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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.