BOYS OF THACKERAY.

Dominion, Volume 4, Issue 1216, 26 August 1911, Page 11

BOYS OF THACKERAY.

To ask -who has created tho most vital I and. actual boys in fiction would be to onsuro a difference of opinion, writes Mr. Rowland Grey in tho "Fortnightly Review." David Copperfield alons"would Rive Dickens a strong case. The "Fat Boy" might claim that few celebrities have ever said so little and been quoted so oftcia as he is. Tom Brown is known to hold his own, and has, somewhat unexpectedly, caught the fancy of the rising generation in France and Switzerland. Then there are the boys of Meredith, a solid, beef-eating phalanx, playing cricket _ admirably.- Harry Richmond, with his enchanted golden age of wild adventure; Richard Feveral, wandering in fields fragrant- with meadow-sweet at tho outset of his soul-moving career; lnoro than all, delightful Crossjay "Pattern, of tho magnificent appetite and tho fine, chivalrous ■ instincts. Yet, after all, Thackeray has introduced us to the largest number of entirely natural boys—enough to have holf-iilled "Grey-friars" or the ''Slaughter House," as ho indifferently names the old school wo are sometimes uncertain/whether he loved or hated most. A brief quotation from tho "Roundabout Papers" best explains tho real reason of his invariable success:—"lf tho gods would give mo tho desiro of my heart, I should be able to write a story which tho boys would relish- for tho next few dozen centuries. Tho boy-critic loves the story; grown up, he loves tho author who wrote the story. Hence tho kindly tie .between writer, and reader." An especial tenderness'for boys', clearly dictated these words to this great man who had no son.

He never caricatured "his boys; ho never idealised them. He set them • plainly before us with judgment unbiased. Has any other classical novelist invariably begun each ot his masterpieces with such vivid pictures of the boyhood with which Thackeray was so evidently in love.? Surely there is a special pathos in the fact that the unfinished story ot "Denis Dnval," like that of "Peter Pan," was a boy who never grew up. How poor are the mawkish" affectations of "Petit Chose," of the - hero of Loti's almost repellant "Roman d'un Enfant," contrasted with blue-eyed, tart-loving Clivo Neweombe; hump-backed "J.J."; Pendennis, brave and simple for all his young conceit? Or with those dashing twain brothers in Virginia, or even that irresistible small rascal, Barry Lyndon. Or little, lonely Harry Esmond, unjustly shadowed by the blackness of the bar sinister. Each is limned with loving care and minute detail; each stands unmistakably before us "in his habit as he lived."