historical participation and commitment for Croce. With it he
achieved an identity so complete as to impart to his narrative an
almost autobiographical tone. This identity it is which sustains the
brooding concern of seventy years for the city and the realm; which
renders no detail too insignificant to draw his eye, endows every
personality which walked its streets or partook in any degree of its
tumultuous life with an attractive spark, permits no inscription or
monument, however obscure, to elude his quest. As a result, that
portion of his work devoted to this history, though perhaps sur-
passed in profundity or range, is unequalled in humanity and nobility,
the simple nobility and the profound humanity of a Cato narrating
the history of his Rome.

Quite apart from such considerations as the stature of its object
and the commitment of its narrator, the history of Naples holds a
unique position among Croce's historical writings. The 'matter of
Naples' (as with an epic resonance it may be) is the matrix
within which Croce first achieved his proper vision of history and
attained his full stature as an historian. This is the vision, as he ex-
presses it, of history as moral drama ¹ with more of tragedy than of
idyll in it. ² This is the vision which is crystallized into the ideal and
the method of ethico-political history.

The vision of human history as moral drama is certainly not new;
it is rather the first, the immediate and spontaneous intuition of
western man concerning history, and the most constant. Mere origin-
ality, however, could never be the mark of a culture so thoroughly,
so profoundly classical as that of Croce. His achievement lay rather
in the re-evocation of this vision of history at a juncture when it had
all but vanished and when western man was most in need of it to
revive in himself the sense of his own humanity and spirituality. The
quality and character of this achievement is, consequently, to be
measured and assayed, not by reference to the vulgar norm of
novelty, but to the clarity and power of his expression of that con-
stant vision of history and by the magnitude of the forces against
which he reasserted it.

These forces Croce tends to group generically under the name
'positivism'. Though heterogeneous, these forces exhibited one com-
mon feature: they tended to reduce man to the level of nature. The
characteristic of the nature to which positivism tended to reduce man
was alienation, the same character which Hegel had recognized as
the mark of nature in all its many forms. The specific form of this

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