surdity of which only hopeless incapacity can persuade itself, in order that it may regard the feeling of its own insignificance as modesty. An Englishman has wittily and correctly observed that merit and modesty have nothing in common except the initial letter.[1] I have always a suspicion about modest celebrities that they may very well be right and Corneille says directly –
"La fausse humilité ne met plus en crédit:
Je sçais ce que je vaux, et crois ce qu'on. m'en dit."
Finally, Goethe has frankly said, "Only good-for-nothings are modest." But the assertion would be still more certain that those who so eagerly demand modesty from others, urge modesty, unceasingly cry, "Only be modest, for God's sake, only be modest!" are positively good-for-nothings, i.e., persons entirely without merit, manufactures of nature, ordinary members of the great mass of humanity. For he who himself has merit also concedes merit – understands himself truly and really. But he who himself lacks all excellence and merit wishes there was no such thing: the sight of it in others stretches him upon the rack; pale, green, and yellow envy consumes his heart: he would like to annihilate and destroy all those who are personally favoured; but if unfortunately he must let them live, it must only be under the condition that they conceal, entirely deny, nay, abjure their advantages. This, then, is the root of the frequent eulogising of modesty. And if the deliverers of these eulogies have the opportunity of suppressing merit as it arises, or at least of hindering it from showing itself or being known, who can doubt that they will do it? For this is the practice of their theory.
Now, although the poet, like every artist, always brings before us only the particular, the individual, what he has
- ↑ Lichtenberg ("Vermischte Schriften," new edition, Göttingen, 1884, vol. iii. p. 19) quotes Stanislaus Leszczynski as having said, "La modestie devroit être la vertu de ceux, a qui les autres manquent."
