MĒRYON, AND MÉRYON’S PARIS. I. Half a century ago a London physician-suave, immaculate, irreproachable-met, followed, and captured a Paris dancing-girl; and the offspring of their loves, such as they were, was the great artist, Méryon. The offspring of their loves being that great artist, with a spirit at once the most original, imaginative, and persistent, a hand at once the most delicate and the strongest, one is curious to know whether the germ of some fine quality of his, in passion or skill, cannot have been inherited—whether that unlicensed connection which gave him birth had at least some heart in it, or whether it was but the vulgar and shabby intrigue of green room and cabinet. The truest, the most trustworthy story we are likely to get, answers that question not quite in the darkest way. Méryon was one of two children, and the other, a girl, was taken to England by her father, the physician, and there, in spite of the disadvantages and difficulties of her birth, there was made for her what the teller of the story describes to me asó a brilliant marriage. She took her place in the world. Méryon himself-Charles Méryon--remained with his mother, whom after some years the father seems to have entirely quitted; the cause of it, again I hear, the offensiveness of the children's grandmother. The vulgarity of the old, of the frowsy, of the unattractive, is a vulgarity one cannot endure; and the woman who allowed to Méryon's mother the life she led—nay, who urged her, it is said, to a worse—is not likely to have brightened for the physician the narrow Paris home into which this and that intolerable relative of the dancer he had lived with would be prone to insinuate herself unbidden and undesired. The physician went his way, taking, as I have said, the daughter with him, and leaving the son to the mother, and making her some not inconsiderable gift of money, perhaps even for some years a stated and sufficient allowance. At all events, in Méryon's childhood and boyhood the means of living did not seem to be lacking. He was destined for the navy, and entered it at the right moment, leaving it to be an artist when still a young man and a lieutenant. Méryon had owed to his father some material provision for his life. To his mother—the sensitiveness, fineness, and passion of whose nature he believed he had inherited-he owed the hourly cares and thoughts for him that were much of her existence. Her life went out in obscurity—under the cloud of illicit ways, in the fettered freedom of a demi-monde---when he was a youth; and perhaps the most impulsive and resolute, imaginative and nervous, of all the youth of Paris was left surrounded at the best, as regards kindred, by a vulgar entourage of puchard and canaille, in a strange loneliness. His nature had the combined gentleness and fire of a man of genius; the fire ready to flare out when work was to be done or opposition to be encountered; the gentleness to be bestowed in the rare moments of sympathetic friendship. The people who knew him in his later time, artists, critics, kind-hearted connoisseurs, fellow-workers, companions, say that he had the charm of genius. He was pleasant to be with. His obstinacy, however, was from the first as indomitable as his activity at the last was nervous and unhealthy. In the Peninsula of Banks, New Zealand, during his long voyage round the world, he and his comrades were forbidden to make use of the captain's little boat, and their pride was touched by the restraint. Méryon himself would make a boat, he said. A tree was hewn for the purpose, a tent set up for Méryon near the shore, but within range of wild beasts. There for three months young Méryon worked, his food brought to him by his fellows, his hands raw with the persistency of his labour. The boat once launched, the captain was moved to admiration. It should be set up at home, he declared, in the naval arsenal of Toulon. Somewhere or other there it must now be. The artistic instinct of Méryon made naval life distasteful. Abandoning the navy, and finding that there were substantial obstacles to his becoming a painter, he determined to be an engraver, and entering after a while the atelier of M. Bléry, he left it in 1850, at the age of twenty-nine, to take humble chambers in the Rue St. Etienne du Mont, and to live if possible by the steady pursuit of his art. Those were the days of the beginning of our modern practice of the art of etching. Bracquemond, Flameng, Jacquemart were young. The two first, at least, lived somewhat in the society of Méryon. Bracquemond etched two portraits of him ; in one he is sitting in a chair, in the other he is as a face carved in bas-relief in marble. Messire Bracquemonde,' wrote Méryon, in the quaint verses . he even then affected, and which subsequently he was wont to set under certain of his prints Messire Bracquemond Au grotesque visage. No one has done as much as M. Burty to spread the knowledge of Méryon, and I am indebted to him for more than one of the particulars contained in this notice. attempted by this chronicler; but at least one broad division requires to be made. For it was when Méryon, after years of absence, had returned for the first time a man to the city of his birth, and while he was employed for money's sake in inuch insignificant and mechanical labour of copying, which even an original engraver, until great fame has reached him, can hardly escape-it was at this time, and in the midst of work which served only its purpose of the hour and day, that Méryon bad that vision of Paris, the ultimate realisation of which, with passion and with patience, lifted him into the rank of the greatest artists that can be. Méryon's work, then, may be broadly divided into two classes : first, the work done mainly in his earliest time, after drawings of many subjects by old French and other artists—Renier Zeeman, the Dutchman, was one of them ;-and second, the sometimes partly original, but oftener wholly original work, in which best of all he recorded those characteristics of the Paris of his own day, and yet of the Middle Age, which were passing away under the improving hands of the Second Empire in its first years. There are also the New Zealand views, among the earliest of all his works, and the insignificant or bizarre fancies of his latter days, when his mind declined; but the work of artistic interest is that in which he recorded Old Paris, and he did this well in the etchings which were copies of old drawings which his art and feeling had made into finer pictures, and supremely well in the etchings which were wholly original. Fancy him, then, established in a lonely way, and yet of course with some artistic comrades within reach, in the cabin-like rooms of the humblest floor of the street, the north side of which is occupied by the church that gives that street its name—St. Etienne du Montand which Méryon made the subject of one of the most harmonious and mysterious of his works. I went one evening this last spring to see the church and street: the street itself will have historic interest as that from which so many of Méryon's finest etchings are dated; but I went chiefly to see, in a way in which hardly any other of the subjects of his pictures would allow one to see, how much or little of voluntary artistic composition entered into his work of record. Not much here, as far as concerns the mere lines of his plate, though the light and shade on the St. Etienne were his own. The Gothic college to the left had disappeared—was threatening no doubt to disappear when he executed his print. But the church itself which remained-of that his record had been absolutely and delicately faithful, both the building and its position, half behind the massive angle of the Panthéon. The humble rooms he lived in, on that side of the church not seen in the picture, must have looked upon the church's bare south wall. The quarter, in any journey from reputable parts of Paris, would be reached by passage from richer street to poorer, and so to poorer again. A lost quarter, even behind and beyond the shabbiest of the quarters of students; around it, in strange lanes, the dwellings of the chiffonniers, the rag-gatherers who with basket on back cluster towards it at midnight from nightly search among offal and gutter, and wander out from it once more when evening has come again, to spread themselves over the town. Beyond it an undiscovered country, known only to the police and to the workers in strange trades plied in remote places. There Méryon lived. That old-world quarter of Paris--a lost quarter, a quarter seemingly deserted, yet thickly peopled all the while—was favourable to Méryon's art, to the growth of his imagination, to the strength and endurance of the impression which the mysterious and crowded city made on him in these the first years of his living there in manhood. He began his study of Paris, observing consciously the quaint combinations of window and house-roof, the chimneys, the tourelles in quiet back streets, narrow blind lanes where the Middle Age lingered, and perhaps not less consciously taking note of that moral aspect of Paris which was to colour his work and to bring into strange and new juxtaposition elements of beauty and horror the fascination of whose union he was almost the first to appreciate. A high literary genius, Victor Hugo, had blended beauty and horror in his great romance, Notre Dame de Paris, which Paris had inspired. But in pictorial art Méryon was to be alone, and the Paris that he pictured was pictured in a way only too much his own—only too much above and beyond the valuing of those to whom he first submitted his work. I went this year into the shop of a little-known dealer, and asked for Méryon's etchings. “Views of Paris ?' he answered, and knew what I meant; but knew no better than did the print-sellers of the artist's own lifetime how entirely these things were pictures, how much they were visions. Well, with little encouragement, Méryon did his work-none the less priceless as a record because it bore on it too the mark of his own sentiment-did the etching of St. Etienne, of the Tour de l'Horloge, of the Cathedral of Notre-Dame seen from behind and from over the water, from places now strangely changed ; did the etching of the thick and speechless uncommunicative walls of the Rue des Mauvais Garçons (Baudelaire's favourite), and “The Doric little Morgue,' the quay alive with the bustle and excitement of an instant of horrible arrival. He did these things, and took them to the dealers. One refused, and another. Wrapping up his portfolio he went on again-tramped, lonely and unencouraged, round the Paris he was beginning to hate. Disappointment and neglect told soon upon the delicate organisation of the artist. Whimsical he had always been ; exaggerated in his hates and loves and in the very efforts of his will; and now some years of poverty and isolation---some years of the production, amidst complete indifference, of immense and immortal work-began to thrust into prominence those traits in his character which could not 6 be noticed without suspicion and fear. He fell violently in love with some little girl of the humble and uneducated class—a fillette de crémerie, a bright young woman, who stood, I suppose, behind the counter of the shop at which he got his morning meal. The charm of the man in his pleasant hours, his genius, his spirit, the prodigious skill of his band, were less apparent to the Parisian shop-girl than the surprises of his wayward temper, his exaltation, his not unfrequent gloom. It was no use, his passion and beseeching——elle ne voulait pas de lui. She stood aloof, and he at last went on his way, embittered and saddened. The hardness of his living, the neglect of his art, the deprivation even of personal pleasure, of the excitement of love-these things curdled in his brain, and hallucinations crowded round him. He had one constant and most kind patron and encouragerMonsieur Niel, librarian at the Ministry of the Interior, who had tried, and not always without success, to get him commissions, and who was forming even then by purchase, when the prints had no recognised value, what was destined to be the earliest of the great collections of Méryon's work. Meeting this gentleman one day, Méryon looked aside with a frown and an expression of injury and grievance. He would have nothing to say to M. Niel. Voyons, said M. Niel ; 'what is it then, Méryon?' “You rob me,' was the answer, and make a profit by my work.' Another day, a critic, who among the earliest had recognised the genius of Méryon to create and interpret—to throw his spirit and the very spirit of Paris into his record of the semblance of its stones—met him in similar mood. • The money that you owe me,' said Méryon, when he was forced to speak. But there was no money owed between them at all. And so the artist, sufficiently neglected indeed from without, came to carry within him his most implacable enemies. In his imagination, they lingered in wait behind the corners of the streets--would be down upon him to distress and thwart him if he paused long or was heedless of who approached. And so with nervous and frightened eye, but with hand still keenly obedient and splendidly controlled, he stood on some empty space of quay, sketching, as his wont had been, with the finest of pencil points, the angles of house and church, bits of window, roof and chimney, to be afterwards pieced carefully together and used in the etching of the plate. The strokes drawn by his pencil were often drawn upwards instead of downwards. Often the sketches were discarded : the point of view had not been the right one. Thus I have seen a drawing of the Pompe Notre-Dame, taken from under a bridge whose arch, as an element in the picture, prominent in the foreground, he afterwards removed. There is a drawing, too, for the right side of his Abside de Notre-Dame, in which the line of varied house-roofs is higher than in the plate. He saw subsequently that the houses must be lower, smaller, and more distant, |