Q Or, Heine's Romanticism‪.‬

The epithets "Grotesque" and "Arabesque" will be found to indicate with sufficient precision the prevalent tenor of the tales here published.... I may ... have desired to preserve, as far as a certain point, a certain unity of design.... I speak of these things here, because I am led to think it is this prevalence of the "Arabesque" in my serious tales, which has induced one or two critics to tax me, in all friendliness, with what they have been pleased to term "Germanism" and gloom.... Let us admit, for the moment, that the "phantasy pieces" now given are Germanic, or what not. Then Germanism is "the vein" for the time being. To morrow I may be anything but German, as yesterday I was everything else. (1) IN THIS PASSAGE FROM THE PREFACE TO HIS Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840), Edgar Allan Poe makes a number of contradictory claims. While striving for a unity of style, he yet refuses to take on a stable character and will not really identify with the tide of "German." Even if he did, he writes, this would be only a momentary name, and not a truly unifying designation or the proper name of an identity. Interestingly, the qualities that provoke this name, "grotesque" and "arabesque," are French, not German. The French word "grotesque" comes from the Italian word coined in the era of Raphael to name the decorative wall paintings found in Nero's Domus Aurea in Rome. Since the palace had been completely buried, painters descended into what seemed like caves (Italian, grotto) to view and copy the wall paintings there, then called "grotesques." "Arabesque," as is well known, refers to repeating decorative floral patterns found in older mosques, and to the kind of curve characteristic of Arab archways. The words "grotesque" and "arabesque" install a kind of extravagance in Poe's title, the double "q" being not very English, invoking a vague Orientalism as well as the French and Italian traditions. Poe's words are indebted not to German, but more to a Romance tradition, or a vocabulary of the Romance languages. The accusation of "Germanism" can perhaps be translated as a charge of Romanticism. (2)