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But we on the other hand shall name her, and we shall call her Harmony, and we shall prove that those who assign a simple aim to Ariosto in the Furioso, Art or Pure Form, were gazing at her and seeing her as it were through a veil of clouds. In doing this, we shall at the same time define the concept of Harmony. We cannot avoid entering upon certain theoretical explanations in relation to this matter; but it would be wrong to look upon them as digressions, since it is only by their means that the way can be cleared to the understanding of the spirit which animates the Furioso. There is something comic or at least ironic in this necessity in which we find ourselves, of weighting with philosophy a discourse relating to so transparent a poet as Ariosto; but we have already warned the reader at the beginning that it is one thing to read and let sing to him the verses of a poet, and another to understand him, and that what is easy to learn may sometimes be very difficult to understand.

It is therefore without doubt contradictory to state that an artist has for his special and particular end or content, art itself, art which is the general end of every artist: as contradictory as to say that an individual has for his concrete and proper end, not this or that work and profession, but life. And there is also no doubt that since every error contains in it an element of truth, those erroneous theories aimed at something effectively existing: a particular content, which they were not able to define, and which could never be in any case art for art. Two sorts of judgments of that formula have nevertheless been expressed in relation to two different groups of works of art: those relating to works which seemed to be inspired by a particular form of art, and those which seem to be inspired by the idea of Art itself, by Art in universal; and for this reason our rapid investigation must be divided and directed first to the one and then to the other case.

The first case includes the poetry which may be called "humanistic" or "classicistic": not the classicism and humanism of pedants without talent or taste, but that lively humanism and classicism which we are wont to admire and enjoy in several poets of our Renaissance in the Latin language, such as Sannazaro, Politian and Pontano, and also in later times those extremely lettered writers in Italian, of whom Monti, in his best work, may be said to be the greatest representative and we might add to him Canova, although he has not poetised in verse. What is there that pleases us in them, in their imitations, their re-writing, their cantos of classical phrases and measures? And what was it that warmed and carried them away, so that they were able to transmit their emotion to us and obtain our delighted sympathy? It has been answered that this was due to their remaining faithful to the already sacred traditions of beautiful form, handed down by the school; but this answer is not satisfactory, because pedants also can be mechanically faithful in repeating; we have alluded to these and shown that on the contrary they weary and annoy us. The truth is that the former hold to those forms of art, because they are the suitable symbol, the satisfactory expression of their feeling, which is one of affection for the past, as being venerable, glorious, decorous, national or super-national and cultural; and their content is not literary form by itself, but love for that past, love for some one or other historical age of art. And if this be true, we must place those romantic archaisers in the same class of art with the humanists or classicists, when considering the substantial nature of things. For the former nourish the same feeling and employ the same procedure, not in relation to the Greek and Roman past, but in relation to the Christian and medieval past, particularly in Germany, where they let us hear again the rude accent of the medieval epic, and represent the ingenuous forms of pious legends and sacred dramatic representations, and make themselves the echo of ancient popular songs: this re-writing has often something in it of the pastiche (as the humanists and classicists also have something of the pastiche, which with them is pedantry), yet sometimes produce passages of delicate art, which if not profound, were certainly agreeable to the heart that remembers, to the eternal heart of childhood which is in us.

Ariosto was also a more or less successful humanist in certain of his minor works, as we have said, but in the Furioso, although he took many schemes and details from Latin poets, he stands essentially outside their line of inspiration, for instead of directing his spirit towards the past, he always draws the past towards his spirit, and there is no observable trace in it of Latin-Augustan archaism, or of the archaism of medieval chivalry. For this reason, the view that he had Art itself as his content must be taken as applicable without doubt in the other sense to him and to certain other artists: as devotion to Art as universal, to Art in its Idea, a devotion which is bodied forth in his narratives, his figures and his verse.

Now it must be remembered that Art in its Idea is nothing but expression or—representation of the real—of the real which is conflict and strife, but a conflict and a strife that are always being settled; that it is multiplicity and diversity, but at the same time unity, dialectic and development, and also and through that, cosmos and Harmony. And since Art cannot be the content of Art, that is to say, it is impossible to represent representation (as it is impossible to think thought, so that if thought is made the object of thought, it is always itself and the other, that is to say, the whole), by eliding the term which is superfluous and has been unduly retained, we obtain the result that when it is stated of Ariosto or of other artists that they have for content pure Art or pure Form, it is really to be understood that they have for content devotion to the pure rhythm of the universe, for the dialectic which is unity, for the development which is Harmony. Thus, if humanistic or otherwise archaistic artists do not as is generally believed love beautiful forms, but rather the past and history, it may be said of those others that they do not love pure Art, but the pure and universal content of Art, not this or that particular strife and Harmony (erotic, political, moral, religious, and so on), but strife and Harmony in idea and eternal.

The concept of cosmic Harmony, which has also been called pure Beauty or absolute Beauty, and indeed God, has been much employed in old philosophy, and notably in the old aesthetic (old always being understood in its logical-historical sense, which is still tenacious of life and reappears in our own day, where it might be least expected), and has made an elaboration of the new theory, which conceives of art as lyrical intuition or expression, very laborious. For many reasons that it would occupy too much time and be out of place to detail here, Harmony or Beauty came to be considered as the true essence of Art; hence the impossibility of accounting, not only for many works of art, but for art in general, and the artificial attempts made by the upholders of this doctrine and by criticism to pervert facts in support of a partial and incorrect principle. For the reasons given above, it is easy for us to discern the origin of the error, which lay in transferring one of the classes of particular contents which Art is able to elaborate, to serve as the end and essence of Art. And the one selected was precisely that which owing to its religious and philosophical dignity, appeared to have the power to absorb Art into itself together with everything else and to dissolve the whole in a sort of mysticism. This is confirmed by the historical course of the doctrine, the first conspicuous form of which was Neoplatonism, which reappeared on several occasions in the Middle Ages, at the time of the Renaissance and during the Romantic period. De Sanctis himself, owing to the romantic origins of his thought, was never altogether free from it; and his judgment upon Ariosto bears traces of the transcendental conception of Art as an actualisation of pure Beauty.

Similar traces are to be found in another& doctrine to which De Sanctis held and formulated as the distinction and opposition between the poet and the artist: a doctrine which it is desirable to make clear, not only with a view of strengthening the concept to which we have had recourse, but also because Ariosto himself is numbered among the poets to whom the distinction has been chiefly applied, as he has been held to be distinct and opposed, along with Politian and Petrarch, and perhaps others, as artists, to Dante or to Shakespeare, as poets. The doctrine appears to be endorsed by facts, and therefore looks plausible and is readily accepted and continually reproduced, as on several occasions in the history of aesthetic ideas. It was not altogether unknown in the days of Ariosto himself, if Giraldo Cinzio can be held to have suggested it, when in his description of an allegorical picture, in which were to be seen the two great Tuscans "in a green and flowery meadow upon a hill of Helicon," Dante, with his robe fastened at the knees, "manipulated the circular scythe, cutting all the grass that his scythe met with," while Petrarch, "robed in senatorial robe, lay there selecting among the noble herbs and the delicate flowers." In spite of this, it is altogether unsustainable as an exact theory, because it introduces an unjustified and unjustifiable dualism, which it is altogether impossible to mediate, since each of the two distinct terms contains in itself the other and nothing else, thus demonstrating their identity: the poet is poet because he is an artist, that is to say, he gives artistic form to feeling, and the artist would not be an artist, if he were not a poet, that is to say, if he had not a feeling to elaborate. The apparent confirmation of this theory by facts arises from this, that there are as we know, artists who have a devotion for cosmic Harmony as their chief content, and others who have other devotions: and this proves that it is advisable to make a very moderate and restrained use of the distinction between poets and artists, between those who represent the beautiful and those who represent the real, as is the case with all empirical distinctions. Sometimes the same distinction, taken from the bosom of poetry or of some other special art, has been thrown into the midst of the series of the so-called arts, severing those arts which have cosmic Harmony, absolute Beauty, ideal Beauty, the rhythm of the Universe for their object, from others which have for their object individual feelings and life. Among the former were numbered (as in the school of Winckelmann) the art of sculpture and certain sorts of painting at least, and among the latter, poetry; or (according to Schelling and Schopenhauer) bestowing upon music alone the whole of the first field. Music would thus be opposed to the other arts and would possess the value of an unconscious Metaphysic, in so far as it directly portrayed the rhythm of the Universe itself. A clumsy doctrine, which we only mention here, because Ariosto would furnish the best example of all among the poets, against the exclusion of poetry from among the arts which alone were able to portray the rhythm of the Universe or Harmony: Ariosto, who, if he had seemed to an Italian philologist to be nothing less than "a poet who was an excellent observer and reasoner," has yet appeared to Humboldt, whose ear was more sensitive to the especially "musical" musikalisch, and to Vischer more especially as one who developed his fables of chivalry 41 in a melodious labyrinth of images, which produced in its sensual serenity the same enjoyment as the rocking and dying of the Italian "canzone," thus giving the reader "the pure pleasure of moving without matter." When empirical classifications are not handled with caution and with a consciousness of their limits, not only do they deprive the principles of science of their rigour and vigour, but also carry with them the unfortunate result of making it seem possible to distinguish concretely what has been roughly divided for the purpose of aiding the creation of images. The double class of poets and of artists, the one moved by particular affections, the other by universal Harmony, does not hold as a logical duality, because the love of Harmony is itself one of many particular affections, and forms part of the series comprising the comic, tragic, humorous, melancholy, jocose, pessimistic, passionate, realistic, classicistic poets, and so on. But even when it has been reduced to the level of the others, there is no necessity, either in its case or in that of the others, to fall into the illusion that there really exist poets who are only tragic or only comic, only realistic or only classicistic, singers only of Harmony, without the other passions, or solely passionate without the passion for Harmony. The love of traditional forms, for example, which we have seen to be the base of classicism, exists in a certain measure in every poet, for the reason that every poet employs, re-lives and renews the words of a given language, which has been historically formed, and is therefore charged with a literary tradition and full of historical meaning. And the love of Harmony exists also in every poet worthy of the name, since he cannot represent his drama of the affections, save as a particular mode of drama and of the dramatic or dialectic cosmic Harmony, which is therefore contained and dwells in it as the universal in the particular.

Are we ourselves overthrowing our own distinctions, immediately after asserting them? We are not overthrowing the principles which we had established in connection with the nature of Art, and with the nature of Harmony and Beauty in the super-aesthetic and cosmical sense; but it was necessary clearly to state and to overthrow the definition of Ariosto as poet of Harmony, because in doing so, we cease to preserve it in its abstractness, but make use of it as a living principle. In other words, by thus defining him, we have attained the first object of our quest, which was no longer to leave him hidden beneath the nebulous description of a poet of art for art's sake, nor beneath that other equally fallacious description of him as a satirical and ironical poet, or as a poet of prudence and wisdom, and so on; and we have pointed out where the principal accent of his art falls. Passing now to other determinations, in order to show in what matter and in what way or tone that accent is realised, maintained and developed, even when it happens that we can do this in the best possible manner, we shall not allow ourselves to be ensnared by the fatuous belief, in vogue with certain critics of the day, that we have supplied an equivalent to Ariosto's poetry with our aesthetic formulas: such an equivalent would not only be an arrogance, but it would also be useless, because Ariosto's poetry is there, and anyone can see it for himself. The new determinations must however also be asserted and refuted, only the new results being preserved, analogous to those already obtained, by means of which we shall dispose of other false ideas circulated by the critics concerning Ariosto and point out the salient characteristics of the material which he selected for treatment, together with the mode and the tone of his poem. The poetry of the Furioso, as for that matter all poetry, is an individuum ineffabile, and Ariosto, the poet of Harmony, limited in this direction and that, never at any time exactly coincides with Ariosto, the Ariostesque poet, the poet of Harmony, and not only of Harmony as denned in the way we have defined it, but also in other ways understood or indefinable. We do not propose to exhaust or to take the place of the concrete living Ariosto; he is indeed present to the imagination of our readers as to our own and forms the perpetual criterion of our critical explanations, which without this criterion would be unintelligible.