d 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 ligh