Personality In the character of these States, whether republics or despotisms, lies, not the only, but the chief reason for the early development of the Italian.To this it is due that he was the firstborn among the sons of modern Europe.
In the Middle Ages both sides of human consciousness--that which was turned within as that which was turned without-- lay dreaming or half awake beneath a common veil.The veil was woven of faith, illusion, and childish prepossession, through which the world and history were seen clad in strange hues.Man was conscious of himself only as a member of a race, people, party, family, or corporation--only through some general category.In Italy this veil first melted into air; an _objective _treatment and consideration of the State and of all the things of this world became possible.The subjective side at the same time asserted itself with corresponding emphasis; man became a spiritual _individual, _recognized himself as such.In the same way the Greek had once distinguished himself from the barbarian, and the Arab had felt himself an individual at a time when other Asiatics knew themselves only as members of a race.It will not be difficult to show that this result was due above all to the political circumstances of Italy.
In far earlier times we can here and there detect a development of free personality which in Northern Europe either did not occur at all, or could not display itself in the same manner.The band of audacious wrongdoers in the tenth century described to us by Liudprand, some of the contemporaries of Gregory VII (for example, Benzo of Alba), and a few of the opponents of the first Hohenstaufen, show us characters of this kind.But at the close of the thirteenth century Italy began to swarm with individuality; the ban laid upon human personality was dissolved; and a thousand figures meet us each in its own special shape and dress.Dante's great poem would have been impossible in any other country of Europe, if only for the reason that they all still lay under the spell of race.For Italy the august poet, through the wealth of individuality which he set forth, was the most national herald of his time.But this unfolding of the treasures of human nature in literature and art--this many-sided representation and criticism--will be discussed in separate chapters; here we have to deal only with the psychological fact itself.This fact appears in the most decisive and unmistakable form.The Italians of the fourteenth century knew little of false modesty or of hypocrisy in any shape; not one of them was afraid of singularity, of being and seeming unlike his neighbors.