Page:English Historical Review Volume 37.djvu/611

1922 REVIEWS OF BOOKS 603 and political conditions convinced Italians that history was necessary to them, for history was held to mean development, and so led to the conception of progress, no matter whether that idea was understood in a theistic or pantheistic sense. These transcendental historians did not refrain from pronouncing moral judgements on the facts which they recorded, but, according to Croce, facts qua facts are ' rational ' and ' in- evitable ', and thus above the judgement of historians ; and in general Italians were unable, during the first part of the century, to keep abreast of the progress of ' philological ' erudition which was so marked in Germany. The works of Botta and Colletta were attempts at reviving a purely literary or humanistic treatment of history at a time when the gradual growth of national feeling was bringing about a revival in the study of pre-Roman and medieval ages at the expense of the Roman and renaissance periods. The national aspirations and programmes reacted upon historiography ; there were historians of neo-Guelph tendencies such as Manzoni, Troya, Balbo, and Gioberti, and historians who, in opposition to the former, named themselves Ghibellines. But none of the latter, neither Niccolini, Ranieri, Vannucci, nor La Farina, were able to do more than elaborate some of Machiavelli's sayings which had no longer any value ; they were as transcendental and biased as their rivals without possessing merits equal to theirs. Younger men perceived the ' philosophical ' errors of their predecessors, and attempted to write ' scientific ' history, excluding all philosophic preoccupations from their works, and, though peculiar circumstances allowed one of them, Amari, to write the fine Storia del Vespro, their works were generally fragmentary : witness those of Roma- gnosi, Cattaneo, and Blanch. The ' scientific ' method was more likely to bear good fruits when historians dealt with particular institutions, but then the difficulty arose of harmonizing the history of these particular institutions with general history. Spaventa and De Sanctis, having accepted and developed Hegelian idealism, solved the difficulty : their works marked a vast improvement on anything which their predecessors or their contemporaries had written, and De Sanctis's history of Italian literature was a masterpiece. This improvement is connected by Croce with the events of 1848, which showed both the neo-Guelph and the neo-Ghibelline theories to be unsound ; but the time had come when philosophic speculation began to wither in Italy as in the rest of Europe. ' In Italy the failure of the revolution of 1848 caused men to lose faith in idealism and turn to positivism. Vice's ascendancy was supplanted by Galileo's. A new scientific spirit permeated historiography. Mere facts became all-important, and out of this tendency grew the new ' philo- logical ' school which only aimed at tracing and critically editing new documents. Such a method was incompatible with the writing of real history. Although research workers, learned periodicals, and regional historical societies all contributed material, ' philologists ' were able to marshall them into chronological order, but unable to weld them into conclusive appreciations. Rajna, d'Ovidio, Novati, Pais, Cipolla, Siragusa, Crivellucci, Monticolo, Torraca, Rossi, Cian, and many others are briefly taken into consideration and summarily condemned. Croce does not deny that they fulfilled a useful task in sifting facts, but relegates all of them