“Well,” I answered, “I am surprised by your definition of a genius. But perhaps you will be more surprised, and sorry you said so much, when I tell you that I consider every one of you a genius.”
“Oh, my,” said Virginia, “how nice! I wish I were.”
I said: “What we usually call genius is but a larger power of understanding, a sense of unity, of the relations of things. And we all have that, in some degree. So we all have genius. It is not a matter of quality but of quantity. We are all the same stuff, only some more and some less.”
Henry said I might use the word in that sense, but he didn’t think it was the true meaning. He said: “What definition is in the dictionary?” We had no dictionary at hand, so I tried to prove my definition true without a dictionary, and I succeeded.
I said: “There is no gulf between the genius and the stupid looker-on. Don’t you see why there could not be?”
“I see,” said Marian; “it is because the looker-on would have to have some genius, or else——” She could not finish.
“Just so, Marian,” I went on; “or else he could not appreciate the artist’s work. It is the genius in the onlooker that appreciates the genius in the artist. And in so far as you can appreciate the genius of Shakespeare, in so far you have the same sort of genius.”
“Then,” said she, “art makes us recognize ourselves.”
“Yes,” I answered, “our bigger selves.”
“So one might speak,” she said, “of a person developing his genius for music, or his genius for painting, and so on?”