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 Fortune du Boisgobey, and in those of Wilkie Collins; bu