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 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