It thus comes about that the emotion of modesty necessarily depends on
the feelings of the people around. The absence of the emotion by no means
signifies immodesty, provided that the reactions of modesty are at once
set in motion under the stress of a spectator's eye that is seen to be
lustful, inquisitive, or reproachful. This is proved to be the case among
primitive peoples everywhere. The Japanese woman, naked as in daily life
she sometimes is, remains unconcerned because she excites no disagreeable
attention, but the inquisitive and unmannerly European's eye at once
causes her to feel confusion. Stratz, a physician, and one, moreover, who
had long lived among the Javanese who frequently go naked, found that
naked Japanese women felt no embarrassment in his presence.
It is doubtless as a cloak to the blush that we must explain the curious
influence of darkness in restraining the manifestations of modesty, as
many lovers have discovered, and as we may notice in our cities after
dark. This influence of darkness in inhibiting modesty is a very ancient
observation. Burton, in the _Anatomy of Melancholy_, quotes from Dandinus
the saying "_Nox facit impudentes_," directly associating this with
blushing, and Bargagli, the Siennese novelist, wrote in the sixteenth
century that, "it is commonly said of women, that they will do in the dark
what they would not do in the light." It is true that the immodesty of a
large city at night is to some extent explained by the irruption of
prostitutes at that time; prostitutes, being habitually nearer to the
threshold of immodesty, are more markedly affected by this influence.
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