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