hat 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.

Sir Seymour Haden has told us that Meryon's method was to make a
number of sketches, two or three inches square, of parts of his
picture, which he put together and arranged into a harmonious whole.
Herkomer says that he "used the burin in finishing his bitten work
with marvellous skill. No better combination can be found of the
harmonious combination of the two." Burty declared that "Meryon
preserves the characteristic detail of architecture... Without
modifying the aspect of the monument he causes it to express its
hidden meaning, and gives it a broader significance by associating it
with his own thought." His employment of a dull green paper at times
showed his intimate feeling for tonalities. He is, more so than
Piranesi, the Rembrandt of architecture. Hamerton admits that the
French etcher was "one of the greatest and most original artists who
have appeared in Europe," and berates the public of the '60s for not
discovering this. Then this writer, copying in an astonishingly
wretched manner several of Meryon's etchings, analysing their defects
as he proceeds, asserts that there is false tonality in Le Stryge.
"The intense black in the street under the tower of St. Jacqu