BOOK REVIEWS
139
He was ahead of his time in assessing the value of what are now described as "cultural relations" between countries. In spite of all the resources at his command, however, he failed to arouse any interest in concluding a commercial treaty, or to put in train a sequence of events, which, had circumstances been different, might have led to the establishment of diplomatic relations between the two greatest countries of the day in East and West to the undoubted benefit of both. In the event he came up against the extreme obscurantism of the Orient which until this twentieth century has been its own worst enemy.
Although Macartney returned to England in 1794, no wholly satisfactory edition of his Journal has previously been available in print. We now have a virtually full transcription, and where irrelevant material has been omitted, the omissions and the reasons for them have been clearly stated. Scholars will welcome the well-documented notes designed for reference, and added at the end of the book, where they cannot distract the reader's attention from the main flow of the narrative. Only the maps are something of a disappointment.
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"While keeping in mind the needs of the specialist," says Mr. Cranmer-Byng in his Preface, "I have edited this Journal in such a way that I hope the general reader will be able to enjoy it. . . . In this endeavour he has been entirely successful. Here is a work which will appeal to scholars, serve as an invaluable book of reference to present and future historians, and at the same time make entertaining reading for the layman who need possess no background knowledge of Chinese history or Anglo-Chinese relations to enjoy it to the full. Apart from its intrinsic worth, this book is an absorbing travel story. It was one of those supremely happy strokes of fortune all too rare in the unfolding of human affairs—that so able a man, gifted with incisive judgment and the power of descriptive writing, should visit China at the end of the finest hour in her long dynastic history.
R. E. LAWRY.