Collected works > Edinburgh edition, 1894-98 - Works of Robert Louis Stevenson > Volume 1, 1894 - Miscellanies, Volume I

MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS
typical incidents, epically conceived, fitly embodying
a crisis. Or again look at Thackeray. If Rawdon
Crawley's blow were not delivered, Vanity Fair
would cease to be a work of art. That scene is the
chief ganglion of the tale ; and the discharge of
energy from Rawdon 's fist is the reward and conso-
lation of the reader. The end of Esmond is a yet
wider excursion from the author's customary fields ;
the scene at Castlewood is pure Dumas ; the great
and wily English borrower has here borrowed from
the great, unblushing French thief; as usual, he has
borrowed admirably well, and the breaking of the
sword rounds off the best of all his books with a
manly, martial note. But perhaps nothing can more
strongly illustrate the necessity for marking incident
than to compare the living fame of Robinson Crusoe
with the discredit of Clarissa Harlox^e. Clarissa is
a book of a far more startling import, worked out,
on a great canvas, with inimitable courage and un-
flagging art. It contains wit, character, passion, plot,
conversations full of spirit and insight, letters spark-
ling with unstrained humanity ; and if the death of
the heroine be somewhat frigid and artificial, the last
days of the hero strike the only note of what we now
call Byronism, between the Elizabethans and Byron
himself. And yet a little story of a shipwrecked
sailor, with not a tenth part of the style nor a
thousandth part of the wisdom, exploring none of
the arcana of humanity and deprived of the perennial
interest of love, goes on from edition to edition, ever
young, while Clarissa lies upon the shelves unread,
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