Page:The Etchings of Charles Meryon.djvu/21

 commercial, in comparison with the severe, tense, concentrated style of Meryon. In his "Eaux-Fortes sur Paris," which extend in date from 1850 to 1854, he achieved a body of work which led the way in what is called the modern revival of etching and in its own special style has never been surpassed, though other etchers have triumphed in other styles of etching which were entirely outside Meryon's limited compass. Not only was he in advance of all the other notable etchers of his generation, but he had finished this series of masterpieces before the others had begun to produce anything of importance. Millet began to etch in 1855; Whistler's Paris set dates from 1858; Haden, though he had etched in the forties, did little that really counts till about 1858. Jacque and Daubigny were working before Meryon, but they are hardly in the same class. It was consonant with Meryon's brooding, introspective temperament that he took the work of etching very seriously. He acquired a profound knowledge of the technique of the art and applied it, in the case of all his important etchings, with conscientious thoroughness. Disdaining anything like a sketchy treatment of his subject, he built up the whole design laboriously, painfully, with tireless perseverance, after making the most conscientious studies of detail. He was, in fact, by habit and temperament more an engraver than an etcher, though he used the etching process instead of attacking the copper with a burin.

But nothing that I have yet said explains what there is in Meryon that makes us regard him as a great artist. Any etcher might have taken all these pains and yet remained to the end nothing but an industrious plodder. It was the combination, in Meryon, of this high degree of mechanical skill with a fine instinct for design and the poet's vision which was still more specially his prerogative, that places him in a different category from a Lalanne, a Martial-Potémont or an Edwin Edwards. The old streets of Paris were not, for him, merely storehouses of picturesque motives, structures composed of walls and porticoes, gables and spires, on which the sun