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Modern individual recitation, then, by this evidence of philology and by the sense of evolution in poetic form, can be no criterion for primitive poetry; hence the inadequate character of such investigations into the nature of poetic rhythm as neglect the facts offered by ethnology and by comparative literature. One must not neglect choral and communal conditions when one deals with primitive verse. For a study of modern epic and dramatic verse as it is read aloud or declaimed, for a study even of verse on the Shaksperian stage, Meumann’s essay is useful in many respects; it is useless for the study of rhythm in that larger sweep of poetic origins and growth.

We must turn, then, to scientific material which deals with primitive stages of human life. A very primitive, perhaps a pre-primitive stage of human life is involved in Darwin’s theory, stated in his Descent of Man, reaffirmed briefly in his book on the expression of emotions, and adopted by Scherer for the explanation of poetic origins, that a study of sexual calls from male to female among animals might unlock the secret of primitive rhythm. This, as has been said, will lead to no good. Love songs, the supposed development of such calls, actually diminish and disappear as one retraces the path of verse and comes to low stages of human progress, to savage poetry at large;^[205] the curve of evolution is against recourse to facts such as Darwin would find convincing; and those “long past ages when ... our early progenitors courted each other by the aid of vocal tones,” are less helpful to the understanding of rhythm and poetry, when restored in such furtive and amiable moments, than when they present the primitive horde in festal dance and song, finding by increased ease of movement and economy of force, by keener sense of kind, by delight of repetition, the possibilities of that social consent which is born of rhythmic motion. Scherer, indeed, saw how much more this social consent and this festal excitement have to do with the matter, and undertook to fix the origin of poetry in an erotic and pantomimic choral, such as one still finds in certain obscene Australian dances;^[206] but the erotic impulse is not social, save in some questionable exceptions; and social consent, as Donovan has shown, began rather on public and frankly social occasions, like the dance of a horde after victory in war.^[207]