This rarity is reprinted from my copy of Poe's Works, Vol. III (Poems &c.) (published by Adam and Charles Black in 1875, edited by John H. Ingram). Since it is one of Poe's rarer works, I have provided it for the perusal and enjoyment of those internet surfers with tastes similar to my own. I quote it verbatim (barring typos) from the book.
In the internal decoration, if not in the external architecture of their residences, the English are supreme.
The Italians have but litle sentiment beyond mables and colours. In France, meliora probant deteriora
sequuntur the people are too much a race of gad-abouts to mantain 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 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 heraldric display in monarchical countries. By a transition 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 proprieter: 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 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 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 Appalachia a well-furnished apartment. Its most
usual defect is a want of keeping. We speak of the keeping of a room as we would of the keeping of
a picture for both the picture and the room are amenable to those undeviating principles which regulate
all varieties of art; and very nearly the same laws by which we decide on the higher merits of a
painting, suffice for decision on the adjustment of a chamber.
A want of keeping is observable sometimes in the character of the several pieces of furniture,
but generally in their colours or modes of adaption to use. Very often the eye is offended by their
inartistical arrangement. Straight lines are too prevalent too uninterruptedly continued
or clumsily
interrupted at right angles. If curved lines occur, they are repeated into unpleasant uniformity. By
undue precision, the appearance of many a fine apartment is utterly spoiled.
Curtains are rarely well disposed, or well chosen in respect to other decorations. With formal furniture,
curtians are out of place; and an extensive volume of drapery of any kind is, under any circumstances,
irreconcilable with good taste the proper quantum, as well as the proper adjustment, depending on the
character of the general effect.
Carpets are better understood of late than in ancient days, but we still very frequently err in their
patterns and colours. The soul of the apartment is the carpet. From it are deduced not only the hues but
the forms of all objects incumbent. A judge at common law may be an ordinary man; a good judge at carpet
must be a genius. Yet we have heard discoursing of carpets, with the air "d'un mouton qui reve,"
fellows who should not and could not be trusted with the management of their own moustaches. Every
one knows that a large floor may have a covering of large figures, and that a small one must
have a covering of small yet this is not all the knowledge in the world. As regards texture, the Saxony is
alone admissible. Brussels is the preterpluperfect tense of fashion, and Turkey is taste in its dying
agonies. Touching pattern a carpet should not be bedizened out like a Riccaree Indian all red chalk,
yellow ochre, and cock's feathers. In brief distinct grounds, and vivid circular or cycloid figures, of no
meaning, are here Median laws. The abomination of flowers, or representaions of well-known objects of any
kind, should not be endured within the limits of Christendom. Indeed, whether on carpets, or curtains, or tapestry, or ottoman coverings
all upholstry of this nature should be rigidly Arabesque. As for those antique floor-cloths still occasionally seen
in the dwellings of the rabble cloths of huge, sprawling, and radiating devices, stripe-interspersed, and glorious
with all hues, among which no ground is intelligible these are but the wicked invention of a race of
time-servers and money-lovers children of Baal and worshippers of Mammon Benthams,
who, to spare thought and economise fancy, first cruelly invented the Kaleidoscope, and then established joint-stock
comanies to twirl it by steam.
Glare is a leading error in the philosophy of American household decoration an error
easily recognised as deduced from the perversion of taste just specified. We are violently enamoured of gas and
of glass. The former is totally inadmissable within doors. Its harsh and unsteady light offends. No one having
both brains and eyes will use it. A mild, or what artists term a cool light, with its consequent warm shadows, will
do wonders for even an ill-furnished apartment. Never was a more lovely thought than that of the astral lamp. We
mean, of course, the astral lamp proper the lamp of Argand, with its original plain ground-glass
shade, and its tempered and uniform moonlight rays. The cut-glass shade is a weak invention of the enemy. The
eagerness with which we have adopted it, partly on account of its greater cost, is a good commentary on the
proposition with which we began. It is not too much to say, that the deliberate employer of a cut-glass shade is
eiher radically deficient in taste, or blindingly subservient to the caprices of fashion. The light proceeding from
one of these gaudy abominations is unequal, broken, and painfull. It alone is sufficient to mar a world of good
effect in the furniture subjected to its influence. Female loveliness, in especial, is more than one-half disenchanted
beneath its evil eye.
In the matter of glass, generally, we proceed upon false principles. Its leading feature is
glitter and in that one word how much of all that is detestable do we express! Flickering,
unquiet lights, are sometimes pleasing to children, and idiots, always so but
in the embellishment of a room they should be scrupulously avoided. In truth, even strong steady lights
are inadmissible. The huge and unmeaning glass chandeliers, prism-gut, gas-lighted, and without shade, which dangle
in our most fashionable drawing-rooms, may be cited as the quintessence of all that is false in taste or
preposterous in folly.
The rage for glitter because its idea has become, as we before observed, confounded
with that of magnificence in the abstract has led us, also, to the exaggerated employment of
mirrors. We line our dwellings with great British plates, and then we imagine that we have done a fine thing.
Now the slightest thought will be sufficient to convince any one who has an eye a all of the ill effects of numerous
looking-glasses, and especially of large ones. Regarded apart from its reflection, the mirror presents a continuous,
flat, colourless, unrelieved surface a thing always and obviously unpleasant. Considered as a
reflector, it is potent in producing a monstrous and odious uniformity; and the evil is here aggravated, not in
merely direct porportion with the augmentation of its sources, but in a ratio constantly increasing. In fact, a
room with four or five mirrors arranged at random, is, for all purposes of artistic show, a room of no shape at all.
If we add to this evil, the attendant glitter upon glitter, we have a perfect farrago of discordant and displeasing
effects. The variest bumpkin, on entering an apartment so bedizened, would be instantly aware of something wrong,
although he might be altogether unable to assign a cause for his dissatisfaction. But let the same person be led
into a room tastefully furnished, and he would be startled into an exclamation of pleasure and surprise.
It is an evil growing out of our republican institutions that here a man of large purse has usually a very little
soul which he keeps in it. The corruption of taste is a portion or a pendant of the dollar-manufacture. As we
grow rich our ideas grow rusty. It is, therefore, not among our aristocracy that we must look (if at all,
in Appalachia) for the spirituality of a British boudoir. But we have seen apartments in the tenure of
Americans of modern means, which, in negative merit at least, might vie with any of the ormolu'd cabinets
of our friends across the water. Even now, there is present to our mind's eye a small and not ostentatious
chamber with whose decorations no fault can be found. The proprieter lies asleep on a sofa the
weather is cool the time is near midnight: we will make a sketch of the room during his slumber.
It is oblong some thirty feet in length and twenty-five in breadth a shape
affording the best (ordinary) opportunities for the adjustment of furniture. It has but one door by
no means a wide one which is at one end of the parallelogram, and but two windows, which are at
the other. These latter are large, reaching down to the floor have deep recesses and
open on an Italian veranda. Their panes are of crimson-tinted glass, set in rose-wood framings, more massive
than usual. They are curtained within the recess by a thick silver tissue adapted to the shape of the window, and
hanging loosely in small volumes. Without the recess are curtains of an exceedingly rich crimson silk, fringed
with a deep network of gold, and lined with the silver tissue, which is the material of the exterior blind. There
are no cornices; but the folds of the whole fabric (which are sharp rather than massive, and have an airy appearance),
issue from beneath a broad entablature of rich giltwork, which encircles the room at the junction of the ceiling and
walls. The drapery is thrown open also, or closed, by means of a thick rope of gold loosely enveloping it, and
resolving inself readily into a knot; no pins or other such devices are apparent. The colours of the curtains and
their fringe the tints of crimson and gold appear everywhere in profusion, and
determine the character of the room. The carpet of Saxony material is
quite half-an-inch thick, and is of the same crimson ground, relieved simply by the appearance of a gold cord (like
that festooning the curtains) slightly relieved above the surface of the ground, and thrown upon it in such
a manner as to form a succession of short irregular curves one occasionally overlaying the other.
The walls are prepared with a glossy paper of a silver grey tint, spotted with small Arabesque devices of a fainter
hue of the prevalent crimson. Many paintings relieve the expanse of the paper. They are chiefly landscapes of an
imaginative cast such as the fairy grottoes of Stanfeild, or the lake of the Dismal Swamp of
Chapman. There are, nevertheless, three or four female heads of an ethereal beauty portraits
in the manner of Sully. The tone of each picture is warm, but dark. There are no "brilliant effects." Repose
speaks in all. Not one is of small size. Diminutive paintings give that spotty look to a room, which is the
blemish of so many a fine work of Art overtouched. The frames are broad but not deep, and richly carved, without
being dulled or filagreed. They have the whole lustre of burnished gold. They lie flat on the walls, and do
not hang off with cords. The designs themselves are often seen to better advantage in this latter position, but the
general appearance of the chamber is injured. But one mirror and this not a very large
one is visible. In shape it is nearly circular and it is hung so that a
reflection of the person can be obtained from it in none of the ordinary stiing-places of the room. Two large
low sofas of rosewood and crimson silk, gold-flowered, form the only seats, with the exception of two light conversation
chairs, also of rosewood. There is a pianoforte (rosewood also), without cover, and thrown open. An octagonal
table, formed altogether of the richest gold-threaded marble, is placed near one of the sofas. This is also without
cover the drapery of the curtains has been thought sufficient. Four large and gorgeous Sevres
vases, in which bloom a profusion of sweet and vivid flowers, occupy the slightly rounded angles of the room. A
tall candelabrum, bearing a small antique lamp with highly perfumed oil, is standing near the head of my perfumed
friend. Some light and graceful hanging shleves, with golden edges and crimson silk cords with gold tassels,
sustain two or three hundred magnificently bound books. Beyond these things, there is no furniture, if we except an
Argand lamp, with a plain crimson-tinted ground-glass shade, which depends from the lofty vaulted ceiling by a single
slender gold chain, and throws a tranquil but magical radience over all.
[And, with the time it took me to type that, you will not be seeing Eureka or even Maezel's Chess-Player here, ever!]