Mary Stuart

Mary Stuart*

The Story. Courtship, for Mary, began in the cradle. At four months she made her first conquest. Henry VIII sought her tiny hand for his infant Prince. But England was Scotland's hereditary foe; France the friend of her traditions and of the religion of the Scottish court. Mary's betrothal to the French Dauphin (Francis

II) was accomplished, he being three, she five. Franc,ois de Valois shy, timid, bilious weakling, married her at Notre Dame when she was 16. Brantome says she was more beautiful than a goddess. Ronsard du Bellay and De Maisonfleur wrote poems for her, over which she wept. She wore blue velvet, embroidered with silver lilies. A year later Franc,ois was King of France, and Mary's devoted slave; after a reign of 16 months she was a widow.

Upon her return to Scotland, Mary and her counselors formed ambitious plans for marrying her to Don Carlos, son of morose Philip of Spain, or to the Archduke of Austria, or into the royal family of France. Scotland was the backdoor to England. Queen Elizabeth was determined Mary should make no "mighty marriage," was fertile in expedients, threats, cajolery. Her Scottish Protestant counselors urged her to a decision as to Mary's marriage: "Remember how earnestly she is sought otherwyse; you see the lustiness of her boddie, you know what these thynges require . . . Loss of her time is our destruction." Elizabeth would only offer vague suggestions as to the English succession and renew her futile suggestion of Dudley, whom she had lovingly tickled under his ruff as he knelt before her to be made Baron Denbigh and Earl of Leicester.

When Elizabeth ordered Henry, Lord Darnley, back to England, hinting that she might marry him, Mary nursed him through the measles and married him herself. She was 23 years old. He was handsome, beardless--"a pretty stripling," reared by a fussily ambitious mother and a vain, weak father never to forget the contingency that if Elizabeth died childless he was heir to the English throne. Within a month Darnley had shown himself to be a selfish, inconstant, drunken roisterer, vicious and contemptible. A hired assassin could have murdered Rizzio, her Italian diplomatist, but to discredit Mary, Darnley was persuaded to have it done of his own will, at the very door of her chamber in Holyrood. "Well, ye have taken the last of me, and so, farewell," she cried to him when she recovered consciousness.

Darnley was with her when their baby (James VI) was born; thenceforth he was politically a cypher. Scottish coins bearing their joint effigy were recalled. Feigning reconciliation she tempted him from the security of his father's castle and a crowd of his own retainers. The poor fool was strangled at Kirk-o'-Field by Rizzio's murderers, whom he had betrayed and Mary had pardoned.

The opportunity was Mary's again to renew plot and counterplot for a political marriage. But, at last, she was madly in love. Her lover was the Earl of Bothwell, recently married and known to have been implicated in her husband's murder. He was broad of shoulder, stout of limb, shaggy, stern, a hawk-headed man. To yield to this passion was fatal; but she yielded, conniving in her own abduction to hasten the marriage. Sir James Melville puts it bluntly: "The queen could not but marry him, seeing that he had ravished her." She was 25.

Bitterly was the marriage rued. The whole court was witness of her unhappiness. Bothwell disdained her openly, visited his former wife, was so cruel that she threatened kill herself. Her people and her nobles united against her; she fled Edinburgh with Bothwell. With Mary beside him, his forces and the enemy ultimately came face to face at Carberry Hill. She could make terms for herself, none for him. Bothwell's outnumbered troops wavered and muttered. He waited no longer; with a hasty word to her he mounted and fled, to die an exile, in prison.

At the island castle of Loch Leven, Mary's charm brought her a rescuer, George Douglas, who loved her, and later, in an English prison, she was wooed by the Duke of Norfolk and pledged herself to him. These were the last despairing attempts of a doomed woman to regain her freedom, to save her life, to win a crown.

The Significance. Pedant, poet, playwright and teller of tales, each after his manner has dealt more or less faithfully with the tragic story of the pitiful Queen of Scots. Mr. Hume applies the scientific method; avoids the Charybdis of sentimentality and the Scylla of puritanism; achieves clarity and justice. The men who loved her were beyond counting, she had many suitors--but once only, as it seems, Mary had a love affair of her own. The others were merely scarlet threads woven into the texture of her ambition to succeed Elizabeth as England's queen and to restore the Catholic church to Britain.

The Author. Martin Hume of England brings scholarly documentation to his task. He was the official editor of the Spanish State Papers of the period (Public Record office), a careful student of all other relevant material, some of it newly accessible. He is author also of The Courtships of Queen Elizabeth, currently republished to match this volume. "Infernal Searchers"

MICROBE HUNTERS--Paul de Kruif--Harcourt, Brace ($3.50). Dr. Kruif takes a dozen bacteriologists and from a thorough knowledge of their contributions (and with perhaps as thorough knowledge of the buying public) creates of all scientists a composite dervish, solitary, crotchety, whirling now at this experiment, now at that test tube, at this insect, at that spectator.

Skillful journalese hooks headlines to the following researchers, popularizes them: Antony Leeuwenhoek, "First of the Microbe Hunters"; Lazzaro Spallanzani," "Microbes Must Have Parents"; Louis Pasteur, "Microbes Are a Menace!"; Robert Koch, "The Death Fighter"; Louis Pasteur, "And the Mad Dog"; Emile Roux and Emil August Behring "Massacre the Guinea Pigs"; Elie Metchnikoff, "The Nice Phagocytes"; Theobald Smith, "Ticks and Texas Fever"; David Bruce, "Trail of the Tsetse"; Ronald Ross and Battista Grassi, "Malaria"; Walter Reed, "In the Interest of Science--and for Humanity!"; and Paul Ehrlich, "The Magic Bullet."

There is clear-headed continuity in the ordering of the book, and also a flippant, strained use of fuzzy words. The historian sees his people motivated by eccentric ideas and insanity. The devil, by the vulgate wording, had much to do with their successes--"hellish and dastardly tests," "devilish ingenuity," "his familiar demon." "For progress, God must send us a few more infernal marvelous searchers of the kind of Robert Koch." He sees them all of a pattern and is frank: "But the stumbling strides of the microbe hunters are not made by a perfect logic, and that is the reason that I might write a grotesque, but not perfect story of their deeds."

FICTION

Snob**

The Story. Down on the lobe of the great elephant's ear that is Africa lives Mary Adams Glenn, in a farmhouse on the lonely veld below blue mountains. The farm belongs to Brand van Aardt, the slow, dependable lover of her girlhood. She lives there virtually on his charity with the amiable mediocrity whom she married instead of Brand. They have a ten-year-old boy, Jackie, and she is soon to bear again.

On the first day of this book she sends her Kaffir runner with an imperative note to fetch Brand. He takes his wife, and on the longmotor drive out from Lebanon village there is time to recall years that have passed, to puzzle over Mary's trouble, whatever it is.

They remember how Mary Adams was afflicted with malignant inferiority as a girl in provincial little Lebanon. Her father was head hawker in the public market, a loud man with a mean soul. Her mother was doting and desperately middle class. Mary was a pretty girl stricken with panic by society's failure to come running to her feet more often than it did. Her nature preened itself and craned for admiration, thus repelling it and thrusting the girl into bitter, pitiful snobbery. She grew to despise Brand, or any one, who thought well of her. Yet so determined was she to excite notice and envy that when she met a mild-mannered young English secretary in Cape Town, she invented for him a grand character, paraded him in Lebanon, married him and went to England. She sprinkled lordly names in her letters, sent money home. . . . Really, she was working in a store to make ends meet.

Brand van Aardt had fallen back on the plain little school mistress, Emma, telling her honestly she was second choice. She had accepted honestly, wanting him even that way. They had grown together, honest friends, not exalted but not unhappy. He had amassed wealth. When Mary Glenn came home with her ineffectual husband and her fraying tissue of appearances, Brand had unobtrusively put them on the farm. It was a livelihood for Elliott Glenn, who was supinely grateful. For Mary it was a refuge, but also a torment. Her snobbery remained swollen while her pretences shriveled and her beauty went.

One of her last pretences had been to make Elliott go hunting on the veld every year, as bigger men did. She could then send game to impress her friends. Even with the baby coming she had insisted he leave her to hunt. Elliott's usual hunting partner failing, she let little Jackie go.

Here is her trouble when Brand and Emma reach her in response to her summons: Elliott is days late in returning. Something has surely happened, probably to the boy. Wracked already, she is bitter with hate for Elliott when he does appear, dry-mouthed, caked with dust, to say he has lost Jackie in the trackless, beast-run hunting veld, lost him completely. There is a nightmare of searching. Mary's baby is born, prematurely but alive, in a desert railway shed. The boy is not found. Back on the farm, Mary's hatred for Elliott shades into insane belief in the boy's return, insanity that rasps into Elliott until answering hatred is aroused in him. Their lives stand stark, brutal, and he blurts out--something that overshadows his ineffectualness and her pettiness, a fact terrible enough to make them see themselves pinned together inseparably in the vise called Life.

The Significance. There is a rigid directness about this story, a dramatic intensity achieved without sensational devices, that makes it notable. Mrs. Millin's is a disciplined intelligence that can find important work close at hand and perform its task without ostentation. Her book is a sort of Main Street in the Greek manner. There is severity, clarity, grave pity.

The Author. Sarah Gertrude Millin has always lived in South Africa. She is the Jewish wife of a Johannesburg barrister. She writes for South African papers, including the Cape Times, whose literary column is by her; also for John Middleton Hurry's very earnest and intelligent Adelphi, in London. The Jordans was her first widely read work. Last year, God's Stepchildren, a study in miscegenation worked out like an inexorable chapter from the Old Testament, was very highly praised. Sequel

ROSA--Knud Hamsun--Knopf ($2.50). The chronicles of Sirilund fishing village are still-life sketches beside Hunger and Segelfoss Town and Growth of the Soil. But Hamsun, pride of Norway, is a man to read thoroughly. This sequel to Benoni is named for Rosa because it is told in the first person by a young student that came to Sirilund just after her divorce was arranged, just before she married Benoni Hartvigsen. He is homely and humble, this student, and loves Rosa inevitably. Is she not the only beautiful thing in that village of drying fish and stuffy sitting rooms? But the centre of gravity is, as always, Trader Mack. The return of his tall, erotic daughter from Denmark, the brilliant suicide of Rosa's first husband, the burial of his great featherbed bath-tub-- none of these shakes the hold of Mack, the strong silent man, over the fumblers about him. Honest British

THE HOUNDS OP SPRING--Sylvia Thompson--Little, Brown ($2). The bird's-eye view of Miss Thompson's novel is promising. A girl's true love goes to war and is reported dead. Desolate and a bit selfish, she marries with half a heart. Then the grave--which was a living one, a prison camp--gives up its dead. She finds it in her to leave husband and child, to conclude, on a veranda in Fiesole, that she was wise to relight her candle after fate had snuffed it. The story is straightforwardly written out, with honest British cliches of word, action and philosophy. It is another young woman's (Miss Thompson is 24) post-bellum retort. It will please many, but to this reviewer the younger characters seem wooden things from the hand of a very self-conscious creator. Not so the elders--Edgar Renner, an anglicized Viennese, and his wife, a sweetly arrogant English girl--with whom Miss Thompson seems more at ease. THE PENTON PRESS CO., CLEVELAND

*THE LOVE AFFAIRS OF MARY QUEEN OF SCOTS--A Political History--Martin Hume--Brentano (54).

**MARY GLENN--Sarah Gertrude Millin--Boni & Liveright ($2).