Charles Meryon was, nevertheless, a sane and a magnificent etcher.  He executed about a hundred plates, according to Burty.  He did not avoid portraiture, and to live he sometimes manufactured pot-boilers for the trade.  To his supreme vision was joined a miraculous surety of touch.  Baudelaire was right—­those plates, the Paris set, so dramatic and truthful in particulars, could have been sold if Meryon, with his wolfish visage, his fierce, haggard eyes, his gruff manner, had not offered them in person.  He looked like a vagabond very often and too often acted like a brigand.  The Salon juries were prejudiced against his work because of his legend.  Verlaine over again!  The etchings were classic when they were born.  We wonder they did not appeal immediately.  To-day, if you are lucky enough to come across one, you are asked a staggering price.  They sold for a song—­when they did sell—­during the lifetime of the artist.  Louis Napoleon and Baron Haussmann destroyed picturesque Paris to the consternation of Meryon, who to the eye of an archaeologist united the soul of an artist.  He loved old Paris.  We can evoke it to-day, thanks to these etchings, just as the Paris of 1848 is forever etched in the pages of Flaubert’s L’Education Sentimentale.

But there is hallucination in these etchings, beginning with Le Stryge, and its demoniac leer, “insatiable vampire, l’eternelle luxure.”  That gallery of Notre Dame, with Wotan’s ravens flying through the slim pillars from a dream city bathed in sinister light, is not the only striking conception of the poet-etcher.  The grip of reality is shown in such plates as Tourelle, Rue de la Tisseranderie, and La Pompe, Notre Dame.  Here are hallucinations translated into the actual terms of art, suggesting, nevertheless, a solidity, a sharpness of definition, withal a sense of fluctuating sky, air, clouds that make you realise the justesse of Berenson’s phrase—­tactile values.  With Meryon the tactile perception was a sixth sense.  Clairvoyant of images, he could transcribe the actual with an almost cruel precision.  Telescopic eyes his, as MacColl has it, and an imagination that perceived the spectre lurking behind the door, the horror of enclosed spaces, and the mystic fear of shadows—­a Poe imagination, romantic, with madness as an accomplice in the horrible game of his life.  One is tempted to add that the romantic imagination is always slightly mad.  It runs to seed in darkness and despair.  The fugitive verse of Meryon is bitter, ironical, defiant; a whiff from an underground prison, where seems to sit in tortured solitude some wretch abandoned by humanity, a stranger even at the gates of hell.