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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.