Manners and Social Usages - Mrs John M. E. W. Sherwood (mobile ebook reader TXT) 📗

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 everyday 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 R�camier, 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 Sta�l 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

R�camier 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.

 

CHAPTER LV. CERTAIN QUESTIONS ANSWERED.

 

We are asked by a correspondent as to when a gentleman should wear

his hat and when take it off. A gentleman wears his hat in the

street, on a steamboat deck, raising it to a lady acquaintance; also

in a promenade concert-room and picture-gallery. He never wears it

in a theatre or opera-house, and seldom in the parlors of a hotel.

The etiquette of raising the hat on the staircases and in the halls

of a hotel as gentlemen pass ladies is much commended. In Europe

each man raises his hat as he passes a bier, or if a hearse carrying

a dead body passes him. In this country men simply raise their hats

as a funeral cort�ge passes into a church, or at the grave. If a

gentleman, particularly an elderly one, takes off his hat and stands

uncovered in a draughty place, as the foyer of an opera-house,

while talking to ladies, it is proper for one of them to say, “Pray

resume your hat “—a delicate attention deeply prized by a

respectful man, who, perhaps, would not otherwise cover his head.

 

Again, our young lady friends ask us many questions on the subject

of propriety, showing how anxious they are to do right, but also

proving how far they are from apprehending what in Old-World customs

has been always considered propriety. In our new country the

relations of men and women are