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