ABSTRACT

One of the surest signs of a feeble age is the admiration of everything forcible. In ages when people have plenty of strength, as they had in the Middle Ages, what people admire is gentleness, one might almost say weakness. Look at the pictures of saints in Italian primitives: they have a feeble dieaway appearance and most emphatically do not look like men of action. The man who won all hearts was St Francis, who would be viewed in the modern world with thinly veiled contempt as one who never appealed to the mailed fist. The modern man has less virility than ferocious heroes such as Simon de Montfort10 or Edward I,11 and as virility decays, the admiration for it increases. Men go to see ‘all-in’ wrestling, where every bodily injury is permitted short of gouging out the eyes. In the days when men were themselves frequently the actors in such contests, they were not prepared to pay to see other men performing in them.