We have found among the factors of modesty:  (1) the primitive animal gesture of sexual refusal on the part of the female when she is not at that moment of her generative life at which she desires the male’s advances; (2) the fear of arousing disgust, a fear primarily due to the close proximity of the sexual centre to the points of exit of those excretions which are useless and unpleasant, even in many cases to animals; (3) the fear of the magic influence of sexual phenomena, and the ceremonial and ritual practices primarily based on this fear, and ultimately passing into simple rules of decorum which are signs and guardians of modesty; (4) the development of ornament and clothing, concomitantly fostering alike the modesty which represses male sexual desire and the coquetry which seeks to allure it; (5) the conception of women as property, imparting a new and powerful sanction to an emotion already based on more natural and primitive facts.

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.

Among ourselves we may note that modesty is a much more invincible motive among the lower social classes than among the more cultivated classes.  This is so even when we should expect the influence of occupation to induce familiarity.  Thus I have been told of a ballet-girl who thinks it immodest to bathe in the fashion customary at the seaside, and cannot make up her mind to do so, but she appears on the stage every night in tights as a matter of course; while Fanny Kemble, in her Reminiscences, tells of an actress, accustomed to appear in tights, who died a martyr to modesty rather than allow a surgeon to see her inflamed knee.  Modesty is, indeed, a part of self-respect, but in the fully-developed human being self-respect itself holds in check any excessive modesty.[72]