To sum up: among the lower races man habitually despises and maltreats
woman, looking on her as a being made, not for her own sake, but for
his comfort and pleasure. Gallantry is unknown. The Australian who
fights for his family shows courage, not gallantry, for he is simply
protecting his private property, and does not otherwise show the
slightest regard for his women. Nor does the early custom of serving
for a wife imply gallantry; for here the suitor serves the parents,
not the maid; he simply adopts a primitive way of paying for a bride.
Sparing women in battle for the purpose of making concubines or slaves
of them is not gallantry. One might as well call a farmer gallant
because, when he kills the young roosters for broilers, he saves the
young hens. He lets these live because he needs eggs. The motive in
both cases is utilitarian and selfish. Ovidian gallantry does not
deserve such a name, because it is nothing but false flattery for the
selfish purpose of beguiling foolish women. Arabic flatteries are of a
superior order because sincere at the time being and addressed to
girls whom the flatterer desires to marry. But this gallantry, too, is
only skin deep. Its motives are sensual and selfish, for as soon as
the girl's physical charm begins to fade she is contemptuously
discarded.
Our modern gallantry toward women differs radically from all those
attitudes in being unselfish. It is synonymous with true
chivalry--disinterested devotion to those who, while physically
weaker, are considered superior morally and esthetically. It treats
all women with polite deference, and does so not because of a vow or a
code, but because of the natural promptings of a kind, sympathetic
disposition. It treats a woman not as a toper does a whiskey bottle,
applying it to his lips as long as it can intoxicate him with pleasure
and then throwing it away, but cherishes her for supersensual
attributes that survive the ravages of time. To a lover, in
particular, such gallantry is not a duty, but a natural impulse. He
lies awake nights devising plans for pleasing the object of his
devotion. His gallantry is an impulse to sacrifice himself for the
beloved--an instinct so inbred by generations of practice that now
even a child may manifest it. I remember how, when I was six or seven
years old, I once ran out the school-house during recess to pick up
some Missouri hailstones, while others, large as marbles, were falling
about me, threatening to smash my skull. I gave the trophies to a
dark-eyed girl of my age--not with a view to any possible reward, but
simply because I loved her more than all the other girls combined and
wanted to please her.