"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 sympathetic; 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 RECAMIER.
Madame Recamier, the famous beauty, was always somewhat shy.
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