Of what use to us would it be to know that a poem of finer quality and more splendid fire than any we have ever read had once been written, if the modesty of its author had led him to keep it always in his pocket and it had finally vanished into the limbo of ignored and forgotten things?

It is then actually wrong to sing the praises of modesty, which is no more than distrust of oneself, egoism, and laziness.

The man who boasts of his modesty will feel no shame at producing nothing.  He hides his ineptitude behind this convenient veil whose thickness allows him to hint of the existence of things which are nothing but figments of his imagination.

We might add that the man who proclaims his modesty enters the struggle with a decided handicap against him.  The moment he begins to have doubts about his own powers he will be sure to find himself the prey of an unfortunate indecision, and that at the very moment when he is called upon to perform some decisive action.

“One day,” says an old writer, “three men, in the course of a climb up a mountain, found themselves confronted by a crevasse that they must cross.

“One of these was a timid man, another a boaster, and the third was possest of a reasoned poise.

“The boaster made a jump without stopping to think and without taking the trouble to measure the gap.  He plunged into it.

“The modest man then advanced, looked down into the gulf, then decided to make use of the irregularities in the surface of the chasm to reduce the width of the jump.

“He made several attempts to carry this out, but could hardly touch the edge before an instinctive movement of fear forced him back.

“He worked so hard and so long at this that he was quite tired out when he at last chose the moment for the decisive attempt.  He jumped, indeed, but in such a half-hearted way that he merely touched the opposite face of the crevasse and fell to the bottom of the precipice alongside of the boaster.

“The third climber, who possest the advantage of poise, had meanwhile been losing no time.  He had mentally gaged the width of the crevasse, had made a number of trial jumps to test his ability to clear it, and when, with a firm resolution to succeed, he reached the edge from which he must leap, his soul, fortified by the knowledge of his powers was fired with a single idea, the consciousness of his own agility and strength.

“By this means he, alone of the three, was able to cross the gulf in which his two companions had perished.”

Effrontery and boastfulness have often another source.  The shyness of those who suffer from timidity, by isolating them and denying them the means of expansion, prevents them from obtaining a real control over their feelings, which undergo a process of deterioration so slow that they do not notice it.

There are very few things to which we can not easily become accustomed, to the extent of a complete failure to notice their peculiarities, if their strangeness is only unfolded to us gradually.