Modesty is the feeling of the true, that is to
say, of the healthy, in love; it long exists as a vision, not yet
attained; vague, yet sufficiently clear for all that deviates
from it to be repelled as offensive and painful. At first, a
remote and seemingly inaccessible ideal, as it comes nearer it
grows human and individual, and emerges from the region of dream,
ceasing not to be loved as ideal, even when it is possessed as
real.
"At first sight, it seems paradoxical to define modesty as an
aspiration towards truth in love; it seems, on the contrary, to
be an altogether factitious feeling. But to simplify the problem,
we have to suppose modesty reduced to its normal functions,
disengaged from its superstitions, its variegated customs and
prejudices, the true modesty of simple and healthy natures, as
far removed from prudery as from immodesty. And what we term the
natural, or the true in love, is the singular mingling of two
forms of imaginations, wrongly supposed to be incompatible: ideal
aspiration and the sense for the realities of life. Thus defined,
modesty not only repudiates that cold and dissolving criticism
which deprives love of all poetry, and prepares the way for a
brutal realism; it also excludes that light and detached
imagination which floats above love, the mere idealism of heroic
sentiments, which cherishes poetic illusions, and passes, without
seeing it, the love that is real and alive.
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