pronius, we'll deserve it."

But the spirit of Romance and Christendom, the spirit which is in every
lover, the spirit which has bestridden the earth with European
adventure, is quite opposite. 'Tis not in mortals to deserve success.
But we'll do more, Sempronius; we'll obtain it.

And this gay humility, this holding of ourselves lightly and yet ready
for an infinity of unmerited triumphs, this secret is so simple that
every one has supposed that it must be something quite sinister and
mysterious. Humility is so practical a virtue that men think it must be
a vice. Humility is so successful that it is mistaken for pride. It is
mistaken for it all the more easily because it generally goes with a
certain simple love of splendour which amounts to vanity. Humility will
always, by preference, go clad in scarlet and gold; pride is that which
refuses to let gold and scarlet impress it or please it too much. In a
word, the failure of this virtue actually lies in its success; it is
too successful as an investment to be believed in as a virtue.
Humility is not merely too good for this world; it is too practical for
this world; I had almost said it is too worldly for this world.

The instance most quoted in our day is the thing called the humility of
the man of science; and certainly it is a good instance as well as a
modern one. Men find it extremely difficult to believe that a man who
is obviously uprooting mountains and dividing seas, tearing down
temples and stretching out hands to the stars, is really a quiet old
gentleman who only asks to be allowed to indulge his harmless old hobby
and follow his harmless old nose. When a man splits a grain of sand and
the universe is turned upside down in consequence, it is difficult to
realize that to the man who did it, the splitting of the grain is the
great affair, and the capsizing of the cosmos quite a small one. It is
hard to enter into the feelings of a man who regards a new heaven and a
new earth in the light of a by-product. But undoubtedly it was to this
almost eerie innocence of the intellect that the great men of the great
scientific period, which now appears to be closing, owed their enormous
power and triumph. If they had brought the heavens down like a house of
cards their plea was not even that they had done it on principle; their
quite unanswerable plea was that they had done it by accident. Whenever
there was in them the least touch of pride in what they had done, th