ARTHUR RIMBAUD
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drama of unsparing and obscene immolation-his answer to the
smug compromises and makeshift security which he soon discov·
ered most living to be composed of.
In this role of the artist as insulter of domestic sanctities and
moral privileges, as a disputant before the bar of justice, Rimbaud
takes on his.radical force. This power Miss Starkie makes credible
and human because she shows it rooted in the rebel's and outcast's
hunger for normal human affections and recognition. She doubt–
less goes too far in her apology when she minimizes Rimbaud's
cruelties and sins. These were not alone the methods of proof
("purification") of an obsessive neurotic. They were what they
always are when other human beings are involved: acts of night·
marish delight in the infliction of pain, in the humiliation of
friends, in effrontery and reckless ingratitude. Rimbaud ceases to
be humanly or morally significant if they are regarded as anything
else. But they are offset by what is now apparent in his nature and
heredity-by qualities of sensibility that made him not only a
lyric poet of extraordinary power but a man of intensely pathetic
weaknesses and strength; a man too of secret griefs who saw the
misery of the Paris slums with a deeper anguish and heroism than
that of Malte Laurids Brigge, a renegade who faced consequences
without fear and whose long term in the lidless hell of Mrica was
alleviated by his knowledge of the misery of his fellow-sufferers
there, by his devotion to his servants, by his delicate care for his
two mistresses, and by acts of kindness that are remembered
among the citizens of Harar to this day.
It was not a season he spent in Hell but a lifetime. The Nine·
teenth Century offers many tragedies of genius, but those of Keats,
Heine, Holderlin, Thomson, and Leopardi pale when compared
with the extremities of Rimbaud's suffering. His life was piti–
lessly sacrificed to a hostile environment, to desperate privations,
and to waste. For when Rimbaud broke with his moral founda·
tions he broke without sparing himself any of the consequences.
The shock of his encounter with human depravity in the Paris
barracks
(Coeur Supplicie)
acted on his tormented sensibility as
an abrupt dissolution of every ethical and moral legality in which
he had been bred. When he put his soul to the rack he committed
the worst affront to decency of which he was capable, but he ex–
pected no flattering comfort from the ordeal and looked for no
