Of Croce's attitude during the war we shall say but a few words. He was one of the very few European philosophers or scholars who did not transform themselves into improvised statesmen, or into passionate defenders of national prejudices and proclaimers of national hatreds. Differing from the Germanized philologist, who was the type prevailing in most universities before the war, in that he had not waited for the war to become aware of the many weaknesses and imperfections of modern German culture, while on the other hand he had lived for years in true and intimate contact with the great spirits of German Romanticism, he resisted with all his power the universal tendency of the time to make of the contingent issues of the war a criterion of intellectual truth and of scientific conduct. At the same time, his temper and education reacted violently against the false ideologies of the war, the superstructure of verbal ideals with which on all sides cunning statesmen and naïve philosophers attempted to veil the true nature of the conflict. Against these, he reasserted his conception of the political life and struggles of states as manifestations of the economic, amoral or pre-moral, activity, and of life itself as a perpetual struggle, finding its reason and its rest in the struggle itself. The theory of the state as justice appeared to him merely as a theoretical error, the fortune of which lay in the opportunity it afforded to give a convenient mask of morality to particular interests, either of individuals or of states. The intrinsic morality of the war he conceived as resting on its tragic reality, as reflected in a severely historical thought, to which it appears as a moment of that historical fate which crushes and destroys states as well as individuals, to create from their ruins always new forms of life.
It is needless to say that for a time at least Croce shared with Bertrand Russell and with Romain Rolland, two thinkers in many respects very distant from him, and yet as impervious as he was to the rhetoric of the war, the privilege of a vast unpopularity. Looking back now on his writings which were later collected in the volume Pagine sulla guerra, it is possible to discover among them many attitudes which were justified and useful only as a reaction against the current fallacies of the time; and also to realize that the man who speaks to us through them is not always and only a pure philosopher, but a man with a given complex of moral and political tastes and passions. But this is, in a way, as it should be; in the same way, between Croce the philosopher of æsthetics and Croce the critic of poetry, there is a difference which is inherent in the nature of the two different forms of intellectual activity; the philosopher is a man of understanding, the critic a man of tastes and passions. In both cases, his ideal has always been to make the critic or the moralist worthy of the philosopher, his particular comprehension of history adequate to his concept of the universal. To say that the equation is never perfect, is only another way of saying that every particular historical problem continually raises new problems of thought, and that Croce's thought finds therefore in itself the motives of its own development, the springs of its own life. Where passion and reason ultimately coincide, the roots of the development are taken away, and death takes the place of life.
Yet, notwithstanding these limitations, I know of no man whose thought on the war is on the whole more acceptable to those among us who lived through the war not as spectators, looking on it as on a vast moral abstraction, but as humble actors, in the midst of its human reality. A sense of collaboration between one side and the other, of being, here as there, employed in a common task, whose meaning was much deeper than any that had been offered to us by the national rhetoricians,—a collaboration which happened to take the aspect of a struggle, and imposed duties antagonistic, but of the same nature—was probably the most usual frame of mind among the soldiers who could think; and it existed, subconsciously, even among the unthinking ones, provided that their duties were of a definite, concrete kind, touched them in the deepest chords of their beings, involved the fundamental issues of life and death. To the man who consciously faces death, there is no comfort in wilful error; only this realization of an end that transcends all particular ideals, because it is the end of life itself, can be worthy of that price. You cannot willingly die for fourteen points any more than for one point, but death which is loathsome in the drama of mere circumstance, however adorned with brilliant rhetoric, is no longer death but an act of life in the tragedy in which the hero is conscious of his fate. There was no war, probably, that was ever more full than the last one of what might be called the material of tragedy; but what have the official celebrators done with it, they who have not feared to desecrate, in all our countries, one at least of the concrete, individual tragedies, in order to make of it an empty symbol, to transform an unknown hero into abstract heroism? In some of Croce's pages, there is a more concrete realization of the ideal tragedy of the war than in any poem or oration that I have seen to this day.
The last years of the war found Croce at work on some of the greatest poetical spirits of modern Europe, Ariosto, Goethe, Corneille, Shakespeare, bringing to the understanding of their work, to this task of concrete history, the deep consciousness of the nature of poetry, and of the relations of poetry with life, acquired in twenty years of philosophical meditations. Even his functions as Minister of Public Education during the last two years did not distract him entirely from his studies, and this year of the sixth centenary of Dante's death was celebrated by him with the publication of La Poesia di Dante, which will certainly remain as the most lasting monument raised to the memory of the poet on this occasion. This troubled peace cannot make him deviate from the path of his appointed labour any more than the war could; in peace as in war, his duty is his daily task, here and to-day, and his confidence in the morality and usefulness of that work which is his work is as little shaken by the prophets of despair in peace, as it was by the messiahs of the promised land who were so loud above the turmoil of war. He is probably now noting with a smile that the same men who talked of the war to end all wars, are now very busy preventing our civilization from dying away; that is, building a peace in the abstract, with programs and words, as they fought a war which was not the war, but a phantasm of their imagination.
[1] Contributo, p. 74.
[II. THE THEORY OF HISTORY]
Two meanings of the word history—History as contemporary history— History and chronicle—The spirit as history—Philology, and philological history—Poetical and rhetorical history—Universal history—The universality of history: history and philosophy—The unity of thought—Philosophy as methodology—The positivity of history—The humanity of history—Distinctions and divisions—The history of nature.
There are two meanings to the word history, in English as well as in other European languages; on one hand it denotes the actual doing, the immediacy of life, on the other, the thinking that seems to follow the doing, the consciousness of life. In a rough, approximate way, we speak of men who make history, and of other men who think or write history—though we are all perfectly aware of the fact that we cannot make history without first thinking history, that the action, in other words, follows a judgment of the situation, which is an elementary form of historical thought, and is accompanied by its own consciousness, which is its immediate history. In this sense, the action cannot be materially severed from its history: the distinction between the two is a purely formal and ideal one. And again, the thinking of history, in the second meaning of the word, consists in making present to our spirit, in re-living, an action or group of actions, which thus become as actual an experience as any practical doing, a fragment of our own life, and, ultimately, the consciousness of our own individual experience. Thus the two meanings which stand out as sharply contrasting when we objectify and solidify them, as an external, chronological series of happenings, and as a formal discipline attempting to give, in innumerable books, a description and as it were a verbal duplicate of that series, once we examine them in the light of our consciousness, reveal themselves merely as different aspects or moments of the same spiritual process.