Modern Italy
A History of Italy, 1871-1915. By Benedetto Croce. Translated THESE two histories of Modern Italy form an illuminating
complement one of the other. Benedetto Croce's canvas is the narrower, since he carries his story only from the attain- ment of unity in 1870 to the outbreak of war in 1915 ; but his
analysis of the movement of thought and ideas that underlay the current of events is his peculiar contribution, and places his book on a higher level—though it will probably appeal to fewer readers—than Signor Villari's very able survey of a longer period. Croce brings to his picture of the age succeeding 1870 all the resources of a mind steeped in knowledge of the
politics and persons, the social and moral conditions of the time, as well as the acumen of the trained philosophic thinker.
His method is rather that of the survey than the chronicle ; but he does not neglect events, and while his style is usually sober, he can occasionally rise to a restrained and excellent eloquence. He is fortunate, too, in having found as his trans- lator so accomplished a writer and Italian scholar as Miss Ady.
This period of the " workaday prose " succeeding the poetry of the Risorgimento is now beginning to receive the attention that it deserves in England, for it presents the unique spectacle of a nation struggling, after nominal unity has been attained, to achieve in a few years all those colossal tasks of State- building which were already a matter of course in the more settled northern countries. The labours confronting the men of the 'seventies and 'eighties in Italy were sufficient to daunt all but the stoutest hearts, and since the generation of Italian Greathearts had almost passed away with the Entry into Rome, or at any rate with the fall of the Right in 1876, it was no wonder that disillusionment and scepticism began to reign when the golden age so often prophesied did not materialize.
Croce traces the retreat of the older idealism before the worship of German influence in science and all the material side of life, while Herbert Spencer and the Positivists reigned for a time and only increased the tendency towards pessimism and a cynical self-distrust.
Ile sees no real awakening in Italian life until the ferment
caused by the reception of Marxian Socialism, " which pro- duced a whole complex of results, correcting, restoring, renewing, deepening and giving a new content to Italian culture. That culture, which had been flaccid and inverte- brate, now had the support of a framework, which, however provisional, did at least give it solidity. It could not give back to Italy the spirit of romanticism, idealism, and the Risorgi- mento, because there is no going back to the past ; but it did
raise her from the depths to which she had sunk when the spiritual force of her heroic age had spent itself." And, on the political side, after a masterly account of the Crispi period—his violences and failures, the tragedy of Abyssinia, the tragedy of his own lonely death--our historian passes to the more hopeful decade, after the turn of the century, when Socialism and Liberalism had begun to co-operate. In these
days, when it is the fashion to ascribe all the later evils of Italian Parliamentary life to the too sagacious manipulations of Giolitti, it is well to be reminded of the real services that that shrewd politician rendered to his country in the period of his long ascendancy. It may be too true that he corrupted the machine of government while he was using it, but at least he had the vision to perceive the elementary needs of his country, and by hard work, good finance, and a certain broad sense of the necessities of things to push her on along the path of progress. Croce on the whole defends the Libyan War, but as he approaches the crisis of 1914••15 his tone grows more detached, and the account he gives of the motives animating Neutralists and Interventionists approaches nearer to impar- tiality than anything we have yet seen. A delicate irony flickers through his reference to the overriding of Parliament by the will of the people in May, 1915. " At the time," writes our philosopher, " few were impressed, and those not deeply, by this failure in the respect due to the constitutional repre- sentatives of the nation ; while the great step that had been taken, and the whirlwind of war that followed, soon caused it to be forgotten. But they could not alter the fact that it had happened." This passage occurs on the last page of
Croce's volume, leaving the reader with an appetite for more, but he is somewhat sternly told that " the story of the part which Italy played in the War and of what befell her after it does not belong to this history. It is perhaps too early as yet for it to belong to anything which can properly be called history."
Such a dictum would leave the greater part of Sig. Villari's book, which covers the whole ground from the early nineteenth century to the present day, to be ranked as something other than history, since two-thirds of it is devoted to the post-War developments of which our author has already made himself the accepted interpreter to the English world. But we believe that the public here will be grateful to him for giving it this larger survey, in which the rise and growth of Fascism fits into its place and finds at least a partial explanation in certain pre-War tendencies. A detailed account of the origin and activities of Italian Freemasonry will be new and welcome to English readers, while the author's thesis that Parliamentary government was unsuited to the Italian character and lent itself to all the arts of manipulation and jobbery certainly receives abundant confirmation from his facts. Serious students of the Fascist State—and who is not interested in its developments nowadays ?—will follow with close attention Sig. Villari's later chapters on the Syndicalist experiment, the relations of Church with State, and the new Foreign Policy ; while controversialists will fasten upon his chapter on the Defence of the State and on his Epilogue, and inquire whether he therein meets the real charges brought by critics over here against the methods of the Fascist Dictator- ship. Probably he does not do so ; and the controversy might draw out to the crack of doom ; but one thing emerges clearly from the study of both these histories, and that is the eternal vitality of the Italian race. For the achievements of Italy in the last sixty years have been gigantic, and it would be no part of the Englishman's character to withhold his meed of admiration.
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