Christa Giles

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creation of the self or the expression of the personality than
with the welling up of the unconscious. Redon desired to
produce through what Poe termed a spiritual effect, a sense
of mystery and uncertainty. He therefore deliberately chose
titles which were equivocal and confused his audience,
concluding: ˝My drawings inspire and do not offer
explanations. They resolve nothing. They place us, just as
music does, in the ambiguous world of the
indeterminate.˝ 389 Huysmans also associated Redon’s work
with music. He believed that it would be difficult to find
Redon’s ancestors except ˝parmi des musiciens peut-être et
certainement parmi des poètes.˝ 390 When he wrote these
lines, he may well have been thinking of Mallarmé, ˝a man
familiar with dreams,˝ given the latter’s stylistic affinities
with Redon. In a letter to Will Rothenstein, Wilde refers to
poetry and prose as ˝word-music, melody and harmony,˝ 391
claiming that, although Rothenstein does not understand
his meaning, ˝Mallarmé would understand it.˝ The
suggestive indefiniteness of Mallarmé’s poetry was
achieved through a symbolic language which suspended
the immediate recognition of the image. Similarly, as we
have seen, Redon’s drawings and lithographs attempted
not to define but to ˝inspire,˝ to be the starting point of a
contemplative mental state. Both, therefore, relied on the