l'Isle-Adam?) is shown in his tense, crouching attitude, his hands
clawing the masonry above him. Nature is become a monstrous fever,
existence a shivering dread. You overhear the crash of stone into the
infernal cellarage--where awaits the hunted wretch perhaps a worse
fate than on the pinnacles above. It is a companion piece to Martin's
Sadak searching for the Waters of Oblivion. Another plate depicts with
ingenuity terraces superimposed upon terraces, archways spaced like
massive music, narrow footways across which race ape-like men, half
naked, eagerly preparing some terrible punishments for criminals
handcuffed and guarded. They are to walk a sharp-spiked bridge.
Gigantic chains swing across stony precipices, a lamp depends from a
roof whose outlines are merged in the gray dusk of dreams. There is
cruelty, horror, and a sense of the wickedly magnificent in the
ensemble. What crimes were committed to merit such atrocious
punishment? The boldness and clearness of it all! With perspicacity
George Saintsbury wrote of Flaubert's Temptation of Saint Anthony: "It
is the best example of dream literature that I know--most writers who
have tried this style have erred, inasmuch as they have endeavoured to
throw a portion of the mystery with which the waking mind invests
dreams over the dream itself. Any one's experience is sufficient to
show that this is wrong. The events of dreams, as they happen, are
quite plain and matter of fact, and it is only in the intervals that
any suspicion occurs to the dreamer."
Certainly Piranesi remembered his dreams. He is a realist in his
delineation of details, though the sweep and breadth of an ideal
design are never absent. He portrays ladders that scale bulky joists,
poles of incredible thickness, cyclopean block and tackling. They are
of wood, not metal nor marble, for the art of Piranesi is full of
discriminations. Finally, you weary. The eye gorged by all the mystic
engines, hieroglyphs of pain from some impossible inquisition--though
not once do we see a monkish figure--all these anonymous monkey men
scurrying on what errand Piranesi alone knows; these towering arches,
their foundations resting on the crest of hell (you feel the
tremendous impact of the architectural mass upon the earth--no mean
feat to represent or rather to evoke the sense of weight, of pressure
on a flat surface); the muffled atmosphere in these prisons from which
no living prisoner emerges; of them all you weary, for the normal
brain can only stand a certain dose of the delirious and the
melancholy. This aspect, then, of Piranesi's art, black magic in all
its potency, need no longer detain us. His Temples of Pæstum sound a
less morbid key than his Carceri, and as etchings quite outrank them.
II
Giambattista Piranesi was born at Venice in 1720. Bryan says that
about 1738 his father sent him to Rome, where he studied under
Valeriani, through whom he acquired the style of Valeriani's master,
Marco Ricci of Belluno. With Vasi, a Sicilian engraver, he learned
that art. Ricci and Pannini were much in vogue, following the example
of Claude in his employment of ruins as a picturesque element in a
composition. But Piranesi excelled both Ricci and Pannini. He was an
architect, too, helping to restore churches, and this accounts for the
proud title, Architect of Venice, which may be seen on some of his
plates. He lived for a time in Venice, but Rome drew him to her with
an imperious call. And, notwithstanding the opposition of his father,
to Rome he went, and for forty years devoted himself to his master
passion, the pictorial record of the beloved city, the ancient
portions of which were fast vanishing owing to time and the greed of
their owners. This was Piranesi's self-imposed mission, begun as an
exalted youth, finished as an irritable old man. Among his
architectural restorations, made at the request of Clement XIII, were
the two churches of Santa Maria del Popolo and Il Priorato. Lanciani
says that Il Priorato is "a mass of monstrosities inside and out." It
is his etching, not his labour as an architect, that will make
Piranesi immortal. He seems to have felt this, for he wrote that he
had "executed a work which will descend to posterity and will last so
long as there will be men desirous of knowing all that has survived
the ruins of the most famous city of the universe."
In the black-and-white portrait of the etcher by F. Polonzani, we see
a full-cheeked man with a well-developed forehead, the features of the
classic Roman order, the general expression not far removed from a
sort of sullen self-satisfaction. But the eyes redeem. They are full,
lustrous, penetrating, and introspective. The portrait etched by the
son of Piranesi, after a statue, discovers him posed in a toga, the
general effect being classic and consular. His life, like that of all
good workmen in art, was hardly an eventful one. He married
precipitately and his wife bore him two sons (Francesco, the etcher,
born at Rome, 1748--Bryan gives the date as 1756--died at Paris, 1810)
and a daughter (Laura, born at Rome, 1750--date of death unknown).
These children were a consolation to him. Both were engravers.
Francesco frequently assisted his father in his work, and Bryan says
that Laura's work resembled her father's. She went to Paris with her
brother and probably died there. She left some views of Rome.
Francesco, with his brother Pietro, attempted to found an academy in
Paris and later a terra cotta manufactory.
The elder Piranesi was of a quarrelsome disposition. He wrangled with
an English patron, Viscount Charlemont, and, like Beethoven, destroyed
title-pages when he became displeased with the subject of his
dedications. He was decorated with the Order of Christ and was proud
of his membership in the London Society of Antiquaries. It is said
that the original copper plates of his works were captured by a
British man-of-war during the Napoleonic conflict. This probably
accounts for the dissemination of so many revamped and coarsely
executed versions of his compositions. His besetting fault was a
tendency toward an Egyptian blackness in his composition. Fond of
strong contrasts as was John Martin, he is, at times, as great a
sinner in the handling of his blacks. An experimenter of audacity,
Piranesi's mastery of the technique of etching has seldom been
equalled, and even in his inferior work the skilful printing atones
for many defects. The remarkable richness and depth of tone, brought
about by continuous and innumerable bitings, and other secret
processes known only to himself, make his plates warm and brilliant.
Nobility of form, grandeur of mass, a light and shade that is
positively dramatic in its dispersion over wall and tower, are the
characteristic marks of this unique etcher. He could not resist the
temptation of dotting with figures the huge spaces of his ruins. They
dance or recline or indulge in uncouth gestures. His shadows are
luminous--you may gaze into them; his high lights caught on some
projection or salient cornice or silvering the August porticoes of a
vanished past, all these demonstrate his feeling for the dramatic. And
dramatic is the impression evoked as you study the majestic temples
that were Pæstum, the bare, ruined arches and pillars that were Rome.
It is Pæstum that is the more vivid. It tallies, too, with the
Piranesi plates; while Rome has visibly changed since his day. His
original designs for chimneys, Diverse Maniere d'Adornare i Camini,
are pronounced by several critics as "foolish and vulgar." He left
nearly two thousand etchings, and died at Rome November 9, 1778. His
son erected a mediocre statue by Angolin for his tomb in Il Priorato.
A manuscript life of Piranesi, which was in London about 1830, is now
lost. Bryan's dictionary gives a partial list of his works "as
published both by himself in Rome and by his sons in Paris. The plates
passed from his sons first to Firmin-Didot, and ultimately into the
hands of the Papal Government."
De Quincey's quotation of Wordsworth is apposite in describing
Piranesi's creations: "Battlements that on their restless fronts bore
stars"; from sheer brutal masonry, gray, aged, and moss-encrusted, he
invented a precise pattern and one both passionate and magical.
MERYON
Until the recent appearance of the Baudelaire letters (1841-66) all
that we knew of Meryon's personality and art was to be found in the
monograph by Philippe Burty and Béraldi's Les Graveurs du XIX Siècle.
Hamerton had written of the French etcher in 1875 (Etching and
Etchers), and various anecdotes about his eccentric behaviour were
public property. Frederick Wedmore, in his Etching in England, did not
hesitate to group Meryon's name with Rembrandt's and Jacquemart's (one
feels like employing the Whistlerian formula and asking: Why drag in
Jacquemart?); and to-day, after years of critical indifference, the
unhappy copper-scratcher has come into his own. You may find him
mentioned in such company as Dürer, Rembrandt, and Whistler. The man
who first acclaimed him as worthy of associating with Rembrandt was
the critic Charles Baudelaire; and we are indebted to him for new
material dealing with the troubled life of Charles Meryon.
On January 8, 1860, Baudelaire wrote to his friend and publisher,
Poulet-Malassis, that what he intends to say is worth the bother of
writing. Meryon had called, first sending a card upon which he
scrawled: "You live in a hotel the name of which doubtless attracted
you because of your tastes." Puzzled by this cryptic introduction, the
poet then noted that the address read: Charles Baudelaire, Hôtel de
Thébes. He did not stop at a hotel bearing that name, but, fancying
him a Theban, Meryon took the matter for granted. This letter was
forwarded. Meryon appeared. His first question would have startled any
but Baudelaire, who prided himself on startling others. The etcher,
looking as desperate and forlorn as in the Bracquemond etched portrait
(1853), demanded news of a certain Edgar Poe. Baudelaire responded
sadly that he had not known Poe personally. Then he was eagerly asked
if he believed in the reality of this Poe. Charles began to suspect
the sanity of his visitor. "Because," added Meryon, "there is a
society of littérateurs, very clever, very powerful, and knowing all
the ropes." His reasons for suspecting a cabal formed against him
under the guise of Poe's name were these: The Murders in the Rue
Morgue. "I made a design of the Morgue--an orang-outang. I have been
often compared to a monkey. This orang-outang assassinated two women,
a mother and daughter. Et moi aussi, j'ai assassiné moralement deux
femmes, la mère et sa fille. I have always taken this story as an
allusion to my misfortunes. You, M. Baudelaire, would do me a great
favour if you could find the date when Edgar Poe, supposing he was not
assisted by any one, wrote his tale. I wish to see if this date
coincides with my adventures." After that Baudelaire knew his man.
Meryon spoke with admiration of Michelet's Jeanne d'Arc, though he
swore the book was not written by Michelet. (Not such a wild shot,
though not correct in this particular instance, for the world has
since discovered that several books posthumously attributed to
Michelet were written by his widow.) The etcher was interested in the
cabalistic arts. On one of his large plates he drew some eagles, and
when Baudelaire objected that these birds did not frequent Parisian
skies he mysteriously whispered "those folks at the Tuileries" often
launched as a rite the sacred eagles to study the omens and presages.
He was firmly convinced of this. After the termination of the trying
visit Baudelaire, with acrid irony, asks himself why he, with his
nerves usually unstrung, did not go quite mad, and he concludes,
"Seriously I addressed to Heaven the grateful prayers of a pharisee."
In March the same year he assures the same correspondent that
decidedly Meryon does not know how to conduct himself. He knows
nothing of life, neither does he know how to sell his plates or find
an editor. His work is very easy to sell. Baudelaire was hardly a
practical business man, but, like Poe, he had sense enough to follow
his market. He instantly recognised the commercial value of Meryon's
Paris set, but knew the etcher was a hopeless character. He wrote to
Poulet-Malassis concerning a proposed purchase of Meryon's work by the
publisher. It never came to anything. The etcher was very suspicious
as to paper and printing. He grew violent when the poet asked him to
illustrate some little poems and sonnets. Had he, Meryon, not written
poems himself? Had not the mighty Victor Hugo addressed flattering
words to him? Baudelaire, without losing interest, then thought of
Daumier as an illustrator for a new edition of Les Fleurs du Mal. It
must not be supposed, however, that Meryon was ungrateful. He was
deeply affected by the praise accorded him in Baudelaire's Salon of
1859. He wrote in February, 1860, sending his Views of Paris to the
critic as a feeble acknowledgment of the pleasure he had enjoyed when
reading the brilliant interpretative criticism. He said that he had
created an epoch in etching--which was the literal truth--and he had
saved a rapidly vanishing Paris for the pious curiosity of future
generations. He speaks of his "naïve heart" and hoped that Baudelaire
in turn would dream as he did over the plates. This letter was signed
simply "Meryon, 20 Rue Duperré." The acute accent placed over the "e"
in his name by the French poet and by biographers, critics, and
editors since was never used by the etcher. It took years before
Baudelaire could persuade the Parisians that Poe did not spell his
name "Edgard Poë." And we remember the fate of Liszt and Whistler, who
were until recently known in Paris as "Litz" and "Whistler." With the
aid of Champfleury and Banville, Baudelaire tried to bring Meryon's
art to the cognisance of the Minister of Beaux-Arts, but to no avail.
Why?
There was a reason. Bohemian as was the artist during the last decade
of his life, he did not always haunt low cafés and drink absinthe. His
beginnings were as romantic as a page of Balzac. He was born a
gentleman _à la main gauche_. His father was the doctor and private
secretary of Lady Stanhope. Charles Lewis Meryon was an English
physician, who, falling in love with a ballet dancer at the Opéra,
Pierre Narcisse Chaspoux, persuaded her that it would be less selfish
on her part if she would not bind him to her legally. November
23,1821, a sickly, nervous, and wizened son was born to the pair and
baptised with his father's name, who, being an alien, generously
conceded that much. There his interest ceased. On the mother fell the
burden of the boy's education. At five he was sent to school at Passy
and later went to the south of France. In 1837 he entered the Brest
naval school, and 1839 saw him going on his maiden voyage. This first
trip was marred by the black sorrow that fell upon him when informed
of his illegitimate birth. "I was mad from the time I was told of my
birth," he wrote, and until madness supervened he suffered from a
"wounded imagination." He was morbid, shy, and irritable, and his
energy--the explosive energy of this frail youth was amazing; because
he had been refused the use of a ship boat he wasted three months
digging out a canoe from a log of wood. Like Paul Gauguin, he saw many
countries, and his eyes were trained to form, though not colour--he
suffered from Daltonism--for when he began to paint he discovered he
was totally colour-blind. The visible world for him existed as a
contrapuntal net-work of lines, silhouettes, contours, or heavy dark
masses. When a sailor he sketched. Meryon tells of the drawing of a
little fungus he found in Akaroa. "Distorted in form and pinched and
puny from its birth, I could not but pity it; it seemed to me so
entirely typical of the inclemency and at the same time of the
whimsicality of an incomplete and sickly creation that I could not
deny it a place in my _souvenirs de voyage_, and so I drew it
carefully." This bit of fungus was to him a symbol of his own gnarled
existence.
Tiring of ship life, he finally decided to study art. He had seen New
Zealand, Australia, Italy, New Caledonia, and if his splendid
plate--No. 22 in M. Burty's list--is evidence, he must have visited
San Francisco. Baudelaire, in L'Art Romantique, speaks of this
perspective of San Francisco as being Meryon's most masterly design.
In 1846 he quit seafaring. He was in mediocre health, and though from
a cadet he had attained the rank of lieutenant it was doubtful if he
would ever rise higher. His mother had left him four thousand dollars,
so he went over to the Latin Quarter and began to study painting. That
he was unfitted for, and meeting Eugène Bléry he became interested in
etching. A Dutch seventeenth-century etcher and draughtsman, Reiner
Zeeman by name, attracted him. He copied, too, Ducereau and Nicolle.
"An etching by the latter of a riverside view through the arch of a
bridge is like a link between Meryon and Piranesi," says D.S. MacColl.
Meryon also studied under the tuition of a painter named Phelippes. He
went to Belgium in 1856 on the invitation of the Duc d'Aremberg, and
in 1858 he was sent to Charenton suffering from melancholy and
delusions. He left in a year and returned to Paris and work; but, as
Baudelaire wrote, a cruel demon had touched the brain of the artist. A
mystic delirium set in. He ceased to etch, and evidently suffered from
the persecution madness. In every corner he believed conspiracies were
hatching. He often disappeared, often changed his abode. Sometimes he
would appear dressed gorgeously at a boulevard café in company with
brilliant birds of prey; then he would be seen slinking through mean
streets in meaner rags. There are episodes in his life that recall the
career of another man of genius, Gerard de Nerval, poet, noctambulist,
suicide. It is known that Meryon destroyed his finest plates, but not
in a mad fit. Baudelaire says that the artist, who was a
perfectionist, did not wish to see his work suffer from rebiting, so
he quite sensibly sawed up the plates into tiny strips. That he was
suspicious of his fellow-etchers is illustrated in the story told by
Sir Seymour Haden, who bought several of his etchings from him at a
fair price. Two miles away from the atelier the Englishman was
overtaken by Meryon. He asked for the proofs he had sold, "as they
were of a nature to compromise him"; besides, from what he knew of
Haden's etchings he was determined that his proofs should not go to
England. Sir Seymour at once returned the etchings. Now, whether
Meryon's words were meant as a compliment or the reverse is doubtful.
He was half crazy, but he may have seen through a hole in the
millstone.
Frederick Keppel once met in Paris an old printer named Beillet who
did work for Meryon. He could not always pay for the printing of his
celebrated Abside de Notre Dame, a masterpiece, as he hadn't the
necessary ten cents. "I never got my money!" exclaimed the thrifty
printer. Enormous endurance, enormous vanity, diseased pride, outraged
human sentiment, hatred of the Second Empire because of the particular
clause in the old Napoleonic code relating to the research of
paternity; an irregular life, possibly drugs, certainly alcoholism,
repeated rejections by the academic authorities, critics, and dealers
of his work--these and a feeble constitution sent the unfortunate back
to Charenton, where he died February 14, 1868. Baudelaire, his
critical discoverer, had only preceded him to a lunatic's grave six
months earlier. Inasmuch as there is a certain family likeness among
men of genius with disordered minds and instincts, several comparisons
might be made between Meryon and Baudelaire. Both were great artists
and both were born with flawed, neurotic systems. Dissipation and
misery followed as a matter of course.
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 archæologist 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.