Messalina, Lassatta, La Femme au Cochon, and La Femme
au Pantin should be studied. He has painted scissors grinders, flower
girls, "old guards," incantations, fishing parties, the rabble in the
streets, broom-riding witches, apes, ivory and peacocks, and a notable
figure piece, An Interment in the Walloon Country, which would have
pleased Courbet.

It is in his incarnations of Satan that Rops is unapproachable. Satan
Sowing the Tares of Evil is a sublime conception, truly Miltonic. The
bony-legged demon strides across Paris. One foot is posed on Notre
Dame. He quite touches the sky. Upon his head is a broad-brimmed
peasant's hat, Quaker in shape. Hair streams over his skeleton
shoulders. His eyes are gleaming with infernal malice--it is the most
diabolic face ever drawn of his majesty; not even Franz Stuck's 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 Dia