IV

In so far as Poe had any predecessor in the composing of a narrative,

the interest of which should reside in the application of human

intelligence to the solution of a mystery, this was not Balzac,--altho

the American romancer was sufficiently familiar with the 'Human Comedy'

to venture quotation from it. Nor was this predecessor Cooper, whom

Balzac admired and even imitated, altho Leatherstocking in tracking his

redskin enemies revealed the tense observation and the faculty of

deduction with which Poe was to endow his Dupin. The only predecessor

with a good claim to be considered a progenitor is Voltaire, in whose

'Zadig' we can find the method which Poe was to apply more elaborately.

The Goncourts perceived this descent of Poe from Voltaire when they

recorded in their 'Journal' that the strange tales of the American poet

seemed to them to belong to "a new literature, the literature of the

twentieth century, scientifically miraculous story-telling by A + B, a

literature at once monomaniac and mathematical, Zadig as

district-attorney, Cyrano de Bergerac as a pupil of Arago."

Voltaire tells us that Zadig by study gained "a sagacity which

discovered to him a thousand differences where other men saw only

uniformity"; and he describes a misadventure which befell Zadig when he

was living in the kingdom of Babylon. One day the chief eunuch asked if

he had seen the queen's dog. "It's a female, isn't it?" returned Zadig;

"a spaniel, and very small; she littered not long ago; she is lame of

the left forefoot; and she has very long ears." "So you have seen her?"

cried the eunuch. "No," Zadig answered; "I have never seen her; and I

never even knew that the queen had a dog."

About the same time the handsomest horse in the king's stables escaped;

and the chief huntsman, meeting Zadig, inquired if he had not seen the

animal. And Zadig responded: "It is the horse that gallops the best; he

is five feet high; his shoe is very small; his tail is three and a half

feet long; the knobs of his bit are of twenty-three-carat gold; and he

is shod with eleven-penny silver." And the chief huntsman asked, "Which

way did he go?" To which Zadig replied: "I have not seen him; and I have

never heard anything about him."

The chief eunuch and the chief huntsman naturally believed that Zadig

had stolen the queen's dog and the king's horse; so they had him

arrested and condemned, first to the knout, and afterward to exile for

life in Siberia. And then both the missing animals were recovered; so

Zadig was allowed to plead his case. He swore that he had never seen

either the dog of the queen or the horse of the king. This is what had

happened: He had been walking toward a little wood and he had seen on

the sand the track of an animal, and he judged that it had been a dog.

Little furrows scratched in the low hillocks of sand between the

footprints showed him that it was a female whose teats were pendent, and

who therefore must have littered recently. As the sand was less deeply

marked by one foot than by the three others, he had perceived the

queen's dog to be lame.

As for the larger quadruped, Zadig, while walking in a narrow path in

the wood, had seen the prints of a horse's shoes, all at an equal

distance; and he had said to himself that here was a steed with a

perfect stride. The path was narrow, being only seven feet wide, and

here and there the dust had been flicked from the trees on either hand,

and so Zadig had made sure that the horse had a tail three and a half

feet long. The branches crossed over the path at the height of five

feet, and as leaves had been broken off, the observer had decided that

the horse was just five feet high. As to the bit, this must be of gold,

since the horse had rubbed it against a stone, which Zadig had

recognized as a touchstone and on which he had assayed the trace of

precious metal. And from the marks left by the horse's shoes on another

kind of stone Zadig had felt certain that they were made of eleven-penny

silver.

Huxley has pointed out that the method of Zadig is the method which has

made possible the incessant scientific discovery of the last century. It

is the method of Wellington at Assaye, assuming that there must be a

ford at a certain place on the river, because there was a village on

each side. It is the method of Grant at Vicksburg, examining the

knapsacks of the Confederate soldiers slain in a sortie to see if these

contained rations, which would show that the garrison was seeking to

break out because the place was untenable. It is also the method of Poe

in the 'Gold-Bug' and in the 'Murders of the Rue Morgue.' In all

probability Poe borrowed it directly from Voltaire, who had taken it

over from Oriental folklore.

In his application of this method, not casually, playfully, and with

satiric intent, as Voltaire had applied it, but seriously and taking it

as the mainspring of his story, Poe added an ingenious improvement of

his own devising. Upon the preternaturally acute observer who was to

control the machinery of the tale, the American poet bestowed a

companion of only an average alertness and keenness; and to this

commonplace companion the romancer confided the telling of the story. By

this seemingly simple device Poe doubled the effectiveness of his work,

because this unobservant and unimaginative narrator of the unraveling of

a tangled skein by an observant and imaginative analyst naturally

recorded his own admiration and astonishment as the wonder was wrought

before his eyes, so that the admiration and astonishment were

transmitted directly and suggestively, to the readers of the narrative.

In the 'Gold-Bug' the wonder-worker is Legrand, and in both the 'Murders

in the Rue Morgue' and the 'Purloined Letter' he is M. Dupin; and in all

three tales the telling of the story is entrusted to an anonymous

narrator, serving not only as a sort of Greek chorus to hint to the

spectators the emotions they ought to feel, but also as the describer of

the personality and peculiarities of Legrand and Dupin, who are thus

individualized, humanized, and related to the real world. If they had

not been accepted by the narrator as actual beings of flesh and blood,

they might otherwise retain the thinness and the dryness of disembodied

intelligences working in a vacuum.

This device of the transmitting narrator is indisputably valuable; and,

properly enough, it reappears in the one series of detective tales which

may be thought by some to rival Poe's. The alluring record of the

investigations of Mr. Sherlock Holmes is the work of a certain Dr.

Watson, a human being but little more clearly characterized than the

anonymous narrators who have preserved for us the memory of Legrand and

Dupin. But Poe here again exhibited a more artistic reserve than any of

his imitators, in so far as he refrained from the undue laudation of the

strange intellectual feats which are the central interest of these

three tales. In the 'Gold-Bug' he even heightens his suspense by

allowing the narrator to suggest that Legrand might be of unsound mind;

and in the 'Murders in the Rue Morgue' the narrator, altho lost in

astonishment at the acuteness of Dupin, never permits his admiration to

become fulsome; he holds himself in, as tho fearing that overpraise

might provoke a denial. Moreover, Poe refrained from all exhibitions of

Dupin's skill merely for its own sake--exhibitions only dazzling the

spectators and not furthering his immediate purpose.

Nothing could be franker than Sir Conan Doyle's acknowledgment of his

indebtedness. "Edgar Allen Poe, who, in his carelessly prodigal fashion,

threw out the seeds from which so many of our present forms of

literature have sprung, was the father of the detective tale, and

covered its limits so completely that I fail to see how his followers

can find any fresh ground which they can confidently call their own. For

the secret of the thinness and also of the intensity of the

detective-story is that the writer is left with only one quality, that

of intellectual acuteness, with which to endow his hero. Everything else

is outside the picture and weakens the effect. The problem and its

solution must form the theme, and the character drawing is limited and

subordinate. On this narrow path the writer must walk, and he sees the

footmarks of Poe always in front of him. He is happy if he ever finds

the means of breaking away and striking out on some little side-track of

his own."

The deviser of the adventures of Sherlock Holmes hit on a happy phrase

when he declared that "the problem and its solution must form the

theme." This principle was violated by Dumas, in the 'Vicomte de

Bragelonne,' giving us the solution before the problem, when he showed

how d'Artagnan used the method of Zadig to deduce all the details of the

duel on horseback, after the author had himself described to us the

incidents of that fight. But when he was thus discounting his effect

Dumas probably had in mind, not Poe, but Cooper, whose observant

redskins he mightily admired and whom he frankly imitated in the

'Mohicans of Paris.'

V

Altho Poe tells these three stories in the first person, as if he was

himself only the recorder of the marvelous deeds of another, both

Legrand and Dupin are projections of his own personality; they are

characters created by him to be endowed with certain of his own

qualifications and peculiarities. They were called into being to be

possest of the inventive and analytical powers of Poe himself. "To be

an artist, first and always, requires a turn for induction and

analysis"--so Mr. Stedman has aptly put it; and this turn for induction

and analysis Poe had far more obviously than most artists. When he was a

student he excelled in mathematics; in all his other tales he displays

the same power of logical construction; and he delighted in the exercise

of his own acumen, vaunting his ability to translate any cipher that

might be sent to him and succeeding in making good his boast. In the

criticism of 'Barnaby Rudge,' and again in the explanation of the

Maelzel chess-player, Poe used for himself the same faculty of

divination, the same power of seizing the one clue needful, however

tangled amid other threads, which he had bestowed upon Legrand and

Dupin.

If we may exclude the 'Marie Roget' narrative in which Poe was working

over an actual case of murder, we find him only three times undertaking

the "tale of ratiocination," to use his own term; and in all three

stories he was singularly happy in the problem he invented for solution.

For each of the three he found a fit theme, wholly different from that

employed in either of the others. He adroitly adjusted the proper

accessories, and he created an appropriate atmosphere. With no sense of

strain, and no awkwardness of manner, he dealt with episodes strange

indeed, but so simply treated as to seem natural, at least for the

moment. There is no violence of intrigue or conjecture; indeed Poe

strives to suggest a background of the commonplace against which his

marvels may seem the more marvelous. In none of his stories is Poe's

consummate mastery of the narrative art, his ultimate craftsmanship, his

certain control of all the devices of the most accomplished

story-teller, more evident than in these three.

And yet they are but detective-stories, after all; and Poe himself,

never prone to underestimate what he had written, spoke of them lightly

and even hinted that they had been overpraised. Probably they were easy

writing--for him--and therefore they were not so close to his heart as

certain other of his tales over which he had toiled long and

laboriously. Probably also he felt the detective-story to be an inferior

form. However superior his stories in this kind might be, he knew them

to be unworthy of comparison with his more imaginative tales, which he

had filled with a thrilling weirdness and which attained a soaring

elevation far above any height to be achieved by ingenious narratives

setting forth the solving of a puzzle.

It is in a letter to Philip Pendleton Cooke, written in 1846, that Poe

disparaged his detective-stories and declared that they "owe most of

their popularity to being something in a new key. I do not mean to say

that they are not ingenious--but people think them more ingenious than

they are--on account of their method and _air_ of method. In the

'Murders in the Rue Morgue,' for instance, where is the ingenuity of

unraveling a web which you yourself (the author) have woven for the

express purpose of unraveling? The reader is made to confound the

ingenuity of the supposititious Dupin with that of the writer of the

story." Here, surely, Poe is over-modest; at least he over-states the

case against himself. The ingenuity of the author obviously lies in his

invention of a web which seemingly cannot be unraveled and which

nevertheless one of the characters of the tale, Legrand or Dupin,

succeeds in unraveling at last. This ingenuity may be, in one way, less

than that required to solve an actual problem in real life; but it is

also, in another way, more, for it had to invent its own puzzle and to

put this together so that the secret seemed to be absolutely hidden,

altho all the facts needed to solve it were plainly presented to the

reader.

In the same letter to Cooke, Poe remarked on the "wide diversity and

variety" of his tales when contrasted one with another; and he asserted

that he did not consider any one better than another. "There is a vast

variety of kinds, and in degree of value these kinds vary--but each tale

is equally good _of its kind_." He added that "the loftiest kind is that

of the highest imagination." For this reason only he considered that

'Ligeia' might be called the best of his stories. Now, after a lapse of

threescore years, the 'Fall of the House of Usher,' with its "serene and

somber beauty," would seem to deserve the first place of all. And among

the detective-stories, standing on a lower plane as they do, because

they were wrought by invention rather than by the interpreting

imagination, the foremost position may be given to the 'Murders in the

Rue Morgue.' In this tale Poe's invention is most ingenious and his

subject is selected with the fullest understanding of the utmost

possibilities of the detective-story. At the core of it is a strange,

mysterious, monstrous crime; and M. Anatole France was never wiser than

when he declared the unfailing interest of mankind in a gigantic misdeed

"because we find in all crimes that fund of hunger and desire on which

we all live, the good as well as the bad." Before a crime such as this

we seem to find ourselves peering into the contorted visage of primitive

man, obeying no law but his own caprice.

The superiority of the poet who wrote the first detective-story over all

those who have striven to tread in the trail he blazed is obvious

enough. It resides not only in his finer workmanship, his more delicate

art, his surer certainty of execution, his more absolute knowledge of

what it was best to do and of the way best to do this; it is to be seen

not only in his command of verisimilitude, in his plausibility, in his

faculty of enwrapping the figures of his narrative in the atmosphere

most fit for them; it is not in any of these things or in all of them

that Poe's supremacy is founded. The reason of that supremacy must be

sought in the fact that, after all, Poe was a poet, and that he had the

informing imagination of a poet, even tho it was only the more prosaic

side of the faculty divine which he chose to employ in these tales of

ratiocination.

It is by their possession of poetry, however slight their portion might

be, that Fitzjames O'Brien and M. Jean Richepin and Mr. Rudyard Kipling

were kept from frank failure when they followed in Poe's footsteps and

sought to imitate, or at least to emulate his more largely imaginative

tales in the 'Diamond Lens' of the Irish-American, in the 'Morts

Bizarres' of the Frenchman, and in half a dozen tales of the

Anglo-Indian. But what tincture of poesy, what sweep of vision, what

magic of style, is there in the attempts of the most of the others who

have taken pattern by Poe's detective-stories? None, and less than

none. Ingenuity of a kind there is in Gaboriau's longer fictions, and

in those of Fortuné du Boisgobey, and in those of Wilkie Collins; but

this ingenuity is never so simply employed, and it is often artificial

and violent and mechanical. It exists for its own sake, with little

relation to the admitted characteristics of our common humanity. It

stands alone, and it is never accompanied by the apparent ease which

adds charm to Poe's handling of his puzzles.

Consider how often Gaboriau puts us off with a broken-backed narrative,

taking up his curtain on a promising problem, presenting it to us in

aspects of increasing difficulty, only at last to confess his impotence

by starting afresh and slowly detailing the explanatory episodes which

happened before the curtain rose. Consider how frequently Fortuné du

Boisgobey failed to play fair. Consider how juiceless was the

documentary method of Wilkie Collins, how mechanical and how arid, how

futilely complicated, how prolonged, and how fatiguing. Consider all the

minor members of the sorry brood hatched out of the same egg, how cheap

and how childish the most of them are. Consider all these; and we are

forced to the conclusion that if the writing of a good detective-story

is so rare and so difficult, if only one of Poe's imitators has been

able really to rival his achievement, if this single success has been

the result of an acceptance of Poe's formula and of a close adherence to

Poe's practise, then, what Poe wrought is really unique; and we must

give him the guerdon of praise due to an artist who has accomplished the

first time of trying that which others have failed to achieve even after

he had shown them how.

(1904.)