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The study of rhythm threw one fact of primitive life into very strong relief,—the predominance of masses of men over individual effort,^[250] and the almost exclusive reign of communal song as compared with poetry of the solitary artist, with that poetry which nowadays makes sole claim to the title. Does this point to a fundamental dualism? Are there two kinds of poetry, communal and artistic; or must one say that the choral throng and the reading public, the improvising singer and the modern poet, are convertible terms, with refrains, repetition, chorus, as a negligible quantity? Is the making of poetry really one process under all conditions of production; or does the main impulse, in itself everywhere invariable, undergo enough change in its outward relations and conditions to warrant the division of its product into two kinds? Goethe is thought to have answered this question in his discussion of certain Lithuanian popular songs, when he wondered “that folk make so much of these ballads of the people, and rate them so high. There is only one poetry, the real and the true; all else is approximation and show. Poetic talent is given to the peasant as well as to the knight; it depends whether each lays hold upon his own condition and treats it as it deserves, in which case the simplest relations will be the best.” And there an end, cries the critic; what more is to be said? Nothing, if one is discussing poetry merely as an impulse to emotional expression which springs simple and distinct from the heart of man. But there is more to be said when one treats poetry not as the impulse, but as the product of the impulse, a product falling into sundry classes according to the conditions under which it is produced. Setting theory aside, it is a fact that critics of every sort have been fain to look upon the product of the poetic impulse as something not simple, but twofold.

As was the case with rhythm, where a tradition of the priority of verse compared with prose led to extravagant theories of early man as singing instead of talking, and realizing generally the conditions of an Italian opera stage, so with this dualism now in hand; extravagant theories of folk-made epics and self-made songs, have brought it into a discredit absolutely undeserved. In some form, to be sure, this dualism of the poetic product pervades the whole course of criticism, and varies from a vague, unstable distinction to a definite and often extravagant claim of divided origins; its differencing factor now sunders the two parts as by a chasm, and now leaves them with only the faintest line between. Always, however, this differencing factor is more than an affair of words. It has nothing to do with classification of materials or of form, as when Schleiermacher opposes the epos and the drama as “plastic” to the purely lyric or “musical.” It is not the dualism of high and low implied in Fontenelle’s delightful “Description of the Empire of Poesy,”^[251] with its highlands, including “that great city, epic,” and the “lofty mountain of tragedy,” burlesque, however, in the lowlands, and comedy, though a pleasant town, quite too close to these marshes of farce to be safe. It is not the antithesis of definition, not a mere exclusion,—poetry against science, pleasure against truth, imaginative verse against unimaginative, emotional against practical and didactic; not a separation of cheap, shabby verses from the poetry which Ben Jonson thought perfect, and fit to be seen “of none but grave and consecrated eyes.” In a loose application, this twofold character of the poetic product takes the form of an antithesis between art and nature, a vague contrast, with terminology yet more vague; and here, again, it is not the rival claims of art and nature in any one piece,—whether

Natura fieret laudabile carmen, an arte,

or in any one man,—“the good poet’s made as well as born”;^[252] but it is the contrast shown by poetry that is essentially “natural” in origin, over against the rival sprung from art. Often it is impartial: Jonson’s learned sock, or the wild wood-notes of Shakspere,—“with Shakspere’s nature or with Jonson’s art,” is Pope’s echo of Milton; but Milton’s nephew, Phillips,^[253] pits “true native poetry” against “wit, ingenuity, and learning in verse, even elegancy itself,”—Spenser and Shakspere, that is, against his moderns. So one comes by way of these great “natural” poets to the rural muse herself, who has always been lauded and caressed when eulogy was safe. If mediocrities are versing, “Tom Piper makes us better melodie”; and this is Spenser’s honest view, not his “ironicall sarcasmus.” Back to the shepherds, says poetry, when it is tired of too much art; rustic and homely and unlettered, is opposed to urban and lettered and polite, song of the fields to verse that looks across an inkstand at folios of the study. But this tendency in criticism to rebuke poetry of the schools, its rouge and powder, by pointing to the fresh cheeks of unspoiled rustic verse, is hardly to the purpose.

Passing from this loose and popular account of the dualism, one finds the contrast, still mainly unhistorical, but stated with precision, in the æsthetic realm. Schiller, one of the masters in that school which combined metaphysical theory with critical insight, divided poetry into the naive and the sentimental; his famous essay, however, should be read along with his poem on the Künstler, and with A. W. Schlegel’s review of the poem; unsatisfactory as Schiller thought his verse, it gives a historical comment on his theory, and he used the idea of it for his Æsthetic Letters. It shows how art,—thought and purpose, that is,—slowly took the place of spontaneity, and so it gives a better because a historical statement of the dualism in hand. Still, the phrase of naive and sentimental passed into vogue; this is almost as much as to say objective and subjective; and one knows what riot of discussion followed. Ancient was set against modern, the old dispute, realist against idealist, classic against romantic, conservative against radical; add short and pithy phrases from Goethe, dithyrambs on “om-mject and sum-mject” from Coleridge; drop then, a nine days’ fall, to the minor treatises in æsthetics: the thought of a century has been ringing changes on this dualism. They are not to be noted here, and are seldom to the purpose. Moses Mendelssohn’s division into the “voluntary” and the “natural” looks at first sight like an oracle from Herder; but it must be borne in mind that Mendelssohn refused to regard as poetry those waifs and strays of song which Herder praised. Masing, in a dissertation^[254] of considerable merit, divides into poetry of perception, which is rimeless, answering to the classical or the objective, and poetry of feeling, which is rimed and includes Christian, individual poetry: but there is no great gain in this. Mr. E. C. Stedman^[255] thinks poetry is “differentiated by the Me and the Not Me,” and thus he obtains his two main divisions of the poetic product. So run some of the purely theoretical contrasts; without stay in historic study, their distinctions are based upon the poetic impulse, and there is of course a far clearer case when one considers poetry in the light of those conditions under which it is produced. Æsthetic writers who apply the tests of sociology, for example, have made a vast gain in their method of treatment and in their results. Poetry to them is no vague, alien substance, a planet to be watched through telescopes; it is an outcome of the social life of man, and social facts must help to explain it. Critic, historian, psychologist, all put new life into the æsthetic discussion; and the artist himself is at hand. Earlier than Taine, Hennequin, and Guyau, and along with Sainte-Beuve, Richard Wagner,^[256] in a practical purpose, and full of the ideas of 1848, tried to bring the conditions of artistic production into line with the study of society. It is not nature, he thinks, but the opposition to nature which has brought forth art; man becomes independent of climate; and social, human struggle is the making of this new man, this “man independent of nature,” who alone called art into being, and that not in tropical Asia, but “on the naked hillsides of Greece.” Primitive man, dependent on nature, could never bring forth art, a social product made in the teeth of adverse natural conditions.^[257] Wagner, however, goes further. Such is the history of art; but what of its future? Art, literature, have become a solitary piece of performance and of reception. The lonely modern man, pining for poetic satisfaction, has but a sad and feeble comfort in the poetry of letters. Back to social conditions, back to the old trinity of song, movement, poem; back to the ensemble, the folk-idea, the poetry of a people; let Shakspere and Beethoven join hands in the art that is to be and that must spring, as it once sprang, from no single individual artist but from the folk!^[258] Dithyramb apart, here is a theory of social origins with a definite though curious dualism of art and nature; Wagner talks Jacob-Grimmisch, it is true, and raves as Nietzsche raved afterward; but he has sociological hints for which one searches the school of Grimm in vain. Even in Victor Hugo’s fantastic but suggestive phrases,^[259] the new science, the agitation of St. Simon and his school, may perhaps be found; and there is no disguise of any sort in the sociological æsthetics of Guyau,^[260] who repeats Hugo’s notion in scientific terms, and so gives a precise expression to the dualism once so vague. Primitive art, according to Guyau, is a waking vision, and what we now call invention was at first nothing but a spontaneous play of fancies and images suggesting and following one another in the confusion of a dream. Real art begins when this pastime comes to be work, when thought and effort seize upon the play of fancy.^[261]

These were mainly critical and æsthetic views. Of greater interest and importance is the dualism as it took shape under the hands of that historical school which had the great democratic movement in literature for its origin, Herder for its prophet, and A. W. Schlegel for its high priest. Here the dualism concerns not so much nature and art, uncertain terms at best, but the body of people, the folk, the community, nation, race, as contrasted with the individual artist, the “man of letters.” It is poetry of the people over against poetry of the schools. Conditions of this sort had been noted by earlier writers of what one may call the scientific bent, that is, by men like Scaliger, who in this respect was following Aristotle; not, of course, by those who looked upon the oldest poet as divine, a prophet and a seer, the view taken by Platonists like Spenser^[262] and Sidney, by the early renaissance, by Ronsard, and by belated followers of Ronsard. He, for example, not only says that earliest poetry was allegorical theology, to coax rough men into ideas of the divine,^[263] but, in his preface about music,^[264] written for a collection of songs and addressed to the king, he holds to the idea of a spontaneous and sacred perfection in this primitive verse. Later, so he explains in his Poetics, came “the second class of poets, whom I call human, since they were filled rather with artifice and labour than with divinity,”—nature and art, again, in pious antithesis. It is different with the scientific school. Scaliger, following Aristotle’s hints about the origin of the drama, is for a normal process from the natural to the artistic. Dante had made dualism a matter of rank, of merit, setting the vulgare illustre apart from the humile vulgare, and bidding spontaneous, facile poets beware how they undertake the things that belong to art;^[265] Scaliger is not only historical but comparative, and in the right fashion, assuming, at least for origins, no gradations of rank. He is not for degeneration but for development; instead of dividing the sheep from the goats, he regards nature and art as two phases of the poetic conditions. Looking at the three forms of primitive life,^[266] he gives the parentage of verse to the pastoral; hunters were too mobile, and ploughmen too busy, while shepherds had not only leisure for meditation but the songs of birds as lure. In this earliest stage Scaliger assumes two kinds of poetry, which he calls the solitary and the social; and again in the second division he makes a further contrast of the artless or natural,—not, he warns his reader, not to be classed as vulgar,—and the more artistic, such as those amœbean forms which are found in later pastoral verse. In other words, Scaliger hints at a fundamental dualism; and his account of the matter, modern in spirit despite its conventional style and its appeal to the ancients, is better than Herder’s cloudy enthusiasm in all respects save one, and that, of course, an exception of vast importance: Scaliger failed to put the rustic and communal verse of Europe on a par with “natural” and social songs of the prime.

This distinction of art and nature as a theory of origins, and with a touch of the historical method in its treatment, is found again and again in treatises on poetry from the renaissance to our own time.^[267] It is by no means confined to the brilliant and epoch-making writers. Who was farther removed from Herder, so far as notions about poetry are concerned, than Gottsched? But Gottsched, dull dog, as Dr. Johnson would have called him, makes a clear distinction between natural and artistic verse;^[268] more than this, he backs his theory of origins by referring to those “songs of the hill folk,” heard in his own day, which still show characteristics of primitive poetry. Earlier yet, in the remarkable work of Morhof^[269] one finds use of the comparative method and a keen sense of historic values; here is investigation, not theory outright, as with the younger Racine,^[270] or mere chronicle, as with M. de la Nauze.^[271] It is curious, too, that from the clergy came some of the most rationalistic accounts of the dualism of nature and art, in opposition to the divine and human idea of the renaissance. One must not forget Herder’s cloth; Lowth took Hebrew poetry, as poetry, quite out of the supernatural; and Calmet,^[272] whose work on the Bible was once valued by scholars, comments at length on the dualism as natural and artificial, not as human and divine. Improvisation seems to be his test for the natural sort, submission to rules and deliberation, his test for artificial verse; and in the first case it is wrath, joy, sorrow, hate, love, some natural outburst of passion, which is poetry by the mere fact of its utterance. Moreover, this poetry of nature is found in every clime;^[273] and inseparable from it, in early stages, is the natural music, song, which itself in course of time must be tamed by art. Like Budde in our own day, Calmet points out “natural” songs in the Bible. It was left, however, for Herder to bring forward all natural, artless poetry not as a regret but as a hope, or rather as a disinherited exile come back to claim his own; how the German pleaded for his client, and with what success, is matter of common fame. At the historical school of which he is the conspicuous exponent in matters of poetry we must give a closer look.

Herder, in point of fact, was before a larger tribunal than that of poetry, and in his plea for communal verse he was joining the great democratic movement which ran through European thought at large, no less active because less conspicuous in science, art, letters, religion, than in affairs of state. A passion for democracy had gone from literature into politics and again from politics into literature, begetting this notion of creative power in the people as a whole; about the time that philosophers discovered the people in politics, Hamann and Herder discovered the folk in verse. The earlier eighteenth century, like all the preceding Christian centuries from the time of St. Augustine,^[274] when saint or prophet or king was the embodiment of progress, still turned history into biography, and human development into a series of individual inventions; any movement in social life, whether of war or of peace, was due to the great man,—general, king, orator, poet,—who began or led the movement. Pascal’s pleasantry about Cleopatra and her nose became a serious system of history and philosophy. Even as late as Turgot,^[275] for example, one pinned one’s faith to great men, to genius, for the advancement of mankind. The seventeenth century had asked for raison; the eighteenth sought esprit.^[276] Genius was already a watchword when the democratic movement began, and it was not discarded by the new school; the Rousseaus and Herders clung to genius, but with a new interpretation of the word, and added that larger idea of “nature.” Critics are apt to forget that the return to nature was preceded by a return to genius. The next step was to substitute natural genius for the great man, to separate genius from the individual; and here the democratic movement found help at hand in the progress and gains of science. Science was now clear of the church, and began to work into the domain of law, causes, force; it sought the impersonal both in natural and in supernatural things. Cold and analytic in the earlier decades, science in the later eighteenth century grew emotional, synthetic, romantic, and full of zeal for what the Germans call “combination.” What a change from the earlier mood, represented, one might say, in Shaftesbury’s letter on enthusiasm! “Good humour,” he writes in 1707,^[277] “is not only the best security against enthusiasm, but the best foundation of piety and true religion.” Even as late as 1766, when the spirit of enthusiasm was again abroad, aristocratic Horace Walpole sounds the old note against the new communalism in his account of a sermon which he heard Wesley preach at Bath; the preacher “exalted his voice, and acted very ugly enthusiasm.” Enthusiasm, however, was now rife in science itself; still blocked on the theological side, it turned to nature and what lay undiscovered in her domain. No talk as yet of a struggle for existence, no distinct lapse of faith in humanity as main object of cosmic solicitudes; but a disposition to find in the sweep and conflict of natural forces sufficiently good answer to any question about the history of man, and a tendency to force upon individual men a transfer of values to the race. Not the individual, but the mass, and behind this mass the currents of life at large, were to interpret history. The great man disappeared, or else served simply as mouthpiece for the national and popular genius; and it was at this point that Herder appeared with his Thoughts for the Philosophy of the History of Mankind,—thoughts that here and there foreshadow the doctrine of evolution. Down to the extreme theories of Buckle, this point of view was taken by historians and philosophers. True, much is said of the individual; Rousseau, Goethe in his Werther, Herder, even, and Hamann, all glorified the free, individual man; it is not individual man in the old sense, however, but rather man himself as type of the human brotherhood, as one of a throng, the “citizen” whether high or low. More than this, it was a glorification of primitive man himself without the differencing and individualizing work of culture; the eighteenth century, and not merely in Rousseau’s sentimental fashion, discovered the savage on one side, and, on the other side, unspoiled men of the prime. In literature there was an outbreak of gentle savages and a very mob of Robinson Crusoes; while for philosophy and science, the alchemy of human perfectibility, a desire to reconstruct society by the elixir of primitive life and a study of man as he ought to be, preceded the chemistry of modern anthropological and sociological researches, which aim at an analysis of earliest social conditions and the science of man both as he was and as he is.

This democratic thought of the eighteenth century had an outer and an inner circle, answering in great measure to the notion of humanity and the notion of the people or “folk.” It was Vico who put men upon the first trail, who reformed scientific methods, and who, with all his antiquated theories, is often so surprisingly modern. He bade men look for the mind of humanity, the soul of it, as revealed in history, poetry, law, language, religion. He traced something of the inner circle as well, tossing aside Homer’s personality, and saying that Homer was the Greek people itself as it told the story of its deeds. He set up the antithesis between imagination and reason, and gave the formula of culture as a decrease of the one and an increase of the other. Herder said these things seventy years later, and indeed his mere plea for humanity and nationality^[278] adds little to the ideas of Vico; what the German added of his own was on the larger scale a substitution of people for race, and on the smaller scale a plea for the actual folk about one, the community of rustics, the village throng, not idealized shepherds and subjects of the Saturnian reign. From Vico to Herder, then, democracy was in the air, pervading the rationalism that so easily turned into sentiment and the naturalism that so readily fabled a new supernaturalism. Particularly in its theories of poetry the eighteenth century responded to the democratic impulse along three lines, the scientific, the historical, and what one would now call the ethnological and sociological.^[279] A detailed account of these three currents of thought in their effect upon the study of poetry would be of interest and profit in the present work, but demands too much space; it must be reserved for separate treatment. We must confine our attention to the movement for communal or popular verse, and even that must be described in merest outline.

The first man in Europe to recognize poetry of the people, and to make it a term of the dualism now in hand, was Montaigne. He discovered the thing and gave a name to it,—la poésie populaire; he praised it for its power and grace; and he brought it into line with that poetry of savages then first coming into the view of European critics. The specimen which he gave of this savage verse remained for a long time the only one commonly known in Europe; in like manner, a Lapland Lament, published in Scheffer’s Latin, came to be the conventional specimen of lowly or popular song. Montaigne, however, spoke boldly for the critical value of both kinds, savage and popular, bidding them hold up their heads in the presence of art. He praises the two extremes of poetic development, nature and simplicity on the one hand, and, on the other, noble artistic effort; for what Cotton translates as “the mongrets” he has open scorn.^[280] Along with the savage verses which he quotes in another essay^[281] he makes shrewd comments on the refrain and the dancing, shows an interest in ethnology, and even names his authorities,—“a man in my house who lived ten or twelve years in the New World,” and in smaller degree natives to whom he talked at Rouen. Now this insight, this outlook, of Montaigne are unique. Sidney, whom a German scholar^[282] praises for catholicity of taste equal to that of Montaigne and not derived from him, is too academic; he notes the areytos of America, by way of proof that rudest nations have poetry, and bursts out in that praise of “the old song of Percy and Douglas,” only to take away from its critical value by a limitation quite foreign to the spirit of Montaigne. Neither Sidney nor Puttenham,^[283] in their notice of savage and of communal poetry, came anywhere near the Frenchman’s point of view.

The catholicity and discernment of Montaigne, the careless approval of Sidney, the comparative vein in Puttenham, had really no following in Europe until Herder’s time. Poetry of the people remained a literary outcast; and as late as 1775 a German professor “would have felt insulted by the mere idea of any attention” to such verse.^[284] Englishmen, to be sure, began long before this to collect the ballads, to print them, and even to write about them in a shamefaced way; but this was eccentricity of the kind for which, according to Matthew Arnold, continental folk still make allowance. Ambrose Phillips, or whoever made the collection begun in 1723, is very bold in his first volume; he “will enter upon the praise of ballads and shew their antiquity;” in the second volume he weakens, and will “say as little upon the subject as possibly” he can; while in the third volume he actually apologizes for the “ludicrous manner” in which he wrote the two other prefaces. He had suggested that the ballads were really “written by the greatest and most polite wits of their age”; but nobody in England paid much heed to the subject of origins, barring a little powder burnt over the thing by Percy and Ritson; and the making of a theory, the founding of ballad criticism and research as a literary discipline, was left to German pens.

It has been said that Herder was the prophet of the faith in communal poetry. Herder’s “origins,” so far as this doctrine is concerned, are interesting enough. That the individual is child of his time, child of his race, child of his soil; that he is not only what “suns and winds and waters” make him, but what long ages and vast conspiracies of nature and the sum of human struggle have made him,—strand by strand of this cord can be brought from Hamann, from Blackwell, Lowth, Robert Wood, Hurd, Spence, from Condorcet, Montesquieu, Rousseau; but all that does not make up Herder. It was his grasp of this entire evolutionary process, his belief in it, his fiery exhortation, in a word, his genius, that made him the only begetter of the modern science. Full of scorn for closet verse of his day, he held up the racial or national, the “popular” in its best sense, against the pedantic and the laboured,—poetry that beats with the pulse of a whole people against poetry that copies its exercises from a dead page and has no sense of race. He sundered poetry for the ear from poetry for the eye, poetry said or sung from poetry that looks to “a paper eternity” for its reward. Under his hands, in a word, the dualism became real, a state of things impossible while one was juggling with an adjective like “natural” or with a phrase like “naive and sentimental.” He gathered and printed songs of the folk, as he calls them, or by another title, voices of the nations.^[285] Here, of course, is lack of precision; a peasant’s song and a soliloquy of Hamlet, one because really “popular,” the other because really “national,” are ranged alike as folksongs. But the dualism stands. Oral, traditional, communal poetry, and whatever springs from these, are set clearly against poetry of the schools. Naturally, Herder was unjust to the cause of art, or rather he seems to be unjust. What he does is to bid the artist stand for a community or race and reflect their life, or else fall, a negligible and detached thing. Poetry is a spring of water from the living rock of community or nation; whether Moses, Homer, Shakspere, dealt the unsealing blow, or whether the waters gushed out of their own force, Herder cared not a whit.

This doctrine of a dualism in poetry was still further elaborated by A. W. Schlegel, who brought to the task not only his unerring literary tact,^[286] his critical insight, his astounding sympathy for foreign literatures, but his method of historical and genetic research. In his early essay on Dante, he broke away from the method then in vogue, and used historical tests instead of that philosophical analysis so dear to Schiller. No one has stated the dualism of communal and artistic poetry so clearly as Schlegel has done;^[287] and yet, owing to a curious lack of perspective in modern criticism, he is credited with the achievement of crushing the dualism to naught. Leaving the details to another occasion, we may give a brief outline of this case, which has so distinct a bearing on the question of poetical origins. In his lectures and in sundry essays, Schlegel states the historical dualism, and repeats Aristotle’s account of early communal and improvised verse, adding, however, what Aristotle refused to give, recognition of this as poetry and respect for its rude nobility of style. As Schlegel left the matter in his lectures, there was nothing to which one could raise an objection; and the same is true of a temperate statement, made by Wilhelm von Humboldt,^[288] which may be quoted here at length. “In the course of human development,” he says, “there arise two distinct kinds of poetry, marked respectively by the presence and the absence of written records. One, the earlier, may be called natural poetry; it springs from an enthusiasm which lacks the purpose and consciousness of art. The second is a later product, and is full of art; but it is none the less outcome of the deepest and purest spirit of poetry.” One sees it is not the communal bantling that has to be praised and defended here; not rude, uncivil verse that once found an advocate in Herder, but now needs no advocate; it is the poetry of art that must be lauded and protected as even-christian with “natural” verse. Democratic ideas had put the poetry of nature above all else; the pantheistic doctrines of Schelling, carrying even Schlegel off his feet, had made a school for the universal, general, communal, absolute, in verse; and a wholesome reaction had set in. Humboldt’s modest words could have been signed by nearly every critical warrior, Trojan or Tyrian, who took up his pen in the long dispute; the trouble had begun when scholars tried to give details about the origin of natural or popular verse and essayed to draw close lines of definition between the people and the artist. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, full of romance, piety, and pantheism, laid stress upon this kindly word “natural” and dogmatized it into a creed.^[289] A song sings itself; a “folk” can be poet; nations make their own epic; the process is a mystery: these and like phrases are now regarded by short-sighted critics as a fair summary of the democratic or communal doctrine of poetry, and are thought to have been blown into space, along with the doctrine, by a clumsy jest of Scherer about the Pentecost. Scherer, indeed, has given a history of this movement, with what seems to him a closing of the account, in his admirable book on Jacob Grimm; but neither this nor his jest can be regarded as final. He appeals to Schlegel as the great literary critic who really killed this doctrine of the folk in verse as soon as it was born, although the great reputation of the Grimms gave it an appearance of life and vigour down to the time say ... of Scherer. Now it is a fact, overlooked by German scholars, that A. W. Schlegel laid down a theory of communal origins, almost identical with that of the Grimms, at a time when Jacob was barely fifteen and Wilhelm fourteen years old. In an essay on Bürger,^[290] whom he loved and admired, Schlegel asks whether this man of genius was really what he thought he was, a poet of the folk, and whether his poetry could be called poetry of the people. To answer the question, Schlegel makes a study of old ballads, and says that these were not purposely made for the folk, but were composed among the people,—“composed, in a manner of speaking, by the folk itself as a whole.”^[291] This community which made the old ballads was of course homogeneous; the style of them is without art or rhetoric; they come spontaneously. In short, “the free poetic impulse did that with ease and success to which the careful artist now purposely returns.” Here is the later doctrine of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm in a nutshell; how much of it did Schlegel reject fifteen years later in that famous criticism^[292] of the Grimms’ Old German Forests, where he turns state’s evidence against his fellow conspirators for demos? Simply its extravagances, but by no means its reiteration of a dualism in the poetic product springing from conditions of production. That idea stands intact; for all of Schlegel’s historical studies are based upon it. Moreover, the Grimms said far more than Schlegel had said, and went into deeper extravagances of romance. He denied their assumption that the great mass of legend, song, epic, which one finds or surmises at the beginnings of a national literature, is the authoritative and essentially true deliverance of the nation itself. Nor is there a pious mystery—and here Schlegel touches the quick—in the making of such songs. A poem implies a poet. In brief, the Grimms were not to furbish up the idyll of a golden age, bind it in a mystery, and hand it over to the public as an outcome of exact philological studies. This process, he said in sum, is all theory and no fact; and here lies the stress of Schlegel’s criticism, which really involved only a partial and superficial recanting of his own doctrine. He was always wont to turn from theory to fact, and in the Grimms’ wild theory he found no facts at all; he protests against the self-made song, the folk-made song even; but he would have been the first to give ear to any plea for a difference between songs of art and songs of the people that was based on facts and that might bring out those social conditions which determine the poem as it is made. He had himself repeatedly brought out these conditions, these facts, and he nowhere recants the doctrine which he founded on them. He unsays, perhaps without consciousness of any change of opinion, his old saying about the folk as a poet; he does not unsay his belief in the dualism of poetry according to the conditions under which it is produced. “All poetry,” he declares, “rests on a union of nature and art; without art it can get no permanent form, without nature its vitality is gone.” True; but there is communal art and there is individual art, or rather there are two kinds of poetry according as art and the individual or instinct and the community predominate; and this dualism he had repeatedly affirmed, just as Aristotle had hinted it long before him. Schlegel does not reduce it to a mere matter of record,^[293] as modern critics do when they seize upon Humboldt’s saying that the difference between oral and written is the “mark” of the dualism—he does not say its essence; for it is treated, even in this critical essay, as a matter of conditions of production. The scholar who took up poetry on the genetic and historical side, who followed brutish and uncivil man slowly tottering into the path of art, is not lost in the critic who simply refuses to see primitive poetry bursting by miracle out of a whole nation into an Iliad, a Nibelungen Lay, a Beowulf.

This, then, is particularly to be borne in mind; the dualism of the poetic product based on the difference between communal and individual conditions of production does not rise and fall with the dualism as it took shape in the theory of the Grimms.^[294] Aristotle had set aside all unpremeditated, artless verse of the throng, and had regarded it at best as mere foundation, no part of the poetic structure. Jacob Grimm went to the other extreme, and set off from poetry all laboured, premeditated, individual verse; he accepted modern poetry, to be sure, but explained away the poet; the superstructure was nothing save as it implied that unseen foundation. Or, to put it in different phrase, the old doctrine of imitation as mainspring of poetry had yielded to the idea of a power, an informing energy; one turned, like Addison, to the imaginative process, or else to deeper sources. Herder told men to seek this source, this poetic power, in the people, with their primitive passions and their unspoiled utterance. Herder was general, often merely negative, and exhorted; the Grimms were positive and dogmatized, teaching that the whole people as a whole people once made poetry. But this extravagance must not drag down in its death those sober facts about which criticism has always hovered with its hints or statements of the twofold nature of poetry. Moreover, just as these facts are to be held in plain view, and not lost in the haze of an impossible theory, so, too, they are not to be rationalized and explained away into a facile, unmeaning phrase about the difference between oral and written record. It is a question of the difference in poetic production due to varying conditions under which the poetic impulse has to work; and some difference of this sort, not of mere record, is recognized in the whole range of criticism, mostly, however, by expressions about art and nature which leave much to be desired in the way of precise statement. Nature and art are terms of æsthetics; even when used in a more or less historical sense, the historical comprehension of them is uncertain; can they not be transferred then, to terms of sociology, of ethnology, of literary conditions, so as to correspond with the actual facts of poetry and with the actual history of man,—transferred in good faith, and for the interests of no theory, but to provide clear tests for an investigation which studies communal poetry in order to determine whether it can throw light upon the conditions of primitive song? There is certainly such a dualism of conditions apart from the record. Even the most intrepid monist allows the dualism of the term “mankind” according as one takes man social or man individual, the solitary man of reflection, ethics, judgment, and the same man as one of a crowd of madmen—mad for the nonce, mad gregariously, but mad. M. Tarde has recently drawn this picture in very bold outlines. There are two men in the juryman,—the individual and the juryman. Does this, then, hold in poetry? It is a fact that poetry made by a throng, or made in a throng, or made for a throng, or made in whatever fashion but finding its way, as favourite expression, to a throng—and every theory of communal verse may be referred to one of these cases—is a quite distinct kind of poetry from that which is made by the solitary poet for the solitary reader. Nowadays nearly all poetry is written and read, but once upon a time nearly all poetry was sung and heard; a very hasty glance at this antithesis will show that it concerns production at least as much as it concerns the record. It serves as basis for the division of poetry into one class where the communal spirit and environment condition the actual making, and into another class where the artist, the individual, has upper hand from the start.^[295] It sets primitive poetry, at least in some important characteristics, over against the poetry of modern times. If, then, communal poetry still exists in survival; if the sense of literary evolution, the facts of literary evolution, the facts of ethnology, the conclusions of sociology, all assert that primitive poetry was communal rather than individual in the conditions of its making; then it is clear that a study of the survivals ought to be one of the best ways by which one could come to reasonably sure conclusions about poetry of the prime.