sic,
with nothing directly revolutionary, no sign of what we call revolt
other than the strict adherence to personal relationship, no other
prejudice than the artist's reaction against all that is not really
refined to art, with but one consuming ardor, and that to render with
extreme tranquillity everything delicate and lovely in passing things.
There is never anything in his pictures outside the conventional logic
of beauty, and if they are at all times ineffably sweet, it is only
because Redon himself was like them, joyfully living out the days
because they were for him ineffably sweet, too. Most of all it is
Redon who has rendered with exceptional elegance and extreme
artistry, the fragment.

It is in his pictures, replete with exquisiteness, that one finds the
true analogy to lyric poetry. This lyricism makes them seem mostly
Greek--often I have thought them Persian, sometimes again, Indian;
certainly he learned something from the Chinese in their porcelains
and in their embroidery. I am sure he has been fond of these outer
influences, these Oriental suggestions which were for him the
spiritual equivalent from the past for his spontaneous ideas, for he,
too, had much of all this magic, as he had much of the hypnotic
quality of jewelry and precious stones in all his so delicate
pictures, firelike in their subtle brilliancy. They have always seemed
to contain this suggestion for me: flowers that seemed to be much more
the embodiment of jades, rubies, emeralds, and ambers, than just
flowers from the common garden. His flamelike touches have always held
this preciousness: notations rather for the courtly robe or diadem
than just drawings. All this gift of goldsmithery comes as one would
expect, quite naturally, from his powers as an engraver, in which art
he held a first place in his time and was the master of the younger
school, especially in Belgium and Germany. Of all the painters of this
time it is certain he was first among them essaying to picture the
jewelled loveliness of nature; it is most evident in La Touche who was
in no way averse to Renoir either, but Redon has created this touch
for himself and it is the touch of the virtuoso. Perhaps it would have
been well if Moreau, who had a sicker love of this type of expression,
had followed Redon more closely, as he might then have added a little
more lustre to these very dead literary failures of his.

I cannot now say who else beside Ferdinand Khnopff has been