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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Memories and Portraits by Robert Louis Stevenson: vary his method and change the point of attack. That which was in
one case an excellence, will become a defect in another; what was
the making of one book, will in the next be impertinent or dull.
First each novel, and then each class of novels, exists by and for
itself. I will take, for instance, three main classes, which are
fairly distinct: first, the novel of adventure, which appeals to
certain almost sensual and quite illogical tendencies in man;
second, the novel of character, which appeals to our intellectual
appreciation of man's foibles and mingled and inconstant motives;
and third, the dramatic novel, which deals with the same stuff as
the serious theatre, and appeals to our emotional nature and moral
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