It is a comfort to those of us who have felt the cold perspiration
start on the brow, at the prospect of entering an unaccustomed
sphere, to remember that the best men and women whom the world has
known have been, in their day, afflicted with shyness. Indeed, it is
to the past that we must refer when the terrible disease seizes us,
when the tongue becomes dry in the mouth, the hands tremble, and the
knees knock together.
Who does not pity the trembling boy when, on the evening of his
first party, he succumbs to this dreadful malady? The color comes in
spots on his face, and his hands are cold and clammy. He sits down
on the stairs and wishes he were dead. A strange sensation is
running down his back. "Come, Peter, cheer up," his mother says, not
daring to tell him how she sympathizes with him. He is afraid to be
afraid, he is ashamed to be ashamed. Nothing can equal this moment
of agony. The whole room looks black before him as some chipper
little girl, who knows not the meaning of the word "embarrassment,"
comes to greet him. He crawls off to the friendly shelter of a group
of boys, and sees the "craven of the playground, the dunce of the
school," with a wonderful self-possession, lead off in the german
with the prettiest girl. As he grows older, and becomes the young
man whose duty it is to go to dinners and afternoon parties, this
terrible weakness will again overcome him. He has done well at
college, can make a very good speech at the club suppers, but at the
door of a parlor he feels himself a drivelling idiot. He assumes a
courage, if he has it not, and dashes into a room (which is full of
people) as he would attack a forlorn hope. There is safety in
numbers, and he retires to a corner.
When he goes to a tea-party a battery of feminine eyes gazes at him
with a critical perception of his youth and rawness. Knowing that he
ought to be supremely graceful and serene, he stumbles over a
footstool, and hears a suppressed giggle. He reaches his hostess,
and wishes she were the "cannon's mouth," in order that his
sufferings might be ended; but she is not. His agony is to last the
whole evening. Tea-parties are eternal: they never end; they are
like the old-fashioned ideas of a future state of torment--they grow
hotter and more stifling. As the evening advances towards eternity
he upsets the cream-jug. He summons all his will-power, or he would
run away. No; retreat is impossible. One must die at the post of
duty. He thinks of all the formulas of courage--"None but the brave
deserve the fair," "He either fears his fate too much, or his
deserts are small," "There is no such coward as self-consciousness,"
etc. But these maxima are of no avail. His feet are feet of clay,
not good to stand on, only good to stumble with. His hands are cold,
tremulous, and useless. There is a very disagreeable feeling in the
back of his neck, and a spinning sensation about the brain. A queer
rumbling seizes his ears. He has heard that "conscience makes
cowards of us all." What mortal sin has he committed? His moral
sense answers back, "None. You are only that poor creature, a
bashful youth." And he bravely calls on all his nerves, muscles, and
brains to help him through this ordeal. He sees the pitying eyes of
the woman to whom he is talking turn away from his countenance (on
which he knows that all his miserable shyness has written itself in
legible characters). "And this humiliation, too?" he asks of
himself, as she brings him the usual refuge of the awkward--a
portfolio of photographs to look at. Women are seldom troubled, at
the age at which men suffer, with bashfulness or awkwardness. It is
as if Nature thus compensated the weaker vessel. Cruel are those
women, however, and most to be reprobated, who laugh at a bashful
man!
The sufferings of a shy man would fill a volume. It is a nervous
seizure for which no part of his organization is to blame; he cannot
reason it away, he can only crush it by enduring it: "To bear is to
conquer our Fate." Some men, finding the play not worth the candle,
give up society and the world; others go on, suffer, and come out
cool veterans who fear no tea-party, however overwhelming it may be.
It is the proper province of parents to have their children taught
all the accomplishments of the body, that they, like the ancient
Greeks, may know that every muscle will obey the brain. A shy,
awkward boy should be trained in dancing, fencing, boxing; he should
be instructed in music, elocution, and public speaking; he should be
sent into society, whatever it may cost him at first, as certainly
as he should be sent to the dentist's. His present sufferings may
save him from lifelong annoyance.
To the very best men--the most learned, the most graceful, the most
eloquent, the most successful--has come at some one time or other
the dreadful agony of bashfulness. Indeed, it is the higher order of
man being that it most surely attacks; it is the precursor of many
excellences, and, like the knight's vigil, if patiently and bravely
borne, the knight is twice the hero. It is this recollection, which
can alone assuage the sufferer, that he should always carry with
him. He should remember that the compound which he calls himself is
of all things most mixed.
"The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together."
Two antagonistic races--it may be his Grandfather Brown and his
Grandmother Williams--are struggling in him for the mastery; and
their exceedingly opposite natures are pulling his arms and legs
asunder. He has to harmonize this antagonism before he becomes
himself, and it adds much to his confusion to see that poor little
pretender, Tom Titmouse, talking and laughing and making merry.
There are, however, no ancestral diversities fighting for the
possession of Tom Titmouse. The grandfathers and grandmothers of Tom
Titmouse were not people of strong character; they were a decorous
race on both sides, with no heavy intellectual burdens, good enough
people who wore well. But does our bashful man know this? No. He
simply remembers a passage in the "Odyssey" which Tom Titmouse could
not construe, but which the bashful man read, to the delight of the
tutor:
"O gods! How beloved he is, and how honored by all men to whatsoever
land or city he comes! He brings much booty from Troy, but we,
having accomplished the same journey, are returning home having
empty hands!" And this messenger from Troy is Tom Titmouse!
Not that all poor scholars and inferior men have fine manners, nor
do all good scholars and superior men fail in the drawing-room. No
rule is without an exception. It is, however, a comfort to those who
are awkward and shy to remember that many of the great and good and
superior men who live in history have suffered, even as they suffer,
from the pin-pricks of bashfulness. The first refuge of the
inexperienced, bashful person is often to assume a manner of extreme
hauteur. This is, perhaps, a natural fence--or defence; it is,
indeed, a very convenient armor, and many a woman has fought her
battle behind it through life. No doubt it is the armor of the many
so-called frigid persons, male and female, who must either suffer
the pangs of bashfulness, or affect a coldness which they do not
feel. Some people are naturally encased in a column of ice which
they cannot break, but within is a fountain which would burst out at
the lips in words of kindliness if only the tongue could speak them.
These limitations of nature are very strange; we cannot explain
them. It is only by referring to Grandfather Brown and Grandmother
Williams again that we understand them at all. One person will be
furnished with very large feet and very small hands, with a head
disproportionately large for the body, or one as remarkably small.
Differences of race must account for these eccentricities of nature;
we cannot otherwise explain them, nor the mental antagonisms, But
the awkward and the shy do not always take refuge in a cold manner;
Sometimes they study manner as they would the small-sword exercise,
and exploit it-with equal fervor. Exaggeration of manner is quite as
common a refuge for these unfortunates as the other extreme of
calmness. They render themselves ridiculous by the lowness of their
bows and the vivid picturesqueness of their speech. They, as it
were, burst the bounds of the calyx, and the flower opens too wide.
Symmetry is lost, graceful outline is destroyed. Many a bashful man,
thinking of Tom Titmouse, has become an acrobat in his determination
to be lively and easy. He should remember the _juste milieu_,
recommended by Shakespeare when he says,
"They are as sick that surfeit with too much. As they that starve
with nothing."
The happy people who are born unconscious of their bodies, who grow
through life more and more graceful, easy, cordial, and agreeable;
the happy few Who were never bashful, never nervous, never had
clammy hands, they need not read these pages--they are not written
for such blessed eyes. It is for the well-meaning, but shy and
awkward, people that the manners of artificial society are most
useful.
For the benefit of such persons we must "improve a ceremonial nicety
into a substantial duty," else we shall see a cultivated scholar
confused before a set of giggling girls, and a man who is all
Wisdom, valor and learning, playing the donkey at an evening party.
If he lack the inferior arts of polite behavior, who will take the
trouble to discover a Sir Walter Raleigh behind his cravat?
A man who is constrained, uneasy, and ungraceful, can spoil the
happiness of a dozen people. Therefore he is bound to create an
artificial manner, if a natural one does not come to him,
remembering always that "manners are shadows of virtues."
The manners of artificial society have this to commend them: they
meditate the greatest good to the greatest number. We do not like
the word "artificial," or to commend anything which is supposed to
be the antipodes of the word "sincere," but it is a recipe, a
doctor's prescription that we are recommending as a cure for a
disease. "Good manners are to special societies what good morals are
to society in general--their cement and their security. True
politeness creates perfect ease and freedom; it and its essence is
to treat others as you would have others treat you." Therefore, as
you know how embarrassing embarrassment is to everybody else, strive
not to be embarrassed.