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,