posed
upon women by men with the object of preserving their own virtue. While
this motive is far from being the sole source of modesty, it must
certainly be borne in mind as an inevitable outcome of the economic factor
of modesty.

In Europe it seems probable that the generally accepted conceptions of
mediaeval chivalry were not without influence in constituting the forms in
which modesty shows itself among us. In the early middle ages there seems
to have been a much greater degree of physical familiarity between the
sexes than is commonly found among barbarians elsewhere. There was
certainly considerable promiscuity in bathing and indifference to
nakedness. It seems probable, as Durkheim points out,[56] that this state
of things was modified in part by the growing force of the dictates of
Christian morality, which regarded all intimate approaches between the
sexes as sinful, and in part by the influence of chivalry with its
aesthetic and moral ideals of women, as the representative of all the
delicacies and elegancies of civilization. This ideal was regarded as
incompatible with the familiarities of the existing social relationships
between the sexes, and thus a separation, which at first existed only in
art and literature, began by a curious reaction to exert an influence on
real life.

The chief new feature--it is scarcely a new element--added to modesty when
an advanced civilization slowly emerges from barbarism is the elaboration
of its social ritual.[57] Civilization expands the range of modesty, and
renders it, at the same time, more changeable. The French seventeenth
century, and the English eighteenth, represent early stages of modern
European civilization, and they both devoted special attention to the
elaboration of the minute details of modesty. The frequenters of the Hotel
Rambouillet, the _precieuses_ satirized by Moliere, were not only engaged
in refining the language; they were refining feelings and ideas and
enlarging the boundaries of modesty.[58] In England such famous and
popular authors as Swift and Sterne bear witness to a new ardor of modesty
in the sudden reticences, the dashes, and the asterisks, which are found
throughout their works. The altogether new quality of literary prurience,
of which Sterne is still the classical example, could only have arisen on
the basis of the new modesty which was then overspreading society and
literature. Idle people, mostly, no doubt, the women in _salons_ and