Page:The Etchings of Charles Meryon.djvu/35

 *wards disfigured by the incongruous insertion of two bells and a device with the initials J. B. (plate 28). The streets of all the etchings of the sixties are filled with excited crowds or little groups of tall, unnatural looking people, and all kinds of curious monsters and allegorical figures hover in the sky or swoop in rapid flight across it. The Collège Henri IV (plate 29) in some of its states, has for background a sea with sails and whales and sea-gods, and the figures in the foreground are the most extraordinary that Meryon ever drew.

It is of no use to dwell at length on these symptoms of mental decline. The lonely artist, subject to hallucinations, thinking that Jesuits were watching him in every street, quarrelling with his best friends, who found it impossible to help him, almost starving because he thought it wrong to eat when others were in need, was no longer capable of the concentrated effort that had produced the masterpieces of the first half of the fifties. On October 12th, 1866, he was shut up again at Charenton, where he died on February 4th, 1868, and where a friend of his sailor days, De Salicis, pronounced an oration over his grave. Bracquemond etched, with a few symbolical ornaments, a copper plate to be laid on the slab of black Breton stone, resting on cubes on white stone, which covered his tomb.

His life had been a failure; he was himself only too ready to proclaim it. He regarded art as something so mysterious, so sacred, as to be quite out of reach. "L'art pour lui n'existait qu' à l'état de fétiche, d'idéal," wrote Dr. Gachet to Bouvenne, "on ne devait pas y toucher—il n'y avait pas d'artistes." To praise him as an artist was to make of him an enemy. To such a temperament fame was denied while he lived. It remained for posterity to do homage that could meet with no rebuff. The sincerest flattery, that of imitation, has been offered to Meryon without stint by a generation of etchers that was being born while he was relaxing by degrees his imperfect grasp of life.