I do not know much of his early career as an artist. I have read passages from letters which he wrote not so long ago, in which he recounts with tenderness the dream life of his childhood, how he used to stand in the field for hours or lie quietly upon some cool hill shaded with young leaves, watching the clouds transforming themselves into wing shapes and flower shapes, staining his fancy with the magic of their delicate color and form--indeed, it would seem as if all things had for him been born somewhere in the clouds and had condescended to an earthward existence for a brief space, the better to show their rarity of grace for the interval. Although obviously rendered from the object, they were still-lifes which seemed to take on a kind of cloud life during the very process of his creation. They paid tribute to that simple and unaffected statement of his--"I have fashioned an art after myself." Neither do I know just how long he was the engraver and just how long he was the painter--it is evident everywhere that his line is the line of the fastidious artist on steel and stone. Beyond these excessively frail renderings of his, whether in oil or in pastel, I do not know him, but I am thinking always in the presence of them that he listened very attentively and with more than a common ear to the great masters in music, absorbing at every chance all that was in them for him. He had in his spirit the classical outline of music, 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.