Arabesque

Abstract

Invited to observe ‘the very pathetic sight’ of ‘three futiles’, Mr Godall, the tobacconist and sometime Prince of Bohemia, replies ironically that it is ‘a character of this crowded age’. Crowded it seems to be, if More New Arabian Nights is anything to go by, but certainly not with futility; rather with a superabundance of creative activity which is forever opening up new prospects by challenging a range of intellectual and cultural assumptions and practices. Stevenson’s oeuvre exemplifies this energy, some of it seeming to complement avant-garde thinking in new fields (Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, for instance, comes out in the same year as Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis) while other works appraise earlier models only to transform them into something so fresh and original that it will puzzle and offend many of his contemporaries and earn the title of ‘un maître’ from Mallarmé.

A man may be reasoned into liking Wordsworth, but not into liking the ‘Arabian Nights’.

Richard Garnett, Introduction to Beckford’s Vathek

… certainly the arabesque is the oldest and most original form of human imagination.

Friedrich Schlegel

‘Why must I think that almost all, no, all the methods and conventions of art today are good for parody only?’

Leverkühn in Thomas Mann’s Dr Faustus