Page:The Etchings of Charles Meryon.djvu/22

 arranged at different times of day different patterns of light and shade; they were that, certainly, and his etcher's eye, trained to observe niceties of gradation between black and white rather than varieties of actual colour, took full advantage of their hitherto unexplored wealth of suggestion. Leaving all metaphor out of court, his actual eyesight was astonishingly keen; he saw details of architecture with the naked eye which would be revealed to average persons only by a telescope. But to him the streets of Paris were haunted places, peopled with ghosts and wet with tears. Their atmosphere was infected by old crimes and miseries and sins. The lonely meditations of a brain already morbid, affected even when he was a boy by the discovery that he was a bastard, suspicious in later life and shrinking from human intercourse, were reflected in the melancholy which seems, to sympathetic observers, to brood over the dark narrow streets, survivors of a mediæval Paris, much of which was doomed to destruction in the great demolitions and reconstructions of the Second Empire. But Meryon did not trust entirely to sympathetic observation to discern his meaning. He expressed himself directly in verses, which were meant to be published, and in some cases actually were published, along with the architectural etchings, to explain what reflections the subjects aroused in the etcher's mind. Sometimes these verses were etched at the foot of the subject itself, as in the fourth state of Le Stryge; more often they were etched on separate plates, in cursive writing, with little ornaments and rather elaborate capitals, the stanzas carefully spaced in a decorative arrangement. They may be seen reproduced, so far as they were actually etched, in M. Loys Delteil's catalogue, but the whole of Meryon's verses, including some that he did not etch, are collected and presented in a more legible form, being printed with type, in Aglaüs Bouvenne's "Notes et Souvenirs sur Charles Meryon." They are jerky, queer and amateurish verses, but they throw so much light on Meryon's mentality that they must not be neglected by any student of his art.