Bowdoin Prize Essays.

The successful Bowdoin Prize Essays were read in Harvard 1 last night.

R. M. Greene '02 read his essay on "Vanity Fair and Becky Sharp."--It was in part as follows:

In any comparison of "Vanity Fair" with "Becky Sharp," it must be remembered that one is the work of a great dramatist, the other of a minor playwright. At the outset it is manifest that the novel must be radically altered in plot before it can be put on the stage. It needs, as playwrights say, a "situation."

Mr. Mitchell, therefore, selects Becky Sharp as the central figure of his drama. From her life he picks out four strong "situations,"--the flight with Rawdon, the Waterloo ball, the midnight supper with Lord Steyne, and the last days at Pumpernickel,--and to the strongest of these, the third, he subordinates the rest, making each the subject of an act.

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.

In so far as this criticism is sound, it must hold also for the two works in their totality. The play ends conventionally, dropping spectators 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.

Whether or not Mr. Mitchell's success might have greater in a very difficult question, Mr. Paul Bourget goes far towards proving that the novel form is so intrinsically different from that of drama that a work once supremely well cast in one cannot be translated into the other. Undoubtedly Mr. Mitchell failed to produce a final literary masterpiece because his task was impossible. Technically the structure of his play is admirable and his selection and co-ordination of incidents is in the main wise and effective. Artistically he has made a number of good stage figures, who speak some very good lines, but in conception and portrayal his characters lack depth and fitness and fall to produce the ultimate ethical impression of those in "Vanity Fair."

In his essay on "The Rise of the Oil Monopoly," G. H. Montague '01 traces at length the reasons and conditions of the great growth of the Standard Oil Trust. The gist of his exposition may be given by quotations from the concluding pages of his essay. The Standard Oil Company, he says, raised itself to the dominant position by controlling the transportation of oil. The steps of its progress are clear. In the period from 1870 till 1874 it so availed itself of railway conditions and of its strategic situation that it secured considerable discriminations from the railroads which touched at Cleveland. During the same period, it organized a system of pipe-lines which, with several smaller systems, secured special discriminations from the railroads in 1874. In 1875, when rate wars made uncertain all the traffic upon the trunk lines and broke up the agreement among the pipe-lines, the Standard Oil Company with its pipe-lines was able to exact still greater favors from the railroads entering Cleveland, and by its superior capital, was able to absorb its weaker rivals. . . . Nothing in subsequent years has been able to undo the shrewd use, by Mr. Rockefeller and his associates, of peculiar opportunities, presented from 1865 till 1877 in the railway and refining industry."

As to the inevitability of the growth of the Standard Oil Trust, the essay summarizes thus: "Given the railway and economic conditions, the progress of the Standard Oil Company is quite inevitable, since it showed at an early time bright promise of industrial efficiency. It readily acquired, after the fashion of the period, proportionate discrimination in freight rates; by getting control through discriminations of the means of transportation, it inevitably achieved monopoly.

. . "Concerning the conditions of the progress of the Standard Oil Company, one must say: they have no rational sanction which can decide ultimate judgment; they were simply inevitable.