It must always be remembered that these factors do not usually occur
separately. Very often they are all of them implied in a single impulse of
modesty. We unravel the cord in order to investigate its construction, but
in real life the strands are more or less indistinguishably twisted
together.
It may still be asked finally whether, on the whole, modesty really
becomes a more prominent emotion as civilization advances. I do not think
this position can be maintained. It is a great mistake, as we have seen,
to suppose that in becoming extended modesty also becomes intensified. On
the contrary, this very extension is a sign of weakness. Among savages,
modesty is far more radical and invincible than among the civilized. Of
the Araucanian women of Chile, Treutler has remarked that they are
distinctly more modest than the Christian white population, and such
observations might be indefinitely extended. It is, as we have already
noted, in a new and crude civilization, eager to mark its separation from
a barbarism it has yet scarcely escaped, that we find an extravagant and
fantastic anxiety to extend the limits of modesty in life, and art, and
literature. In older and more mature civilizations--in classical
antiquity, in old Japan, in France--modesty, while still a very real
influence, becomes a much less predominant and all-pervading influence. In
life it becomes subservient to human use, in art to beauty, in literature
to expression.
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