ABSTRACT
The first change to manifest itself in them so soon as they were touched by the Harmony which sang at the bottom of the poet’s heart, was their loss of autonomy, their submission to a single lord, their descent from being the whole to becoming a part, their becoming occasions rather than motives, instruments rather than ends, their common death for the benefit of the new life. The magical power which accomplished this prodigy was the tone of the expression, that self-possessed, lightness of tone, capable of adopting a thousand forms and remaining ever graceful, known to the old school of critics as “the confidential air,” and remembered among the other “properties” of the “style” of Ariosto. Ariosto’s naturalistic and objective tendency is also to be regarded as nothing more than a metaphor, because Ariosto reduced his material to nature, in order to spiritualise it in a new way, by creating spiritual forms of Harmony.
