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PARTISAN REVIEW
The secret ambition and defeats of Mme. Rimbaud are unmis–
takably the beginning of her son's conflict with the world, and
perhaps the source of his poetic animus. Many of the central pas–
sages in his works take their force from his resistance to the stric–
tures of her morality. "The poet makes himself a visionary through
a long, immense, and reasoned derangement of all the senses....
He exhausts all poisons in himself to keep only their quintessences.
An indescribable torture in which he has need of all faith, all
superhuman force, in which he becomes, among all, the great sick
man, the great criminal, the great accursed-and the supreme
Scholar!-for he arrives at the unknown; and even if, driven
insane, he should end by losing his grasp on his visions, he has seen
them.... Even as a child I used to admire the incorrigible convict
on whom the jail is always closing again.... He had for me more
strength than a saint, more good sense than a traveller-and him–
self, himself alone! for witness of his glory and his reason." The
rebellion to imposed morality in these railleries originated in the
intense duel of wills that is defined in
Les Poetes de Sept Ans,
that
forms the exquisite tension of
Une Saison en Enfer,
and that Rim·
baud shared subconsciously throughout his life with the inflexible
woman of Charleville.
From the confines of his youthful home Rimbaud stepped
forth to his progressive rebellions against the world-against "the
inferior race [that] has covered everything-the people, as we say,
Reason, the Nation, and Science." These became what Mr.
Schwartz says of them-the poisoned atmosphere of industrialized
capitalism. But the poison that Rimbaud breathed first and last
was something so profoundly integral to his psychic constitution
and conscience that the taste of it made even the pollution of Paris
seem by comparison superficial. Rimbaud saw his age's humilia–
tions and he noted them with the accuracy of the naturalists in
Paris se Repeuple, Nuit de l'Enfer,
and
L'Eclair.
But his sense of
evil and human shame was rooted in his moral nature, and in the
abnormalities of emotion and conduct that caused that nature to
become inflamed and luminous. His biography tends to lessen the
isolated importance of his successive encounters with fact. His
four brief years in Paris become a crucial episode; his railleries
against church, state, army, town, and friends, whether in the cafes
of Charleville or the lobbies of Paris theatres, become part of a
