Elizabeth*
She Was Unkind
The Sayings:
I am more afraid of making a fault in my Latin than of the Kings of Spain, France, Scotland, the whole house of Guise, and all of their confederates.
When people arrive at my age , they take all they can get with both hands, and only give with the little finger.
(To the Earl of Arundel, by way of thanks for his magnificent hospitality, just after his father had been beheaded, and while he planned flight.) Consider yourself a prisoner in your own house.
(To Irishmen who had tortured a prisoner by pouring hot rosin into his boots.) I accept in good part your careful travail and greatly commend your doings.
(To a delegation of 18 tailors.) Good morning, gentlemen both.
(On hearing that the Pope had a high opinion of her ability.) I think he and I should get married!
(Of Bacon, noting his ample fore-head.) My lord Bacon's soul lodgeth well.
(To Burghley, gouty.) My lord, we make use of you, not for your bad legs, but for your good head.
(To officials at King's, Cambridge, after a visit.) If there were greater provision of beer and ale, I should re-maim until Friday 1
Though I am not imperial, and Elizabeth may not deserve it, the Queen of England will easily deserve to have an emperor's son to marry.
I would rather be a beggar and single, than a queen and married.
I should call the wedding-ring the yoke-ring.
(Of certain Catholics.) Those who appear the most sanctified are the worst.
(To the Dean of St. Paul's, from her Pew.) Leave that ungodly digression, and return to your text!
Get out! What the laws cannot do to his head my authority will do!
(To Francis Bacon.) Bacon, how can the magistrate maintain his authority, if the man be despised?
(To one who had run off to the wars.) Serve me so once more and I will lay you fast enough for running!
(To Duke d'Alengon.) For you are brother to the King of France, who is childless, and I am so advanced in years that you can hardly hope to have a child by me, and my doctors warn me that if I have a child I shall die in childbed, and that is out of the question. This apart, I may live yet so many years that if after my death you married again you might not be able to beget children.
If Elizabeth is to live, Mary must die.
(To Essex, as she boxed his ears.) Go and be hanged! [He was.]
Pho, Williams, how your boots stink!
I was never beautiful, but I had the reputation of it, 30 years ago.
The name of a successor is like the tolling of my own death-bell!
(To Burghley.) I have been strong enough to lift you out of the dirt, and I am still strong enough to cast you down again.
(Several days before her death.) I wish not to live any longer but desire to die.
(Her--presumably--last words. To the Archbishop of Canterbury, who had been recalling her great accomplishments.) My lord, the crown which I have borne so long has given enough of vanity in my time. I beseech you not to augment it in this hour when I am so near my death.
The Significance. Mr. Chamberlin regards the Queen as a genius, as "not a Crown but a person." "The Western World," says he, in a previous work, "has never seen such an absolute monarch." He does not, unfortunately, stop short of idolatry. It will take a more analytic and less biased intelligence than his to sort out the "Sayings," and to build for us from them a real conception of Elizabeth.
F. Scott Fitzgerald He Is Kindly
The other evening at a dancing club a young man in a gray suit, soft shirt, loosely tied scarf, shook his tousled yellow hair engagingly, introduced me to the beautiful lady with whom he was dancing and sat down. They were Mr. and Mrs. F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Scott seems to have changed not one whit from the first time I met him at Princeton, when he was an eager undergraduate bent upon becoming a great author. He is still eager. He is still bent upon becoming a great author. He is at work now on a novel which his wife assures me is far far better than either This Side of Paradise or The Beautiful, and Damned, but like most of our younger novelists he finds it imperative to produce a certain number of short stories to make the wheels go around. That The Vegetable, his play, did not receive a Manhattan presentation seems to have disappointed rather than discouraged him. He is still eminently lighthearted, charmingly outrageous-- the complete playboy.
I have always considered him the most brilliant of our younger novelists. No one of them can touch his; glowing bitterness, his style, nor the superb quality of his satire. He has yet to fuse them in a novel with carefulness of conception and profound development of character. He can become almost any kind of writer that his peculiarly restless temperament will allow.
Born in St. Paul, he attended Princeton, served in the Army, wrote his first novel in a training camp, achieved fame and fortune, married a Southern girl, has a child and lives in Great Neck, L. I. At heart, he is one of the kindliest of the younger writers. Artistry means a great deal to F. Scott Fitzgerald--and into his own best work he pours a real torrent of artistic endeavor. This he demands in the work of others, and when he does not find it he criticizes with passionate earnestness. I have known him, after reading a young fellow-novelist's book, to take what must have been hours of time to write him a lengthy, careful and penetrating analysis.
Just what he will write in the future remains cloudy. With a firmer reputation than that of the other young people, he yet seems to me to have achieved rather less than Robert Nathan and rather more than Stephen Vincent Benet, Cyril Hume or Dorothy Speare. His coming novel should mean a definite prophecy for future work. It is to be hoped that from it will be absent the seemingly inevitable flapper. J. F.
New Books
The following estimates of books much in the public eye were made after (careful consideration of the trend of critical opinion.
THE STORM -CENTER -- Burton E. Stevenson--Dodd, Mead ($2.00). Almost anything is rather more than likely to happen in Algiers. In order to insure its vigorous occurrence, Mr. Stevenson takes at least two high-grade heroes, the same number of carefully selected villains, and projects them together among the sinister wilds of the Atlas mountains. An exchanged seat on a train, a mysterious warning, a veiled lady, a crazy archaeologist, a tangle of Moslem intrigue, all give infinite opportunity for slaughter, mystery, catastrophe. The two heroes are respectively Irish, and French; the villains are perfectly valid cinema sheiks. A capital tale for the weary commuter.
RUSTLERS' VALLEY--Clarence E. Mulford--Doubleday ($2.00). Clarence Mulford is worth 20 Zane Greys, if only because he holds no brief for his great open spaces. He does not let his watering eye wander for chapters over the mesas, nor does he shake his horny finger reproachfully at the jazzing East. He hasn't time. His heroes are always too much on the move--solving mysteries, pulling guns, cracking jokes, riding pintos, drinking redeye, winning heroines, proving that the accusations against them are (in large part) false-- anyway exaggerated. This book follows the accepted pattern. He gives you what you want if you buy a book with this title--unencumbered by vast masses of sticky sentiment. And his plots are always astonishingly novel rearrangements of the old counters.
THE INVERTED PYRAMID--Bertrand W. Sinclair--Little Brown ($2.00). Roderick Noaquay and Mary Thorne start the book off at a tender age by shooting the rapids together off Little Dent, Vancouver Island. The rest of 'the book takes Roderick and Mary through innumerable misfortunes, chiefly financial. Most of them are due to his elder brother's business acumen unfortunately not equalled by his judgment. The name of Norquay is, in danger throughout the book, but Roderick, last of the line, manages to save it after a hard fight. But he has to sell the old Norquay homestead to do it, which it took five generations of doughty Norquays to put together. Andy Hall, one of those old philosophers without whom no logging camp is complete, has a theory which explains the title, if nothing else. It isn't important. The important things are Roderick's splendid moral character and the way he applies it to business and love.
* THE SAVINGS OF QUEEN ELIZABETH-- Frederick Chamberlin--Dodd, Mead ($4.00)