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 Corbière's
"Éternel féminin de l'éternel 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 mediæval 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 sex. He drives cowering to her corner,
after her earlier triumphs, his unhappy victim of love, absinthe, and
diabolism. Not for an instant does he participate personally in the
strained voluptuousness or terrific chastisements of his designs. He
has all the old monachal contempt of woman. He is cerebrally chaste.
Huysmans, in his admirable essay on Rops, wrote, "Car il n'y a de
réellement obscènes que les gens chastes"; which is a neat bit of
special pleading and quite sophistical. Rops did not lead the life of
a saint, though his devotion to his art was Balzacian. It would be a
more subtle sophistry to quote Paul Bourget's aphorism. "There is," he
writes, "from the metaphysical observer's point of view, neither
disease nor health of the soul; there are only psychological states."
The _états d'âmes_ of Félicien Rops, then, may or may not have been
morbid. But he has contrived that his wit in its effect upon his
spectators is too often profoundly depressing and morbid and