Ariosto, Shakespeare and Corneille. Benedetto Croce
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