aristocracy
of blood, and having therefore as a natural, and indeed as an inevitable
thing, fashioned for ourselves an aristocracy of dollars, the _display of
wealth _has here to take the place and perform the office of the heraldic
display in monarchical countries. By a transition readily understood, and
which might have been as readily foreseen, we have been brought to merge
in simple _show _our notions of taste itself

To speak less abstractly. In England, for example, no mere parade of
costly appurtenances would be so likely as with us, to create an
impression of the beautiful in respect to the appurtenances themselves -
or of taste as regards the proprietor: - this for the reason, first, that
wealth is not, in England, the loftiest object of ambition as constituting
a nobility; and secondly, that there, the true nobility of blood,
confining itself within the strict limits of legitimate taste, rather
avoids than affects that mere costliness in which a _parvenu _rivalry may
at any time be successfully attempted.

The people _will _imitate the nobles, and the result is a thorough
diffusion of the proper feeling. But in America, the coins current being
the sole arms of the aristocracy, their display may be said, in general,
to be the sole means of the aristocratic distinction; and the populace,
looking always upward for models,,are insensibly led to confound the two
entirely separate ideas of magnificence and beauty. In short, the cost of
an article of furniture has at length come to be, with us, nearly the sole
test of its merit in a decorative point of view - and this test, once
established, has led the way to many analogous errors, readily traceable
to the one primitive folly.

There could be nothing more directly offensive to the eye of an artist
than the interior of what is termed in the United States - that is to say,
in Appallachia - a well-furnished apartment. Its most