Méryon, I remember, took me by storm as a great artistic personality, and, since he conquered me immediately, I have always been faithful to him. In that there is no sort of virtue; for has he not now become, thus early, almost everywhere, where prints are loved, an accepted classic? To appreciate Whistler--even at all to enjoy him--requires a longer education. There are even some things that at first one resents. A touch of charlatanry lurks, one at first supposes, in the Bond Street ‘arrangement in yellow and white,’ and in the _velarium_ under which we were invited to gather when the master held sway in Suffolk Street. But, in time, that impression passes. Then, one accepts the man whole--takes him as he is--genius like his has a certain licence to be abnormal. And though it pleases Mr. Whistler, in sundry catalogues and joyous little books about the ‘art of making enemies,’ to represent from time to time that I, among a hundred others, do not appreciate him, that is only because he would have us believe he is a victim to the interesting monomania of persecution, and I, forsooth, when this is his mood, am called upon to figure as one of those who would pursue and vex him. Peace! peace! Now that he has ‘done battering at England’ (I will not vouch precisely for the phrase), I am, it seems, an ‘enemy’ no more. So much the better! I take it, he and Méryon are quite the greatest of the etchers this century has seen, and if so (since of great true etchers the Eighteenth Century was barren), they are the greatest since the days of Claude and Rembrandt. To no one who has studied any group of their plates for a single quarter of an hour, can it be necessary to insist upon the essential unlikeness of these two remarkable men. Unity of impression--almost a test of excellence, the one note dominant, the rest subordinated--that is found, I know, and found almost equally, in the work of both. But by what different measures has it been maintained! Whistler, in so much of his work, has shown himself the flexible, vivacious, and consummate sketcher, the artist whose choice of economical and telling ‘line’ is faultless and perhaps well-nigh immediate. Méryon, upon the other hand, has been remarkable for building up, with learned patience worthy of Albert Dürer, little by little, his effects; so that when the thing is done, and that sombre vision of his has become a realised performance, he has not so much made a drawing upon a plate, as erected a monument (for so it strikes one) from base to coping-stone. Such work has at least the permanence of the very monuments it records. An _œuvre de longue haleine_--a task severe and protracted--is each one of Méryon’s important coppers. Yet all the length of Méryon’s labour witnesses to no relaxing hold of his first thought, and in the great complexity of ordered line there is revealed no superfluous, no insignificant stroke.