The Ratiocinative Art: Mr. Poe's Startling Tales of Moral Analysis in the American Metropolis
By the hand of our transatlantic correspondent, we receive intelligence most curious and edifying from the city of Philadelphia, in the United States of America. It is there that Mr. Edgar Allan Poe, a literary gentleman of melancholy repute and undoubted genius, hath completed a work entitled 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue,' now published in the pages of Graham's Magazine. This tale, we are told, undertakes to lay bare the process of human reason in the solution of a most horrid and inexplicable double murder, wherein the ordinary faculties of the police are rendered wholly useless.
The narrative, as our correspondent describes it, introduces a certain Chevalier Auguste Dupin, a Parisian gentleman of noble birth but reduced circumstances, who, by the sheer force of 'analysis,' disentangles a crime that hath baffled the keenest officers of the French capital. The method employed is not that of vulgar clue-hunting, but a species of moral mathematics, a cold and relentless dissection of the human mind itself. Mr. Poe's own life, shadowed by poverty and loss, lends an air of authenticity to his depictions of the darker passions, and his readers are said to be both thrilled and unsettled by the cold precision of his hero's intellect.
We in Transylvania, who are no strangers to the mysteries of the human heart and the deceptions of the charlatan, cannot but view this American development with a professional interest. For if the public taste doth incline toward such tales of rational investigation, it may well be that the purveyors of spiritual frauds and midnight sΓ©ances shall find their trade diminished. Yet we hold our breath, for the love of the marvellous is deeply rooted in the peasantry and the gentry alike, and a single tale, however ingenious, cannot dispel the fog of centuries.
Still, we commend Mr. Poe's endeavour to the attention of our readers, for it demonstrates that the human intellect, when properly applied, may pierce the veil of even the most sanguinary enigma. Let us hope that his example may inspire our own local magistrates to employ similar rigour in the investigation of those crimes that too often are dismissed as the work of phantoms or the devil. In the meantime, we shall watch with keen interest the progress of this new 'ratiocinative' school of fiction, and its effects upon the credulous minds of both continents.