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