that he had the genius of a great artist; here we have the possibility realized, the convincing proof of accomplished work. Moll Flanders is in some respects superior as a novel.  Moll is a much more complicated character than the simple, open-minded, manly mariner of York; a strangely mixed compound of craft and impulse, selfishness and generosity—­in short, a thoroughly bad woman, made bad by circumstances.  In tracing the vigilant resolution with which she plays upon human weakness, the spasms of compunction which shoot across her wily designs, the selfish afterthoughts which paralyse her generous impulses, her fits of dare-devil courage and uncontrollable panic, and the steady current of good-humoured satisfaction with herself which makes her chuckle equally over mishaps and successes, Defoe has gone much more deeply into the springs of action, and sketched a much richer page in the natural history of his species than in Robinson Crusoe. True, it is a more repulsive page, but that is not the only reason why it has fallen into comparative oblivion, and exists now only as a parasite upon the more popular work.  It is not equally well constructed for the struggle of existence among books.  No book can live for ever which is not firmly organized round some central principle of life, and that principle in itself imperishable.  It must have a heart and members; the members must be soundly compacted and the heart superior to decay.  Compared with Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders is only a string of diverting incidents, the lowest type of book organism, very brilliant while it is fresh and new, but not qualified to survive competitors for the world’s interest.  There is no unique creative purpose in it to bind the whole together; it might be cut into pieces, each capable of wriggling amusingly by itself.  The gradual corruption of the heroine’s virtue, which is the encompassing scheme of the tale, is too thin as well as too common an artistic envelope; the incidents burst through it at so many points that it becomes a shapeless mass.  But in Robinson Crusoe we have real growth from a vigorous germ.  The central idea round which the tale is organized, the position of a man cast ashore on a desert island, abandoned to his own resources, suddenly shot beyond help or counsel from his fellow-creatures, is one that must live as long as the uncertainty of human life.

The germ of Robinson Crusoe, the actual experience of Alexander Selkirk, went floating about for several years, and more than one artist dallied with it, till it finally settled and took root in the mind of the one man of his generation most capable of giving it a home and working out its artistic possibilities.  Defoe was the only man of letters in his time who might have been thrown on a desert island without finding himself at a loss what to do.  The art required for developing the position in imagination was not of a complicated kind, and yet it is one of