Romantic Love and Personal Beauty / Their development, causal relations, historic and national peculiarities

by Henry T. Finck

II.—CROSSING

Darwin has proved experimentally that in the vegetable kingdom “cross-fertilisation is generally beneficial, and self-fertilisation injurious. This is shown by the difference in height, weight, constitutional vigour, and fertility of the offspring from crossed and self-fertilised flowers, and in the number of seeds produced by the parent plants.” He also showed that “the benefit from cross-fertilisation depends on the plants which are crossed having been subjected during previous generations to somewhat different conditions.”

Similarly, concerning animals, we read in Topinard, that “breeders who select their subjects with a definite object to breed in and in, that is to say, between near relations, rapidly obtain excellent results. They know, however, that fertility then diminishes, and that it will cease altogether if they do not have recourse from time to time to crossing, in order to strengthen the race.”

But both in the vegetable and the animal kingdom, as we have seen, superior Health also implies superior Beauty.

The inference is natural that the human race also must be benefited by marriages of individuals of different races, or of the same race, but brought up under different conditions of life. And the facts are entirely in favour of this supposition, as are the best authorities in Anthropology. Dr. Topinard gives the following instances among many others: “Immigration into the United States, which has taken so considerable a flight during the last thirty years, has already been enormous. Every variety of cross has been going on between English, Irish, Germans, Italians, French, etc., with the greatest possible success. We may also mention numberless Spaniards from the Peninsula, among whom are found the features of the Saracen invaders of the ninth century; then that population on the Barbary coast, called Moors, and which is a medley of races of every description, the Arab and Berber blood predominating. On tracing back the yellow races, we also discover a perfect eugenesis.... De Mas speaks in the highest terms of mixed breeds of Chinese and Mongolians, and MM. Mondières and Morice of those of Chinese and Annamites under the name of Minuongs. Dr. Bowring describes a race in the Philippine Islands, intermediate between the Malays and Chinese, as the principal agent of civilisation in these latitudes.”

On the other hand, “it is undeniable that in Africa the Negro races do not cross to any great extent.” Nor has any one ever accused the Negroes of an excessive amount of Beauty. Whereas in Lima, which has the finest women in South America, “there are twenty-three different names to designate the varieties of mixed breeds of Spaniards, Peruvians, and Negroes.” “The number of mongrels on the face of the globe has been estimated at twelve millions, of whom no fewer than eleven millions are in South America.” South American women are already famous for their Beauty, and there is reason to believe that when the fusion of all these elements is complete the race will be one of the finest in the world. What Beauty it has now seems to be owing chiefly to the magic of Crossing; for attention to Health there is little but what comes from life in the open air; while Romantic Love is perhaps as rare as Mental Refinement, inasmuch as Courtship is not so free and easy a matter as in North America. All the more honour to the potency of Crossing.

Take a few more cases. The African Negroes, as just stated, do not mix much, and are an ugly type. Among the Polynesians, on the other hand, there are many very fine types of human beauty; and it is therefore not surprising to read that to-day in Polynesia, “mixed breeds are so numerous that it would be difficult to find among them any individuals of pure race.”

Again, concerning the Magyars or Hungarians, Schweiger-Lerchenfeld remarks that “they are a splendid race, physically and intellectually.... The girls and young women are of most piquant charm, models of health in mind and body.” But these Magyars, when they first came to Europe, were, as Waitz states, “of a repulsive ugliness in the eyes of all their neighbours.” That they have mixed with the Indo-Germanic type is shown by their appearance, as well as by peculiarities of their language. “Where they have probably remained less mixed,” Waitz continues, “and at the same time less cultivated, in some remote regions, especially in the mountains, the ugly primitive type may be found to the present day; in the plains may be found every transitional form from this to the nobler type; at Szegedin both are found face to face.”

The Magyars, in turn, have, like the Slavo-Italians, Czechs, etc., assisted the Austrians in evolving a superior type of Beauty by fusing with them. That there is very much more Beauty in Vienna than in any purely German city is an almost proverbial commonplace; and the reason why may be found in the statistics: in Germany 31·80 per cent are blond, 14·05 brunet, 54·15 mixed; in Austria 19·59 per cent are blond, 23·17 brunet, and 68·04 mixed.

The European Turks have much nobler forms of the head and features than their Asiatic relatives; and the inference seems inevitable that they owe these improvements to intermarriage with Circassian women.