mfort. And even on this side of his genius he has never been
excelled, the Japanese alone being his equals in daring of invention,
while he tops them in the expression of broad humour.

In the Luxembourg galleries there is a picture of an interesting man,
in an etcher's atelier. It is the portrait of Rops by Mathey, and
shows him examining at a window, through which the light pours in, a
freshly pulled proof. It depicts with skill the intense expression
upon his handsome face, the expression of an artist absolutely
absorbed in his work. That is the real Rops. His master quality was
intensity. It traversed like a fine keen flame his entire production
from seemingly insignificant tail-pieces to his agonised designs, in
which luxury and pain are inextricably commingled.

He was born at Namur, Belgium, July 10, 1833, and died at Essonnes,
near Paris, August 23,1898. He was the son of wealthy parents, and on
one side stemmed directly from Hungary. His grandfather was Rops
Lajos, of the province called Alfod. The Maygar predominated. He was
as proud and fierce as Goya. A fighter from the beginning, still in
warrior's harness at the close, when, "cardiac and impenitent," as he
put it, he died of heart trouble. He received at the hands of the
Jesuits a classical education. A Latinist, he was erudite as were few
of his artistic contemporaries. The mystic strain in him did not
betray itself until his third period. He was an accomplished humourist
and could generally cap Latin verses with D'Aurevilly or Huysmans.
Tertullian's De Cultu Feminarum he must have read, for many of his
plates are illustrations of the learned Bishop of Carthage's attitude
toward womankind. The hot crossings of blood, Belgian and Hungarian,
may be responsible for a peculiarly forceful, rebellious, sensual, and
boisterous temperament.

Doubtless the three stadia of an artist's career are the arbitrary
classification of critics; nevertheless they are well marked in many
cases. Balzac was a romantic, a realist, a mystic; Flaubert was
alternately romantic and realist. Tolstoi was never a romantic, but a
realist he was, and he is a mystic. Dostoievski, from whom he absorbed
so much, taught him the formulas of his mysticism--though Tolstoi has
never felt the life of the soul so profoundly as this predecessor.
Ibsen passed through the three stages. Huysmans, never romantic, began
as a realistic pessimist and ended as a pessimistic mystic. Felicien
Rops could n