at the method of Zadig is the method which has
made possible the incessant scientific discovery of the last century. It
is the method of Wellington at Assaye, assuming that there must be a
ford at a certain place on the river, because there was a village on
each side. It is the method of Grant at Vicksburg, examining the
knapsacks of the Confederate soldiers slain in a sortie to see if these
contained rations, which would show that the garrison was seeking to
break out because the place was untenable. It is also the method of Poe
in the 'Gold-Bug' and in the 'Murders of the Rue Morgue.' In all
probability Poe borrowed it directly from Voltaire, who had taken it
over from Oriental folklore.

In his application of this method, not casually, playfully, and with
satiric intent, as Voltaire had applied it, but seriously and taking it
as the mainspring of his story, Poe added an ingenious improvement of
his own devising. Upon the preternaturally acute observer who was to
control the machinery of the tale, the American poet bestowed a
companion of only an average alertness and keenness; and to this
commonplace companion the romancer confided the telling of the story. By
this seemingly simple device Poe doubled the effectiveness of his work,
because this unobservant and unimaginative narrator of the unraveling of
a tangled skein by an observant and imaginative analyst naturally
recorded his own admiration and astonishment as the wonder was wrought
before his eyes, so that the admiration and astonishment were
transmitted directly and suggestively, to the readers of the narrative.

In the 'Gold-Bug' the wonder-worker is Legrand, and in both the 'Murders
in the Rue Morgue' and the 'Purloined Letter' he is M. Dupin; and in all
three tales the telling of the story is entrusted to an anonymous
narrator, serving not only as a sort of Greek chorus to hint to the
spectators the emotions they ought to feel, but also as the describer of
the personality and peculiarities of Legrand and Dupin, who are thus
individualized, humanized, and related to the real world. If they had
not been accepted by the narrator as actual beings of flesh and blood,
they might otherwise retain the thinness and the dryness of disembodied
intelligences working in a vacuum.

This device of the transmitting narrator is indisputably valuable; and,
properly enough, it reappears in the one series of detective tales which
may be thought by some to rival Poe's. The all