The attitude of trying to keep one's actions from becoming known is not a laudable one, and can only be adopted as the result of a philosophy of inaction.
What treasures of knowledge would have remained unknown to us if all the scientists and all the men of genius had made a practise of modesty!
If our forefathers had been modest, when it was the fashion to be proud of this quality, our museums would be empty and only a few of the initiated would know that men of exceptional merit, which they had sedulously concealed, had written manuscripts which had never been published. The humility of the writers in such cases could be made to pay too severe a penalty.
No! Men who have merits are not modest! This false virtue is the appanage of none but weak and irresolute hearts.
We should congratulate ourselves, while admitting these facts, that our forefathers were not so constituted, and that their faith in themselves, by giving them confidence in their own work, made it possible for them to hand these on to their descendants.
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.