heir naked loveliness as among the greatest. Never did Redon
seek for the miniature; he knew merely that the part is the
representation of the whole, that the perfect fragment is a true
representative of beauty, and that the vision of some fair hand or
some fair eye is sure to be the epitome of all that is lovely in the
individual.

We have as a result of this almost religious devotion of Redon's, the
fairest type of the expression of that element which is the eye's
equivalent for melodious sound. In his pictures he perpetuated his
belief in the unfailing harmony in things. Either all things were
lovely in his eye, or they are made beautiful by thinking beautifully
of them. That was the only logic in Redon's painting. He questioned
nothing; he saw the spiritual import of every object on which his eye
rested. No one shall go to Redon for any kind of intellectual
departure or for any highly specialized theory--it is only too evident
from his work that he had none in mind. He had, I think, a definite
belief in the theosophic principle of aura, in that element of
emanation which would seem sometimes to surround delicate objects
touched with the suffusion of soft light. For him all things seemed
"possessed" by some colorful presence which they themselves could in
no way be conscious of, somewhat the same sort of radiance which
floods the features of some beauteous person and creates a presence
there which the person is not even conscious of, the imaginative
reality, in other words, existing either within or without everything
the eye beholds. For him the very air which hovered about all things
seemed to have, as well, the presence of color not usually seen of
men, and it was this emanation or presence which formed the living
quality of his backgrounds in which those wondrous flowery heads and
hands and wings had their being, through which those dusty wings of
most unearthly butterflies or moths hurry so feverishly. He has given
us a happy suggestion of the reality of spiritual spaces and the way
that these fluttering bodies which are little more than spirit
themselves have enjoyed a beauteous life. He was Keats-like in his
appreciation of perfect loveliness, like Shelley in his passionate
desire to transform all local beauty into universal terms.

No one will quarrel with Redon on account of what is not in him. What
we do find in him is the poetry of a quiet, sweet nature in quest
always of perfect beauty, longing to make