of deliberate genius, or the accidental stroke of a hack who fell upon a
golden suggestion in the account of Alexander Selkirk and increased
its value ten thousand fold by an unintentional but rather perfect
marshaling of incidents in order, and by a slovenly ignorance of
character treatment that enhanced the interest to perfect intensity?
This question may be discussed without undervaluing the book, the
extraordinary merit of which is shown in the fact that, while its idea
has been paraphrased, it has never been equalled. The "Swiss Family
Robinson," the "Schonberg-Cotta Family" for children are full of merit
and far better and more carefully written, but there are only the desert
island and the ingenious shifts introduced. Charles Reade in "Hard
Cash," Mr. Mallock in his "Nineteenth Century Romance," Clark Russel in
"Marooned," and Mayne Reid, besides others, have used the same theater.
But only in that one great book is the theater used to display the
simple, yearning, natural, resolute, yet doubting, soul and heart of man
in profound solitude, awaiting in armed terror, but not without purpose,
the unknown and masked intentions of nature and savagery. It seems
to me--and I have been tied to Crusoe's chariot wheels for a dozen
readings, I suppose--that it is the pressing in upon your emotions of
the immensity of the great castaway's solitude, in which he appears like
some tremendous Job of abandonment, fighting an unseen world, which is
the innate note of its power.

* * * * *

The very moment Friday becomes a loyal subject, the suspense relaxes
into pleased interest, and after Friday's funny father and the Spaniard
and others appear it becomes a common book. As for the second part of
the adventures I do not believe any matured man ever read it a second
time unless for curious or literary purposes. If he did he must be one