Satan has eyes so full of liquid damnation.  Scattering miniature female figures, like dolls, to the winds, this monster passes over Paris, a baleful typhoon.  The moral is not far to seek; indeed, there is generally a moral, sometimes an inverted one, in the Rops etchings.  Order Reigns at Warsaw is a grim commentary on Russian politics quite opportune to-day.  La Peine de Mort has been used by Socialists as a protest against capital punishment.  Les Diables Froids personifies the impassible artist.  It is a page torn from the book of hell.  Rops had read Dante; he knew the meaning of the lines:  “As the rill that runs from Bulicame to be portioned out amid the sinful women”; and more than once he explored the frozen circles of Gehenna.  Victor Hugo was much stirred by the design, Le Pendu, which depicts a man’s corpse swinging under a huge bell in some vast and immemorial, raven-haunted, decaying tower, whose bizarre and gloomy outlines might have been created by the brain of a Piranesi.  An apocalyptic imagination had Felicien Rops.

III.  MONTICELLI

I

Poor “Fada”!  The “innocent,” the inoffensive fool—­as they christened that unfortunate man of genius, Adolphe Monticelli, in the dialect of the South, the slang of Marseilles—­where he spent the last sixteen years of his life.  The richest colourist of the nineteenth century, obsessed by colour, little is known of this Monticelli, even in these days when an artist’s life is subjected to inquisitorial methods.  Few had written of him in English before W.E.  Henley and W.C.  Brownell.  In France eulogised by Theophile Gautier, in favour at the court, admired by Diaz, Daubigny, Troyon, and Delacroix, his hopes were cracked by the catastrophe of the Franco-Prussian war.  He escaped to Marseilles, there to die poor, neglected, half mad.  Perhaps he was to blame for his failures; perhaps his temperament was his fate.  Yet to-day his pictures are sought for as were those of Diaz two decades ago, though there was a tacit conspiracy among dealers and amateurs not to drag his merits too soon before the foot-lights.  In 1900 at the Paris Exposition a collection of his works, four being representative, opened the eyes of critics and public alike.  It was realised that Monticelli had not received his proper ranking in the nineteenth-century theatre of painting; that while he owed much to Watteau, to Turner, to Rousseau, he was a master who could stand or fall on his own merits.  Since then the Monticelli pictures have been steadily growing in favour.

There is a Monticelli cult.  America can boast of many of his most distinguished specimens, while the Louvre and the Luxembourg are without a single one.  The Musee de Lille at Marseilles has several examples; the private collections of M. Delpiano at Cannes and a few collections in Paris make up a meagre list.  The Comparative Exhibition in New York, 1904, revealed to many accustomed to overpraising Diaz and Fromentin the fact that Monticelli was their superior as a colourist, and a decorator of singularly fascinating characteristics, one who was not always a mere contriver of bacchanalian riots of fancy, but who could exhibit when at his best a justesse of vision and a controlled imagination.