Word: machiavellis
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...current historical-novel bug has bitten even Somerset Maugham. With Then and Now he leaves the 19th and 20th Centuries for the first time since his Making of a Saint (1898), retreats 400-odd years to the Italy of Cesare Borgia and Niccoló Machiavelli. Then and Now is a talky, occasionally witty costume piece about Machiavelli in love and Borgia in his glory. It is also an ironical sermon on the unchanging wonders of human nature. Novelist Maugham, now 72, denies that he preaches sermons of any kind. Said he recently: "I think it is an abuse...
...with particularly illegitimate and realistic political ideas. Quite probably he picked up some from his father, Pope Alexander VI,* who was realistic enough to shock even Renaissance Italy. Borgia made a great impression on Europe while he lasted (he died at 31). He made a greater one still on Machiavelli, who spent a few months at his headquarters, as envoy from the Signory of Florence...
Then and Now is a story built around the events of those few months. His Machiavelli is by no means the wicked Old Nick after whom the Devil himself is said to be named. He is a wary, humorous, thoughtful lecher with stomach trouble, who spends most of his free time worrying about how (and if) he is going to keep an assignation with a lady named Aurelia. During business hours he proves to be an astute, hard-working Florentine spy. He admires Borgia's ruthless audacity, but always from a diplomatic distance...
...good old ignorant days of Sherlock Holmes and Arsene Lupin, the thriller was a mild, usually non-murderous affair in which there was nothing more bestial than a hound with phosphorescent jowls. Today, when "emancipation is complete [and] Freud and Machiavelli have reached the outer suburbs," the pulp thriller is "a daydream appropriate to a totalitarian age . . . a distilled version of the modern political scene, in which such things as mass bombings of civilians . . . torture to obtain confessions . . . execution without trial . . . drownings in cesspools, systematic falsification of records and statistics . . . bribery and quislingism are normal and morally neutral, even admirable...
...Western philosophy from Thales (B.C. 640) to Philosopher Russell. It also discusses great religions (Greek polytheism, Judaism, Christianity, Mohammedanism) and a number of thinkers whom philosophers do not consider philosophers but whose thought and actions have been important to man's mind (St. Francis, St. Benedict, Karl Marx, Machiavelli, Byron). There are expositions of great books, Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding and Spinoza's Ethics, and the History is almost as full of poems as an anthology...