dragging the soul down to the mire in which it wallows. They forget that
by its brutal insistence upon physical needs it often preserves from
madness, and timely arrests him who goes like a sleep-walker upon the
verge of the abyss. Weariness and hunger are like brakes upon the car;
they stop the dire momentum of grief, and insure that if misery will
again drive us furiously, she must lash winded steeds anew. But what
force should stay a disembodied sorrow, which unbreathed by period or
alternation of despair, should be rapt onward in the whirlwind and the
hurricane, gathering eternally a fresh impetus of woe? Let us rail at
the body for its weakness if we will, but prize it also for its
restraint of the distracted mind. In the worst hour of my dejection it
was the body which called the lost reason home. I became hungry and ate,
hardly knowing what I did; I slept exhaustion away; and after many hours
awoke with clearer eyes, grateful to the weak flesh, and ready in its
company to face life once more, a defeated but not a desperate man. I
was glad to be thus reminded that the body could play this helpful part,
and my gratitude for its timely rescue taught me in after days to endure
its tyranny with a better grace. In the interlude between despair and
new effort, I once more turned a dispassionate gaze upon myself, as upon
some abandoned slave of a drug; and maintaining an attitude of
half-amused detachment, sought by a diagnosis of my case to establish
the real causes of my failure to lead a normal life.
At the outset I would make it clear that for me the only shyness that
counts, is that which is so deeply ingrained, as to have outlasted
youth. It may, indeed, be physically related to that transient
bashfulness which haunts so many of us in our younger days only to
vanish at maturity, swift as the belated ghost at cockcrow. But unlike
this common accident of growth, it is no surface-defect, but an inward
stain which dyes the very fibres of the being. It may, indeed, be
somewhat bleached and diminished by a timely and skilful treatment, but
is become too much a part of life to be ever wholly washed away. And the
unhappy step-children of nature whose inheritance it is, seldom find a
deliverer good at need; for as the world draws no distinction between
their grave affliction and that other remediable misery of youth, it
will sanction no other treatment than banter or mockery, which does but
infuse yet more deeply the mournful dye. When this fails, it leaves its
victims to the desolation which according to its judgment they have
wilfully chosen; for the most part ignoring their existence, but often
chastising them with scorpion-stings of disdain. Yet the subjects of
this scorn, sufferers as I believe from a hereditary tendency matured by
neglect into disease, deserve a more merciful usage than this, and their
plea for extenuating circumstances should not be too impatiently
rejected. For in them what is to most men a transient ailment has thrown
down permanent roots to draw a nourishment from pain: and he who is
fortunate enough to be whole should think twice before he makes sport of
those in this distress.
To me this malady seems to arise from an antinomy between the physical
and intellectual elements of the personality, from an unhappy marriage
of mind and body, suffering the lower of the two partners to abase the
life of the higher by the long-drawn misery of a hateful but
indissoluble union. When the physical and mental natures in a man are
happily attuned, there is a fair concord in his life and the outward
expression of his being is an unimpeded process, to which, as to the
functions of a healthy organism, no heedful thought is given. If both
natures are of the finest temper, they find utterance in a noble
amiability and ease of manner; if both are coarse in the grain, they
blend in a naive freedom always sure of itself, the freedom of Sancho
spreading himself in the duchess's boudoir. Between these two extremes
there intervene a hundred compromises by which minds and bodies less
equally yoked contrive to muffle the discordant notes of an inharmonious
wedlock.
In most cases use gives to this politic agreement the peace and
permanence of settled habit; the body proves itself so far amenable that
it is accepted as a needful if uninspiring companion, and its plain
usefulness ends by dulling the edged criticisms of the mind. But
wherever there is a permanent incompatibility too profound for
compromise, an elemental difference keeping the personality continually
distraught, then shyness, in the sense in which I understand it, assumes
its inalienable dominion. The flame of rebellion may smoulder unobserved
while the sufferer is in his own home, but among strangers it will
blaze fiercely, as the mind protests against the misinterpretations of
its unworthy partner. This burning shame is not the proof of a foolish
conceit, as unsympathetic criticism proclaims it, but the visible misery
of a keen spirit thwarted by physical defect. The man who manifests it
is angered with himself because through a physical hindrance he has
failed to take the place which would otherwise be his. He is proud, it
may be, but not fatuous; for shyness as a rule implies a comparative
quickness and alertness of intellect: its exceeding sensibility is
exclusive of dulness; and it is frequently due to the presence in a
reluctant body of a mind endowed with active powers.
Inasmuch as diffidence appears where the subtler formalities of life are
compulsory, it is clear that it essentially belongs to the class called
gentle, for this class alone enforces that exacting code of etiquette to
which our discomfiture is so largely due. Shyness has seldom place in
the patriarchal life where men live, "sound, without care, every man
under his own vine or his own fig-tree," nor among those who, perforce
pursuing a too laborious existence, have no leisure for superficial
refinements. Though here and there you may find a Joseph Poorgrass, it
is rare among the simple; it is not a popular weakness, and therefore
wins no popular sympathy. Such is its first social limitation: it is
almost restricted to the classes which are outwardly refined.
But it has another limitation of equal importance which may be described
as climatic; for this malady is not found in equal degrees all over the
habitable globe. There are many lands where it hardly exists at all even
among the class which is alone liable to it; and in its serious form it
is found only over a small part of the earth. There are many causes
which conduce to this partial distribution. In one country manners are
not minutely schooled, women being held of secondary account, and men
content without subtlety; in another, life is in itself too primitive to
devise the artifices of refinement; in a third, the fundamental disunion
between the mind and the physical organism is prevented by the kindly
hand of nature. For these reasons all the savage world, all the East,
and the whole of southern Europe have little knowledge of the diffident,
and what zoologists would call the area of distribution of the species
is confined within narrow geographical limits.
It is in fact chiefly in the north and west of our own continent that
the haunts of the diffident are to be found, for there alone are all the
conditions necessary to their maintenance fulfilled--a society
sufficiently leisured and wealthy to have elaborated conventional rules
of intercourse, the assemblage of both sexes upon an equal footing, and
a climate which exaggerates the antagonism between the quick mind and
the unresponsive body. Here the cold humid airs have produced a race
with great limbs and great appetites, but compensated these gifts by a
certain unreadiness in the delicate encounter of wits and graces. To
these impassive natures all displays of the personality are distasteful,
and the lighter social arts, seeming both insignificant and histrionic,
are learned with difficulty and practised with repugnance. An
awkwardness of address, in the uneducated almost bovine, becomes in the
cultivated a painful reserve and self-consciousness, reflecting in open
physical distress the uneasiness of the man's whole being.
And among the northern nations which are thus afflicted England has
achieved an undesirable supremacy, having herself smoothed the path of
her eminence by a school system which withdraws her youth from female
influences during the years when the tendency to reserve may be combated
with a certain hope of success. It would ill become one who has never
recovered from the effects of such deprivation to assume on the ground
of his own narrow experience any wide dissemination of similar defects
among his countrymen; his testimony would be received with suspicion,
and he would be condemned as one who to justify himself would drag
others down to his own poor level. Let me therefore place myself on
surer ground by calling as a witness an impartial observer from another
country, one exceptionally trained in the analysis of national
temperament and conduct.
When M. Taine visited England towards the close of the nineteenth
century one of the first things to attract his notice was the
bashfulness which he encountered in unexpected places. He was surprised
to meet travelled and cultured men who were habitually embarrassed in
society, and so reserved that you might live with them six months before
you discovered half their excellent qualities. To unveil their true
nature there was needed the steady breeze of a serious interest or the
hurricane of perilous times; the faint airs of courtliness could not
stir the heavy folds that hung before their hearts. These strong men
could not join in delicate raillery, but shrank back afraid; as if a
tortoise, startled by a shower of blossoms, should withdraw into that
thick carapace which can bear the impact of a rock. There was one who
stammered pitifully in a drawing-room, but the next day sought the
suffrages of electors with an unembarrassed and fluent eloquence, so
proving that his failure came not of folly or cowardice, but from lack
of training in a certain school of fence. He needed the open air for the
play of his broadsword; and to his hand, apt to another hilt, the foil
appeared a woman's weapon. Speaking of high aims and national ideals, he
moved in a large place oblivious of himself; but in the social arena he
tripped with timid steps, like a man essaying an unfamiliar dance. On
the platform he had the enthusiasm and confidence of an orator; on the
carpet he could not string three sentences in any courtly language.
In the North the art of mercurial dialogue, which in the South is a
natural gift, is only learned under favourable conditions, and is often
condemned by those who have it not, as a popinjay's accomplishment.
Immediate cordiality to strangers is frowned upon as tending to divorce
courtesy from truth. It is otherwise with the southern peoples. While
the Englishman conceals his benevolence by a frigid aloofness of manner,
or blurts out friendliness like an indiscretion, the Italian is courtly
without a second thought, and the Frenchman seems the comrade of a
chance acquaintance from the moment when he has taken his hand. They are
amiable without effort in the security of a harmonious nature, and if
they encounter diffidence at all, observe it like an anthropologist
confronted with a survival of primitive times in the culture of a
civilized age.
Taine did not err when he found the home of shyness among the Teutonic
peoples; he saw that it flourishes in climatic conditions acting hardly
upon a vigorous race, and only allowing it to cultivate ease of manner
by effort and outlay, just as they only allow it to raise under glass
the grapes and oranges which more favoured peoples can grow in the open
air. He saw too that this pain of diffidence becomes more subtle as the
progress of culture makes us more sensitive to vague impressions from
our environment, and tunes the nerves to a higher pitch. A shy nature
upon this plane of susceptibility suffers anguish from an uncontrollable
body; and even in peaceful moments the memory of the discomfitures so
inflicted may distort a man's whole view of the world around him. He is
impatient of the wit which demands a versatility in response beyond his
powers, and persuades himself into contempt of those ephemeral arts to
which his nature cannot be constrained. Irritated at the injustice which
places so high in the general scale of values accomplishments which he
cannot practise, shrinking from the suave devices of gesture and
expression which in his own case might quickly pass into antic or
grimace, he withdraws more and more from the places where such arts win
esteem to live in a private world of inner sentiment. As he leaves this
sure retreat but rarely himself, so he forbids ingress to others; and
becoming yearly a greater recluse, he confines himself more and more
within the walls of his forbidden city. The mind which may have been
fitted to expand in the free play of intellectual debate or to explore
the high peaks of idea, loses its power of flight in this cave where it
dwells with a company of sad thoughts, until at last the sacrifice is
complete and the perfect eremite is formed.
But the virile Teutonic spirit does not suffer things to reach this
ultimate pass without stubborn resistance, and this is one reason why
shyness is often so conspicuous, seeming deliberately to court an
avoidable confusion. Over and over again it forces the recalcitrant body
back into the arena, preferring repeated humiliation to a pusillanimous
surrender. People often wonder at the recklessness with which the shy
expose themselves to disaster, forgetting that in this insistence of a
soul under discomfiture, there is evidence of a moral strength which is
its own reward. What discipline is harder than that which conscientious
diffidence imposes upon itself? To stand forth and endure, though every
instinct implores retreat, is a true assertion of the higher self for
the satisfaction of imperious duty. Such deliberate return towards
suffering is no cowardice, but a triumph over weak flesh; and the
awkward strife of diffidence may often prove a greater feat of arms than
the supple fence of self-possession.
Like the physical obstacles, the mists, the snows and bleak winds, which
have hardened the fibre of northern men, diffidence as an obstacle to
ease has its place among the causes of strong character; and those who
appear at a first glance weak and ineffectual as Hamlet, will often in
the light of knowledge be found guided by the most inflexible moral
determination. They see, as in a mirage, peace supreme and adorable, but
may not tread the hermit's path that leads to her dwelling. Only a
religious vow might justify the abandonment of the human struggle, and
even that appears desertion. The stern genius of the North grudges
immurement, even to great piety, remembering that Christ himself
remained but forty days in the desert and then returned to deliver the
world. If he had remained there all his life, and never met the
Pharisees and high-priests, our forefathers would have rejected his law.
For this reason there can be no more rest for the shy than for starving
Tantalus; for this reason my flight into the East had been foredoomed to
failure.
If shyness is thus affected by climate and geography, its birth and
growth are also conditioned by historical causes. Just as it is the
peculiar failing of northern and western peoples, so it is the creation
of comparatively modern times; it had no place among the classified
weaknesses of men until these peoples began in their turn to make
history.
In Greece, where limb and thought were consentient in one grace of
motion, the body was too perfect an expression of the mind to admit any
consciousness of discord; the greater simplicity of a life passed
largely in the open air, left no place for awkwardness in the franker
converse of man with man. Moreover the seclusion of women rendered
unnecessary that complicated code of manners which the freer intercourse
of the sexes has built up in later times as a barrier against brutality
or the unseemly selfishness of passion. In Greece the words of the witty
and the wise could be heard in the market-place; good conversation was
not for the few alone; and the common man might of unquestioned right
approach the circle of Socrates or Plato. The sense of community was
everywhere, overthrowing reserve, and propitious to the universal growth
of fellowship.
In the Roman world things were changed; there were more closed doors and
courts impenetrable of access. Insignia of office, gradations of wealth
and rank, sundered those of high estate from classes which now
acknowledged their own inferiority; privacies, exclusions, distinctions
innumerable, altered the face of public life as the easy _mos majorum_
was confined by the ordinances of encroaching fashion. It was now that
women began to be cast for leading parts upon the great stage of life.
Under the Empire, by the rapid removal of her disabilities the Roman
matron achieved a position of independence which made her, according to
her nature, a potent force of good or evil. It was now that the
intricate threads of social prescription were woven into that ceremonial
mantle which was afterwards to sit so uneasily on the shoulders of
barbarian men.
But the time for shyness was not yet come, for Italy is a sunny land
where clear air makes clear minds, blandly or keenly observant of the
world, and never impelled by onset of outer mists and darkness to tend a
flickering light within themselves. There was melancholy, high and
stately, such as Lucretius knew, when he went lonely among the
homesteads or along the shore; but it was too exalted to be one with
diffidence, for he who will hold the sum of things in his thoughts walks
on clouds above the heads of men, free of all misgiving. Perhaps beyond
the Alps, in some Rhaetian upland where Roman dignity was interfused with
old barbaric roughness, the first signs of our malady were perceived and
the first ancestor of all the shy was born. But even yet the time was
not ripe, nor the place prepared. Christianity had to come, turning
men's eyes inwards and proclaiming the error of the objective pagan way.
A new feeling, the sense of personal unworthiness before God, spreading
through the Roman world, now stirred mankind to still communing with
themselves, and sanctioned the stealing away from the noisy festivals of
life. By enjoining a search into the depths of the heart, it encouraged
the growth of a self-consciousness hitherto unknown. It was not always a
panic of contrition, sweeping the joyous out of the sunlight into a
monastic shade, which brought the troubled into a new way of peace, but
sometimes a quiet joy in renunciation, congruous with a timid mood,
leading by gradual allurement to cloisters of shadowy lanes and cells
which were forest bowers. The new faith gave open sanction to evasion of
the banquet, and thus fortified and increased those who loved not the
ceremonial day. The spirit of solitude, no more a maenad, but a nun,
sheltered earth's children in the folds of her robe, and no man said her
nay.
Moreover, Christianity quickened the force of that feminine influence
which Rome had first set flowing through the civilized world, but
diverted the stream from irregular and torrential courses into a smooth
channel gliding amid sacred groves. It clothed woman with ideal grace
and virtue, and perceived in her powers which the virile mind could
never wield. "Inesse quinetiam sanctum aliquid et providum putant, nec
aut consilia earum aspernantur, nec responsa negligunt." So our
ancestors held in the northern woods, and Christianity, purifying and
expanding their belief, fulfilled it with a new perfection.
But this gradual binding of all men's limbs in silken cords of
reverence, making a rude world civil, was now to inaugurate for
diffidence its miserable career. Through the rough deference of the
German camp, through the Provencal code of _courtoisie_, up to the
modern law of fine manners, the drudge and chattel of the primeval tribe
has risen to impose her law upon the modern world. Earth is better for
this finer power, but social intercourse is less sincere. For woman,
having curbed the brute man by conventional restraints of outward
demeanour, has made human intercourse smooth and seemly, but imposed
upon mankind the wearing of unnatural masks. Before the multitude of
locked souls with labels of smiling faces the sensitive nature feels
itself mocked, and is soon distraught. It cannot suffer convention
gladly for an ultimate good, but is chilled by this everlasting
urbanity, which must, it fancies, be compact of irony and conceal a
disingenuous soul.
All this finished science of illusion is like an east wind to the
confidences of the shy, and if they stay within its range they are
blighted before their hearts have time to unfold. They long for a less
biting air, for vernal hours in sheltered dells, where without sheaths
and unguarded the hearts of flowers lie open to their neighbours and to
heaven. There was once a simple day when religion set hearts
interflowing, but now it can melt them only within the precincts; the
fire which is carried from the altar is dead at the church door. The
brotherliness of those early days is indeed often found in humble walks
of life, but these we cannot continually tread, because our intellectual
and artistic tastes find there no sufficient nurture. Among the cultured
a cold convention often reigns, behind which only a more persistent
nature than ours can pass. Unless, therefore, we find our way into some
circle of gentle scholars or lovers of the beautiful quite simple in
their tastes, a thing possible but not often granted by a niggard
fortune, we are perforce thrown back upon our own company, and move
towards the grave alone. For this we accuse none; nothing is more at
fault than our own constitution. But to us society is a school of dames,
who are not to be blamed if amid the crowd that clamours for their
teaching, they find no time for the backward scholar. We are the dunces
of the school, and are dismissed without learning the accomplishments
set forth upon the prospectus. That is why in our northern streets so
many seeming hats are cowls.
In England the loss of congenial intercourse is perhaps more certain
than in other lands. For through his national reserve the
highly-cultured Englishman has a cold perfection of good breeding to
which heartiness is vulgarity; he emanates intimidation, and in courtesy
is rather studious than spontaneous, seldom genial but in an ancient
friendship. If you knew him to the concealed heart, and were suffered to
assay the fine metal beneath this polished surface, you would win a
golden friendship; but only on a desert island would he permit the
operation. To the shy who may encumber his path his bearing seems marked
by an indifference which they magnify into aversion, and are thereby the
worse confounded. In a land where such convention reigns they go through
life like persons afflicted with a partial deafness; between them and
the happier world there is as it were a crystalline wall which the
pleasant low voices of confidence can never traverse.
I say, then, that the real, the enduring shyness is that inveteration of
reserve to which a few men in a few countries are miserably condemned.
Others know it as a transient inconvenience, as the croup or measles of
childhood; but in us it is obstinate and ineradicable as grave disease.
If out of the long frustration of our efforts to be whole some strain of
bitterness passes into our nature; if sometimes we burn with unjust
resentment against the fate which, suffers such lives as ours to be
prolonged, let it be remembered in extenuation that to those who bear a
double burden human charity owes the larger kindliness. For though like
you we bear our share of common troubles, O happier men and women, the
common pleasures and compensations which are as wings upon your
shoulders are heavy packs on ours. The cheerful contrasts are for you
alone; for us the bright threads interwoven in the dark stuff of life
were faded before they reached the loom.