Disgust, of course, is not the peculiar adjunct of genius, but an emotion perfectly familiar to no end of adolescents, growing in strength as they get nearer the suicidal twenties. It was the misfortune as well as the glory of Rimbaud's adventure that it should have been undertaken when he was so young. For precocious as he was, he had not by any means put behind him at seventeen man's great climacteric. So that while his imagination was more extravagant and his aptitude for self-transformation more remarkable then than it would have been at thirty, forces even stronger than his will to aberration stopped him short before he had gone three years.
As he admitted in Une Saison, then, his adventure soon turned into a flight, with disgust following close on his heels. From Charleville he went to Paris, from Paris to Brussels, from there to London, and the chase would begin over again with variations. Only in his Illuminations could he fixate the poised violence of his efforts to throw himself once and finally beyond human desires.
Alas, for all his violence, he only succeeded in falling into the arms of Nature, attaining at times a sweet resignation, premonitory of the end.
"Qu'on patiente et qu'on s'ennuie,
C'est si simple! . . . Fi de ces peines.
Je veux que l'été dramatique
Me lie à son char de fortune.
Que par toi beaucoup, ô Nature,
Ah! moins nul et moins seul! je meure. . . ."
He attained more; for one supreme moment he "stripped away the sky's azure which is blackness and lived, gold spark of the radiance nature." A shrill song of triumph, so swift as scarcely to be distinguishable from the light itself: "The sea gone with the sun." Follows a long fall.
"I am an inventor very differently deserving from all who have preceded me; a musician even, who has found something like the key to love. At present, squire of a meagre countryside, with a gloomy sky, I try to rouse myself with memories of my beggar's childhood, my apprenticeship or my coming into sabots, my polemics, my six or seven widowhoods, and the several parties when my strong head kept me from rising to the diapason of my comrades.
