ports, that he ever wrote. That a man of so much ability, to say the least, should stop writing at the age of nineteen has astonished and annoyed a great many people, and some of them have tried to explain how it happened. Of course, it is a great mystery why men write anyway, but writing has come to be counted a natural function, and we reserve our curiosity for those who give it up. The easiest theory about Rimbaud seems to have been that by a logical route he arrived at the conclusion that his writing did good neither to him nor to any one else, and that he ought to devote himself to other pursuits. But this theory does not really explain anything. Artists rarely give up one form of expression except for another, and when they do, it is not for logical reasons. There must have been some active element, some actual aversion, which made writing impossible. The disgust which had made him burn his old poems had crept up and fixed itself in the very idea of writing.
Even so, he continued to write for a little while but in a very different spirit from that of the first Illuminations. The innocence of mind which he had acquired with so much labour was no longer there. He had come to the towns as a savage might, treating civilization as he treated nature; and it had seemed to him that he found civilization good. But the strain was too great; the actuality of others began to force itself again on his attention. He began to judge. There is an impure complexity in the last Illuminations, an echoing of many voices out of tune, in these execrations of society by one who, try as he would, could not but feel himself party to "all this Sin."
Une Saison en Enfer, which followed Les Illuminations, is an account not only of his enterprise and its failure but of his struggle with that new disorder which now, when he was sick with disgust, suddenly unmasked itself before him. "Le Bonheur! Sa dent, douce à la mort, m'avertissait au chant du coq,—ad matutinum, au Christus venit,—dans les plus sombre villes." Paul Claudel picks this passage out of Une Saison with a knowing chuckle. He has been there himself; the symptoms are not unfamiliar to him. Happiness, or as the church calls it, salvation had come to Rimbaud with intolerable sweetness; at moments he had visions of "endless beaches covered with white nations in joy."
Yet he was scarcely ripe for all the indignities. Authority and limitation still as horrible as ever returned to annoy him in all their
