Remy de Gourmont applies the word metaphore to the paintings of Redon. They live by logic of imagination.
His reflections are always illuminating. Speechless nature, (plants, flowers), have normal, secret life-laws which landscape painters must feel to express. There is an art of design freed from burden of details.
In life there is suffering. Art is made to console. He insists Rembrandt created clair-obscur just as Phidias created line. New art, outside law and vision of pagan Greece, must derive from Rembrandt.
He thinks that the power to put into a work of art more significance than the creator suspects is done by them whose hearts are perfectly true, they who hold in the soul something greater than art. This means it is the rich heritage of them who have lived.
Redon remarked: “When I am alone I can love the highways.” Tu Fu, a poet of Eighth Century China, sang:
“I find that I like to walk alone.”
Thinking, evidently, is a thing outside of time. Redon says that with God, he can enjoy natural things. I prefer rough ways, uncultivated spaces, untouched by the human hand. I even love black woods when they are sad. I love wild storms, abundant rain, cold, snow and the frost. I love these harsh things men grumble over. They even keep a language which enchants me.
Long ago Redon felt sensitively the coming of the dangerous, scientifically minded New World; an age dry of emotion. He exclaimed in words touched with both grief and fear: “Plastic art is dead, because the wind of the infinite has blown upon it.” That is exactly what science will prove to be; the wind of the infinite.
Somewhere else I recall, he declares that the superiority of the Christ is the fact that all loved Him without argument. Over the memory of man there floated the candor of His smile, and the fact that He could love every one who approached Him.