University of Virginia Library

PREFACE.

The epithets “Grotesque” and “Arabesque” will be
found to indicate with sufficient precision the prevalent
tenor of the tales here published. But from the fact
that, during a period of some two or three years, I
have written five-and-twenty short stories whose
general character may be so briefly defined, it cannot
be fairly inferred—at all events it is not truly
inferred—that I have, for this species of writing,
any inordinate, or indeed any peculiar taste or prepossession.
I may have written with an eye to this
republication in volume form, and may, therefore,
have desired to preserve, as far as a certain point, a
certain unity of design. This is, indeed, the fact;
and it may even happen that, in this manner, I shall
never compose anything again. 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. The charge is in
bad taste, and the grounds of the accusation have
not been sufficiently considered. 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.
These many pieces are yet one book. My friends
would be quite as wise in taxing an astronomer with
too much astronomy, or an ethical author with treating
too largely of morals. But the truth is that, with
a single exception, there is no one of these stories in
which the scholar should recognise the distinctive
features of that species of pseudo-horror which we are
taught to call Germanic, for no better reason than
that some of the secondary names of German literature
have become identified with its folly. If in many
of my productions terror has been the thesis, I maintain
that terror is not of Germany, but of the soul,
—that I have deduced this terror only from its
legitimate sources, and urged it only to its legitimate
results.

There are one or two of the articles here, (conceived
and executed in the purest spirit of extravaganza,)
to which I expect no serious attention, and
of which I shall speak no farther. But for the rest I
cannot conscientiously claim indulgence on the score
of hasty effort. I think it best becomes me to say,
therefore, that if I have sinned, I have deliberately
sinned. These brief compositions are, in chief part,
the results of matured purpose and very careful
elaboration.