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.
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