Sympathy is the most delicate tendril of the mind, and the most
fascinating gift which nature can give to us. The most precious
associations of the human heart cluster around the word, and we love
to remember those who have sorrowed with us in sorrow, and rejoiced
with us when we were glad. But for the awkward and the shy, the
sympathetic are the very worst company. They do not wish to be
sympathized with--they wish to be with people who are cold and
indifferent; they like shy people like themselves. Put two shy
people in a room together, and they begin to talk with unaccustomed
glibness. A shy woman always attracts a shy man. But women who are
gifted with that rapid, gay impressionability which puts them _en
rapport_ with their surroundings, who have fancy and an excitable
disposition, a quick susceptibility to the influences around them,
are very charming in general society, but they are terrible to the
awkward and the shy. They sympathize too much, they are too aware of
that burning shame which the sufferer desires to conceal.
The moment that a shy person sees before him a perfectly
unsympathetic person, one who is neither thinking nor caring for
him, his shyness begins to flee; the moment that he recognizes a
fellow-sufferer he begins to feel a reinforcement of energy. If he
be a lover, especially, the almost certain embarrassment of the lady
inspires him with hope and with renewed courage. A woman who has a
bashful lover, even if she is afflicted with shyness, has been known
to find a way to help the poor fellow out of his dilemma more than
once. Hawthorne, who has left us the most complete and most tragic
history of shyness which belongs to "that long rosary on which the
blushes of a life are strung," found a woman (the most perfect
character, apparently, who ever married and made happy a great
genius) who, fortunately for him, was shy naturally, although
without that morbid shyness which accompanied him through life.
Those who knew Mrs. Hawthorne later found her possessed of great
fascination of manner, even in general society, where Hawthorne was
quite impenetrable. The story of his running down to the Concord
River and taking boat to escape his visitors has been long familiar
to us all. Mrs. Hawthorne, no doubt, with a woman's tact and a
woman's generosity, overcame her own shyness in order to receive
those guests whom Hawthorne ran away from, and through life remained
his better angel. It was through this absence of expressed sympathy
that English people became very agreeable to Hawthorne. He
describes, in his "Note Book," a speech made by him at a dinner in
England: "When I was called upon," he says, "I rapped my head, and
it returned a hollow sound."
He had, however, been sitting next to a shy English lawyer, a man
who won upon him by his quiet, unobtrusive simplicity, and who, in
some well-chosen words, rather made light of dinner-speaking and its
terrors. When Hawthorne finally got up and made his speech, his
"voice, meantime, having a far-off and remote echo," and when, as we
learn from others, a burst of applause greeted the few well-chosen
words drawn up from that full well of thought, that pellucid rill of
"English undefiled," the unobtrusive gentleman by his side
applauded, and said to him, "It was handsomely done." The compliment
pleased the shy man. It is the only compliment to himself which
Hawthorne ever recorded.
Now, had Hawthorne been congratulated by a sympathetic, effusive
American who had clapped him on the back, and who had said, "Oh,
never fear--you will speak well!" he would have said nothing. The
shy sprite in his own eyes would have read in his neighbor's eyes
the dreadful truth that his sympathetic neighbor would have
indubitably betrayed--a fear that he would not do well. The
phlegmatic and stony Englishman neither felt nor cared whether
Hawthorne spoke well or ill; and, although pleased that he did speak
well, invested no particular sympathy in the matter, either for or
against, and so spared Hawthorne's shyness the last bitter drop in
the cup, which would have been a recognition of his own moral dread.
Hawthorne bitterly records his own sufferings. He says, in one of
his books, "At this time I acquired this accursed habit of
solitude." It has been said that the Hawthorne family were, in the
earlier generation, afflicted with shyness almost as a disease--
certainly a curious freak of nature in a family descended from
robust sea-captains. It only goes to prove how far away are the
influences which control our natures and our actions.
Whether, if Hawthorne had not been a shy man, afflicted with a sort
of horror of his species at times, always averse to letting himself
go, miserable and morbid, we should have been the inheritors of the
great fortune which he has left us, is not for us to decide. Whether
we should have owned "The Gentle Boy," the immortal "Scarlet
Letter," "The House with Seven Gables," the "Marble Faun," and all
the other wonderful things which grew out of that secluded and
gifted nature, had he been born a cheerful, popular, and sympathetic
boy, with a dancing-school manner, instead of an awkward and shy
youth (although an exceedingly handsome one), we cannot tell. That
is the great secret behind the veil. The answer is not yet made, the
oracle has not spoken, and we must not invade the penumbra of
genius.
It has always been a comfort to the awkward and the shy that
Washington could not make an after-dinner speech; and the well-known
anecdote--"Sit down, Mr. Washington, your modesty is even greater
than your valor "--must have consoled many a voiceless hero.
Washington Irving tried to welcome Dickens, but failed in the
attempt, while Dickens was as voluble as he was gifted. Probably the
very surroundings of sympathetic admirers unnerved both Washington
and Irving, although there are some men who can never "speak on
their legs," as the saying goes, in any society.
Other shy men--men who fear general society, and show embarrassment
in the every-day surroundings--are eloquent when they get on their
feet. Many a shy boy at college has astonished his friends by his
ability in an after-dinner speech. Many a voluble, glib boy, who has
been appointed the orator of the occasion, fails utterly,
disappoints public expectation, and sits down with an uncomfortable
mantle of failure upon his shoulders. Therefore, the ways of shyness
are inscrutable. Many a woman who has never known what it was to be
bashful or shy has, when called upon to read a copy of verses, even
to a circle of intimate friends, lost her voice, and has utterly
broken down, to her own and her friends' great astonishment.
The voice is a treacherous servant; it deserts us, trembles, makes a
failure of it, is "not present or accounted for" often when we need
its help. It is not alone in the shriek of the hysterical that we
learn of its lawlessness, it is in its complete retirement. A bride,
often, even when she felt no other embarrassment, has found that she
had no voice with which to make her responses. It simply was not
there!
A lady who was presented at court, and who felt--as she described
herself--wonderfully at her ease, began talking, and, without
wishing to speak loud, discovered that she was shouting like a
trumpeter. The somewhat unusual strain which she had put upon
herself, during the ordeal of being presented at the English court,
revenged itself by an outpouring of voice which she could not
control.
Many shy people have recognized in themselves this curious and
unconscious elevation of the voice. It is not so common as a loss of
voice, but it is quite as uncontrollable.
The bronchial tubes play us another trick when we are frightened:
the voice is the voice of somebody else, it has no resemblance to
our own. Ventriloquism might well study the phenomena of shyness,
for the voice becomes bass that was treble, and soprano that which
was contralto.
"I dislike to have Wilthorpe come to see me," said a very shy woman
--"I know my voice will squeak so." With her Wilthorpe, who for some
reason drove her into an agony of shyness, had the effect of making
her talk in a high, unnatural strain, excessively fatiguing.
The presence of one's own family, who are naturally painfully
sympathetic, has always had upon the bashful and the shy a most evil
effect.
"I can never plead a cause before my father?" "Nor I before my son,"
said two distinguished lawyers. "If mamma is in the room, I shall
never be able to get through my part," said a young amateur actor.
But here we must pause to note another exception in the laws of
shyness.
In the false perspective of the stage shyness often disappears. The
shy man, speaking the words, and assuming the character of another,
often loses his shyness. It is himself of whom he is afraid, not of
Tony Lumpkin or of Charles Surface, of Hamlet or of Claude Melnotte.
Behind their masks he can speak well; but if he at his own dinner-
table essays to speak, and mamma watches him with sympathetic eyes,
and his brothers and sisters are all listening, he fails.
"Lord Percy sees me fall."
Yet it is with our own people that we must stand or fall, live or
die; it is in our own circle that we must conquer our shyness.
Now, these reflections are not intended as an argument against
sympathy properly expressed. A reasonable and judiciously expressed
sympathy with our fellow-beings is the very highest attribute of our
nature. "It unravels secrets more surely than the highest critical
faculty. Analysis of motives that sway men and women is like the
knife of the anatomist: it works on the dead. Unite sympathy to
observation, and the dead Spring to life." It is thus to the shy, in
their moments of tremor, that we should endeavor to be calmly
unsympathetic; not cruel, but indifferent, unobservant.
Now, women of genius who obtain a reflected comprehension of certain
aspects of life through sympathy often arrive at the admirable
result of apprehending the sufferings of the shy without seeming to
observe them. Such a woman, in talking to a shy man, will not seem
to see him; she will prattle on about herself, or tell some funny
anecdote of how she was tumbled out into the snow, or how she
spilled her glass of claret at dinner, or how she got just too late
to the lecture; and while she is thus absorbed in her little
improvised autobiography, the shy man gets hold of himself and
ceases to be afraid of her. This is the secret of tact.
Madame Rcamier, the famous beauty, was always somewhat shy. She was
not a wit, but she possessed the gift of drawing out what was best
in others. Her biographers have blamed her that she had not a more
impressionable temper, that she was not more sympathetic. Perhaps
(in spite of her courage when she took up contributions in the
churches dressed as a Neo-Greek) she was always hampered by shyness.
She certainly attracted all the best and most gifted of her time,
and had a noble fearlessness in friendship, and a constancy which
she showed by following Madame de Stal into exile, and in her
devotion to Ballenche and Chateaubriand. She had the genius of
friendship, a native sincerity, a certain reality of nature--those
fine qualities which so often accompany the shy that we almost, as
we read biography and history, begin to think that shyness is but a
veil for all the virtues.
Perhaps to this shyness, or to this hidden sympathy, did Madame
Rcamier owe that power over all men which survived her wonderful
beauty. The blind and poor old woman of the _Abbaye_ had not lost
her charm; the most eminent men and women of her day followed her
there, and enjoyed her quiet (not very eloquent) conversation. She
had a wholesome heart; it kept her from folly when she was young,
from a too over-facile sensitiveness to which an impressionable,
sympathetic temperament would have betrayed her. Her firm, sweet
nature was not flurried by excitement; she had a steadfastness in
her social relations which has left behind an everlasting renown to
her name.
And what are, after all, these social relations which call for so
much courage, and which can create so much suffering to most of us
as we conquer for them our awkwardness and our shyness? Let us pause
for a moment, and try to be just. Let us contemplate these social
ethics, which call for so much that is, perhaps, artificial and
troublesome and contradictory. Society, so long as it is the
congregation of the good, the witty, the bright, the intelligent,
and the gifted, is the thing most necessary to us all. We are apt to
like it and its excitements almost too well, or to hate it, with its
excesses and its mistakes, too bitterly. We are rarely just to
society.
The rounded and harmonious and temperate understanding and use of
society is, however, the very end and aim of education. We are born
to live with each other and not for ourselves; if we are cheerful,
our cheerfulness was given to us to make bright the lives of those
about us; if we have genius, that is a sacred trust; if we have
beauty, wit, joyousness, it was given us for the delectation of
others, not for ourselves; if we are awkward and shy, we are bound
to break the crust and to show that within us is beauty,
cheerfulness, and wit. "It is but the fool who loves excess." The
best human being should moderately like society.