s asked me 'if I didn't think that it was so,' that
for the time being I really felt I was something of a philologist
myself. It was only after I had left him that I realized that I had
learned a great deal from the famous master.

The nice people of the world are those who make you feel satisfied with
yourself. All the talkers, advice-givers, assertive critics put together
are not worth for your good a considerate friend who gives you a little
praise, or a good, loving woman who, two or three times a day, gives you
a teaspoonful of admiration.

After all, the greatest reward for our humblest efforts is appreciation,
the greatest incentive is encouragement. What makes us powerless to
achieve anything are the sneers of all the wet-blankets and kill-joys of
this world.

You do not make a child get on at school by calling him a little idiot
and telling him he will never do anything in his life; you do not impart
bravery into the heart of a timid soldier by treating him as if he were
a coward.

If a horse is afraid of anything lying on the road, don't whip him,
don't use the spurs; pat him gently on the neck and lead him near the
object to make him acquainted with it. Like that you will cure him of
his shyness.

Help men with encouragement, praise, and admiration.

CHAPTER XVII

WHAT IS GENIUS?

Genius is a form of madness. Early in the Christian era, St. Augustine
declared that there was no genius without a touch of insanity. The human
being who is born without a grain of folly will never be a great poet, a
great novelist, a great painter or sculptor, a great musician, or a
great anything.

Unless you are erratic, irritable, full of fads, you need not aspire to
attain sublime heights. Homer, Shakespeare, Raphael, Shelley, Wagner
were lunatics. That is why, to my mind, nothing is more absurd,
preposterous, than to go and poke one's nose into the private life of
geniuses. Let us admire the work that their genius has left to us,
without inquiring whether they regularly came home to tea, and were
attentive fathers and faithful husbands. Do we not love Burns and
Shelley?

Certainly, if I had lived in their times and had a marriageable
daughter, I would have been careful to see that she did not fall in love
with either of them; but what has that to do with their poetry and the
enjoyment of it?

To this very day, in the autumn of my life, I enjoy the fables of dear
old La Fontaine, and can't help smiling w