LIFE’S HANDICAP.

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXV, Issue 4755, 24 September 1924, Page 1

LIFE’S HANDICAP.

THE SHYNESS OF MEN. EMBARRASSMENT OF BLUSHING. It used to be a world —at any rate, with the poets—of fair women and brave men, so that if men have really turned as shy as Mr Masefield believes it is a revolution which, perhaps, the psychologists ought to look into. This allocation of shyness can, of course, be fortified with examples, but it may be argued that they may make the exceptions rather than the rule. In fiction the bashful man, in the person of Blushington, the sensitive plant of Brasenose, has had a play ail to himself, and even small parts exploiting masculine' ishyness and pluyed with an exquisite confusion have made the fortunes of many comedies. But there has been a touch of the stage about them. In real life the classical example, is Aloysius Gonzaga, a gentleman of so refined a shyness that he could not sit in a room alone with his Bwn mother without blushing. After him comes that Henry de Essex, who, turning his back on the world, hid his head in a cowl, under which, betwixt shyness and sanctity, “he blushed out the remainder of his life.’’ Sir Thomas Browne suffered grievously from shyness—“blush after blush would mantle over his face jvithout any observable caujse at air and we know from Fanny Burney that in the days when a dip in the Shannon was supposed to remove nervousness and mauvais honte Mr Twiss was by no means the only gentleman in need of the river’s services. No ladies, apparently, stood on the banks. The little winds of controversy are likely to blow round the head of Mr Mnstield ae the result of one or two remarks .which form the preface to the syllabus of his verse-speaking contest in Oxford. Poetry at its best, he says, being made by men, is best spoken by men. Whenever poetry has been a popular delight the voices of men have made it so. He was, therefore, deeply disappointed that in last year’is contest the voices of men were heard sb rarely, and, adventuring for the reason, finds it primarily in the circumstances that men are usually more busily employed than women, and that men are more shy than women. This year, therefore,'men are to be both allured and protected by competing with themselves throughout, so that their “natural shrinkage from competing with women” will be given full play, states “G.M.A.” in the “Manchester Guardian.” But the catalogue of shy, crimson men is happily, soon exhausted, since we cannot forget that the blush-shy-ness’s insignia has had far mote said against it than for it. George Eliot insisted that it was the most dubious of flag-signals, and her great friend Herbert Spencer was so afraid of the misconstruction that might be placed upon cheeks reddening merely with pleasure that he once stopped, in its mid-career, a Beethoven sonata. “Thank you, I’m getting flushed.” A little refutation of Mr Masefield’s .theory is also offered by Darwin. When Darwin was anxious to find out whether blushes can be enacted in solitude or in the dark, it was several ladies who are great blushers” whom he questioned. There ip no record that he applied to any member of his own sex fgr elucidation of his problem.

Both Fanny Burney and Jane Austen detested the embarrassment of shyness. ’ Fanny grows enthusiastic over a Mrs Wright, who, married to a. man who was a little stupid, never once made him blush with the consciousness bf hip own inferiority. It was a great achievement, Fanny thought, for them both. Jane Austen agreed with Mr Masefield that men are shy. but hastened to add that it was a masculine defect rather than a virtue “His only fault, indeed,” she writes to her niece Fanny, who is hesitating about a sweetheart, “seems modesty. I have no doubt he will get more like yourself ap he is more with you. He will catch your ways if he belongs to you.” Jane was delighted when even children became self-pos-sessed and cool-cheeked. “Our little visitor has all the ready civility which one sees in the best children in the present day—so unlike anything that I was myself at her age that I am all shame.” Nothing surely would have provoked Jane’s rapier more sharply than shy men shyly speaking verse. “ It cannot’ in justice be forgotten that English literature contains many excitements to shyness and modesty in women by shy and modest men. Addison entreats his gentle readers to ‘ sew on their tuckers again,’ and tel’s widows that if only they are shy in their widowhood it will almost be as though they had never been married at all. Charles Lamb, on the other hand, says gallantly that men could not be shy and modest at all if women did not give them the opportunity, and that of all spectacles a man balancing, like a posturing, dancing master, between bashfulness and bravery is the most stimulating. Perhaps the hazard may be made that Mr Masefield is not up against shyneps or busyness at all, and that though he is right in saying that poetry, at its best, has been made by men and is best spoken by men, yet some of the best if it has been made for women, that it is on women’s appreciation that it glows and thrives, and that The spondee, dactyl, trochee, anapest, Do not inflame my passions in the least. is to-day much more a masculine than a feminine sentiment. Perhaps, too, Mr Masefield is fighting less shy-

ness than that great characteristic of his sex, IqVe of silence. For the idea of Mr Lawrence is the ideal of the Englishman—” To come at last to a nice place under the. treep, with your amiable spouse who has at last learned to hold , her tongue, and to possess your own soul in silence and to feel all clamour lapse.”