Even at its best, in the simple perfection of form that Poe bestowed on it, there is no denying that it demanded from its creator no depth of sentiment, no warmth of emotion, and no large understanding of human desire.  There are those who would dismiss it carelessly, as making an appeal not far removed from that of the riddle and of the conundrum.  There are those again who would liken it rather to the adroit trick of a clever conjurer.  No doubt, it gratifies in us chiefly that delight in difficulty conquered, which is a part of the primitive play-impulse potent in us all, but tending to die out as we grow older, as we lessen in energy, and as we feel more deeply the tragi-comedy of existence.  But inexpensive as it may seem to those of us who look to literature for enlightenment, for solace in the hour of need, for stimulus to stiffen the will in the never-ending struggle of life, the detective tale, as Poe contrived it, has merits of its own as distinct and as undeniable, as those of the historical novel, for example, or of the sea-tale.  It may please the young rather than the old, but the pleasure it can give is ever innocent; and the young are always in the majority.

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.”