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 Rhætian 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 mænad, 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 Provençal 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.