IV.  COYNESS

When a man is in love he wears his heart on his sleeve and feels eager to have the beloved see how passionately it throbs for her.  When a girl is in love she tries to conceal her heart in the innermost recesses of her bosom, lest the lover discover her feelings prematurely.  In other words, coyness is a trait of feminine love—­the only ingredient of that passion which is not, to some extent, common to both sexes.  “The cruel nymph well knows to feign, ... coy looks and cold disdain,” sang Gay; and “what value were there in the love of the maiden, were it yielded without coy delay?” asks Scott.

     ’Tis ours to be forward and pushing;
     ’Tis yours to affect a disdain,

Lady Montagu makes a man say, and Richard Savage sings: 

     You love; yet from your lover’s wish retire;
     Doubt, yet discern; deny, and yet desire. 
     Such, Polly, are your sex—­part truth, part fiction,
     Some thought, much whim, and all a contradiction.

“Part truth, part fiction;” the girl romances regarding her feelings; her romantic love is tinged with coyness.  “She will rather die than give any sign of affection,” says Benedick of Beatrice; and in that line Shakspere reveals one of the two essential traits of genuine modern coyness—­dissemblance of feminine affection.

Was coyness at all times an attribute of femininity, or is it an artificial product of modern social conditions and culture?  Is coyness ever manifested apart from love, or does its presence prove the presence of love?  These two important questions are to be answered in the present section.

WOMEN WHO WOO

The opinion prevails that everywhere and always the first advances were made by the men, the women being passive, and coyly reserved.  This opinion—­like many other notions regarding the relations of the sexes—­rests on ignorance, pure ignorance.  In collecting the scattered facts bearing on this subject I have been more and more surprised at the number of exceptions to the rule, if, indeed, rule it be.  Not only are there tribes among whom women must propose—­as in the Torres Straits Islands, north of Australia, and with the Garos of India, concerning whom interesting details will be given in later chapters; but among many other savages and barbarians the women, instead of repelling advances, make them.

“In all Polynesia,” says Gerland (VI., 127), “it was a common occurrence that the women wooed the men.”  “A proposal of marriage,” writes Gill (Savage Life in Polynesia, II.), “may emanate with propriety from a woman of rank to an equal or an inferior.”  In an article on Fijian poetry (731-53), Sir Arthur Gordon cites the following native poem: