ARTHUR RIMBAUD
273
in physical terms. His struggle was not only reflected in the
violences of his personal life; it is demonstrated in the changing
mode and intensity of his poems and it is finally formulated as his
aesthetic morality. The state of ecstasy and superhuman bliss sug–
gested by the "spontaneous incoherence" of
Matinee d'Ivresse
is
the extension to a metaphysical plane of the lyric happiness of
Ma
Boheme.
These signals of growth and maturity are continuous in
Rimbaud's poetry. There is an organic emergence of the later
thought and emotion from the earlier, and the_connection, so little
apparent in the surface aspect of the poems, stands out when their
subordinate motives and phrases are scrutinized and their specific
personal quality is understood.
II.
Rimbaud was not the first example of his type-the demonic
angel; the "mystique
a
l'etat sauvage"-in poetic history, but he
represented the type in its starkest essentials; one might say in its
unmixed and unrationalized essentials if we were not made aware
by Miss Starkie's documents that the rebel and mystic in Rimbaud
were mixed with the rigor and tenacity of an extremely realistic
mind, that he was tortured by an inheritance of moral rectitude
and Christian discipline playing against his social vagrancy. Com–
pared with Verlaine's his intelligence was ruthlessly responsible
for itself. The religious quality in him, however latent, was harder
and more intractable; his contempt for the moral surrender re–
corded in Verlaine's
Sagesse
is one sign of it. The conflict of his
terrifying. logic of behavior with Verlaine's pathetic susceptibility
was certainly a major cause of the break between the two. Baude–
laire had induced Rimbaud to believe in dream as the highest mode
of communication between man and the hidden world around him;
Les Illuminations
developed partly from an effort to induce the
state of perpetual dreaming through drugs, alcohol, hunger, thirst,
and fatigue, and the ensuing dissociation of images and impres–
sions, conveying the vivid manifestations of the hashish sleep,
aimed to express the delights of that condition. But Rimbaud con–
fessed his extreme difficulty in achieving "this magic state of
~:eceptivity,
for he knew that he was still bound by what he con–
sidered his besetting inhibition, a consciousness of sin. He was
