The Italian communes present, in their sharp vicissitudes
of fortune, a spectacle not less dramatic and infinitely more momentous for the
general history of Europe. In Italy, as in Flanders, the fair ideal of civic
freedom was blurred and defaced by party feuds and personal ambitions, by the
fickleness and passion of the mob, by the lust of conquest and the fratricidal
jealousies of neighbouring republics. Yet to the influence of this ideal we
must attribute both the solidarity of the Italian city-state and the wealth of
individual genius which it fostered.
The Italian Renaissance was little more
than the harvest-time of medieval Italy, the glorious evening of a day which
had dawned with the Fourth Crusade and had reached high noon in the lifetimes
of Dante and Giotto. In the fifteenth century the aptitudes which had ripened
in the intense and crowded life of turbulent republics were concentrated upon
art and letters. The leisure and the security which the specialist demands were
bought by renouncing the Utopian visions of the past. But the growth of
technical dexterity was a poor compensation for the narrowing of interests; the
individual was sacrificed to make the artist; and art, too, suffered by the
divorce from practical affairs. If we are moved to impatience by the waste of
life and energy involved in the turmoils of medieval Italy, we must remember
that in no atmosphere less electric would the national energies have matured so
early, or piled achievement on achievement with such feverish speed.
