This affirmation is not to be taken in a general sense, the words in which it is formulated must not be construed literally, for in that case it would be easy to raise the reasonable objection, that not only Ariosto, but every artist, just because he is an artist, never has any end but that of art, of singing for singing's sake, representing for representation's sake, of elaborating pure form, and of satisfying the need that he feels to realise his own dreams: woe to the artist, who has an eye to any other ends, and tries to teach, to persuade, to shock, to move, to make a hit or an effect, or anything else extraneous to art. The theory of art for art, opposed by many, is incontestable from this point of view, it is indeed indubitable and altogether obvious. The critics who attribute that end as a character of Ariosto's poetry, mean rather to affirm, that the author of the _Furioso_ proceeded in his own individual proper manner with respect to other poets; and they then proceed to determine their thoughts upon the subject in two ways, differing somewhat from one another. Both of these are to be found mingled and confused in the pages of De Sanctis. Ariosto is held to have allowed to pass in defile within him the chain of romantic figures of knights and ladies and the stories of their arms and audacious undertakings, of their loves and their love-making, with the one object of _delighting the imagination._ Ariosto is held to have depicted that various human world without interposing anything between himself and things, without reflecting himself in things, without sinking them in himself or in his own feelings. He is held to have been solely an _objective observer._ Now, taking the first case, that is to say, if the work of Ariosto be really resolved into a plaything of the imagination, although he might have pleased himself by doing something agreeable to himself and to others, yet he would not have been a poet, "the divine Ariosto," because the pleasure of the fancy belongs to the order of practical acts, to what are called games or diversion. And in the second case, when he has been praised for being perfectly objective, this is not only at variance with the actual creation of the poet, but is also in contradiction to it--and indeed in contradiction to every form of spiritual production. As though things existed outside the spirit and it were possible to take them up in their supposed objectivity and to externalise them by putting them on paper or canvas. The theory of art for art, when taken as a theory of merely fanciful pleasure or of indifferent objective reproduction of things, should be firmly rejected, because it is at variance with and contradicts the nature of art and of the universal spirit. At the most, these two paradigms,--art as mere fancy and art as extrinsic objectivity,--might be of avail as designating two artistic forms of deficiency and ugliness, _futile_ art and _material_ art, that is to