Yet, however unanimous, simple and unrestrainable be the aesthetic approbation accorded to the poem of Ariosto, the critical judgments delivered upon it are just as discordant, complicated and laboured; and indeed this is one of those cases where the difference of the two spiritual moments, intuitive or aesthetic, the apprehension or tasting of the work of art, and intellective, the critical and historical judgment,--a difference wrongly disputed from one point of view by sensationalists and from another by intellectualists,--stands out so clearly as to seem to be almost spatially divided, so that one can touch it with one's hand. Anyone can easily read and live again the octaves of Ariosto, caressing them with voice and imagination, as though passionately in love; but to say whence comes that particular form of enchantment, to determine that is to say, the character of the inspiration that moved Ariosto, his dominant poetical motive, the peculiar effect which became poetry in him, is a very different undertaking and one of no small difficulty. The question has tormented the critics from the time when literary and historical criticism acquired individual prominence and energy, that is to say at the origin of romantic aestheticism, when works of art were no longer examined in parts separated from the whole, or in their external outline, but in the spirit that animated them. Yet we must not think that earlier times were without all suspicion of this, for an uncertain suggestion of it is to be found even in the eccentric enquiries, as to whether the _Furioso_ be a moral poem or not, or whether it should be looked upon as serious or playful. But intellects such as Schiller and Goethe, Humboldt and Schelling, Hegel, Ranke, Gioberti, Quinet and De Sanctis, treated or touched upon it in the last century, and very many others during and after their times, and the theme has again been taken up with renewed keenness, in dissertations, memoirs and articles, some of them foreign, but mostly Italian.