SOURCE: "From the Far Side of Despair," in Rimbaud's Poetic Practice: Image and Theme in the Major Poems, Harvard University Press, 1963, pp. 201-22.

[In the following essay, Frohock disputes the view—held by many earlier critics —that in Une Saison en enfer Rimbaud irrevocably rejected both the world around him and his literary aspirations. Frohock maintains that although Rimbaud condemned both the Christian tradition and his personal experiment with voyancy, he accepted the challenge of dealing with reality and searching for a new form of poetic expression.]

Nothing could be more natural than that our time should have made Rimbaud one of its special heroes. We have been aware of ourselves as living in—perhaps living through—an age of anxiety, and identified him as typically anxious. The heroes of our fiction have been alienated figures, and we know that Rimbaud's alienation was deep. We have honored, above all, those who have shown themselves capable of pronouncing a total refusal of the world in which we have no choice but to live, and written down Rimbaud as one of the most exemplary of such révoltés. Discussions of his work as a "poetry of revolt" have abounded, especially since the brave days of Existentialism and the publication by Albert Camus of The Rebel, and the importance of Une Saison en enfer has been ephasized, at times out of proportion.

Revolt, once defined by Camus as the utterance of a universal No—example: Ivan Karamazov's rejection of a world made good by one child's suffering—is distinguishable from mere rebellion by its absoluteness, philosophical seriousness, and cosmic scope. The most cogent metaphysical statement is perhaps contained in André Malraux's demonstration, in The Voices of Silence, that the function of art has always been to express man's refusal of "the human condition." How Rimbaud—especially the Rimbaud "with the wind in his heels" of the various biographies—could have come to be seen as the ancestor of all who held such views is easy to understand. Had he not written a book which was a complete rejection of the world as he had known it? And had he not, having written it, followed word with deed, simply walking out and slamming the door definitively behind him? If he had not actually expressed the theory of revolt, he had, according to this view, furnished a classic example of the practice.

It can at least be said in favor of such a notion that, even if closer inspection reveals that Rimbaud fell rather short of being the model he has been said to be, his example made it considerably easier for the latter-day stereotype of the révolté to come into existence. But before more than this can be granted, certain critical distinctions are in order: we are not free to forget, though some have managed to do so, that Rimbaud himself speaks, in Une Saison en enfer, of never having understood "la révolte." That he was violently repelled at times by the world around him no one who can read would conceivably deny. He has looked on life and not found it invariably good. With so many poets of his time, from Hugo to Tennyson, he can imagine a rationally organized political future in which ordinary human beings would be allowed to realize their innate potentialities and a society in which love would replace greed and cupidity. Of this what he sees about him falls heart-breakingly short—as it falls short also of the world of the innocent child, who now is doomed to be contaminated and degraded by the mere process of growing up. Anyone could imagine something better, such as his imaginary "Orient," exempt from the devastation of commerce, industry, colonialism, and what his time thinks of as science. The effort of creating a more habitable world would not be great, even if the difficulty had been increased by the consciousness of accumulated guilts which apparently strike him as the principal heritage of a Christian society.

But this is only one of the several "visages" of Rimbaud which appear in Une Saison en enfer. This is also the youth who is at the end of his liaison with Verlaine, who begins his account of his personal hell just before, and finishes it just after, the shooting in Brussels. In addition, this is the poet who has staked so much on poetry and fallen far short of the goal; the failure half-foreseen in the "Lettre du voyant" has become a part of the reality in which he must manage to live. He has, finally, had the experience of the brink of insanity, to which he has been led perilously close by the practice of his method. The mixed nature of his spiritual and physical predicament, with the disaffections which turn inward as well as outward, radically complicates the question of Rimbaud's revolt.

2

Human life, as Sartre's Oreste was not the first to observe, begins on the far side of despair. Rimbaud's account of his spiritual experience follows him not only down through the Slough of Despond but up again on the far side and onto the firm ground beyond. This "collection of a few pages from the notebook of the Damned" does reveal a progress, however incoherent and tortured the account may be: it takes its reader from the utter despair of the earlier sections through to a mood of acceptance (however unwilling) and of reconciliation (at least partial). The impression that Rimbaud's intention, together with his feelings, underwent some modification while his book was in the writing is, almost certainly, well grounded: there may well have been a moment, after his break with Verlaine, when he could see no exit from his predicament, and another, subsequent one when some hope was once again possible.' We may not, after all, neglect that he finally called his book a Season, after toying with such titles as Livre païen and Livre nègre; the characteristic of seasons is that they have a beginning and an end.

It is incontestable that places in Une Saison en enfer are expressions of complete revolt. But a review of the entire book leaves the feeling that the mood of revolt is not everywhere present and that it does not prevail in the end.

A majority opinion among Rimbaud specialists holds that the opening section is an introduction written after the shooting scrape in Belgium, and contains a preliminary statement of the major themes. The time had been, the text says, when everything was good, when all hearts were open and every wine flowed free, a time of a fine party—"un festin"—when, in short, he had been happy. But subsequently he had lost the "key" to the "festin" and had, so to speak, shot his albatross, by taking Beauty upon his knees and insulting her. Now, having realized his mistake in extremis —on the point of "the last quack," a possible allusion to what might have happened if Verlaine had been a better hand with firearms—he would like to find the "key" again. The key is charity, he says. But thinking that he can recover it is a delusion; Satan is there to tell him that he must remain a "hyena" to the end. So at the end of the passage he offers Satan his notes on the experience.

It is just as likely that the second section, "Mauvais sang," was written before the final visit to Verlaine which culminated in the shooting, or at least that it was conceived if not actually written before these events, since it alone contains the material which would justify his having written a friend about the titles he later discarded. Here Rimbaud is attributing his faults to his belonging to an "inferior race"—seeing himself at first as a descendant of the old, conquered Gauls and subsequently as a Negro in some distant country about to be colonized by Europeans. In either of these avatars he belongs to those who do not choose Christianity but have it forced upon them and become its prisoners. Momentarily his imagination plays with the idea of being born a true and complete pagan, ignorant of and thus unplagued by the ideas of good and evil and the "torments of the soul which is almost dead to the Good." But this vision dissolves like the previous ones and the section ends with an image of himself marching like a soldier into combat.

"Nuit de l'Enfer" is devoted to the reality of the hell where he now finds himself. Directly now, not through metaphors, he describes his plight. He is indeed a victim of Christianity in that, without being able to divest himself of his sins, he is still aware of them as sins and as condemning him to eternal punishment. If he seems relatively untroubled by the loss of heaven he is remarkably conscious of the pains of hell. This section is more intelligible to those who accept the hypothesis that after Verlaine shot him, Rimbaud, under the shock of having come close to death and at the same time seeing all his projects collapse entirely, went through a religious crisis which very nearly resulted in a return to the Catholic practices of his childhood.

In the following section, "Délires," he turns violently to self-accusation. The first of its two subdivisions, the celebrated "Epoux infernal," the account of his life with Verlaine, uses the noteworthy literary strategy of giving the point of view to the other member of the couple. Verlaine is characterized by his voice, which is full of self-pity, nagging, and female weakness. He comes off poorly, a pitiable if not despicable picture. The technique lets Rimbaud appear as he imagines he must have looked to Verlaine, extraordinarily cruel and revoltingly sadistic, as well as perversely vicious. Rimbaud's judgment of himself is no less severe for being indirect. And the second subsection, "L'Alchimie du verbe," goes on, with the poet speaking in his own person, to condemn him as thoroughly as poet as he has been condemned just before as moral individual. There is a fair possibility that the second subsection was written before the first and before the rupture with Verlaine; it seems hardly possible, on the other hand, that the first can have been written before the two poets separated for good and all. Thus, if this assumption is correct, Rimbaud would first have contemplated reasons for the unsatisfactoriness of his poetry, and then have looked for the reasons in his own moral inadequacy.

But the "Orient" section, which follows next, turns attention from the defective poet to the defective world, setting up a contrast between an "Orient" which he imagines and an "Occident" which is the world he lives in and tolerates so little. This section has given encouragement to exegetes who, like Rolland de Renéville, interpret Rimbaud's poetry as implying close familiarity with Eastern philosophy. But what Orient is Rimbaud talking about? The whole subject remains vague. Actually, in the full thematic development of the Saison, what is important is less an East that never was than a West which the poet knows well and detests thoroughly. The East has negative virtues only: the absence of the "false elect," of a bourgeois society, of a Christianity which is also bourgeois, of western commerce and industry, art, and philosophy. We have returned, in other words, to the theme first stated in "Mauvais sang," and to a material which permits us to talk about a revolt against life. But here again, self-accusation complicates the picture: if only, he says, he had had the eyes to see the truth of all this while there was still time. And once again, for all his savagery, there is audible the faintest note of self-pity.

The themes now having been stated, and developed as far as they will ever be, Rimbaud returns to the violent, almost frenetic tone of "Mauvais sang," and in "L'Eclair" protests against the empty notion of salvation through work. He can admit that all human effort may not be vanity, and he recalls his moments of socialist idealism when the dignity of labor appealed to him, but he rejects the possibility of redemption by such effort as too slow. He puts the thought away along with his attempts to attain the Unknown, and also dismisses the solution of religion as a hangover from childhood. He simply does not want to die; he wants to go on and live his "twenty years," meaning the two decades he allows himself as a future. And if eternity is thus lost—a sarcastic final exclamation—so much for that!

Thus he comes to the point, in "Matin," of measuring his final degradation. The promise of youth, by whatever crime or error of his, has not been kept. Let anyone who will tell the story; he has, himself, passed beyond the limit of communication. "I no longer know how to speak." And yet, he continues, the story of his suffering is now finished. He has been through the real hell, the one, he insists, of which the Son of Man burst the gates. There is open before him a kind of vision of Bethlehem, with the star always before his eyes and the Magi of heart, soul, and spirit, together with the promise of a "new work, new wisdom, the confusion of tyrants, and the end of superstition." The section ends by picking up the theme of the "pagan" and "Negro" sections: "Slaves, let us not curse life." The tone is quieter now than it has been previously, and he mentions his lassitude.

In the final section, "Adieu," it is "already autumn," but why, he asks, regret a waning earthly sun when one is in search of a divine light? Yet autumn calls up a picture of intense suffering, and distress, followed by the thought that if this is bad, comfort is hardly better. He passes into a tone of resignation, and the words he uses are famous. "J'ai créé toutes les fêtes, tous les triomphes, tous les drames: J'ai essayé d'inventer de nouvelles fleurs, de nouveaux astres, de nouvelles chairs, de nouvelles langues. J'ai cru acquérir des pouvoirs surnaturels. Eh bien! je dois enterrer mon imagination et mes souvenirs!" And on this note of acceptance of his lot, with all this implies in respect to the themes which run through his book, his season ends. He had thought himself seer or angel, and created his own feasts and triumphs and dramas, a new nature, a new heaven, new bodies, and new languages; he has returned to earth, to the new duty he must find, with a harsh reality to embrace.

3

In order to make sense of these texts in their totality, one must be alert to their falling at times into a dramatic form: it should be recognized that Rimbaud is speaking here in more than one voice. If what he says means anything at all, he has been on the threshold of madness. There can be very little doubt of what kind of insanity he had contemplated so closely. "L'Alchimie du verbe" makes it abundantly clear that his visionary experiments had not been far from breaking his contact with the world in which men live and to which their dreams ordinarily refer. There can come a moment when the subject merely turns his face to the wall, refuses to know people around him, becomes unable to take food and finally succumbs to inanition. How close to the edge the author of the Illuminations actually came, in that moment when he was "waiting to become a dangerous madman," nobody can say, but he leaves no doubt that it was close enough to give him a severe fright. Thus it is no surprise to detect at times in the Saison en enfer one voice which is savage, sarcastic, ironic, and occasionally brutal, which keeps speaking up in the name of harsh reality—the reality which must at all costs be embraced, and which replies to the other voice, that of the poet-voyant.

Critics who from the internal evidence of the Illuminations and Une Saison en enfer tend to the persuasion that it is possible to divide Rimbaud's life as poet into sharply defined periods, are also fond of the idea that he went through a moment of violent hallucination and delusion during the spring of 1872, at the moment of the last inchoate poems in verse. It is true that his illustrations of his "madness," which he quotes in "L'Alchimie du verbe," are from these writings, but nothing proves that the time of the writing was his only one of precarious mental balance. Isabelle Rimbaud may not be the most dependable of witnesses, the best interpreter of her brother's poems or the significance of various events in his life, but there is little reason to think that what she says of his behavior during the writing of these pages in the attic of the farmhouse at Roche—the shouts and groans from above stairs, the unpredictable conduct and erratic moods—is an invention. The story is true because she would have no object in telling a false one: the struggle to keep a grip on reality was grim. Her story is confirmed by the texts themselves—which Isabelle long failed to realize that the world would ever read.

An example can be the evocation of childhood in "Nuit de l'Enfer," where his imaginations of hell are particularly vivid. "La peau de ma tête se dessèche. Pitié! Seigneur, j'ai peur. J'ai soif, si soif. Ah! l'enfance, l'herbe, la pluie, le lac sur les pierres, le clair de lune quand le clocher sonnait douze … le diable est au clocher, à cette heure. Marie! Sainte-Vierge!" (The italics are in the text.) This voice belongs to the hallucinated poet. To it the voice of the man in contact with reality answers abruptly and with impatience: "Horreur de ma bêtise."

One could be tempted to identify the two voices with the two parts of the divided personality of the "Lettre du voyant"—the "JE" who is "autre" and the "je" who is not. The first of the two speeches follows the then-and-now pattern familiar from some of the Illuminations: opposed to the frightening dryness of the infernal present are childhood and the sweetness of nature, and the moonlit sounds of the midnight belfry which have now been replaced by Satan. Thus, the second voice can be read as rejecting the "stupidity" of the poems—as well as that of the poet.

Another example occurs in the introductory passage. The poet has explained how he has lost the key to the great feast and sunk into various sorts of depravity; now, at the point of death, he would like to recover the key which is Charity.

Or, tout dernièrement m'étant trouvé sur le point de faire le dernier couac! j'ai songé à rechercher la clef de l'ancien festin, où je reprendrais peut-être appétit.

La Charité est cette clef.

So far, this is the voice of the voyant, desperately seeking salvation. But now the other voice interrupts: "Cette inspiration prouve que j'ai rêvé." Here again, and as always, the second voice is the voice of reality and sanity.

This technique is standard with Romantic ironists from Stendhal to Henri de Montherlant. "Aedificabo et destruam," writes Montherlant, "I shall construct, but to destroy." The procedure has nothing new for confirmed readers of Rimbaud. "And what about my job?" asks the voice of Nina at the end of " Les Réparties," and the down-to-earth question brings to an abrupt close that most detailed phantasy about love in a benevolent nature. At the end of "Roman," it will be remembered, the poet returns from flights of erotic reverie to the realization that he must look like something of a puppy. And though the words of "Le Cœur supplicié" speak of complete disgust with life, the lilting rhythm reminds us that the poet is conscious of being a bit too intensely eloquent for his years and stature. The same effect is produced in the poem that begins, "Qu'est-ce pour nous, mon cœur," when the poet emerges from a dream of global holocaust into an awareness that after all nothing has happened.

In Une Saison en enfer, each of the persistent themes— Christian religion, childhood, hostile external world, romantic travel, and so forth—occasions a renewal of the same treatment.

4

The religious crisis Rimbaud is supposed to have passed through in the hospital in Brussels is psychologically possible. Although his wound itself was minor, the experience of being shot was not. Rimbaud could have died without opportunity to confess his sins,. do penance, and amend his life. To one brought up a Catholic, the thought is sobering. But the experience can only have sent him more precipitately along a way already chosen: he had begun Une Saison before this episode and is in a mood to examine his conscience.

Once he had committed himself to the ancient metaphor which equates suffering with the Nether Pit, he had almost no choice but to continue in the language of the Judaeo-Christian tradition. Suffering being hell, and hell being in turn punishment, the question, old as Job, arises inevitably: What have I done to merit this? The tone necessarily becomes one of self-recrimination and confession. Nothing could be less surprising than that readers like Claudel, Daniel-Rops, and Jacques Rivière, already predisposed to see every conflict stated in Christian terms, should have discovered in Rimbaud a kind of crypto-Catholic. To agree with them, however, requires resolute inattention to the contexts of the passages that they cite most often in defense of their view.

If there is any validity to the claim, put forth above, that the Saison frequently falls into the form of a dialogue between two voices which are both the poet's, then it must be significant that the voice that is aware of the claims of reality intervenes most often when the other voice has embarked on the subject of salvation through religion. In the introduction, Charity appears to be represented as the key to the lost "feast," but it is not entirely true that at that point the poet represents himself as having lost two of the three theological virtues: while he has been through a period of despair, part of him lives in hope of finding his key again; and it is now that the other voice denies the hope, telling him that he will always remain the "hyena." We may conclude from this that the religious urge is only one velleity among others. And each time the Christian solution is mentioned in the pages that follow, this conclusion is reconfirmed; the voice of reason and reality reminds him that he is losing the indispensable contact.

Throughout Rimbaud's confession such phrases occur as the famous: "I await God with gourmandise," an expression more easily understood by those familiar with the language of Catholic mysticism and the doctrine of transubstantiation. (Saint Teresa of Avila is known to have preferred the largest possible hosts at communion.) "God is my strength," he declares in another place, "And I praise God." No more is required to send those who are predisposed to do so off on an orgy of rereading the Illuminations, to make such discoveries as that the "Génie," otherwise identifiable with the voyant side of the poet's personality, is really Jesus Christ. But even those of such readers who are willing to admit that Rimbaud reveals himself to them as a Christian only upon fleeting occasion are bound to encounter very serious obstacles.

Rimbaud's cry about waiting for God with gourmandise is followed in the next sentence by the statement that he belongs "to an inferior race throughout eternity," and the ellipsis between the two declarations can hardly be filled by anything but a statement of causal relationship, either "because" or "consequently." The often quoted: "De profundis, domine," in "Mauvais sang," is followed immediately by words less often cited: "Am I stupid!" The words following his remark in "L'Eclair" about the odor of incense coming so strong to his bed in the hospital are to the effect that he recognizes "in this the filthy education of my childhood."

In texts written, most likely, both before and after the shooting, he associates Christianity with the idea of an inferior race. His feeling that he descends directly from the old Gauls, with all their bad habits and their vices, including laziness, seems less incongruous when one remembers that he was a contemporary of determinists like Taine. As one of the conquered people, he sees himself in a series of atavistic incarnations: pilgrim, leprous beggar, foot soldier, all playing subordinate roles, never members of the "councils." And historically, he reminds himself, the Gauls did not exactly seek Christianity, but had it forced upon them by their conquerors. At the same time, God is the refuge of the inferior.

When he sees himself not as a son of old Gaul but as a Negro in a country about to be invaded by Europeans, the connecting theme is inferiority. The whites come ashore, the cannon fire: one must submit, dress oneself in clothes, go to work. Not even those most persuaded of Rimbaud's Catholicism will argue that such a page constitutes a cry of Christian triumph. To accept Christianity, in this purview, implies an irrevocable admission not only of defeat but of one's having been defeated from the start. His playing with the idea that if one is genuinely exempt from all the inhibitions of a Christian civilization one is better off constitutes another flight from reality. The reader who submits scrupulously to the meaning of the total work recognizes that occasional velleities of submission and acceptance are counterbalanced by velleities of rejection.

The general theme persists in "Nuit de l'enfer," and in an even more desperate tone. He is trapped in his Christian tradition, the "slave of his baptism." He has had the vision of peace and bliss which would go with reconciliation to his faith: "Millions of charming creatures, a suave spiritual concert, strength and peace, noble ambitions, and so forth." But here the paragraph ends. The new one, which consists only of a repetition of "noble ambitions," but this time written with an exclamation point, can only be read as ironical: the voice of sanity has intervened again to collapse the vision; one who has been trained a Christian must live with what he has learned in his catechism; only the true, born pagan is safe from hell; the poet's parents have wrought his misfortune as well as their own.

And at the end of the book, in "Matin," in spite of the references to the star, the desert, and the Magi, the "Noël on earth" he speaks of is surely not the Christian one. New work and new wisdom, flight of tyrants and demons, and an end to superstition, go well of course with the idea of peace to men of good will—but these are men whose ideal of good will is, most likely, the far off, divine event of nineteenth-century idealistic socialism. The acceptance which the last pages of Rimbaud's book may be said to breathe is not an acceptance of Christianity. He is talking, rather, about a world which would be of a quality such that he would not feel himself preternaturally alienated from it.

What makes Rimbaud seem, at moments, so close to Christianity is, more than anything, his capacity for self-accusation. But in the last accounting, even this leaves one a bit suspicious. The very violence of the language he uses to call himself a fool, a knave, and a scoundrel has a touch of masochism about it. There is too good a chance that this self-laceration brings satisfactions and reliefs of its own. To be a fool and a failure is not, of itself, a sin. The frustration which comes from knowing that one has failed and been foolish can be as real as any other. Rimbaud, as we know, had the habit of lashing out when he was frustrated and does so now, when the source of the trouble is inside himself. Religion need not enter the discussion at this point. He may still be, quite simply, the young poet who tolerated nothing that came between him and felicity.

5

The world Rimbaud seems to have wanted would have had to be entirely different from the one he was in. He knows that in this present one the inferior race has inherited the earth. The last century has seen, he says, the victory of the People, of reason, of the nation, of knowledge. But knowledge—science to his contemporaries—seems to be nothing more than medicine, which is the codifying of old wives' remedies, and philosophy, which is the rearrangement of the sentiments of popular songs. For progress he has only scorn. "We are headed for the conquest of matter by mind," he declares, and the irony emerges as it develops that in his visions the priests and professors are always opposed to him. The leaders of the modern world—merchants, magistrates, generals, and emperors—are "faux nègres," he says, inspired by fever and cancer. It would be best to quit this continent and go off to "the true kingdom of the children of Cham" and, like them, be a cannibal. He gives to the devil the martyrs, the art, the inventions, and the ardor of those he calls the "pillagers"—his fellow Europeans. These aggressively commercial proprietors own everything, including Christianity.

To the characteristic delusions of the West, that nothing is vain, that knowledge is progress, and that work is good, he remains closed: no subterfuge can hide the fact that the trouble with the workaday world is work, the progress of the snail toward something which will never take place. The glimpses of the great modern city, probably London, are again—as in the Illuminations—reminiscent of Blake.

Rimbaud is no more specific on the world he detests than on any other of the half-dozen subjects which preoccupy him in Une Saison. Whether or not it is true that he now has no gift for description, as he says on the opening page, he clearly has no desire to describe. As always, his focus is not on objects but on his feeling about them. He wants no part of this world he finds about him; it makes him ill and all his instinct is to reject it. Yet he also has to face his situation: this world is a part of the reality which he must bring himself, at the end, to embrace. For the sake of his sanity and perhaps of his life he must accept it, though we may remember that to embrace is not always, and necessarily, a sign of love.

The opening pages of this book, plus the happy tone of some of the Illuminations in which the visions are reminiscences of childhood, has led some readers to believe that the Saison should be read as a rejection of the adult world and an expression of the wish to return, or regress, to childhood. In favor of this view, there is ample evidence in the Illuminations that as Rimbaud got older some early moment in life looked increasingly attractive to him. But on the other hand, the more one examines his biography, the harder it is to find any moment in his own life which would fit the description.

The children in his poems are not particularly happy either. Those in "Les Etrennes des orphelins" are in a pitiable plight; the group in "Les Effarés" are poor and cold. Those in the more autobiographical poems, "Les Poètes de sept ans," and "Les Premières Communions," are abjectly wretched. The only happy figure in Rimbaud's poems, actually, is the young poet who has momentarily contrived an evasion either through a real life fugue or through one of the imagination. And the author of Une Saison en enfer is by no means persuaded that the author of "Ma bohème" was on the road to happiness. "Ah, the life of my childhood, the open road in every weather, naturally sober, caring less than the best of beggars, proud of having neither country or friends, what stupidity it was!"

On the whole, it seems more likely that childhood appeared to him less as a specific refuge than as a time when, innocence and purity not having been contaminated by a specific vice, he had not departed on a course of scattering his talent to the winds. In a sense, Une Saison en enfer repeats the burden of the "Chanson de la plus haute tour":

Oisive jeunesse
A tout asservie,
Par délicatesse
J'ai perdu ma vie.

Rimbaud seems considerably more willing than some of his admirers have been since to face the fact of his vice. In the fugitive piece called "Les Déserts de l'amour," he is entirely explicit: "Not having loved women—though full of blood—his soul and heart, his strength, were brought up in strange errors." The author of the "Délires" chapter and of the Illumination called "Vagabonds," hard as he may be on poor Verlaine, does not spare himself.

But his vice is not his only reason for looking on his own character with disgust. He speaks of others: his proneness for anger and his delight in immorally soft living, his laziness and his lying. Here, as usual, he veils his terms and it is hard to know what he means in every case. It is not surprising if his experiments in voyancy put his nerves in a state such that he was subject to flare-ups of very bad temper; on the other hand, he and Verlaine were always so short of money that it is hard to imagine what experience he had of sybaritic living. Lying, since the French "mensonge" includes the lie which is lived as well as the lie which is told, may refer to the whole quality of his life during these years.

We do know what he meant by laziness. Rimbaud had never had any patience with work. Back in 1871 his mother had left him both frightened and indignant with her threats to make him get a job. He was always instinctively orthodox on this point: work was the primeval curse laid upon the race. His momentary exaltation over human labor was probably an expression of his sympathy for the laboring class during the months when he was intent on joining the Commune, rather than a personal commitment to toil. He says that he has all the laziness of the old Gauls, and part of his horror at discovering himself to be a member of the inferior race he connects with the state of being a slave: slaves are condemned to work.

We may wonder whether, in addition, he meant that he had not done faithfully the work of the poet. It is true that, unless there is poetry written in the interval of which we know nothing, he had done relatively little since mid-1872. As compared with Verlaine, at least, he had not much to show. But the conclusion is ours alone, and one which he does not endorse, that the practice of voyancy gradually incapacitated him for poetry.

In any case, along with all the other reasons for his self-revulsion there is the paramount one that, from his angle, the great experiment of voyancy had not succeeded. No document connected with modern French poetry is more often cited than "L'Alchimie du verbe." It has been taken as a faithful report of what he had been trying to do ever since the letter to Demeny. This is reasonable so long as the report is recognized as retrospective, and as an explanation of what he had meant in the letter itself. He is certainly saying that, looking back upon it, his enterprise was a great mistake. The attempt to induce hallucinations resulted in nothing more than induced hallucinations. The "sacred disorder of his mind" had given the world nothing that was not paltry. The project of tapping the irrational sources of poetry turned out to have been an immense, nearly fatal, self-deception.

But he exaggerates, somewhat, the case against his own work. Looking back over the poems in verse of 1872, one simply does not find the trace of all the trivialities which he says fascinated him during his period of disorder. Nor does one find them in the prose Illuminations, whenever it may be that these were written. Where, for example, is the evidence of his pleasure in church Latin, except possibly in the Saison itself? There is disagreement as to how much of his poetry he includes in his condemnation. The traditional view, that he had in mind everything he had ever written, has given way to one which has at least the merit of not going miles beyond what "L'Alchimie du verbe" actually says: it holds that he was saying farewell only to the kind of poetry which was to have been the glory of the "voyant." But this opens new questions.

Either we have to believe that this impulsive young man, having had his great inspiration no later than May 15, 1871, waited almost a year to explore the possibilities of hallucination, or else that he condemned virtually all his poetry written before the Saison. A year in the accelerated life of Rimbaud is the equivalent of a cycle in that of almost any other poet. Moreover, the Saison itself confirms what one gathers elsewhere about his impatience when moved by an impulse. And we have seen that some of the poems written within short months after the "Lettre du voyant" are more easily interpreted if one presupposes the practice of the program it sets forth. Moreover, we know that by June 10, 1871, he was urging Demeny to burn all the early poems which subsequently went not into the fire but into the "Collection Demeny." The request suggests strongly that the poet was persuaded of the superior value of poems of a new sort; and poems like "Le Cœur supplicié" and "Voyelles," whatever the present estimate of their value, already reveal an irrationality which has yet to be proved not to be the result of applying the famous method. The thesis advanced in an earlier chapter, that the "Bateauivre" is a report on systematically contrived hallucinations, is not widely supported by respected experts in the subject, but the evidence stands by itself. No one contests that in Roche, in 1872, Rimbaud brought on himself a crisis which frightened him considerably—even though the evidence is nothing more than a line left in one of his drafts—but this makes it no easier to concede that his renunciation in "L'Alchimie du verbe" applies only to a very small part of his total output.

The poems which he sprinkles through this chapter are, obviously, the work of 1872, and mostly of the first half of that year. But he also condemns "Voyelles" as a characteristic product of his enterprise, and this poem is surely earlier. That he now scorns the poems of 1872 is very likely, since either he does not go to the bother of copying them into his new work in correct form or else quotes them defectively on purpose. But this does not have to mean that only these poems were included in his condemnation.

It should be remembered that Rimbaud was in the habit of abandoning his poetry. The injunction to Demeny was a formal act, covering the poems up to that time. The sudden cessation, about a year later, of the flow of poems in syntactically solid verse would seem to be a second, this time informal, renunciation. Une Saison en enfer now appears as the third in a series, almost indicative of a habit. The fact that he does not specifically include in his renunciation the prose Illuminations may be taken to confirm Bouillane de Lacoste's view that these last had not been written, or may, on the other hand, simply show that in 1873 Rimbaud did not recognize that the texts formed a unified collection. Everything testifies that Rimbaud had no objections to publishing his work; it seems likely that in 1875, when he wanted to recover the manuscripts from Verlaine, his intention of sending them to be printed was very real. The possibility that Rimbaud did not repudiate the prose Illuminations simply because he was not aware that there was anything there to repudiate is not entirely to be dismissed.

Everything considered, however, we may as well assume that Rimbaud's declaration regards only the poetry he has written up to 1873—whatever may be included in this list. It does not constitute a promise never to write poetry again, and cannot be considered a general farewell to the activity of writing. Rimbaud is simply giving up writing a kind of poetry which he has now outgrown, just as he had done once before in his life and quite possibly twice. Few poets have not had moments of discouragement when they felt that their work to date amounted to less than nothing, and yet not hoped, perhaps without daring to say so, that in future they might yet realize their promise.

The scandal of Une Saison, if scandal there is, lies in Rimbaud's having been so willing to abandon poems which must be counted, by any standard, among the finest in French poetry. Here at last the Romantic has been divorced from the oratorical and the grand manner (which had hampered Baudelaire and sometimes Gérard de Nerval) and is not inferior to the best English and German Romanticism. It is a pity that Rimbaud did not know it.

But he is now very completely trapped in a machine of his own making. Poetry—at least his poetry—now takes its place as a means of eluding "harsh reality." Among other ways of doing so are those pictured in the vision of the Saison, in which he sees himself hardened by travel and adventure. These are often brought forward by interpreters who neglect to add, because they do not notice, that these things are introduced into the book only so that Rimbaud can reject them.

One of these is the celebrated "prophecy" of his own future: "I have put in my time. I am leaving Europe. The sea air will burn my lungs; far climates will bronze me … I shall return with iron muscles, skin darkened, fury in my eye: by my features people will take me for one of the strong race. I shall have gold, and be lazy and brutal. Women care for these strange invalids who are back from the hot countries. I shall have a hand in politics. Saved!" Biographers like Berrichon and Madame Maléra have been tremendously impressed by this passage and, by such devices as harmlessly increasing the total of Rimbaud's savings in Abyssinia, have made it sound like an uncanny prevision of what actually happened to him. But it is the voice of the voyant which has taken over the dialogue here. There is a break in the text in a moment, and then the voice speaks which values reality: "One does not leave." This vision is herewith rejected just as he had rejected Christianity, and just as he had rejected the method when it did not lead to happiness. There is no escape.

The more one ponders this enigmatic text, the more one has trouble believing that escapes were what Rimbaud felt he needed, and the harder it becomes, accordingly, to read Une Saison en enfer as the preface to a departure for Abyssinia. So far as the testimony of the book goes, he has come to see that he is engaged, as he had thought long ago he might be, in an unsuccessful enterprise. Now he admits the truth and, at the end of the book, is ready to go on living.

This does not sound like the work of a poet in revolt so much as it sounds, as does everything else he wrote, like the work of a very great poet.