Chapter 3

My life henceforth was to be ringed round and overhung with so heavy an air that joy and fancy should never fly in it, but fall dead as the birds above Avernus according to the ancient story. I seemed to see nothing upon the path of the future but the stern form of Renunciation drawing between me and the living world the impassable circle of death in life, the _ultima linea rerum_. It was the last decree, the irrevocable sentence, the absolute end: and I had not yet reached half the Psalmist's span; I had not yet forgotten the lost summer mornings when the breeze scented with lilac came blowing through the casement, bearing with it the sound of glad voices welcoming the day.

Philosophers are prone to gird at the animal in man, accusing it of 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.