“Our doubts are traitors,
And make us lose the good we oft might win
By fearing to attempt,”
says Shakspere; and Chesterfield remarks à propos, that “that silly sanguine notion which is firmly entertained here, that one Englishman can beat three Frenchmen, encourages and has sometimes enabled one Englishman in reality to beat two.”
Ovid knew the value of boldness. And although his object was not to teach how to win permanent Love, but how to get honey without taking care of the bees, yet his psychology is correct, and agrees with Goethe’s aphorism that “if thou approachest women with tenderness thou winnest them with a word; but he who is bold and saucy comes off better.”
Perhaps this is one reason why officers are so successful in Love, for several of them have been known to be bold and saucy.
Another reason may be that their pursuit is more distinctively and exclusively masculine than any other profession.
What, for instance, could be more delightfully masculine, i.e. mediæval, than the way in which, according to the Chronicon Turonense, William the Conqueror wooed and won Mathilde, the daughter of Count Baldwin, Prince of Flanders. At first he was unsuccessful, “for the young girl,” says Professor Scherr, “declared proudly she would not marry a bastard. Then William rode to Bruges, waylaid Mathilde, attacked her when she came from church, pulled her long hair, and maltreated her with his fists and with kicks, after which heroic performance he made his escape. Strange to say, this peculiar mode of Love-making imposed so greatly on the beauty that she declared with tears in her eyes that she would marry no one but the Norman Duke, whom she actually did marry. A parallel case may be found in the German Nibelungenlied (str. 870 and 901).”
Since, according to the old philosophy, human nature, including Love and Love-making, is the same at all times and in all countries, it follows that a modern lover, after donning his brass buttons, should administer his sweetheart a sound thrashing. That will make her mellow and docile.