272
PARTISAN REVIEW
Paris, and from this he took his strongest energy as a poet. The
larger atmosphere of the historical moment came to him later. It
helped him realize himself; it did not make him what he was.
For what he was we must go to the whole body of his works,
every part of which bears upon the brilliant passages which often
suffer the worst mangling in the hands of interpreters and trans·
lators. The picturesque Flemish charm of
La Maline, Au Cabaret
Vert, Le Buffet,
and
Les Effares
embodies the first exhilaration of
the enchanted vagabond of
Ma Boheme,
whose sympathy with the
poor had not yet arrived at the bitter pathos of the Paris years.
The purity of
Reve pour l'River
expresses an adolescent emotion
not yet shocked by the realities which soon overtook it and made
it impossible for Rimbaud to retain the lyric simplicity that was
Verlaine's enigmatic secret through the years of his worst debauch·
ery. The peasant sympathies of
Le Mal, Rages de Cesar, Le Dor·
meur du Val,
and
L'Eclatante Victoire de Saarbroucke-records
of the War of 1870-convey a recognition of human stupidity
that tempers and subtilizes the contempt he wrote into his com·
ments on the aftermath of that national humiliation in
Chant
de Guerre Parisien, Les Accroupissements, Les Assis, Les Pauvres
a
l'Eglise,
and
Paris se Repeuple.
They also suggest that
Une
Saison en Enfer
must be read with a good deal more realism than
is usually brought to it. In the chapter
L'lmpossible,
where Rim·
baud records his failure in philosophical and religious belief, he
recalls childhood as the most precious period in life (he again so
describes it in
Les Illuminations),
the age that must be recaptured
at all possible costs as the time of instinctive wisdom when God
speaks directly to man. But he also sees the delusion of thinking
that one can ever go back to it or recapture its innocence, for the
innocence never really existed. In a momentary vision of perfect
purity he realizes that
it
is through the spirit alone that man can
reach God. The transition from the world of
Ma Boheme
and
Reve
pour l'River
is suddenly revealed as a token of the
poet~s
growth
in spiritual maturity. Similarly the idea, in
Les Illuminations,
that the spirit must pass beyond its futile attempts to incarnate
itself in concrete images or words which are incapable of contain·
ing it wholly, suggests the transition in Rimbaud's thought from a
world of physical and practical fixities to one of symbolic words
and transcendent values. He forged his way through this transition
