There are two species of timidity,--the timidity of the
mind, and the timidity of the nerves; a physical timidity, and a moral
timidity. The one is independent of the other. The body may fear and
tremble, while the mind is calm and courageous, or vice versa. This is
the key to many moral eccentricities. When the two are united in one
man, that man will be a cipher all his life; such double-sided
timidity makes him what we call "an imbecile." Often fine suppressed
qualities are hidden within that imbecile. To this double infirmity we
may, perhaps, owe the lives of certain monks who lived in ecstasy; for
this unfortunate moral and physical disposition is produced quite as
much by the perfection of the soul and of the organs, as by defects
which are still unstudied.
The timidity of Jean-Jacques came from a certain torpor of his
faculties, which a great teacher or a great surgeon, like Despleins,
would have roused. In him, as in the cretins, the sense of love had
inherited a strength and vigor which were lacking to his mental
qualities, though he had mind enough to guide him in ordinary affairs.
The violence of passion, stripped of the ideal in which most young men
expend it, only increased his timidity. He had never brought himself
to court, as the saying is, any woman in Issoudun. Certainly no young
girl or matron would make advances to a young man of mean stature,
awkward and shame-faced in attitude; whose vulgar face, with its
flattened features and pallid skin, making him look old before his
time, was rendered still more hideous by a pair of large and prominent
light-green eyes.
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