All great literary men are shy. I am myself, though I am told it is
hardly noticeable.
I am glad it is not. It used to be extremely prominent at one time, and
was the cause of much misery to myself and discomfort to every one about
me--my lady friends especially complained most bitterly about it.
A shy man's lot is not a happy one. The men dislike him, the women
despise him, and he dislikes and despises himself. Use brings him no
relief, and there is no cure for him except time; though I once came
across a delicious recipe for overcoming the misfortune. It appeared
among the "answers to correspondents" in a small weekly journal and
ran as follows--I have never forgotten it: "Adopt an easy and pleasing
manner, especially toward ladies."
Poor wretch! I can imagine the grin with which he must have read that
advice. "Adopt an easy and pleasing manner, especially toward ladies,"
forsooth! Don't you adopt anything of the kind, my dear young shy
friend. Your attempt to put on any other disposition than your own will
infallibly result in your becoming ridiculously gushing and offensively
familiar. Be your own natural self, and then you will only be thought to
be surly and stupid.
The shy man does have some slight revenge upon society for the torture
it inflicts upon him. He is able, to a certain extent, to communicate
his misery. He frightens other people as much as they frighten him.
He acts like a damper upon the whole room, and the most jovial spirits
become in his presence depressed and nervous.
This is a good deal brought about by misunderstanding. Many people
mistake the shy man's timidity for overbearing arrogance and are
awed and insulted by it. His awkwardness is resented as insolent
carelessness, and when, terror-stricken at the first word addressed to
him, the blood rushes to his head and the power of speech completely
fails him, he is regarded as an awful example of the evil effects of
giving way to passion.
But, indeed, to be misunderstood is the shy man's fate on every
occasion; and whatever impression he endeavors to create, he is sure
to convey its opposite. When he makes a joke, it is looked upon as a
pretended relation of fact and his want of veracity much condemned.
His sarcasm is accepted as his literal opinion and gains for him the
reputation of being an ass, while if, on the other hand, wishing to
ingratiate himself, he ventures upon a little bit of flattery, it is
taken for satire and he is hated ever afterward.
These and the rest of a shy man's troubles are always very amusing to
other people, and have afforded material for comic writing from time
immemorial. But if we look a little deeper we shall find there is a
pathetic, one might almost say a tragic, side to the picture. A shy
man means a lonely man--a man cut off from all companionship, all
sociability. He moves about the world, but does not mix with it. Between
him and his fellow-men there runs ever an impassable barrier--a strong,
invisible wall that, trying in vain to scale, he but bruises himself
against. He sees the pleasant faces and hears the pleasant voices on the
other side, but he cannot stretch his hand across to grasp another hand.
He stands watching the merry groups, and he longs to speak and to claim
kindred with them. But they pass him by, chatting gayly to one another,
and he cannot stay them. He tries to reach them, but his prison walls
move with him and hem him in on every side. In the busy street, in the
crowded room, in the grind of work, in the whirl of pleasure, amid the
many or amid the few--wherever men congregate together, wherever the
music of human speech is heard and human thought is flashed from human
eyes, there, shunned and solitary, the shy man, like a leper, stands
apart. His soul is full of love and longing, but the world knows it not.
The iron mask of shyness is riveted before his face, and the man beneath
is never seen. Genial words and hearty greetings are ever rising to his
lips, but they die away in unheard whispers behind the steel clamps. His
heart aches for the weary brother, but his sympathy is dumb. Contempt
and indignation against wrong choke up his throat, and finding no
safety-valve whence in passionate utterance they may burst forth, they
only turn in again and harm him. All the hate and scorn and love of a
deep nature such as the shy man is ever cursed by fester and corrupt
within, instead of spending themselves abroad, and sour him into a
misanthrope and cynic.
Yes, shy men, like ugly women, have a bad time of it in this world, to
go through which with any comfort needs the hide of a rhinoceros. Thick
skin is, indeed, our moral clothes, and without it we are not fit to be
seen about in civilized society. A poor gasping, blushing creature, with
trembling knees and twitching hands, is a painful sight to every one,
and if it cannot cure itself, the sooner it goes and hangs itself the
better.
The disease can be cured. For the comfort of the shy, I can assure them
of that from personal experience. I do not like speaking about myself,
as may have been noticed, but in the cause of humanity I on this
occasion will do so, and will confess that at one time I was, as the
young man in the Bab Ballad says, "the shyest of the shy," and "whenever
I was introduced to any pretty maid, my knees they knocked together just
as if I was afraid." Now, I would--nay, have--on this very day
before yesterday I did the deed. Alone and entirely by myself (as the
school-boy said in translating the "Bellum Gallicum") did I beard a
railway refreshment-room young lady in her own lair. I rebuked her in
terms of mingled bitterness and sorrow for her callousness and want of
condescension. I insisted, courteously but firmly, on being accorded
that deference and attention that was the right of the traveling Briton,
and at the end I looked her full in the face. Need I say more?
True, immediately after doing so I left the room with what may
possibly have appeared to be precipitation and without waiting for any
refreshment. But that was because I had changed my mind, not because I
was frightened, you understand.
One consolation that shy folk can take unto themselves is that shyness
is certainly no sign of stupidity. It is easy enough for bull-headed
clowns to sneer at nerves, but the highest natures are not necessarily
those containing the greatest amount of moral brass. The horse is not an
inferior animal to the cock-sparrow, nor the deer of the forest to the
pig. Shyness simply means extreme sensibility, and has nothing whatever
to do with self-consciousness or with conceit, though its relationship
to both is continually insisted upon by the poll-parrot school of
philosophy.
Conceit, indeed, is the quickest cure for it. When it once begins to
dawn upon you that you are a good deal cleverer than any one else in
this world, bashfulness becomes shocked and leaves you. When you can
look round a roomful of people and think that each one is a mere child
in intellect compared with yourself you feel no more shy of them than
you would of a select company of magpies or orang-outangs.
Conceit is the finest armor that a man can wear. Upon its smooth,
impenetrable surface the puny dagger-thrusts of spite and envy glance
harmlessly aside. Without that breast-plate the sword of talent cannot
force its way through the battle of life, for blows have to be borne as
well as dealt. I do not, of course, speak of the conceit that displays
itself in an elevated nose and a falsetto voice. That is not real
conceit--that is only playing at being conceited; like children play
at being kings and queens and go strutting about with feathers and
long trains. Genuine conceit does not make a man objectionable. On the
contrary, it tends to make him genial, kind-hearted, and simple. He
has no need of affectation--he is far too well satisfied with his own
character; and his pride is too deep-seated to appear at all on
the outside. Careless alike of praise or blame, he can afford to be
truthful. Too far, in fancy, above the rest of mankind to trouble
about their petty distinctions, he is equally at home with duke or
costermonger. And valuing no one's standard but his own, he is never
tempted to practice that miserable pretense that less self-reliant
people offer up as an hourly sacrifice to the god of their neighbor's
opinion.
The shy man, on the other hand, is humble--modest of his own judgment
and over-anxious concerning that of others. But this in the case of
a young man is surely right enough. His character is unformed. It is
slowly evolving itself out of a chaos of doubt and disbelief. Before
the growing insight and experience the diffidence recedes. A man rarely
carries his shyness past the hobbledehoy period. Even if his own inward
strength does not throw it off, the rubbings of the world generally
smooth it down. You scarcely ever meet a really shy man--except
in novels or on the stage, where, by the bye, he is much admired,
especially by the women.
There, in that supernatural land, he appears as a fair-haired and
saintlike young man--fair hair and goodness always go together on the
stage. No respectable audience would believe in one without the other.
I knew an actor who mislaid his wig once and had to rush on to play the
hero in his own hair, which was jet-black, and the gallery howled at
all his noble sentiments under the impression that he was the villain.
He--the shy young man--loves the heroine, oh so devotedly (but only
in asides, for he dare not tell her of it), and he is so noble and
unselfish, and speaks in such a low voice, and is so good to his mother;
and the bad people in the play, they laugh at him and jeer at him, but
he takes it all so gently, and in the end it transpires that he is such
a clever man, though nobody knew it, and then the heroine tells him she
loves him, and he is so surprised, and oh, so happy! and everybody loves
him and asks him to forgive them, which he does in a few well-chosen and
sarcastic words, and blesses them; and he seems to have generally such
a good time of it that all the young fellows who are not shy long to be
shy. But the really shy man knows better. He knows that it is not quite
so pleasant in reality. He is not quite so interesting there as in the
fiction. He is a little more clumsy and stupid and a little less devoted
and gentle, and his hair is much darker, which, taken altogether,
considerably alters the aspect of the case.
The point where he does resemble his ideal is in his faithfulness. I am
fully prepared to allow the shy young man that virtue: he is constant in
his love. But the reason is not far to seek. The fact is it exhausts
all his stock of courage to look one woman in the face, and it would
be simply impossible for him to go through the ordeal with a second.
He stands in far too much dread of the whole female sex to want to go
gadding about with many of them. One is quite enough for him.
Now, it is different with the young man who is not shy. He has
temptations which his bashful brother never encounters. He looks around
and everywhere sees roguish eyes and laughing lips. What more natural
than that amid so many roguish eyes and laughing lips he should become
confused and, forgetting for the moment which particular pair of roguish
ayes and laughing lips it is that he belongs to, go off making love
to the wrong set. The shy man, who never looks at anything but his own
boots, sees not and is not tempted. Happy shy man!
Not but what the shy man himself would much rather not be happy in that
way. He longs to "go it" with the others, and curses himself every day
for not being able to. He will now and again, screwing up his courage
by a tremendous effort, plunge into roguishness. But it is always a
terrible _fiasco_, and after one or two feeble flounders he crawls out
again, limp and pitiable.
I say "pitiable," though I am afraid he never is pitied. There are
certain misfortunes which, while inflicting a vast amount of suffering
upon their victims, gain for them no sympathy. Losing an umbrella,
falling in love, toothache, black eyes, and having your hat sat upon may
be mentioned as a few examples, but the chief of them all is shyness.
The shy man is regarded as an animate joke. His tortures are the sport
of the drawing-room arena and are pointed out and discussed with much
gusto.
"Look," cry his tittering audience to each other; "he's blushing!"
"Just watch his legs," says one.
"Do you notice how he is sitting?" adds another: "right on the edge of
the chair."
"Seems to have plenty of color," sneers a military-looking gentleman.
"Pity he's got so many hands," murmurs an elderly lady, with her own
calmly folded on her lap. "They quite confuse him."
"A yard or two off his feet wouldn't be a disadvantage," chimes in the
comic man, "especially as he seems so anxious to hide them."
And then another suggests that with such a voice he ought to have been
a sea-captain. Some draw attention to the desperate way in which he is
grasping his hat. Some comment upon his limited powers of conversation.
Others remark upon the troublesome nature of his cough. And so on, until
his peculiarities and the company are both thoroughly exhausted.
His friends and relations make matters still more unpleasant for the
poor boy (friends and relations are privileged to be more disagreeable
than other people). Not content with making fun of him among themselves,
they insist on his seeing the joke. They mimic and caricature him for
his own edification. One, pretending to imitate him, goes outside
and comes in again in a ludicrously nervous manner, explaining to him
afterward that that is the way he--meaning the shy fellow--walks into
a room; or, turning to him with "This is the way you shake hands,"
proceeds to go through a comic pantomime with the rest of the room,
taking hold of every one's hand as if it were a hot plate and flabbily
dropping it again. And then they ask him why he blushes, and why he
stammers, and why he always speaks in an almost inaudible tone, as if
they thought he did it on purpose. Then one of them, sticking out his
chest and strutting about the room like a pouter-pigeon, suggests quite
seriously that that is the style he should adopt. The old man slaps him
on the back and says: "Be bold, my boy. Don't be afraid of any one." The
mother says, "Never do anything that you need be ashamed of, Algernon,
and then you never need be ashamed of anything you do," and, beaming
mildly at him, seems surprised at the clearness of her own logic. The
boys tell him that he's "worse than a girl," and the girls repudiate the
implied slur upon their sex by indignantly exclaiming that they are sure
no girl would be half as bad.
They are quite right; no girl would be. There is no such thing as a shy
woman, or, at all events, I have never come across one, and until I do I
shall not believe in them. I know that the generally accepted belief
is quite the reverse. All women are supposed to be like timid, startled
fawns, blushing and casting down their gentle eyes when looked at and
running away when spoken to; while we men are supposed to be a bold and
rollicky lot, and the poor dear little women admire us for it, but are
terribly afraid of us. It is a pretty theory, but, like most generally
accepted theories, mere nonsense. The girl of twelve is self-contained
and as cool as the proverbial cucumber, while her brother of twenty
stammers and stutters by her side. A woman will enter a concert-room
late, interrupt the performance, and disturb the whole audience
without moving a hair, while her husband follows her, a crushed heap of
apologizing misery.
The superior nerve of women in all matters connected with love, from the
casting of the first sheep's-eye down to the end of the honeymoon, is
too well acknowledged to need comment. Nor is the example a fair one to
cite in the present instance, the positions not being equally balanced.
Love is woman's business, and in "business" we all lay aside our natural
weaknesses--the shyest man I ever knew was a photographic tout.