Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/497

Rh with that of France. Bellio has distributed the poets, painters, and sculptors of antiquity according to their place of birth, over a map of that country. The effect has been to emphasize the enormous preponderance of artistic genius all through the north, from Tuscany to the Alps. How does this coincide with our previous deduction concerning France? It seems, perhaps, to corroborate the relation of Teutonism to art, until we recall the fact that all northern Italy is overwhelmingly Alpine by race, as compared with the artistically sterile south. Couple with this the fact that in reality Teutonism is a negligible factor in Italy, physically speaking, and that precisely the same ethnic type in France, which is so fecund culturally in Italy, is the one localized wherever art is not; and all doubt as to the predominant cause of the phenomenon is dissipated. We see immediately that the artistic fruitfulness in either case is the concomitant and derivative product of a highly developed center of population. Contact of mind with mind is the real cause of the phenomenon.

This mode of destructive criticism, appeal to the social geography of other countries wherein the ethnic balance of power is differently distributed, may be directed against almost any of the phenomena we have instanced in France as seemingly of racial derivation. In the case either of suicide or divorce, if we turn from France to Italy or Germany, we instantly perceive all sorts of contradictions. The ethnic type which is so immune from propensity to self-destruction or domestic disruption in France, becomes in Italy most prone to either mode of escape from temporary earthly ills. For each phenomenon culminates in frequency in the northern half of the latter country, stronghold of the Alpine race. Nor is there an appreciable infusion of Teutonism, physically speaking, herein, to account for the change of heart. Of course, it might be urged that this merely shows that the Mediterranean race of southern Italy is as much less inclined to the phenomenon than the Alpine race in these respects, as it in turn lags behind the Teuton. For it must be confessed that even in Italy neither divorce nor suicide is so frequent anywhere as in Teutonic northern France. Well, then, turn to Germany. Compare its two halves in these respects again. The northern half of the empire is most purely Teutonic by race; the southern is not distinguishable ethnically, as we have sought to prove, from central France. Bavaria, Baden, Würtemberg are no more Teutonic by race than Auvergne. Do we find differences in suicide, for example, following racial boundaries here? Far from it; for Saxony is its culminating center; and Saxony, as we know, is really half Slavic by heart,