Little Essays of Love and Virtue | Page 4

a state of society where roughness and violence, though not, as we
sometimes assume, chronic, were yet always liable to be manifested, it
was necessary for every man and woman to be able to face the crudest
facts of the world and to be able to maintain his or her own rights
against them. The education that best secured that strength and
independence was the best education and it necessarily involved an
element of hardness. We must go back earlier than Montaigne's day,
when the conditions were becoming mitigated, to see the system
working in all its vigour.
The lady of the day of the early thirteenth century has been well
described by Luchaire in his scholarly study of French Society in the
time of Philip Augustus. She was, he tells us, as indeed she had been in
the preceding feudal centuries, often what we should nowadays call a
virago, of violent temperament, with vivid passions, broken in from
childhood to all physical exercises, sharing the pleasures and dangers of
the knights around her. Feudal life, fertile in surprises and in risks,
demanded even in women a vigorous temper of soul and body, a
masculine air, and habits also that were almost virile. She accompanied
her father or her husband to the chase, while in war-time, if she became
a widow or if her husband was away at the Crusades, she was ready, if
necessary, to direct the defences of the lordship, and in peace time she
was not afraid of the longest and most dangerous pilgrimages. She
might even go to the Crusades on her own account, and, if
circumstances required, conduct a war to come out victoriously.
We may imagine the robust kind of education required to produce
people of this quality. But as regards the precise way in which parents
conducted that education, we have, as Luchaire admits, little precise
knowledge. It is for the most part only indirectly, by reading between
the lines, that we glean something as to what it was considered befitting
to inculcate in a good household, and as what we thus learn is mostly

from the writings of Churchmen it is doubtless a little one-sided. Thus
Adam de Perseigne, an ecclesiastic, writes to the Countess du Perche to
advise her how to live in a Christian manner; he counsels her to abstain
from playing games of chance and chess, not to take pleasure in the
indecent farces of actors, and to be moderate in dress. Then, as ever,
preachers expressed their horror of the ruinous extravagance of women,
their false hair, their rouge, and their dresses that were too long or too
short. They also reprobated their love of flirtation. It was, however, in
those days a young girl's recognised duty, when a knight arrived in the
household, to exercise the rites of hospitality, to disarm him, give him
his bath, and if necessary massage him to help him to go to sleep. It is
not surprising that the young girl sometimes made love to the knight
under these circumstances, nor is it surprising that he, engaged in an
arduous life and trained to disdain feminine attractions, often failed to
respond.
It is easy to understand how this state of things gradually became
transformed into the considerably different position of parents and
child we have known, which doubtless attained its climax nearly a
century ago. Feudal conditions, with the large households so well
adapted to act as seminaries for youth, began to decay, and as education
in such seminaries must have led to frequent mischances both for
youths and maidens who enjoyed the opportunities of education there,
the regret for their disappearance may often have been tempered for
parents. Schools, colleges, and universities began to spring up and
develop for one sex, while for the other home life grew more intimate,
and domestic ties closer. Montaigne's warning against the undue
tenderness of a narrow family life no longer seemed reasonable, and the
family became more self-centred and more enclosed. Beneath this, and
more profoundly influential, there was a general softening in social
respects, and a greater expansiveness of affectional relationships, in
reality or in seeming, within the home, compensating, it may be, the
more diffused social feeling within a group which characterised the
previous period.
So was cultivated that undue tenderness, deplored by Montaigne, which
we now regard as almost normal in family life, and solemnly label, if

we happen to be psycho-analysts, the Oedipus-complex or the
Electra-complex. Sexual love is closely related to parental love; the
tender emotion, which is an intimate part of parental love, is also an
intimate part of sexual love, and two emotions which are each closely
related to a third emotion cannot fail to become often closely associated
to each other. With a little thought we might guess