The Book of Love

by Paolo Mantegazza

CHAPTER IV MODESTY

Modesty is one of the psychical phenomena the physiological study of which is more difficult because that phenomenon is very indistinct and vague, although prepotent and most exacting in some of its forms; because it is very variable in the different races; and because, though a part of the energies which develop in the reciprocal approaching of the sexes, it seems to keep them apart, and, born of love, seems to have a tendency to frustrate its supreme end.

I, too,—I must admit it,—through the various periods of life, have changed the idea I first had of modesty. At first it seemed to me a sentiment that rises within us in childhood and during adolescence, as spontaneous as egotism, self-esteem and love; but, later, I became convinced that modesty is taught first and learned afterward; therefore, it is one of those sentiments which I term acquired or secondary.

Modesty is an extra-current of love, and has its principal source in those powerful energies which, through a battle or a choice, must relight the torch of life. Animals demonstrate to us some rudimentary forms originating from modesty. Many of them conceal themselves when offering a sacrifice to voluptuousness; very many females, sought by the male, begin by fleeing, resisting, hiding that which they desire to concede. And this is probably an irreflective, automatic act; it is, perhaps, a form of fear which rises before the aggressive demands of the male; but the aim of these resistances, of these pretenses of modesty is to excite the male as much as the female and to make the ground better fitted for fecundation. It is possible that animals conceal their loves from our sight to protect themselves from danger, knowing that in those supreme moments they are exposed to every attack; but until the psychology of brutes is so limited we will be allowed to assume that among them also the first light of modesty has penetrated. If this be so, then we will find justification in the fact that, in superior animals also, this sentiment appears first in the female, for whom the anatomy of the organs and the defensive mission in the battles of love make the actions of modesty more spontaneous and natural. And to the human female, too, nature has assigned the same mission, making her characteristically a hundred times more modest than the male.

The first hand brought by woman to cover parts which the male wished to see gave origin to the first energies of the sentiment of modesty, which arose, therefore, at the same time as the first forms of coquetry. Man and woman, then living together in the family or in the tribe, were naturally forced to become, independently of their greater psychical development, the most modest animals, because woman is subject to repulsive periodical infirmities and man shows other genital phenomena which, if not concealed, would attract too much attention from all and excite perturbation in males and in females. It is therefore natural that almost all, not to say all, races of the earth present some form of modesty, and that also in the human race the female should be more modest than the male, because the aggressive mission, which is reserved to him by nature, makes modesty dangerous and almost impossible, at least in the last battles.

Modesty, born in this way, is taught, together with many other things, by men to children, as the latter cannot, until they reach puberty, distinguish the special importance of copulative organs, or the aggressive mission of the male, or the thousand offensive and defensive vicissitudes of love. Modesty, however, is perhaps born spontaneously, or, to use a better expression, by heredity in the more perfect and elevated natures. Hence modesty is taught to those who, of themselves, would not know it, and we determine its limits in such a way as to circumscribe it within the purely genital field or to widen it beyond the amorous boundaries. The Sherihat prescribes that Turkish women should cover the back of the hand, but permits them to expose the palm. The Armenian women of the population of southern India cover their mouths wherever they happen to be, even in their own homes, and when they go out they wrap themselves in a white cloth. The married women live in strict seclusion, and for many years they cannot see their male relatives, hiding their faces even from the father-in-law and the mother-in-law. And these two examples, selected from a thousand that might be quoted, should be sufficient to persuade us that accessory and conventional elements often accompany true modesty, to which, physiologically, they do not belong. We, ourselves, in our own countries, find that the boundaries of modesty are, in many places, marked by the various fashions of dress, and that they stop from the knees down or from the breast up and not according to the national mode of dress. He who mistook these conventional elements for modesty could write the great psychological heresy, that this sentiment had its origin in the custom of covering the body.

We must not confound with true modesty those other esthetic needs which compel us to conceal some repulsive actions of our animal life. The true sentiment of modesty defends from profane eyes the organs and the mysteries of love and those parts of the body that are directly or indirectly related to it. We behold almost all races conceal first the genitals, afterward the sides, the breast, the legs, the arms, then the entire trunk, and finally the head; but here modesty yields the place to the requirements of social intercourse or of jealousy.

The sentiment of modesty is among the most changeable in form and degree. Its ethnical history is written in the volume which I have dedicated to the ethnology of love. It will suffice here to point out that I divide the nations into immodest, semi-modest and modest, according to the traces of modesty and the greater or less development of this sentiment. Modesty is unlike intelligence, or the sentiment of the beautiful, or other psychical phenomena, which show an ascending and regular progress as we gradually proceed from the lowest races to the highest; therefore, it cannot be considered alone as a dynamometer of progress. The Tehuelches of South America bathe very often, generally before dawn: but the men go into the water separately from the women; they are very modest people who never, in any case, take off their chirípas. And the Japanese, with a civilization a hundred times superior to that of the Tehuelches, are much inferior to them in the matter of modesty. The Malaysians are very modest, but the Greeks and the Romans were none too much so. Without leaving our own race and times, we have women who would die rather than subject themselves to an examination with the speculum, while men of great intelligence and lofty passions admit that they hardly feel a shadow of modesty.

In the higher races, however, if we neglect a few exceptions and take human groups in great masses, we may say that modesty, like all psychical phenomena of a high order, grows, refines and presents more delicate forms proportionately to the growth of the moral and intellectual importance of a people. The nations which are the most advanced in civilization and morality are also the most modest. Modesty is one of the most elect forms of the seductions and the reticences of love; an extra-current of the great fundamental phenomena of generation; a physical self-respect; one of the psychical phenomena of the highest order. Faithful companion of love, it is a sentiment which in superior natures possesses infinite mysteries, ineffable delicacies, gestures deserving a virtue prize, glances which are a paradise, words and sighs which deserve to be immortalized by the pen of an artist. He who possesses the immodest or semi-modest nature of the Fuegian or the Japanese loses more than half of the treasures of love, and is like a man who, deprived of the olfactory sense, admires the flowers of a garden.

Woman is the vestal of modesty, the queen of its most elect forms, and, when a virgin and as pure as crystal, she possesses intact the entire treasure of the most exquisite chastity. Wandering through the garden of love, she loses some of its gems, and she loses more if her companion helps her to disperse the treasure. It very rarely happens, however, that a woman, even in the exciting and wearing races of a thousand loves, loses all the wealth of modesty with which nature has enriched her. Even in the most gay and libertine life, even in the filth of libertinism, we see with infinite wonder some diamonds flash, which the fire of lust was incapable of destroying and the mud of amorous simony could not soil. We remain astonished and moved at such a power of resistance in a sentiment that seems so fragile and delicate. And as long as a corner of sacred earth remains to woman upon which a humble flower of modesty grows, virtue is not all dead and resurrection is still possible. Bow your head before this flower, you, jeering deniers of every feminine virtue! you, insatiable tormentors of lust. Respect that clod of sacred earth; do not pluck that humble and last flower of a garden, which you so brutally have stripped of all leaves and reduced to desolation!