The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Hidden Masterpiece by Honore de Balzac: fortune, rich in his spring-time of genius, whose heart has not beaten
loudly as he approached a master of his art? If there be, that man
will forever lack some heart-string, some touch, I know not what, of
his brush, some fibre in his creations, some sentiment in his poetry.
When braggarts, self-satisfied and in love with themselves, step early
into the fame which belongs rightly to their future achievements, they
are men of genius only in the eyes of fools. If talent is to be
measured by youthful shyness, by that indefinable modesty which men
born to glory lose in the practice of their art, as a pretty woman
loses hers among the artifices of coquetry, then this unknown young
man might claim to be possessed of genuine merit. The habit of success
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