Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: III. SELF-COKSCIOUSNESS. If we were asked to state in a single word what purely personal characteristic has probably caused most misery to its innocent victims all the world over in this sublunary life of ours, we are inclined to think we should answer at once, not avarice, or jealousy, or temper, or love, but quite simply that commonplace feeling, self-consciousness. To be sure, love, we will admit ? at the risk of being considered horribly cynical ? runs it a neck-and- neck race for that bad pre-eminence; for who does not remember that half the tragedies and terrors in this earthly life of ours have had their ultimate basis and groundwork of being in the tender passion? We know at ouce that our girls have reached the age of love-making when we see their eyes pretty constantly red with crying in the early morning. Nevertheless, even in spite of this most serious competitor for the post of honor as a general misery-monger, we are still disposed to place self-consciousness in the very first and foremost rank as a common cause of human distress. To every one person who suffers from the pangsof jealousy, of fear, or of unrequited affection, there are a hundred who suffer from the terrible, pressing, and ever-present demon of mere self-consciousness. It is not a vice, or, at least, only a very small one; it is not even a failing, or a weakness, or a peccadillo; it is, after all, a pure misfortune. It injures nobody but the person himself who feels it ? or perhaps one ought rather to say the person herself who is its subject; for, though men and women alike suffer iu secret from this horrible scourge, it chooses its victims most particularly among the young, the timid, the modest, and the beautiful of the fairer sex. A philanthropist who had it in his power to abolish, if he c…
