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 reellement obscenes 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 _etats d’ames_ of Felicien 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 disquieting.

The triumphant chorus of Rops’s admirers comprises the most critical names in France and Italy:  Barbey d’Aurevilly, J.K.  Huysmans, Pradelle, Josephin Peladan—­once the Sar of Babylonian fame—­Eugene Demolder, Emile Verhaeren, the Belgian poet; Camille Lemonnier, Champsaur, Arsene Alexandre, Fromentin, Vittorio Pica, De Heredia, Mallarme, Octave Uzanne, Octave Mirbeau, the biographer Ramiro and Charles Baudelaire.  The last first recognised him, though he never finished the projected study of him as man and artist.  In the newly published letters (1841-66) of Baudelaire there is one addressed to Rops, who saw much of the unhappy poet during his disastrous sojourn in Brussels.  It was the author of Les Fleurs du Mal who made the clever little verse about “Ce tant bizarre Monsieur Rops...  Qui n’est pas un grand prix de Rome, mais dont le talent est haut, comme la pyramide de Cheops.”

A French critic has called Rops “a false genius,” probably alluding to the malign characters of the majority of his engraved works rather than to his marvellous and fecund powers of invention.  Perverse idealist as he was, he never relaxed his pursuit of the perfection of form.  He tells us that in 1862 he went to Paris, after much preliminary skirmishing in Belgian reviews and magazines, to “learn his art” with Bracquemond and Jacquemart, both of whom he never ceased praising.  He was associated with Daubigny, painter and etcher, and with Courbet, Flameng, and Therond.

He admired Calmatta and his school—­Bal, Franck, Biot, Meunier, Flameng.  He belonged to the International Society of Aquafortistes.  He worked in aquatint and successfully revived the old process, vernis mou.  A sober workman, he spent at least fourteen hours a day at his desk.  Being musical, he designed some genre pieces, notably that of the truthfully observed Bassoonist.  And though not originating he certainly carried to the pitch of the artistically ludicrous those progressive