their own uses.  This is considered legitimate, though not a high order of art; however, the second-rate rules in the market-place, let the genius rage as he will.  He must be tamed.  He must be softened; his divine fire shaded by the friendly screens of more prudent, more conventional talent.  Even among men of genius up on the heights it is the personality of each that enters largely into the equation of their work.  No one can confuse Whistler the etcher with the etcher Rembrandt; the profounder is the Dutchman.  Yet what individuality there is in the plates of the American!  What personality!  Now, Felicien Rops, the Belgian etcher, lithographer, engraver, designer, and painter, occupies about the same relative position to Honore Daumier as Whistler does to Rembrandt.  How seldom you hear of Rops.  Why?  He was a man of genius, one of the greatest etchers and lithographers of his century, an artist with an intense personal line, a colossal workman and versatile inventor—­why has he been passed over and inferior men praised?

His pornographic plates cannot be the only reason, because his representative work is free from licence or suggestion.  Giulio Romano’s illustrations to Aretino’s sonnets are not held up as the representative art of this pupil of Raphael, nor are the vulgarities of Rowlandson, Hogarth, George Morland set against their better attempts.  Collectors treasure the engravings of the eighteenth-century editions des fermiers-generaux for their capital workmanship, not for their licentious themes.  But Rops is always the Rops of the Pornocrates!  After discussing him with some amateurs you are forced to realise that it is his plates in which he gives rein to an unparalleled flow of animal spirits and gauloiserie that are the more esteemed.  Rops the artist, with the big and subtle style, the etcher of the Sataniques, of Le Pendu, of La Buveuse d’Absinthe and half a hundred other masterpieces, is set aside for the witty illustrator, with the humour of a Rabelais and the cynicism of Chamfort.  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.