In most cases use gives to this politic agreement the peace and permanence of settled habit; the body proves itself so far amenable that it is accepted as a needful if uninspiring companion, and its plain usefulness ends by dulling the edged criticisms of the mind. But wherever there is a permanent incompatibility too profound for compromise, an elemental difference keeping the personality continually distraught, then shyness, in the sense in which I understand it, assumes its inalienable dominion. The flame of rebellion may smoulder unobserved while the sufferer is in his own home, but among strangers it will blaze fiercely, as the mind protests against the misinterpretations of its unworthy partner. This burning shame is not the proof of a foolish conceit, as unsympathetic criticism proclaims it, but the visible misery of a keen spirit thwarted by physical defect. The man who manifests it is angered with himself because through a physical hindrance he has failed to take the place which would otherwise be his. He is proud, it may be, but not fatuous; for shyness as a rule implies a comparative quickness and alertness of intellect: its exceeding sensibility is exclusive of dulness; and it is frequently due to the presence in a reluctant body of a mind endowed with active powers.
Inasmuch as diffidence appears where the subtler formalities of life are compulsory, it is clear that it essentially belongs to the class called gentle, for this class alone enforces that exacting code of etiquette to which our discomfiture is so largely due. Shyness has seldom place in the patriarchal life where men live, "sound, without care, every man under his own vine or his own fig-tree," nor among those who, perforce pursuing a too laborious existence, have no leisure for superficial refinements. Though here and there you may find a Joseph Poorgrass, it is rare among the simple; it is not a popular weakness, and therefore wins no popular sympathy. Such is its first social limitation: it is almost restricted to the classes which are outwardly refined.
But it has another limitation of equal importance which may be described as climatic; for this malady is not found in equal degrees all over the habitable globe. There are many lands where it hardly exists at all even among the class which is alone liable to it; and in its serious form it is found only over a small part of the earth. There are many causes which conduce to this partial distribution. In one country manners are not minutely schooled, women being held of secondary account, and men content without subtlety; in another, life is in itself too primitive to devise the artifices of refinement; in a third, the fundamental disunion between the mind and the physical organism is prevented by the kindly hand of nature. For these reasons all the savage world, all the East, and the whole of southern Europe have little knowledge of the diffident, and what zoologists would call the area of distribution of the species is confined within narrow geographical limits.