Women secretly detest bashful men. It is their own duty, prescribed by
etiquette, to be passive, shy, and diffident; hence if men were shy and
diffident too, no advances would be made, and all progress in
Love-making would be retarded.
Women love courage. He who robs lions of their hearts can easily win a
woman’s.
“Our doubts are traitors,
And make us lose the good we oft might win
By fearing to attempt,”
says Shakspere; and Chesterfield remarks _à propos_, that “that silly
sanguine notion which is firmly entertained here, that one Englishman
can beat three Frenchmen, encourages and has sometimes enabled one
Englishman in reality to beat two.”
Ovid knew the value of boldness. And although his object was not to
teach how to win permanent Love, but how to get honey without taking
care of the bees, yet his psychology is correct, and agrees with
Goethe’s aphorism that “if thou approachest women with tenderness thou
winnest them with a word; but he who is bold and saucy comes off
better.”
Perhaps this is one reason why officers are so successful in Love, for
several of them have been known to be bold and saucy.
Another reason may be that their pursuit is more distinctively and
exclusively masculine than any other profession.
What, for instance, could be more delightfully masculine, _i.e._
mediæval, than the way in which, according to the _Chronicon Turonense_,
William the Conqueror wooed and won Mathilde, the daughter of Count
Baldwin, Prince of Flanders. At first he was unsuccessful, “for the
young girl,” says Professor Scherr, “declared proudly she would not
marry a bastard. Then William rode to Bruges, waylaid Mathilde, attacked
her when she came from church, pulled her long hair, and maltreated her
with his fists and with kicks, after which heroic performance he made
his escape. Strange to say, this peculiar mode of Love-making imposed so
greatly on the beauty that she declared with tears in her eyes that she
would marry no one but the Norman Duke, whom she actually did marry. A
parallel case may be found in the German _Nibelungenlied_ (str. 870 and
901).”
Since, according to the old philosophy, human nature, including Love and
Love-making, is the same at all times and in all countries, it follows
that a modern lover, after donning his brass buttons, should administer
his sweetheart a sound thrashing. That will make her mellow and docile.