Shorter Notices
The Machiavellians. By James Burnham. (Putnam. 7s. 6d.)
To wish that your enemy had written a book may have been enough in Old Testament days, but today how much better to wish that
he had written two books! For one temporarily important book may be written by a very mediocre but, for that very reason, repre- sentative writer. Such a book was Mr. Bumham's The Managerial
Revolution. It supplied a plausible answer to the doubts and fears— and hopes—of a lot of people. This is a sequel. " Those familiar with The Managerial Revolution will find that in this new book the author brings to the surfarx many of the underlying principles upon which the theory of the managerial revolution was based, and at the same time clarifies and adds to his earlier conclusions." So the blurb. The result is this odd, complacent, dull, inaccurate and ill- written hotch-potch of Sorel, Pareto, Gaetano Mosca, Michels, with Machiavelli dragged in from time to time. There is something comic, in itself, in this solemn panegyric of realism, of knowing what the world is really like, written by a don about dons. What were all these masters of them that know doing? What is Mr. Burnham about? Why give away the secret of empire? Why not use it? To have realism preached by Hitler or Stalin or Roosevelt is one thing, but to have it preached with such self-admiration by Professor Burnham is another. Count Mosca, even in fiction, is 3 more interesting character than Gaetano Mosca. There is such a thing as bovaryism; this is stendhalism. Alas! Stendhal was a great artist and Professor Burnham is not. So much nonsense is talked today, so much optimistic self-deception is greeted as wisdom, that Mr. Burnham cannot help making some real points. But until he had tried, one would have said it was impossible to make of so many God-given bulls-eyes, so many near misses.
The Motherly and Auspicious. By Maurice Collis. (Faber and Faber 12s. 6d.) THE Empress Tze Hsi was probably one of the most disastrous rulers ever to afflict the realm of China. Cruel without foresight,
extravagant without taste, corrupt yet muddle-headed, she com- mitted the Empire into the hands of seedy, uneducated eunuchs, upset the great dynastic traditions of the Ch'ing house, and ham- strung the administrative system just when its .strength was to be tested by the encroachments of the Western Barbarism.
That Tze Hsi won and maintained her power by murder and usurpation is established beyond reasonable doubt. But some ex- perience in the quagmire of recent Chinese history, some painful knowledge of how sparingly and inaccurately the paths through the quagmire are marked, make us hesitate to accept as the ultimate gospel the Chinese authorities on which Mr. Collis so lavishly and lightheartedly draws. Particularly do we feel suspicious of his T'ung Chih sequences. The youth's brief, enigmatic reign cannot, we believe, be reduced to a formula so simple as that designed by Mr. Collis. These however are technical objections. More serious is Mr. Collis' failure to illuminate the psychology of Tze Hsi. She is merely a monstrous figure whose dark schemes invariably triumph ; with Li Lien-ying, her confidential eunuch-assassin, she moves in the sulphurous atmosphere of a Victorian melodrama—a sort of Lady Sweeney Todd of Peking. Nevertheless, for all its rather old-fashioned air, the play is often effective ; it should please those who liked Lady Precious Stream, and who would learn some- thing of modern Chinese history from tomes less imposing than the works of Messrs. Backhouse and Bland.
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