These three faculties are certainly necessary for genius, but they are not sufficient for it. What essentially distinguishes genius from taste is the attribute of creative power. Taste feels, judges, discusses, analyzes, but does not invent. Genius is, before all, inventive and creative. The man of genius is not the master of the power that is in him; it is by the ardent, irresistible need of expressing what he feels, that he is a man of genius. He suffers by withholding the sentiments, or images, or thoughts, that agitate his breast. It has been said that there is no superior man without some grain of folly; but this folly, like that of the cross, is the divine part of reason. This mysterious power Socrates called his demon. Voltaire called it the devil in the body; he demanded it even in a comedian in order to be a comedian of genius. Give to it what name you please, it is certain that there is a I-know-not-what that inspires genius, that also torments it until it has delivered itself of what consumes it; until, by expressing them, it has solaced its pains and its joys, its emotions, its ideas; until its reveries have become living works. Thus two things characterize genius; at first, the vivacity of the need it has of producing, then the power of producing; for the need without the power is only a malady that resembles genius, but is not it. Genius is above all, is essentially, the power of doing, of inventing, of creating. Taste is contented with observing, with admiring. False genius, ardent and impotent imagination, consumes itself in sterile dreams and produces nothing, at least nothing great. Genius alone has the power to convert conceptions into creations. If genius creates it does not imitate. But genius, it is said, is then superior to nature, since it does not imitate it. Nature is the work of God; man is then the rival of God. The answer is very simple. No, genius is not the rival of God; but it is the interpreter of him. Nature expresses him in its way, human genius expresses him in its own way. Let us stop a moment at that question so much discussed,--whether art is any thing else than the imitation of nature. Doubtless, in one sense, art is an imitation; for absolute creation belongs only to God. Where can genius find the elements upon which it works, except in nature, of which it forms a part? But does it limit itself to the reproduction of them as nature furnishes them to it, without adding any thing to them which belongs to itself? Is it only a copier of reality? Its sole merit, then, is that of the fidelity of the copy. And what labor is more sterile than that of copying works essentially inimitable on account of the life with which they are endowed, in order to obtain an indifferent image of them? If art is a servile pupil, it is condemned never to be any thing but an impotent pupil.