This connexion between the imagination and the moral qualities of the Italian repeats itself continually.If, nevertheless, we find more cold calculation in cases where the Northerner rather follows his impulses, the reason is that individual development in Italy was not only more marked and earlier in point of time, but also far more frequent.Where this is the case in other countries, the results are also analogous.We find, for example, that the early emancipation of the young from domestic and paternal authority is common to North America with Italy.
Later on, in the more generous natures, a tie of freer affection grows up between parents and children.
It is, in fact, a matter of extreme difficulty to judge fairly of other nations in the sphere of character and feeling.In these respects a people may be developed highly, and yet in a manner so strange that a foreigner is utterly unable to understand it.Perhaps all the nations of the West are in this point equally favored.
But where the imagination has exercised the most powerful and despotic influence on morals is in the illicit intercourse of the two sexes.It is well known that prostitution was freely practiced in the Middle Ages, before the appearance of syphilis.A discussion, however, on these questions does not belong to our present work.What seems characteristic of Italy at this time, is that here marriage and its rights were more often and more deliberately trampled underfoot than anywhere else.The girls of the higher classes were carefully secluded, and of them we do not speak.All passion was directed to the married women.
Under these circumstances it is remarkable that, so far as we know, there was no diminution in the number of marriages, and that family life by no means underwent that disorganization which a similar state of things would have produced in the North.Men wished to live as they pleased, but by no means to renounce the family, even when they were not sure that it was all their own.Nor did the race sink, either physically or mentally, on this account; for that apparent intellectual decline which showed itself towards the middle of the sixteenth century may be certainly accounted for by political and ecclesiastical causes, even if we are not to assume that the circle of achievements possible to the Renaissance had been completed.Notwithstanding their profligacy, the Italians continued to be, physically and mentally, one of the healthiest and best-born populations in Europe, and have retained this position, with improved morals, down to our own time.