THE PHILOSOPHY OF FURNITURE.
by Edgar Allan Poe
(1840)
• 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.
Whatever may have been Hawthorne's private lot, he has the importance
of being the most beautiful and most eminent representative of a
literature. The importance of the literature may be questioned, but at any
rate, in the field of letters, Hawthorne is the most valuable example of the
American genius. That genius has not, as a whole, been literary; but
Hawthorne was on his limited scale a master of expression. He is the writer
to whom his countrymen most confidently point when they wish to make a
claim to have enriched the mother-tongue, and, judging from present
appearances, he will long occupy this honourable position. If there is
something very fortunate for him in the way that he borrows an added
relief from the absence of competitors in his own line and from the general
flatness of the literary field that surrounds him, there is also, to a spectator,
something almost touching in his situation.
Henry James, Hawthorne, 1879
Hawthorne on the one side is so subtle and slender and
unpretending, and the American world on the other is so vast
and various and substantial, that it might seem to the author of
The Scarlet Letter and the Mosses from an Old Manse, that we
render him a poor service in contrasting his proportions with
those of a great civilization. But our author must accept the
awkward as well as the graceful side of his fame; for he has the
advantage of pointing a valuable moral. This moral is that the
flower of art blooms only where the soil is deep, that it takes a
great deal of history to produce a little literature, that it needs a
complex social machinery to set a writer in motion. American
civilization has hitherto had other things to do than to produce
flowers, and before giving birth to writers it has wisely occupied
itself with providing something for them to write about. Three
or four beautiful talents of trans-Atlantic growth are the sum of
what the world usually recognizes, and in this modest nosegay
the genius of Hawthorne is admitted to have the rarest and
sweetest fragrance.
Henry James, Hawthorne, 1879
I have alluded to the absence in Hawthorne of that quality of realism which is now
so much in fashion, an absence in regard to which there will of course be more to
say; and yet I think I am not fanciful in saying that he testifies to the sentiments of
the society in which he flourished almost as pertinently (proportions observed) as
Balzac and some of his descendants--M M. Flaubert and Zola--testify to the manners
and morals of the French people. He was not a man with a literary theory; he was
guiltless of a system, and I am not sure that he had ever heard of Realism, this
remarkable compound having (although it was invented some time earlier) come
into general use only since his death. He had certainly not proposed to himself to
give an account of the social idiosyncrasies of his fellow-citizens, for his touch on
such points is always light and vague, he has none of the apparatus of an historian,
and his shadowy style of portraiture never suggests a rigid standard of accuracy.
Nevertheless he virtually offers the most vivid reflection of New England life that has
found its way into literature. His value in this respect is not diminished by the fact
that he has not attempted to portray the usual Yankee of comedy, and that he has
been almost culpably indifferent to his opportunities for commemorating the
variations of colloquial English that may be observed in the New World […]
Hawthorne's work savours thoroughly of the local soil--it is redolent of the social
system in which he had his being.
H. James, Early Writings, p. 387
• This is the real charm of Hawthorne's writing--this purity and
spontaneity and naturalness of fancy. For the rest, it is interesting to
see how it borrowed a particular colour from the other faculties that
lay near it--how the imagination, in this capital son of the old
Puritans, reflected the hue of the more purely moral part, of the
dusky, overshadowed conscience. The conscience, by no fault of its
own, in every genuine offshoot of that sombre lineage, lay under the
shadow of the sense of sin. This darkening cloud was no essential part
of the nature of the individual; it stood fixed in the general moral
heaven under which he grew up and looked at life. It projected from
above, from outside, a black patch over his spirit, and it was for him
to do what he could with the black patch.
H. James, 387-388
• Hawthorne, of course, was exceptionally fortunate; he had his genius to help him.
Nothing is more curious and interesting than this almost exclusively imported character
of the sense of sin in Hawthorne's mind; it seems to exist there merely for an artistic or
literary purpose. He had ample cognizance of the Puritan conscience; it was his natural
heritage; it was reproduced in him; looking into his soul, he found it there. But his
relation to it was only, as one may say, intellectual; it was not moral and theological. He
played with it and used it as a pigment; he treated it, as the metaphysicians say,
objectively. He was not discomposed, disturbed, haunted by it, in the manner of its usual
and regular victims, who had not the little postern door of fancy to slip through, to the
other side of the wall. It was, indeed, to his imaginative vision, the great fact of man's
nature; the light element that had been mingled with his own composition always clung
to this rugged prominence of moral responsibility, like the mist that hovers about the
mountain. It was a necessary condition for a man of Hawthorne's stock that if his
imagination should take licence to amuse itself, it should at least select this grim precinct
of the Puritan morality for its play-ground. He speaks of the dark disapproval with which
his old ancestors, in the case of their coming to life, would see him trifling himself away
as a story-teller. But how far more darkly would they have frowned could they have
understood that he had converted the very principle of their own being into one of his
toys!
H. James, 389
• The old Puritan moral sense, the consciousness of sin and hell, of the
fearful nature of our responsibilities and the savage character of our
Taskmaster--these things had been lodged in the mind of a man of
Fancy, whose fancy had straightway begun to take liberties and play
tricks with them--to judge them (Heaven forgive him!) from the
poetic and aesthetic point of view, the point of view of entertainment
and irony. This absence of conviction makes the difference; but the
difference is great.