MR. EMERSON ON SHYNESS.
THE new volume of Mr. Emerson's essays• opens with one exceedingly characteristic of that subtle and acute inter- preter of nature, whose principal fault it is that he makes it a sort of religion (perhaps for want of what others think religion) to force a symbolic meaning in natural facts even where he has not been able truly to discover one. Thus he gives us here a rationale of shyness which strikes us as in the highest degree questionable. It follows a very graphic and humorous account of a humourist he once knew,—who might, in most of his characteristics at least, stand for Nathaniel Hawthorne,—who " declared that he could not get enough alone to write a letter to a friend." "He left the city," proceeds Mr. Emerson. " He hid himself in pastures. The solitary river was not solitary enough ; the sun and moon put him out. When he bought a house the first thing he did was to plant trees. He could not enough conceal himself. Set a hedge here ; set oaks there ; trees behind trees ; above all, set evergreens, for they will keep a secret all the year round. The most agreeable compliment you could pay him was to imply that you had not observed him in a house or a street where you bad met him. Whilst he suffered at being seen where he was, he consoled himself with the delicious thought of the inconceivable number of places where he was not." We may safely assert, by the way, that that last con- solation was a consolation suggested by the humourist (Mr. Emerson, or his friend ?) to the consciousness of the shy man, and no natural alleviation of the agonies of shyness. " He would have given his soul," proceeds Mr. Emerson, "for the ring of Gyges. His dismay at his visibility had blunted his fears of mortality. ' Do you think,' he said, I am in such great terror of being shot,—I who am only waiting to shale off my corporeal jacket, to slip away into the back stars and put diameters of the solar system and sidereal orbits between me and all souls, then to wear out ages in solitude, and forget memory itself, if it be possible?' He had a remorse running to despair of his social gaucheries, and walked miles and miles to get the twitchings out of his face, the starts and shrugs out of his arms and shoulders. He admired in Newton not so much his theory of the moon as his letter to Collins, in which he forbade him to insert his name with the solution of the problem in the Philosophical Transactions. ' It would perhaps increase my acquaintance,—the thing which I chiefly study to decline.' " And now for Mr. Emerson's rationale of this horror and agony of observation,—of this lust of privacy. He interprets it aa the effort of nature to keep genius itself, to keep it unalloyed bythe common-places of a tyrannical world. " Each must stand on his glass tripod," he says, " if he would keep his electricity." " Dear heart ! take it sadly home to thee," he cries again, with just a touch
of affectation, "there is no cooperation we sit and muse and are serene and complete; but the moment we meet with anybody, each becomes a fraction."
Soeiely and Solitude. Twelve Chapters by Ralph Waldo Emerson. London: Sampson Low.
Now, surely Mr. Emerson has confounded two utterly different things when he describes the symptoms and when he gives his inter- pretation. What he describes so finely is shyness—which be does not interpret. What he interprets is the capillary repulsion, so to speak, of genius for all menacing and alloying substances, which he hardly describes. That there is this instinct in genius to possess its own soul apart, and resist as an injury the attempts of society to break it in to the yoke of ordinary conventionalism, is absolutely true. But in the most remarkable instances it has been true of men who were never in their lives troubled with shyness. Goethe, for instance, was the least shy of mankind. Yet he was always jealously guarding himself from the alien influences, the intellectual aggressiveness, of his ablest companions, and striving to restore his true self in solitude or such society as was perfectly plastic to his influence. It was the same with Wordsworth, with Shelley, with plenty of men of genius who were not poets. They felt that they had a deposit to guard which too much contact with the common air would oxidize, would rust, and turn into some- thing far less bright and valuable. But all this jealousy of alien influences is not shyness, and has hardly any true connection with that horror of mere observation which often affects the least remarkable intellects quite as powerfully as the most remarkable,— which often attacks the minds which would be simply improved by even rough friction with the world, as much as the minds which would lose all the delicate essence of their charm in so rough a process. Of course, genius may have both these qualities ;—both the instinctive dread of alien influence which belongs to all sensitive genius, and the instinctive dread of mere eyes, the hiding instinct, which is the essence of shyness. Hawthorne had both feelings ; Cowper had both ; and when they exist together, it is no doubt impossible accurately to discriminate them. But the two are essentially distinct, and the interpretation which Mr. Emerson has given of the one does not in the least apply to the other. The desire to flee away to " the back stars," and there barricade yourself in with worlds against the myriad eyes of the universe, is not in any sense, we imagine, due to the rebellion of genius against conventional influences, though that of course must increase it, but is attri- butable to that morbid self-consciousness of deficiencies which any- thing like the appearance of observation from without stimu- lates into intense activity. Shyness comes of mirrors,—moral or physical. Mr. Emerson's friend who felt remorse for his gaucheries and walked miles to get the twitchings out of his arms, was the victim of both moral and physical looking-glasses. There are many men and women who are always weigh- ing themselves and finding themselves wanting ; and these, if any eye at all is upon them, cannot refrain from weighing themselves again with a special view to the imaginary criticisms of the owner of this particular eye ; and so their mind in thrown into tumultuous vibrations fatal to their peace. Now, it is obvious that this sort of temperament, though it may in some sense be a sensitive one, is not in the least necessarily connected with peculiar power of any kind, and may be common-place in the last degree. To interpret it as the anxiety of nature to protect her most individual creations, is like saying that the effeminacy which makes some women scream at a spider is a special provision for their protection against that most inoffensive of insects. Indeed, the fact is, that though there are exceptional cases like Hawthorn's and Cowper's, shyness fre- quently exists in the highest intensity in those natures when there is the least of individual life to preserve. The mere presence of real creative power tends, so far as it goes,to diminish the intensity of passive self-consciousness, to betray into self-forgetfulness, to blind tothatpurely imaginary gaze from which' the mind shrinks. It is only in those whose minds rarely bubble up into full energy of their own, that this desire to find a secure hiding-place assumes the strongest form. It is true that men of genius are very often indeed, especially in our modern days, men of a double nature. One side of Goethe's mind, the bard side, was almost always watching the soft, impressionable -side ; and the same is true of Thackeray, and George Eliot, and Miss Bronte, and a host of modern artists. Still, none of these are capable of any such high intensity of the feeling as Mr. Emerson describes. Their own genius is too strong for it. They identify themselves so closely both with the observing power as well as with the nature observed, that the resulting feeling is hardly so much that of increased sensitiveness to observation, as of increased power of observation. It almost takes a person who is denied the resource of any such faculty as this, to be, in the most painful sense of the word, 'shy.' You must be far more conscious of yourself than of the power to observe yourself,—in fact, perceptiveness must be utterly secondary
to sensitiveness,—in other words, genius must be quite secondary to the discomforts of feeling,—in order to give that word its fullest meaning.
Mr. Emerson having missed, as we believe, the essence of the malady, has, of course, missed the essence of the remedy for shynes., and only suggests that true society,—the society in which you can feel your inner nature to some extent kindled into vividness,—is the proper balance for the natural "eve of solitude proper to all 'true genius. But it is not the men of genius—who have plenty of resource in themselves—who most need a remedy for this terrible malady. It is those who have no such genius, who are afflicted with the consciousness of having all the eyes of their world glaring fixedly upon them without any distraction due to the exercise of an original faculty of their own, who stand in real need of good counsel and a way of escape. And to them we would say that far the best and easiest escape for shy men or women is to make a rash into the enemy's country, and divert attention from themselves by showing to good purpose that they have been studying some one else. There is nothing which is so much observed as apparent silence and reticence. Be full of interest in others, of whatever kind, and you are as much hidden as the cuttle-fish in the inky fluid it expels. In point of fact, shyness creates what it fears. Everybody attends to a silent and self-engrossed person, because he is a hidden power, a riddle, an untested possibility, an unknown moral quantity—with which no one likes to associate. But then the world is very easily satisfied, with even an appearance of overflow. It will estimate almost anyone at a moment's notice and soon loses all curiosity about those who openly express curiosity about others. There is no incognito in the world so effectual as a little well-expressed interest in others. People take their eyes off you directly you have spoken the kind of thing they expected to hear, and especially if it be something which diverts the attention elsewhere. An enigma will always be scanned till it is guessed ; and obviously silent, thinking people are always an enigma to the world at large. The true privacy is a certain superficial atmosphere of social feeling,—a power of effervescing slightly in all sorts of society, and showing that the effervescence is due to a certain adequate, but not necessarily at all profound, appreciation of that society. And no power is more easily acquired. A shy person with the least bonhomie (and most persons, however peculiar, have some) can acquire a habit in no time,—a habit, of course, purely selfish in its motive, but full of relief in its results,—of noting, and discussing with animation, the personal interests of his friends and acquaintances, so that he is soon as much unobserved as .2Eneas in the mist which his mother cast about him when he entered Carthage. This is the true " ring of Gyges." Attack others with a gentle, superficial raillery, show that you have noted their traits of character, their wishes, their powers, their amiable weaknesses, and you may slip about as unobserved as if you were in "the back stars" with diameters of solar systems between you and all other souls. There are no persons so truly reserved as those who seem to live in an atmosphere of genial superficial raillery. This is the silk cocoon in which the chrysalis of many a shy mind is so deeply enveloped as to be quite beyond mortal sight. And no veil is easier to draw, unless, indeed, the powers of insight and of will are more than ordinarily slight. It is pleasant and easy to know something characteristic of every one. It is not very difficult, especially if you realize that the immediate result is not to expose but to con- ceal you, to use this knowledge with that ready banter and easy criticism which disarm all true criticism in return. We recom- mend this specific to all shy readers. They will find it far more useful than the rather transcendental recipes of Mr. Emerson, —which, too, are not in the main adapted for the malady of ordinary mortals.
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