"That is not logical. You answer one question by asking another."
"I am not sure but that is allowable," interrupted Ranney. "You pose your opponent with an unanswerable question, and he in turn proposes several, thereby suggesting that there are things unknown, and that if you will push him to that realm you are equally involved. It may not be logical, but it usually silences."
"Not quite, in this instance," said Henry, "for we know by their manifestations that life and electricity are; they manifest themselves to us."
"And by the same rule genius manifests itself to your brother, although it may not to you."
"Thank you, Mr. Ranney," said Bart.
"Now I do not suppose," he went on, "that genius is a beneficent little imp, or genie, lodged in the brain of the fortunate or unfortunate, who is all-powerful, and always at hand to give strength, emit a flash of light, or pour inspiration into the faculties, nor does it consist in anything that answers to that idea. But there are men endowed with quick, strong intellects, with warm, ardent, intense temperaments, and with strong imaginations; where these, or their equivalents, are found happily blended, the result is genius. There is a working power that can do anything, and with apparent ease. If it plunges down, it need not remain long; if it mounts up, it alights again without effort or injury."
"And such a 'working power,' you suppose, would, of itself, be a constant self-supply, and always equal to emergencies, and of its own unaided spontaneous inspirations and energies, I suppose," said Henry, "and has nothing to do but float and plunge about, diving and soaring, in the amplitude of nature?"
"Well, Henry, you can't get out of a man what isn't in him. You need not draw on a water-bottle for nectar, or hope to carve marble columns from empty air; genius can't do that. An unformed, undeveloped mind never threw out great things spontaneously, as the cloud throws out lightning. Men are not great without achievement, nor wise without study and reflection. Nor was there ever a genius, however strong and brilliant in the rough, that would not have been stronger and more brilliant by cutting," said Bart, with vehemence. "All I contend for is, that genius, as I have supposed, can make the most and best of things, often doing with them what other and commoner minds cannot do at all."
"This is not the school-boy's idea of genius," said Ranney.
"And," said Bart, a little assertively, "I am not a school-boy."