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."