I have not the necessary degree of stupidity to become what is called a _genius_ pure and simple, nor the prodigious obstinacy which is eventually deified under the high-sounding name of _will_, when the great man has reached the radiant summit of the mountain, and which is indispensable to attain that height;--I know too well how hollow all things are and that they contain only putrefying matter, to attach myself for very long to anything and follow it ardently and exclusively through everything. Men of genius are very shallow, and that is why they are men of genius. Lack of intelligence prevents them from perceiving the obstacles that separate them from the end they wish to attain; they go ahead, and in two or three strides devour the intervening spaces.--As their mind remains obstinately closed to certain currents, and as they see only the things that are most closely connected with their ends, they expend much less thought and action; nothing diverts them, nothing turns them aside, they act more by instinct than otherwise, and some of them, when removed from their special sphere, exhibit a nullity hard to understand. Assuredly it is a rare and charming gift to write poetry well; few people take more pleasure than I in poetical matters;--but I do not choose to limit and circumscribe my life within the twelve feet of an alexandrine; there are a thousand things that interest me as much as a hemistich:--the state of society and the reforms that must be undertaken are not among those things; I care extremely little whether the peasants know how to read and write or whether men eat bread or browse on grass; but there pass through my brain, in an hour, more than a hundred thousand visions which have not the slightest connection with rhyme or the cæsura, and that is why I actually do so little, although I have more ideas than some poets who could be burned alive with their own works. I adore beauty and I feel it; I can describe it as well as the most amorous sculptors can understand it,--and yet I am no sculptor. The ugliness and imperfections of the rough sketch disgust me; I cannot wait until the work reaches perfection by dint of polishing and repolishing; if I could make up my mind to omit certain things in what I do, whether in versifying or in painting, I should end perhaps by writing a poem or painting a picture which would make me famous, and they who love me--if there be any one on earth who takes that trouble--would not be compelled to believe me on my word alone and would have a triumphant retort for the sardonic sneers of the detractors of that great unknown genius, myself.