Word: thackeray
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Dates: during 1900-1909
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...place for students. Appropriately preceding Mr. Hurlbut's article are three inspiring verses "To Harvard College," by Dean Brigg. The only other contributions in this number, except for a sonnet and a short poem, are part of the Bowdoin Prize Essay for 1900-01, which is a comparison of Thackeray's "Vanity Fair" with the play "Becky Sharp," and an unoriginal story called "Sailor Jack's First Voyage...
With a keen eye for situtation and a good judgment for details, Mr. Mitchell builds up a very well constructed play; but in conception and treatment of character he often fails so notably that his drama loses much of its ethical and aesthetic value. Becky, in particular, whom Thackeray made a perfectly animate literary creation, as far beyond analysis as a living woman, becomes in the play a bundle of catalogued qualities tied together with a cord...
...back into the sunny, sleepy commonplace of average existence. The novel, on the other hand, leaves one with a profound realization of its tragedy, --"played out." Its lesson is that human beings must ultimately go somewhere beyond Vanity Fair for lasting happiness. Without changing the motley for the gown, Thackeray has preached the world a great moral truth. But Mr. Mitchell leaves Becky so well off that one rather sympathizes with her misdemeanors...
...battle. On the whole the short story offers greater opportunities for a young writer than the novel. In the short story one may be didactic and yet not wearisome, and then the short story can pose problems and leave them unanswered. Now the novelists George Sand Dickens and Thackeray not only stated problems, but also answered them. The modern method of the short story, however, is to treat the matter in such an ambiguous manner, that two opposing answers may be possible. Again, a short story writer always asks his readers to take a great deal for granted, which...
...Vanity Fair" was Thackeray's first great success. In truthful depiction and now in satire he had succeeded; he was then to enter, as a novelist, the third stage of his literary development. "Fun is good, truth is better, and love is best of all" he once wrote, and he was about to take up that kind of writing which mirrors the moral ideals of the world, the law of which is love. If "Vanity Fair" was Thackeray's most powerful book, "Henry Esmond" was of all his works the best and noblest. Its charm does...