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;