Even Balzac, with all his mastery of the novelist’s art, lost more than he gained when he strove to arouse the interest of his readers by an appeal to their curiosity.  His mystery-mongering is sometimes perilously close to blatant sensationalism and overt charlatanry; and he seems to be seeking the bald effect for its own sake.  In the ‘Chouans,’ and again in the ‘Tenebreuse Affaire,’ he has complicated plots and counterplots entangled almost to confusion, but the reader “receives no impression of reality or life” even if these novels cannot be dismist as empty examples of “airless, elaborate mechanism.”

The members of the secret police appearing in these stories have all a vague likeness to Vidocq, whose alleged memoirs were published in 1828, a few years before the author of the ‘Human Comedy’ began to deal with the scheming of the underworld.  Balzac’s spies and his detectives are not convincing, despite his utmost effort; and we do not believe in their preternatural acuteness.  Even in the conduct of their intrigues we are lost in a murky mistiness.  Balzac is at his best when he is arousing the emotions of recognition; and he is at his worst when he sinks to evoking the emotions of surprize.

III

In the true detective-story as Poe conceived it in the ’Murders of the Rue Morgue,’ it is not in the mystery itself that the author seeks to interest the reader, but rather in the successive steps whereby his analytic observer is enabled to solve a problem that might well be dismist as beyond human elucidation.  Attention is centered on the unraveling of the tangled skein rather than on the knot itself.  The emotion aroused is not mere surprize, it is recognition of the unsuspected capabilities of the human brain; it is not a wondering curiosity as to an airless mechanism, but a heightening admiration for the analytic acumen capable of working out an acceptable answer to the puzzle propounded.  In other words, Poe, while he availed himself of the obvious advantages of keeping a secret from his readers and of leaving them guessing as long as he pleased, shifted the point of attack and succeeded in giving a human interest to his tale of wonder.

And by this shift Poe transported the detective-story from the group of tales of adventure into the group of portrayals of character.  By bestowing upon it a human interest, he raised it in the literary scale.  There is no need now to exaggerate the merits of this feat or to suggest that Poe himself was not capable of loftier efforts.  Of course the ’Fall of the House of Usher,’ which is of imagination all compact, is more valid evidence of his genius than the ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue,’ which is the product rather of his invention, supremely ingenious as it is.  Even tho the detective-story as Poe produced it is elevated far above the barren tale of mystery which preceded it and which has been revived in our own day, it is not one of the loftiest of literary forms, and its possibilities are severely limited.  It suffers to-day from the fact that in the half century and more since Poe set the pattern it has been vulgarized, debased, degraded by a swarm of imitators who lacked his certainty of touch, his instinctive tact, his intellectual individuality.  In their hands it has been bereft of its distinction and despoiled of its atmosphere.