never pay. A few years after the completion of his Paris series he was lodged in the madhouse of Charenton. Its order and care restored him for a while to health, and he came out and did a little more work, but at bottom he was exhausted. In 1867 he returned to his asylum, and died there in 1868. In the middle years of his life, just before he was placed under confinement, he was much associated with Bracquemond and with Flameng,—skilled practitioners of etching, while he was himself an undeniable genius—and the best of the portraits we have of him is that one by Bracquemond under which the sitter wrote that it represented “the sombre Méryon with the grotesque visage.”
There are twenty-two pieces in the Eaux-fortes sur Paris. Some of them are insignificant. That is because ten out of the twenty-two were destined as headpiece, tailpiece, or running commentary on some more important plate. But each has its value, and certain of the smaller pieces throw great light on the aim of the entire set. Thus, one little plate—not a picture at all—is devoted to the record of verses made by Méryon, the purpose of which is to lament the life of Paris. The misery and poverty of the town Méryon had to illustrate, as well as its splendour. The art of Méryon is completely misconceived when his etchings are spoken of as views of Paris. They are often “views,” but they are so just so far as is compatible with their being likewise the visions of a poet and the compositions of an artist. It was an epic of Paris that Méryon determined to make, coloured strongly by his personal sentiment, and affected here and there by the occurrences of the moment—in more than one case, for instance, he hurried with particular affection to etch his impression of some old-world building which was on the point of destruction. Nearly every etching in the series is an instance of technical skill, but even the technical skill is exercised most happily in those etchings which have the advantage of impressive subjects, and which the collector willingly cherishes for their mysterious suggestiveness or for their pure beauty. Of these, the Abside de Notre Dame is the general favourite; it is commonly held to be Méryon’s masterpiece. Light and shade play wonderfully over the great fabric of the church, seen over the spaces of the river. As a draughtsman of architecture, Méryon was complete; his sympathy with its various styles was broad, and his work on its various styles unbiased and of equal perfection—a point in which it is curious to contrast him with Turner, who, in drawing Gothic, often drew it with want of appreciation. It is evident that architecture must enter largely into any representation of a city, however much such representation may be a vision, and however little a chronicle. Besides, the architectural portion even of Méryon’s labour is but indirectly imaginative; to the imagination he has given freer play in his dealings with the figure, whether the people of the street or of the river or the people who, when he is most frankly or even wildly symbolical, crowd the sky. Generally speaking, his figures are, as regards draughtsmanship, “landscape-painter’s figures.” They are drawn more with an eye to grace than to academic correctness. But they are not “landscape-painter’s figures” at all when what we are concerned with is not the method of their representation but the purpose of their introduction. They are seen then to be in exceptional accord with the sentiment of the scene. Sometimes, as in the case of La Morgue, it is they who tell the story of the picture. Sometimes, as in the case of La Rue des Mauves Garçons—with the two passing women bent together in secret converse—they at least suggest it. And sometimes, as in L’Arche du Pont Notre Dame, it is their expressive gesture and eager action that give vitality and animation to the scene. Dealing perfectly with architecture, and perfectly, as far as concerned his peculiar purpose, with humanity in his art, Méryon was little called upon by the character of his subjects to deal with Nature. He drew trees but badly, never representing foliage happily, either in detail or in mass. But to render the characteristics of the city, it was necessary that he should know how to portray a certain kind of water—river-water, mostly sluggish—and a certain kind of sky—the grey obscured and lower sky that broods over a world of roof and chimney. This water and 'this sky Méryon is thoroughly master of; he notes with observant affection their changes in all lights.
Méryon’s excellent draughtsmanship, and his keen appreciation of light, shade and tone, were, of course, helps to his becoming a great etcher. But a living authority, himself an eminent etcher, and admiring Méryon thoroughly, has called Méryon by preference a great original engraver—so little of Méryon’s work accords with Sir Seymour Haden’s view of etching. Méryon was anything but a brilliant sketcher; and, if an artist’s success in etching is to be gauged chiefly by the rapidity with which he records an impression, Méryon’s success was not great. There can be no doubt that his work was laborious and deliberate, instead of swift and impulsive, and that of some other virtues of the etcher—“selection” and “abstraction” as Hamerton has defined them—he shows small trace. But a genius like Méryon is a law unto himself, or rather in his practice of his art he makes the laws by which that art and he are to be judged.
It is worth while to note the extraordinary enhancement in the value of Méryon’s prints. Probably of no other artist of genius, not even of Whistler, could there be cited within the same period a rise in prices of at all the same proportion. Thus the first state of the “Stryge”—that “with the verses,”—selling under the hammer in 1873 for £5, sold again under the hammer in 1905 for £100. The first state of the “Galérie de Notre Dame,” selling in 1873 for £5, and at M. Wasset’s sale in 1880 for £11, fetched in 1905, £52. A “Tour de l’horloge,” which two or three years after it was first issued sold for half a crown, in May 1903 fetched £70. A first state (Wedmore’s, not of course M. Delteil’s “first state,” which, like nearly all his first states, is in fact a trial proof) of the “Saint Etienne du mont,” realizing about £2 at M. Burty’s sale in 1876, realized £60 at a sale in May 1906. The second state of the “Morgue” (Wedmore) sold in 1905 for £65; and Wedmores second of the “Abside,” which used to sell throughout the ’seventies for £3 or £5, reached in November 1906 more than £200. At no period have even Dürers or Rembrandts risen so swiftly and steadily.
Bibliography.—Philippe Burty, Gazette des beaux arts (1865); Descriptive Catalogue of the Works of Méryon (London, 1879); Aglaüs Bouvenne, Notes et souvenirs sur Charles Méryon; P. G. Hamerton, Etching and Etchers (1868); F. Seymour Haden, Notes on Etching; H. Béraldi, Les Peintres graveurs du dix-neuvième siècle; Baudelaire, Lettres de Baudelaire (1907); L. Delteil, Charles Méryon (1907); Frederick Wedmore, Méryon and Méryon’s Paris, with a descriptive catalogue, of the artist’s work (1879; 2nd ed., 1892); and Fine Prints (1896; 2nd ed., 1905). (F. We.)
MESA (Span. mesa, from Lat. mensa, a table), in physical
geography, a high table-land capped with hard rock, being the
remnant of a former plateau. This type is general where strata
are horizontal. In the process of denudation the hard rock acts
as a flat protective cap preserving the regions between stream
valleys or other places where denudation is especially active,
in the form of “table-mountains” or “fortress-hills.” Many
examples are found in Spain, North and South Africa, the Bad
Lands and Colorado regions of North America, in Arabia, India
and Australia.
MESHCHERYAKS, or Meshchers, a people inhabiting eastern
Russia. Nestor regarded them as Finns, and even now part of
the Mordvinians (of Finnish origin) call themselves Meshchers.
Klaproth, on the other hand, supposed they were a mixture of
Finns and Turks, and the Hungarian traveller Reguli discovered
that the tatarized Meshchers of the Obi closely resembled
Hungarians. They formerly occupied the basin of the Oka
(where the town Meshchersk, now Meshchovsk, has maintained
their name) and of the Sura, extending north-east to the Volga.
After the conquest of the Kazan Empire by Russia, part of them
migrated north-eastwards to the basins of the Kama and Byelaya,
and thus the Meshchers divided into two branches. The western
branch became russified, so that the Meshcheryaks of the governments
of Penza, Saratov, Ryazan and Vladimir have adopted
the customs, language and religion of the conquering race;
but their ethnographical characteristics can be easily distinguished
in the Russian population of the governments of Penza
and Tambov. The eastern branch has taken on the customs,
language and religion of Bashkirs, with whom their fusion is still
more complete.
MESHED (properly Mash-had, “the place of martyrdom”), capital of the province of Khorasan in Persia, situated in a plain watered by the Kashaf-rud (Tortoise river), a tributary of the
