The Professor and the Detective

THE deadly after-dinner pause had arrived. During the hour of the banquet itself, conversation had been general, if desultory; but in the drawingroom an awkward hush descended. The hostess surveyed with some alarm her tame lions, the most distinguished delegates to an international convocation of scholars. Nervously she threw into the arena for dissection the latest sensations in the world of books, the ‘most provocative’ of all provocatives, the ‘most startling’ of all exposes of human weakness. With weary courtesy the lions oped their mastic jaws; but it was only too obvious that the animals were lethargic. Desperately, she turned to the distinguished scholar at her right — a man whose name is known even to thousands who have never read his contributions.

‘Tell me,’ she begged, ‘what do you think is the most significant book of recent years?’

‘There you have me,’ the great man declared with candor. ‘I never can make up my mind between The Bellamy Trial and The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. Of course, I know there are people who would say that Greene Murder Case, but . . .’

His hostess gasped. But in another moment her horror had turned to amazement. Her lions forgot their tameness; the bodies thrown into the arena were no longer the lay figures by which they had been fooled so long. The odor of blood was in their nostrils. For an hour the struggle raged; and when at last the lions, gorged with prey, had departed to their cages, they left behind them a hostess who realized that her dinner had been a complete triumph, who had learned the most valuable of all lessons for her future entertainment of the academic guest: when all else fails, start your professors upon the detective story — if they have not already started themselves!

Throughout England and America to-day, you will find the same thing to be true. Lending libraries in college towns are hard put to it to keep up the supply; university librarians are forced to lay in a private stock ‘for faculty only.’ Let but two or three academics gather together, and the inevitable conversation ensues. At the meetings of learned societies this year, it will not be of the new physics or the new astronomy, of the new morality or the new psychology, that your specialists in these fields will be debating, but of footprints and thumb marks, of the possibility of poisoning by means of candles, of the chances of opening a locked door with a pair of tweezers and a piece of string! More heated the arguments, more violent the discussions, than ever were the contentions of mediæval schoolmen. And in time to come, when we shall have been gathered to our ancestors, you will find us, not in Paradise, but, like that little group of Milton’s fallen angels in Hell, ‘in discourse more sweet’ than were ever hymns of rejoicing, sitting apart on some ‘retir’d’ hill, unaware of Pandemonium, unaware of Hades, while around us giants and demons tear up mountains and cast them into t he sea, ‘reasoning high’ of clues and openings, of poisons and daggers, of tricks for disposing of unwanted bodies, of Dr. Thorndyke and of Colonel Core.

I

That glib expositor of all mysteries, the pseudo-psychologist, has an explanation, of course. To the academic mind, he avers, detective stories constitute the ‘literature of escape.’ He goes even further: our lives, we hear, are barren and narrow; our college walls (not even modern American architecture can shake this metaphor) hem in a little unreal world, in which wander lost spirits, ghosts and shades as melancholy as any who ever haunted the tenebrous Styx, wailing — not, like those spirits, for a life they had lost — but for a life we have never had. Inhibited by our unnatural existence, we find ‘release’ in books of blood and thunder. Through tales of abduction and poisoning, shooting and stabbing, we are able to wallow for a moment in adventures we cannot share, to lose ourselves for an evening in a world of excitement, and return next day to our dry-as-dust lectures, refreshed by vicarious violence. Unworldly, unnatural academics, who would deny us our brief moment’s respite! So, having explained us to his own satisfaction, having neatly docketed us in his capacious catalogue, the pseudo-psychologist passes on to fresher woods. Like an earlier gentleman, somewhat hasty in generalization, he does not stay for an answer.

Nor, I must confess, would we bother to give it to him, did he stay. For how can we explain to such as he that escape, in the sense in which he means it, is the last thing in the world the academic mind either requires or wishes? How can he know that, as a group, we are more free from ‘suppressed desires,’ ‘inhibitions,’ and ‘complexes’ than any other group in the world to-day? It is not from the life of the mind that we seek release, nor is it that we may flee from the bondage of academic walls that we revel in the literature of escape.

Yet, in a sense which he does not understand, the academic reader is turning to the detective story to-day seeking release. Consciously in eighty per cent of the cases, unconsciously in the other two tenths, he has reached the limit of his endurance of characteristically ‘contemporary’ literature. Contrary to the usual belief, the college professor to-day does keep up with recent literature. Gone is the bearded visionary who was a child in the affairs of the world, the pedant who boasted that he had read nothing published since 1660. There are few professors in the colleges of the arts who are not familiar with the ‘latest’ in drama, in fiction, in poetry. If the family budget will not cover the new books, there are the local book clubs; and, when all else fails, there are always the community bookshops, whose tables are surrounded by poverty-stricken academics, grimly reading the newest arrivals, standing now on one foot, now on the other, peering determinedly between uncut pages. Probably no other group except the professional book reviewers has, during the last ten years, waded through so many thousands of pages of psychological analysis. And now we are reaping the whirlwind.

Yes, the detective story does constitute escape; but it is escape not from life, but from literature. We grant willingly that we find in it release. Our ‘revolt’ — so mysteriously explained by the psychologists — is simple enough: we have revolted from an excessive subjectivity to welcome objectivity; from long-drawn-out dissections of emotion to straightforward appeal to intellect; from reiterated emphasis upon men and women as victims either of circumstances or of their glands to a suggestion that men and women may consciously plot and consciously plan; from the ‘stream of consciousness’ which threatens to engulf us in its Lethean monotony to analyses of purpose, controlled and directed by a thinking mind; from formlessness to form; from the sophomoric to the mature; most of all, from a smart and easy pessimism which interprets men and the universe in terms of unmoral purposelessness to a rebelief in a universe governed by cause and effect. All this we find in the detective story.

We are not alone in our revolt against the ‘psychological novel,’ but perhaps our cry for release is more passionate than that of any other group. As the new book lists appear in spring and autumn, as the brilliant new covers in violent hues bedeck the windows of the bookshops, as the publishers’ blurbs grow necessarily more and more superlative, you may hear rising and swelling in protest the litany of the professors: ‘From the most profound and searching dissection of human emotions; from the poignant cry of a human soul; from the daring analysis of the springs of human action; from the wings of pain and ecstasy; from the brutal frankness of the seeker after truth; from the lyric passion of a youthful heart; from the biting and mordant wit of a satirist swifter than Swift; from the provocative demolishment of a fusty Victorianism; from the ruthless exposure of the shams and hypocrisies of the age — Good Lord, deliver us!’

The chant is not ours alone; but assuredly our groans are deeper, our revolt more violent. For, to all whose daily contact is with college students, but most to those who profess to teach ‘English,’ the characteristic contemporary novel seems but the student theme, swelled to Gargantuan proportions. We wade yearly through pounds of paper liberally sprinkled with the pronoun ‘I’; we have long ceased to expect complete sentences — and never even hope for complete thoughts; dots and dashes we accept as the only possible marks of punctuation. We read with a jaundiced eye dissections of human nature which their authors at least believe to be profound and searching. We listen to lyric cries and passioriate outbursts until our ears are weary. We follow the brutal destruction and the searching for truth of young authors, automatically correcting their spelling as we do so. We suggest as delicately as possible — remembering always the sacred ‘individuality’ of these young people with which we must not interfere — that imitation of Mr. Mencken is not always the sincerest form of flattery. We labor all day with a generation which has always reacted — never been forced to think or consider or judge. Is it any wonder that, when the last paper has been corrected, the last reaction tabulated, we reach out a weary hand for books which will be as different as possible? Having labored all day with minds that are — and should be — those of sophomores, is there any reason why we should wish to spend our nights with literature that is sophomoric?

We revolt truly enough against subjectivity, because we are too used to promising young authors, who interpret their individual growing pains in terms of cosmic convulsions. We are clearly aware that adolescence will always emphasize the ‘I’; will always find dissection of emotion more thrilling than analysis of intellect; will always fall victim to easy philosophies of pessimism and skepticism; wall always prefer the formless, the vague, to the ordered, the defined; will always believe that it is facing the facts with candor and fearlessness — though, in reality, facts are so much less spectacular and so much less interesting than youth believes. But all this is the inevitable and natural feeling of adolescence. We whose business it is to teach the young accept it with tolerance, with sympathy — more frequently than the world believes, with humor. It is not strange, however, that we do not turn to-day for release to those children of a larger growth, the contemporary novelists, the ‘bad boys’ and ‘smart girls’ of literature. It is not mere chance that this decade is seeing a recrudescence of interest, on the part of thoughtful readers, in that most mature age of writing, the eighteenth century; that to-day Boswell and Johnson. Swift and Voltaire, are being read by constantly increasing numbers. These were men, not boys; their wit was intellectual, their method analytical; their appeal is constantly to the mind, never to the emotions.

It is likewise not mere coincidence that scholars, philosophers, economists, are creating a demand for detective stories unparalleled in the past; that the art which might otherwise have been expended upon literature is transforming the once-despised ‘thriller’ into what may easily become a new classic; that Oxford and Cambridge dons, a distinguished economist, a supposedly distinguished æsthetician (we have only his pseudonymous word for his identity), an historian, and a scientist should have set themselves to this new and entrancing craft. More than one well-known author, weary unto death of introspective and psychological literature, has turned with relief to this sole department of fiction in which it is still possible to tell a story. Gilbert Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc were pioneers; Lord Charnwood, A. A. Milne, and J. B. Priestley follow gladly after. It is, we granted earlier, escape; but the more one ponders, the more the question insistently thrusts itself forward: Is it not also return?

II

Certainly it is a return to the novel of plot and incident — that genre despised these many years by littérateurs. The appeal of the detective story lies in its action, its episodes. Gone are the pluperfect tenses of the psychical novel, the conditional modes; the present, the progressive, the definite past — these are the tenses of the novel of action. Character — so worshiped by the psychological novelists — troubles us little, though characters we have in abundance. Characters addicted to dependence upon the subconscious or upon the glands need not apply; men and women need all their conscious wits about them in the detective yarn. One brooding moment, one pluperfect tense, one conditional mode, may be fatal. We grant that our characters are largely puppets, and we are delighted once more to see the marionettes dance while a strong and adept hand pulls the strings cleverly. Our real interest is not in the puppets, but in the brain which designed them. Yet characters have emerged from the new detective form, in spite of their authors. The modern detective is as individual as Sherlock Holmes — though less and less often is he patterned after that famous sleuth. Our detective is made in our image and in that of the author; like ourselves, he can make mistakes; he is no longer omniscient or ubiquitous. We are passing away from the strong silent man who, after days of secret working, produces a villain whom we could never have suspected. Sometimes, indeed, the detective is wrong until the last chapter; sometimes, again, both he and we suspect the villain long before we can prove his guilt, and our interest, like the detective’s, is less in the discovery than in the establishment of guilt. The nameless inspector of Scotland Yard has become, for instance, Inspector French, who more than once is puzzled and confused by false trails.

Often the detective is not a professional at all, or at least not one connected with one of the central bureaus here or abroad. There is Poirot, who is conveniently found upon the Blue Train at the needed moment, who even was known to settle down in England for a time, growing cabbages, while he waited for murder to be committed. There is Dr. Thorndyke, the medicolegal wizard, from whom we simple academics have learned most of the natural science we know. There is the amateur Colonel Gore, who began his career by a chance application for a golf secretaryship, and has now opened his own private inquiry office — a movement which his admirers greet with pleasure, as promising an indefinite number of cases for the future. There is our friend the expert in poisons, who lives in his house around the corner from the British Museum, whence he is summoned at dead of night by the butler to a noble family and precipitated into a mystery he does not choose to solve. There is even the psychological detective, keeping us up with the limes. Yet, though we welcome the technique of his creator, and call him master, many of the weary academics are inclined to resent that upstart Philo Vance, whose manners — like his footnotes — smack too much of the ‘smart ’ young novelists and students from whom we arc escaping. With all these characters, however, familiar though they are to us, the interest of the reader lies never in what they, are, but in what they do. If they emerge as individuals, they emerge still from the novel of action.

We have revolted also against contemporary realism, and in these novels we return to an earlier manner. As every connoisseur knows, the charm of the pure detective story lies in its utter unreality. This is a point the untrained reader does not comprehend. He wonders at our callousness, at our evident lack of sensitiveness; he cannot understand how we can wade eagerly through streams of blood, how we can pursue our man even to the gallows with the detachment of Dr. Thorndyke himself. He is tortured by visions of bloodstained rugs; he shudders at the smoking revolver, the knife still sticking in the wound. ‘I dreamed all night of people lying in pools of blood,’ declared my unsympathetic friend at breakfast this morning. ‘How can you read those things and go to sleep at all?’ And she will never believe me quite a human being again because I assured her that after five murders I can put out the light and sleep like a child until morning, the reason being that where she has seen, with horrible distinctness, an old man lying in a pool of his own blood, I had seen — a diagram. She brings to the thriller a mind accustomed to realism. But the essence of this new detective story lies in its complete unreality.

Hence, though we may read them also, we connoisseurs tend to disparage those novels of the Poe school, whose authors attempt to work upon the emotions; interesting they may be, but never in the purest style. No one of us ever believes that the murder actually occurred; no one of our best authors attempts to persuade us that it ever could occur. We come to the detective story with a sigh of relief— the one form of novel to-day which does not insist that we must lose ourselves to find ourselves; the one form of contemporary literature in which our cool impersonality need never fail. That, of course, is the great difference between detective literature and contemporary journalistic accounts of murders, in which we have no interest. Not for a moment can you fool us, either, with collections of True Detective Stories, or confessions of actual criminals. We seek our chamber of horrors with no adolescent or morbid desire to be shocked, startled, horrified. We handle the instruments of the crime with scientific detachment. It is for us an enthralling game, which must be played with skill and science, in which the pieces possess no more real personality than do the knights and bishops and pawns of chess, the kings and queens of bridge. Mediæval writers, to be sure, delighted in allegories of chess, in which the pieces took on moral or spiritual significance; but those who seek to read character and emotion into our pieces and our cards miss the essence of this most entrancing game.

Here perhaps we approach the real centre of the whole matter, which explains both our revolt and our return, and suggests the peculiar characteristic of this new style of writing. Your chess player will sit by the hour in frowning contemplation before a board set with pieces. Your true bridge player finds his real life when the cards are dealt and the contest of wits begins. Your crossword-puzzle expert, dictionary on knee, spends evening after evening in solitary occupation. In each case the expert, though kind enough in other relations of life, despises the amateur. So too the connoisseur of detective stories. We restrain ourselves with difficulty when the occasional reader seeks to dispute with us, to enter into conversations and debates sacred to the initiate. It is as if a body of specialists, — physicists, astronomers, and mathematicians, — met to discuss the Einstein theory, were to be forced, for politeness’ sake, to talk about the concept of relativity with a bright youngster who labored under the popular delusion that Mr. Einstein has somehow reformed — or destroyed — the moral standard. We who are connoisseurs are profound and constant students of the new science, as regular in our practice of the art as the most passionate bridge or chess player. We ‘keep up’ as assiduously with the output as the physician, the scientist, the scholar, with learned journals. From ten to one at night is our favorite period for reading; the bedside table holds a varied assortment, drawn from rental collections or from the libraries of our wealthier colleagues.

Like the crossword puzzle, ours is a game which must be played alone; yet on the other hand, as in chess, the antagonists are really two, for the detective story is a battle royal between the author and the reader, and the great glory of the contemporary form is that we both accept it as such. How their eyes must twinkle — those creators of heroes and villains — as they set out their pieces before the game begins. They are the only authors, we must believe, who to-day find fun in writing. As in all other games, much depends upon the opening move, the significance of which each expert fully understands. We have our favorite openings, to be sure, though we recognize all the traditional ones. The familiar scene in the oak-paneled library, the white-haired man sprawling upon his desk, two glasses beside him, the electric light still burning — it is for us photographically real, though never realistic. We know it as a type opening in our game of chess. No detective quicker than we to be on the watch for clues: the torn letter, the soiled blotter, the burned paper on the hearth, the screen moved askew, particularly the book out of place on the shelves — if our author is an expert, each of these has had its meaning to him, and must to us. Or there is that other familiar opening move — the body discovered in a place far from alt human haunts (this year tending to be fished up in a basket or packing case from the depths of the sea). There is no limitation to the number of places in which murder may be committed; the very spot a real criminal would most surely avoid becomes for us a glorious experiment. W have had more than one murder on a golf links; no less than three of the season’s favorites occur on a train — a device more customary in the English carriages than in American cars, though we still remember loyally The Man in Lower Ten.

As the game proceeds, there are countless other signals which we know and watch for. The move of your opponent and his discard are as important here as ever in bridge or chess. We learn new moves and tricks at every game. We can distinguish with deadly precision among tobaccos we have never seen; let but a character casually be caught smoking an exotic cigarette in a yellowish paper, and we have our eye upon him till the end. You cannot fool us with the obvious tricks of a decade ago — and what scorn we heap upon an amateur who attempts to write for us, knowing far less of technique than we know ourselves. We are aware that finger prints may be forged; we can tell you more accurately than many a scientist what will happen to your footprints if you try to walk backward, if you are wearing borrowed shoes, or if you insist on carrying through the garden the corpse of the gentleman you have recently killed. We can tell you the exact angle at which your body will hang if you commit suicide with your silk stockings. We can detect with unerring precision whether the body found by the railroad tracks is that of a man killed by accident or murdered before the train passed. We can distinguish with more deadly accuracy than your hairdresser whether your hair is dyed, whether its wave is permanent or real.

Modern inventions are daily making our task more difficult. We have long been familiar with the dictaphone as a device for securing an alibi. We are not fooled by photographic evidence, which we know may have been faked. But the radio and the wireless, and particularly the airplane, give us pause. We used to know, as well as Bradshaw, the exact time of departure of every train in the British Isles, and the length of every journey in the United States. We know the location of every public airport in three countries; but the growing tendency toward private ownership of aircraft occasionally causes us trouble in our computations.

On the whole, we incline to deprecate the use of utopian devices on the part of our authors — the death ray, the drug which produces indefinite hypnosis, the fourth dimension. We dislike as a group the unfair use of amnesia and aphasia, just as we dislike the subconscious. Being the fairest-minded of all readers, we demand that our characters be given every chance, and we feel it is not cricket, if they are forced to work against undue psychological influence. We demand of our authors fair play; and for the most part we get it in full measure. Gone are the days of the identical twin, the long-lost brother from Australia. Gone for the most part is the trick ending— though over the last pages of Roger Ackroyd we divide into two passionate camps. My own party insists that that is not a trick ending in which every single thread has been put into our hands, every device has been a familiar one. Regretfully we acknowledge that, once used, that ending can never be employed again; nevertheless, the novel remains to us a classic, one of the few that ever completely fooled us.

And as we grow in knowledge and experience, it is becoming increasingly hard to fool us. It is seldom, indeed, that we do not know the identity of the murderer long before he is taken into custody. But if you think that such foreknowledge spoils the interest, you do not understand the new science. In that grimly contested battle of wits, it is inevitable that we should guess, unless the author is far more skilled than we. But once the decision is fairly certain in our minds, we have the added pleasure of watching the author’s technique, of checking those passages in which he is trying to send us off the track. Just as he tries his best (and less than his best we will not have) to deceive us, so we do our best to catch him out. In this new game, both scrupulously observe the rules, but both of us know the rules so well that we take delight in reading each other’s signals. 1 he burden which the connoisseur is laying upon the writers of detective fict ion to-day is a heavy one; but gallantly the best of them are accepting the challenge. This very interaction of specialized authors and readers in a new and international game is producing some of the cleverest technique in fiction to-day, and is developing in that fiction some remarkably interesting characteristics.

It is forcing upon the author a complete objectivity and impersonality in the handling of his material, which in l lie past has been peculiar to the highest art. I have suggested that t his lack of subjectivity constitutes the chief appeal of the detective novel to its academic readers to-day. From the self-consciousness of youthful writers, who, having psychoanalyzed themselves, would seek to persuade us also of the astounding discovery that we are much like other men, we turn to breathe the purer air serene of complete impassivity, forced upon authors by the exigencies of the situation. One false step, and the enemy is ours. Let the author for a moment suggest a personal reaction, a sentimental affection for his character, and we have him on the hip. There is no group of readers so quick to catch a false cadence in an author’s voice. And this requirement is having another effect upon technique. The author must weigh and balance all his characters; he cannot have a single unnecessary one; he cannot introduce a servant whom we will not scan sharply. The simplest action, the slightest gesture, is pregnant with meaning. He knows it, and so do we.

Very different, this insistence upon selection, from the all-inclusiveness of a Ulysses. The author is forced every moment to be alert, on guard; nothing can be left to chance, no unnecessary comments introduced. In this form of contemporary literature alone, ungoverned emotional reactions are fatal. Hence the pure detective story to-day is never — and what a relief! — a love story. If the love element is introduced at all, — the connoisseur prefers that it be omitted, — it must be distinctly subordinated, for to make your hero and your heroine sympathetic enough to permit their love story is at once to free them from the list of possible suspects. And in the pure detective story, as in that grimmest of legal theories, every man and woman is guilty until he has proved himself innocent. Our detective story has thus returned to-day to a welcome insistence that love between the sexes is not. the only possible motif for fiction: jealousy, hatred, greed, anger, loyalty, friendship, parental affection — all these are our themes. No longer is the wellspring of man’s conduct to be found only in the instinct of sex.

And, indeed, this change of emphasis is producing a curious effect upon the treatment of women in the detective novel. Men characters are always in the majority; the detective story, indeed, is primarily a man’s novel. Many women dislike it heartily, or at best accept it as a device to while away hours on the train. And while we do all honor to the three or four women who have written surpassingly good detective stories of the purest type, we must grant candidly that the great bulk of our detective stories to-day are being written by men — again, perhaps, because of their escape from a school of fiction which is becoming too largely feminized. It is noticeable also that the women characters in these contemporary stories are no longer inevitably sympathetic. More than once the victim is a woman; and even here, where our authors might become sentimental, we notice their impassivity. For in the great majority of cases the victim in a murder story is one who richly deserved to die. One or two authors have experimented with the woman detective, but for the most part with little success. Apart from minor characters, the two important roles in the detective story for women are, alliteratively enough, victim and villainess. With the changing standards of sentimentality, there is no longer any assurance that a woman character is not the murderer. Time was when we could dismiss women with a wave of the hand; but all of us think of at least four contemporary heroines, three of them young and beautiful, who in the end turn out to be cold and calculating murderers. Inevitably, too, we recall the more subtle ending of The Bellamy Trial. Whatever may be the sentimental reaction of modern judges and juries in our courts of law, in the high tribunal of the detective story women are no longer sacred.

A high tribunal it is. Earlier, I suggested that our revolt was from a smart and easy pessimism, which interprets the universe in terms of relativity and purposelessness, our return to an older and more primitive conception of the cosmic order. Here lies, I believe, the really unique contribution of the detective story to contemporary ethics. With the engaging paradox of the old lady in Punch, who sought through shelves of psychological literature for ‘a nice love story — without any sex,’ we weary academics seek refreshment in a highly moral murder. Perhaps we are protesting against a conception of the universe as governed — if governed at all — by chance, by haphazard circumstance; against a theory which interprets the way of life as like the river in the ‘Vision of Mirza,’ the bridge of San Luis Rey; against a conception of men and women as purposeless, aimless, impotent; against a theory of the world as wandering, devoid of purpose and meaning, in unlimited space. In our detective stories we find with relief a return to an older ethics and metaphysics: an Hebraic insistence upon justice as the measure of all things — an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth; a Greek feeling of inevitability, for man as the victim of circumstances and fate, to be sure, but a fate brought upon him by his own carelessness, his own ignorance, or his own choice; a Calvinistic insistence, if you will, upon destiny, but a Calvinistic belief also in the need for tense and constant activity on the part of man; last of all, a scientific insistence upon the inevitable operation of cause and effect. For never, in the just world of the detective story, does the murderer go undetected; never does justice fail in the end. No matter how charming, how lovable, the murderer, or how justifiable the killing, there is no escaping the implacable avenging Nemesis of our modern detective, Fury and Fate in one.

To be sure, we will not condemn our charming murderer to the gallows, for we are artists as well as moralists. We will allow the debonair, the charming rogue one final gallant moment — the sudden spurt of the match’s flame as, for the last time, he lights his cigarette with that nonchalance we know so well. Do we not realize as well as he that that last cigarette is the one all well-trained murderers carry constantly for this purpose? We allow the murderess the reward of her cleverness — the last swift motion as the cyanide reaches her lips or the knife her heart. Yet the life must be spent for the life. Like the Greek dramatist, we excuse neither ignorance nor carelessness. No matter how great the personality, how masterful the mind, by one single slip he is hoist with his own petard. By fate or predestination, — what you will, — the murderer is from the beginning condemned to his end; his election is sealed. Not for a moment does our neo-Calvinistic justice permit him to go down to punishment without an intense struggle to escape the consequence of his act. But our science and our theology, our ethics and our metaphysics, are based upon a belief in implacable justice, in the orderly operation of cause and effect, in a universe governed by order, founded on eternal and immutable law.

III

Perhaps it is for this reason that the most persistent readers of detective literature to-day are the philosophers and the scientists who were bred under an older system of belief. It may be that their revolt from a changing universe, without standard and without order, is a return to a simpler causality under which they are more at home. They alone can tell. One thing more, however, I may add to our apologia. What effect this addiction to detective literature is having without the college world I cannot pretend to say; another must speak for its influence upon the life of the capitalist, the physician, the president-elect. But I dare challenge the academic critics to say that in the field of scholarship it is not making for a new vitality. After all, what essential difference is there between the technique of the detective tracking his quarry through Europe and that of the historian tracking his fact, the philosopher his idea, down the ages? Watch the behavior of your professor for but an hour, and you know him for what he is. Do his eyes sparkle, his cheeks flush, as he pursues his idea, forgetting his class, forgetting his audience, as he leaps from historical thumb mark to ethical footprint, from cigarette stub to empty glass? If so, he’s the man for your money. In the long conversation which follows, though yon begin with the quantum theory or the influence of Plato, you will end with Dr. Thorndyke or Hercules Poirot.

And if you come to compare the methods by which the scientist or the philosopher has reached his conclusions, you will find that they are merely those of his favorite detective. Only two methods are open to him, as to them. He may work by the Baconian method of Scotland Yard: he may laboriously and carefully accumulate all possible clues, passing over nothing as too insignificant, filling his little boxes and envelopes with all that comes his way, making no hypothesis, anticipating no conclusion, believing the man innocent until he can prove him guilty. Here he finds a single thread, there a grain of rice dropped in a drawingroom; here he measures a footprint, there he photographs a thumb mark. His loot finally collected, he of Scotland Yard will select the ‘dominant clue,’ and that he will follow with grim persistence until the end. Weary but victorious, he stands at last outside the prison to which he has condemned his idea, and listens to the passing bell. That is one method. But if he is of the opposite nature, he will follow the method of ‘intuition,’ upon which the detective bureaus of the country of Descartes have based their work. To him the torn cigarette and the discarded blotter are of little importance; he leaves such things for his indefatigable rivals of Scotland Yard. Tucked away behind the rose bushes in the garden maze, he devotes himself to thought. Having, like his great predecessor, thought away all else in the universe, nothing remains but the culprit. By strength of logic alone, he has reconstituted the universe, and in his proper place has set the villain of the piece.

Yes, those are the only two methods, both in scholarship and in the pursuit of criminals. For, after all, scholars are, in the end, only the detectives of thoughts. The canvas is vaster, the search more extensive; the ‘case’ takes, not a few weeks, but a lifetime. Yet, in the end, method and conclusion are the same. Evening after evening, throughout the length and breadth of the country, lights burn longer and longer in academic studies, and philosophers, scientists, historians, settle down with sighs of content to the latest and most lurid murder tale. Yet the professorial reader, pursuing with eager interest the exploits of Dr. Thorndyke or of Colonel Gore, is not, in the last analysis, escaping from his repressions; is not even consciously returning from the present to the past; but is merely carrying over to another medium the fun of the chase, the ardor of the pursuit, which makes his life a long and eager and active quest, from which he would not willingly accept release.