Hear what De Tocqueville writes about democracy in America. He had one of the most dangerously penetrating minds the world has known: I think that the species of oppression by which democratic nations are menaced is unlike anything that ever existed before ... men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy but it prevents existence.
The gentle, the humanity loving philosophizing of the painter, Redon, in his notes, is good to know. It tells us, too, how great his heart was. He insists continually upon something I have always believed, that, in supreme creating, the heart, nobility of nature, play a not yet credited part.
As the Bhagavad Gita is a breviary for the soul, some of the notes of Redon are a breviary for art and its making. Few can read him without feeling an impulse to be better, loftier visioned. His brief notes, his diary jottings, are a kind of New Testament of Beauty.
A Biblical soul, flinging forth proud, powerful phrases! A prophet painting super-terrestrial flowers, too ripe in color, too wise, graceful, lovely, but weighted with divine regret!
Redon could see and feel. Sometimes his words are poetry, especially when he addresses the sea. In words he snares amazing, unexpected revelations. In his unselfconscious hours of meditation, sometimes he is a thinker. Again I am impressed with the fact that they who are great, keep within untapped deeps of good. He declares that that which comes from the heart can not die. Goethe said something similar. And that was the teaching of Faust. The last resolve of its united modern and mediæval wisdom was the heart’s supremacy. Beethoven asserted it. Redon, as it happened, adored Beethoven. As I recall the musician’s words they were these: “Man’s title to nobility is his heart.” Now I recall Goethe’s words: Nur was vom Herzen kommt, zum Herzen geht. This completing of logic in word-phrase is a characteristic, I think, of the great German.
Redon goes on to say that if on some centenary of Michael Angelo he were chosen to make the address, he would speak only of the great soul of the man.
There were long periods when Michael Angelo neither painted nor modeled. In these between spaces his sonnets were written. I recall at this moment a sonnet in that old Italian tongue I have loved so long, which tells how he likes sleep and the substance of stone:
Caro m’è ’l sonno, e piu esser di sasso.
The woman whom Michael Angelo loved declared she wrote only to give vent to inner grief:—