Page:The Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow, a Book for an Idle Holiday - Jerome (1886).djvu/111

 ventures upon a little bit of flattery, it is taken for satire, and he is hated ever afterwards.

These, and the rest of a shy man's troubles, are always very amusing, to other people; and have afforded material for comic writing from time immemorial. But if we look a little deeper, we shall find there is a pathetic, one might almost say a tragic, side to the picture. A shy man means a lonely man—a man cut off from all companionship, all sociability. He moves about the world, but does not mix with it. Between him and his fellow-men there runs ever an impassable barrier—a strong, invisible wall, that, trying in vain to scale, he but bruises himself against. He sees the pleasant faces, and hears the pleasant voices on the other side, but he cannot stretch his hand across to grasp another hand. He stands watching the merry groups, and he longs to speak, and to claim kindred with them. But they pass him by, chatting gaily to one another, and he cannot stay them. He tries to reach them, but his prison walls move with him, and hem him in on every side. In the busy street, in the crowded room, in the grind of work, in the whirl of pleasure, amidst the many or amidst the few; wherever men congregate together, wherever the music of human speech is heard, and human thought is flashed from human eyes, there, shunned and solitary, the shy man, like a leper, stands apart. His soul is full of love and longing, but the world knows it not. The iron mask of