acids with the gravity of a philosopher and the indifference of a destroying angel.  There is a diabolic spleen more strongly developed in Rops than in any of his contemporaries, with the sole exception of Baudelaire, who inspired and spurred him on to astounding atrocities of the needle and acid.  This diabolism, this worship of Satan and his works, are sincere in the etcher.  A relic of rotten Romanticism, it glows like phosphorescent fire during his last period.  The Church has in its wisdom employed a phrase for frigid depravity of the Rops kind, naming it “morose delectation.”  Morose Rops became as he developed.  His private life he hid.  We know little or nothing of it save that he was not unhappy in his companionships or choice of friends.  He loathed the promiscuous methods by which some men achieve admiration.  But secret spleen there must have been—­a twist of a painter’s wrist may expose his soul.  He became a solitary and ate the bitter root of sin, for, cerebral as he is, his discovery of the human soul shows it as ill at ease before its maker.  Flaubert has said that “the ignoble is the sublime of the lower slope.”  But no man may sun himself on this slope by the flames of hell without his soul shrivelling away.  Rodin, who admires Rops and has been greatly influenced by him; Rodin, as an artist superior to the Belgian, has revealed less preoccupation with the ignoble; at least, despite his excursions into questionable territory, he has never been carried completely away.  He always returns to the sane, to the normal life; but over the volcanic landscapes of Rops are strewn many moral abysses.

II

He had no illusions as to the intelligence and sincerity of those men who, denying free-will, yet call themselves free-thinkers.  Rops frankly made of Satan his chief religion.  He is the psychologist of the exotic.  Cruel, fantastic, nonchalant, and shivering atrociously, his female Satan worshippers go to their greedy master in fatidical and shuddering attitudes; they submit to his glacial embrace.  The acrid perfume of Rops’s maleficent genius makes itself manifest in his Sataniques.  No longer are his women the embodiment of Corbiere’s “Eternel feminin de l’eternel jocrisse.”  Ninnies, simperers, and simpletons have vanished.  The poor, suffering human frame becomes a horrible musical instrument from which the artist extorts exquisite and sinister music.  We turn our heads away, but the tune of cracking souls haunts our ear.  As much to Rops as to Baudelaire, Victor Hugo could have said that he had evoked a new shudder.  And singularly enough Rops is in these plates the voice of the mediaeval preacher crying out that Satan is alive, a tangible being, going about the earth devouring us; that Woman is a vase of iniquity, a tower of wrath, a menace, not a salvation.  His readings of the early fathers and his pessimistic temperamental bent contributed to this truly morose judgment of his mother’s