P.
Escoube, in a judicious essay (included in _Preferences_, 1913), presents a more reasonable view of this aspect of Verlaine's temperament.

Even apart altogether from the evidence as to the poet's tendency to passionate friendship, there can be no appeal from the poems themselves, which clearly possess an absolute and unquestionable sincerity.
[101] Sir Richard Burton, who helped to popularize this view, regarded the phenomenon as "geographical and climatic, not racial," and held that within what he called the Sotadic Zone "the vice is popular and endemic, held at the worst to be a mere peccadillo, while the races to the north and south of the limits here defined practice it only sporadically, amid the opprobrium of their fellows, who, as a rule, are physically incapable of performing the operation, and look upon it with the liveliest disgust." He adds: "The only physical cause for the practice which suggests itself to me, and that must be owned to be purely conjectural, is that within the Sotadic Zone there is a blending of the masculine and feminine temperaments, a crasis which elsewhere only occurs sporadically" (_Arabian Nights_, 1885, vol.x, pp.

205-254).

The theory of the Sotadic Zone fails to account for the custom among the Normans, Celts, Scythians, Bulgars, and Tartars, and, moreover, in various of these regions different views have prevailed at different periods.

Burton was wholly unacquainted with the psychological investigations into sexual inversion which had, indeed, scarcely begun in his day.
[102] Spectator (_Anthropophyteia_, vol.vii, 1910), referring especially to the neighborhood of Sorrento, states that the southern Italians regard passive _pedicatio_ as disgraceful, but attach little or no shame to active _pedicatio_.