He found nudity sublime. He compared them with luxurious, motionless, royally expanded, radiant flowers of tropic India. He longed to see their bronzed and splendid flesh encircled with monstrous forest growths, or stretched out on sand that is hard and smooth.
Chamfort thought that people with cold, reasoning minds exist, but only the impassioned know how to live; I too am most grateful for the rare times I have had strength to leap petty, picket fences which shut in the too safe, the usually relied upon; when I have dared, kept to faith of self.
They do wrong who mock the testimony of the saints, the seers, such as Saint Teresa of Avila. There must be facts beyond the registering of commonplace faculties. Just as there are musicians and painters, with their special endowments, there are people great in soul-power, possessing, perhaps, extra-terrestrial vision.
Goethe’s mind was clear and fine. He always wished he could have had more details about the statements of St. John, which allured then troubled him. But Goethe was too great to deny the unknown or mock the unmeasured genuine. He could guess what wonders might dwell there. They who go ahead, go guided by something greater than man’s reason.
Redon speaks of his art as a little door opening upon mystery. He insists thinking people are crushed by the grandeur of problems they try to solve. Sometimes such people possess heart, however, then they begin to comprehend.
Redon admired Degas. But he declared that the admiration of Degas for Ingres was of the head not of the heart. He thinks Degas marks the first halt in the journey to New World art. He calls him free, joyous, exultant artist.
Once Redon exclaims fretfully: “I can’t speculate about Alsace-Lorraine. How could I? Art is the refuge of the peace-loving, where can be no disputed frontiers. Wars are made by dull, imperfect, fragmentary minds, minds incapable of lofty logic, where suddenly a part assumes the false significance of a whole. In short, merely a loss of mental perspective.”
I do not often procure pleasure from reading Proust. His thoughts, the meat of the matter, are substantial, satisfying enough, if not alluring. But I do not like stumbling through so many twisting, cluttered alleys. His prose is dowdy. I do not call Proust a neglected genius. In the human realm (in word art) he is a plant which did not possess that which permits to flower. Proust’s Swan helps date the death of creative art.