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.
[CHAPTER IV]
THE MATERIAL FOR THE HARMONY
Had Ariosto been a philosopher or a poet-philosopher, he would have given us a hymn to Harmony, similar to a good many others which are to be found in the history of literature, celebrating that lofty Idea, which enabled him to understand the discordant concord of things and while satisfying his intellect, filled his soul with peace and joy. But Ariosto was the opposite of a philosopher, and certainly, were he able to read what we are now investigating and discovering in him, first he would be astonished, then he would smile and finally he would comment upon our work with some good-natured jest.
His love for Harmony never took the form of a concept, it was not love of the concept and of the intelligence, that is to say of things answering to a need which he did not experience: it was love for Harmony directly and ingenuously perceived, for sensible Harmony: a harmony, therefore, which did not arise from a loss of his humanity and an abandonment of all particular sentiments, a religious mounting up to the world of the ideas, but existed for him rather as a sentiment among sentiments, a dominant sentiment, surrounding all the others and assigning to each its place. In this respect, he really belonged to one of the chief spiritual currents of the period of the Renaissance, or more accurately, of the early Cinquecento: to the period, that is to say, when Leonardo, Raphael, Fra Bartolommeo, Andrea del Sarto, with their beautiful, harmonious decorum and majestic forms, had succeeded to Ghirlandaio, to Botticelli, to Lippi, when it seemed (in the words of Wölfflin, a historian of art) "as though new bodies had suddenly grown up in Italy," a new and magnificent population, resplendent in painting and sculpture, which was indeed the reflection of a new psychical attitude, of a different direction and of a new centre of interest.
Now if we undertake to consider the sentiments which form part of the Furioso, if we disassociate them from the connection established among them by the harmonising sentiment of Harmony, and therefore in their particularity, disaggregation and materiality, we shall have before us the material of the Furioso. For the "material" of Art is nothing but this, when ideally distinguished from the content, in which the sentiments themselves are fused in the dominant sentiment, whether it be called the leading motive or the lyrical motive: a content which in its turn can be only ideally distinguished from the form, in which it expresses itself or is possessed and present in the spirit. Philological criticism, deprived of philosophical enlightenment, philology in its bad sense or philologism, means rather by "material" or "sources," as they are also called, external things, such as the books which the poet had read or the stories that he had heard told, and on the pretext of supplying in this way the genesis of a work of art ab ovo, it penetrates to the sources of the sources, let us say to the origins of warrior women, of the ogress and the hippogryph of Ariosto. Their procedure suggests that of one who when asked what language a poet found in circulation in his time, should open for that purpose an etymological dictionary of the Italian language, or of the romance languages, or of Indo-European languages, which expound formative ideological processes, either forgotten or thrown into the background of the speaker's consciousness when engaged in speaking. But even if we do not lose our way in such learned and interminable dissertations, if we escape the error referred to above, of forming judgments as to merit upon them, philologistic search for sources and for material becomes capricious and ends by being impossible; because it takes as sources only certain literary lumber scattered here and there, and were we to unite this with the whole of the rest of literature, with the figurative and musical arts, and with other external things which actually surround the poet, public and private events, scientific teachings and disputes, beliefs, customs, and so on, we should find ourselves involved in all endless and infinite enumeration, convincing proof of the illogical nature of such an inquiry. Nor do we make any progress in the determination of the material by limiting it to more modest terms, that is to say, only to certain things which the poet had before him (even if they be documents and information, not without use for certain ends), because the true material of art, as has been said, is not things but the sentiments of the poet, which determine and explain one another, why and for what reason he turns to certain things and not to others, to these things rather than to those. Since we have already described Ariosto's character and shown its reflection in his minor works, now that we are examining the material of the Furioso, we shall find the same character, that is to say, the same complex of sentiments which it will be desirable to illustrate and to distinguish in a somewhat different manner, with an eye no longer directed to the psychology of the man or to the minor works, but just to the Furioso.