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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]