THE CHARM OF ACCESSIBILITY.
THOSE who know the dark races say that the first thing they desire in their rulers is that they should be accessible. The man in authority should be ready, they think, to hear the grievance of his humblest subordinate. If he will listen patiently, be will never be hated, even by the man against whom be may have given a harsh decision. Justice may miscarry, but the Judge may be forgiven for not being impartial so long only as he is not impersonal. The feeling to which these facts testify is implanted very deep in human nature, wherein lies the instinct of appeal and reply. The thought of an angry deity is far less discouraging than that of a relentless fate. The possibility of anger implies the possibility of sympathy. A man can keep his sanity in the midst of mortal enemies, but a lengthened period of solitary and silent confinement will unhinge the mind of the most stolid and brutish of men. It is speech which chiefly divides us from the animals, and we all desire with special intensity to have speech with those upon whom our fate bangs. If surgery should ever come to be done by machinery, it will add to the terrors of the operating theatre.
But it is not only to those in power that human nature desires access. We all hate to be kept at a distance, and wish to know the real mind of the men and women with whom we are thrown, and we as a rule like those best who will let us know most. There is something in accessibility which of itself charms. There are people whose attitude towards the whole world is confidential. Whatever their political opinions or their social station, they are the real democrats and the only true Socialists. Their ideas are at every man's service, and they are not concerned to protect common property. If any one wants their sympathy, be can have it. If any one would like to know their views, be can know them—such as they are. The windows of their minds give upon the open road of life. They erect no barrier between themselves and others. The meaning which has been given to the word "touching" illustrates what we are trying to say. They are not always the best people, but they are always the most popular. Few men and few women lacking this quality have anything which can rightly be called charm. Without it they may inspire the terror which seems at times to exercise a kind of fascination upon inferior natures, and they may awake curiosity or command admiration in superior ones. They may constrain regard, obtain ascendency, gain credit, but they get little affectiou and no forgiveness. On the other band, it is difficult to dislike or to condemn the accessible person. If we want to do so, we must keep away from him. Many a rogue disarms his critic by offering to him the hospitality of his mind. "It was a dreadful thing to do, but I know bow he came to do it," says the man who would have cursed the rogue altogether had he not fallen beneath this spell. There are, of course, certain faults which accessibility precludes and certain virtues which it proclaims. The accessible man cannot well be essentially false, though he may be wanting in integrity ; he cannot be affected ; he cannot be capricious ; and he cannot, in the bad sense of a loosely used word, be proud. On the other hand, he is sure to have some moral courage and some mental independence. Why affectation is so repellent a quality it is difficult to say, for often it is closely allied, especially upon the lower rungs of the social ladder, with a certain ideality, and ought never to be confounded even with the milder manifestations of hypocrisy. The man who is trying hard after better manners than are usual in the class from which he spirngs, and the woman who not only desires to appear as refined as she can but would really like to be as refined as she appears, generally end by being affected. But even where affecta- tion partakes more of the nature of virtue than of vice, it is still a barrier to sympathy and a medium in which no charm can work.
If there is a quality which more than any other proscribes accessibility, it is caprice. The door of tlie capricious man's mind is defended by a two-edged sword. The more we watch him the less we know him, and to "get into touch" with him is impossible. The foolhardy are sure of a serious wound. If there is any vital principle within upon which his being turns, it must be arrived at by intuition; it cannot be
found out from observation. Experience in his case can but increase ignorance. But, it may be objected, in the case of a woman caprice surely often serves to augment charm ? We are inclined to doubt this widely believed proposition. Many a seemingly capricious woman is, of course, charming, but we fancy the quality is often mistakenly diagnosed from the symptoms. Simulation and surprise play a large part in the art of flirtation, and, except as a measure of flirtation, no one admires caprice, even in the fairer sex. No woman has ever praised it in another woman, and no man likes it in his wife or can tolerate it in his sister. How many women, on the other hand, get credit for far more intelligence, far more sympathy, and far more unselfishness than they possess merely because they are accessible. The diffident stranger is charmed because lie is frankly received, because he can see the face of his interlocutor and judge of her thoughts, and knows that he is in company with a human being and is not listening to a voice behind a mask. Not infrequently, however, the want of confidence, which is almost always harshly interpreted, and must in the nature of things repel, ought rather to be pitied than resented, for it comes of nothing whatever but a sense of insecurity, social or otherwise. Those who fly behind their fortifications the very instant that they see a stranger may be moved by a real pleasure in being disagreeable—the most civilised and attenuated form taken in the most sophisticated circles by the love of cruelty—but more often they are simply actuated by fear. They are afraid lest they should condescend or should presume too far, afraid to assert that kinship which a touch of nature proclaims, 'afraid of being contradicted, of making themselves ridiculous, of admitting that their opinions are not of the fashionable shade, or that their mental equipment is poor. Sometimes they are simply shy, but anyhow, while their fear or their shyness lasts, they are not charming.
Poor people are sometimes curiously inaccessible. They are often so very proud, and even suspicious. The more respectable they are, the less easy it often is to get at them. It is quite natural. They have none of the privacy which money produces, no large houses, no possibility of avoiding outward contact with their neighbours, no conventional method of marking a difference between themselves and those below them in civilisation. Small wonder if they shut themselves up in themselves in order that they may be in some sense alone. Now and then one is tempted to think that they begin every fresh acquaintanceship by reflecting upon the words of the constables in the police reports : "What you say may be used against you." Then, again, even where they are not suspicious they feel a great disparity between their thoughts and their capacity of expression, and do not like to send forth their cherished notions in an unworthy form. Consequently they keep them within. Want of education of itself tends to inaccessibility. Cultiva- tion opens the mind as much as it enlarges it. But natural or not, the peculiarity which certain of the poor owe to un- fortunate circumstances is a repellent one, and they have no charm. This fact is thrown into strong relief when we consider what good company an old labourer and cottage woman can be if they will but allow their interlocutor to. cross the threshold of their hearts. There are ways in which they know so much more than the educated man or woman—no money and no traditional illusions have stood between them and the realities of life—who can but listen spellbound, if they can really tell him how this strange world, with its hardships and its pleasures, its generosity and its injustice, strikes them, and what sort of shelter of philosophy they have built for themselves out of the collected items of their experience.
Of course, an accessible person must not be confounded with an aggressive one. The difference between the two types of mind is as great as that between a hospitable house and a prison. There is no such bore as the man who drags us into the innermost dungeon of his soul and insists that we should stay there till we have beard all that he has to say. Accessibility is a passive virtue, while such a tyrannous craving for sympathy is at best a lamentable weakness, and sometimes degenerates into an active vice. The accessible man will force no one to enter the precincts of his mind, but when some one claims admittance his instinct is to say, not "Who is there ? " but "Come in !"
Previous page
