say, in both cases, non-art; and in like manner the theory of art for art's sake would in those cases be the definition of one or more forms of artistic perversion. Owing to the impossibility of denying to Ariosto any content, and at the same time of enjoying him and of acclaiming him a poet,--an impossibility more or less obscurely felt by some, although without discovering and demonstrating it as has been done above,--it has come about that not only other critics, but those very critics who, like De Sanctis, had described him as a poet of pure fancy or pure objectivity, have been led to recognise in him a content, and sometimes several contents, one upon the top of the other, in a heap. One of such contents, perhaps that most generally admitted, is without doubt the _dissolution of the world of chivalry,_ brought about by Ariosto through irony: a historical position conferred upon him by Hegel, and amply illustrated by De Sanctis. But what do they mean by saying that Ariosto expresses the dissolution of the world of chivalry? Certainly not simply that in his poem are to be found documents concerning the passing of the ideals of chivalry, because whether this be true or not, it does not concern the concrete artistic form, but its abstract material, considered and treated as a source of historical documentation. Nor can it mean that he was inspired with aversion to the ideals of chivalry and in favour of new ideals, because polemic and criticism, negation and affirmation, are not art. So what was really meant was (although those who maintain this interpretation often understand it in one or other of those meanings, which are external to art), that Ariosto was animated with a true and real feeling toward the ideals of the life of chivalry, and that this feeling supplied the lyrical motive for his poem. This motive has been disputed in its details in various ways, some holding it to have been aversion, others a mixture of aversion and of love, others of admiration and of pleasure; but before we engage in further investigation, we must first ascertain if there exist, that is to say, if Ariosto really endowed with his own feeling--whatever it be, prevailing aversion or prevailing inclination or a prevalent alternation of the two,--the material of chivalry, rendering it serious and emotional, through the seriousness and emotion of his own feeling. And this does not exist at all, for what all feel and see as chivalry in Ariosto's mode of treatment, is on the contrary a sort of aloofness and superiority, owing to which he never engages himself up to the hilt in admiration or in scorn or in passionate disagreement with one or the other; and this impression which his narratives of sieges and combats, of duels and feats of arms produce upon us, has afforded the ground for the above-mentioned opposed theories as to his objective attitude and as to his cultivation of a mere pastime of the imagination. Had Ariosto really aimed, as is