The members of the defeated parties, on the other hand, often came into a position like that of the subjects of the despotic states, with the difference that the freedom or power already enjoyed, and in some cases the hope of recovering them, gave a higher energy to their individuality. Among these men of involuntary leisure we find, for instance, an Agnolo Pandolfini (died 1446), whose work on domestic economy is the first complete programme of developed private life. His estimate of the duties of the individual as against the dangers and thanklessness of public life is in its way a true monument of the age.
DANTE
Banishment, too, has this effect above all, that it either wears the exile out or develops whatever is greatest in him. “In all our more populous cities,” says Giovanni Pontano, “we see a crowd of people who have left their homes of their own free will; but a man takes his virtues with him wherever he goes.” And, in fact, they were by no means only men who had been actually exiled, but thousands left their native place voluntarily, because they found its political or economical condition intolerable. The Florentine emigrants at Ferrara and the Lucchese in Venice formed whole colonies by themselves.
The cosmopolitanism which grew up in the most gifted circles is in itself a high stage of individualism. Dante, as we have already said, finds a new home in the language and culture of Italy, but goes beyond even this in the words, “My country is the whole world.” And when his recall to Florence was offered him on unworthy conditions, he wrote back: “Can I not everywhere behold the light of the sun and the stars, everywhere meditate on the noblest truths, without appearing ingloriously and shamefully before the city and the people? Even my bread will not fail me.” The artists exult no less defiantly in their freedom from the constraints of fixed residence. “Only he who has learned everything,” says Ghiberti, “is nowhere a stranger; robbed of his fortune and without friends, he is yet the citizen of every country, and can fearlessly despise the changes of fortune.” In the same strain an exiled humanist writes: “Wherever a learned man fixes his seat, there is home.”[c]
EUROPEAN CULTURE IN GENERAL
The oppression which weighed upon the rest of Europe contributed to the maintenance of barbarism, less by rendering difficult and sometimes dangerous the acquisition of knowledge, than by taking away all attraction from the exercise of the mind. Thought was a pain to those capable of judging the state of the human species; of studying the past, of comparing it with the present; and of thus foreseeing the future. Danger and suffering appeared on all sides. The men who, in France, Germany, England, and Spain, felt themselves endued with the power of generalising their ideas, either smothered them, not to aggravate the pain of thought, or directed them solely to speculations the farthest from real life—towards that scholastic philosophy which so vigorously exercised the understanding, without bringing it to any conclusion.
In Italy, on the contrary, liberty secured the full enjoyment of intellectual existence. Everyone endeavoured to develop the powers which he felt within him, because each was conscious that the more his mind opened the greater was his enjoyment; everyone directed his powers to a useful and practical purpose, because each felt himself placed in a state of society in which he might attain some influence, either for his own benefit or that of his fellow creatures. The first want which towns had experienced was that of their defence. Accordingly, military architecture had taken precedence in the arts. From its exercise the transition was easy to that of religious architecture, at a time when religion was indispensable to every heart—to civil architecture, then encouraged by a government in which everything was for all. The study and pursuit of the beautiful in this first of the fine arts had paved the way to all the others. From the pleasures of the imagination through the eye, men ascended to those derived from the soul; and hence the birth of poetry.[d]
The language of Provence had attained its highest degree of cultivation; Spain and Portugal had already produced more than one poet; and the langue d’Oil, in the north of France, was receiving considerable attention, while the Italian was not yet enumerated amongst the languages of Europe, and the richness and harmony of its idiom, gradually and obscurely formed amongst the populace, were not as yet appreciated. But in the thirteenth century Dante arose to immortalise this hitherto neglected tongue, and, aided by his single genius, it soon advanced with a rapidity which left all competition at a distance.
The Lombardian duchy of Benevento, comprising the greater part of the modern kingdom of Naples, had preserved, under independent princes, and surrounded by the Greeks and the Saracens, a degree of civilisation which, in the earlier part of the Middle Ages, was unexampled throughout the rest of Italy. Many of the fine arts, and some branches of science, were cultivated there with success. The schools of Salerno communicated to the West the medical skill of the Arabs, and the commerce of Amalfi introduced into those fertile provinces not only wealth but knowledge. From the eighth to the tenth century, various historical works, written, it is true, in Latin, but distinguished for their fidelity, their spirit, and their fire, proceeded from the pen of several men of talent, natives of that district, some of whom clothed their compositions in hexameter verses, which, compared with others of the same period, display superior facility and fancy.