consists of a series of lithographic albums, all published since 1880: Dans le Rêve, À Edgar Poe, Les Origines, Hommage à Goya, La Tentation de Saint Antoine, À Gustave Flaubert, Piéces Modernes, and Les Fleurs de Mal. Each album contains from six to ten plates in large folio, printed on beau papier de Chine, without text, often without title, or with a vague and tantalising legend, such as Au réveil, j'aperçus la Déesse de l'Intelligible, au profit severe et dur. So, without an attempt to conciliate the average intelligence, without a word of explanation, without a sign of apology for troubling the brains of his countrymen, Odilon Redon has sent out album after album. So little effect have they produced that it has taken ten years to sell twenty-four out of the twenty-five copies of Dans le Rêve. "Reste l'exemplaire."
Odilon Redon is a creator of nightmares. His sense for pure beauty is but slight, or rather for normal beauty; for he begets upon horror and mystery a new and strange kind of beauty, which astonishes, which terrifies, but which is yet, in his finest work, beauty all the same. Often the work is not
