Page:The Dial (Volume 68).djvu/844

comprehension of his visions, he has seen them! Let him die in his leap among things unheard of and without names: other horrible toilers will come; they will begin at the horizons where he went down. . . .

So the poet is truly Thief of Fire.

He is entrusted with humanity, with the animals even; he must make his inventions felt, touched, listened to. If that which he brings back from down there has form, he gives form; if it is unformed he gives unform. Find a language. . . .

This language will be of the soul, for the soul, everything: smells, sounds, colours, thought hooking thought and drawing it through. The poet would define the unknown awaking in the soul of the universe during his time: he would give more than the formula of his thought, than the announcement that he was walking with Progress! Enormity become norm, absorbed by all, he would be really a multiplier of progress!

This future will be materialistic, you see.—Always full of Number and Harmony, poems will be made to stay.—At bottom, this will again be something like the poetry of Greece. . . .

So I am working to make myself a seer. . . .

You would be abominable not to answer; quick, for in eight days I shall be in Paris, perhaps.

Au revoir. A. Rimbaud."

As we have seen, the Paris illusion blew up very shortly.

One word about the letter. It is true that it has a rather theatrical tone, but at least this better becomes a boy of seventeen than an adult like Baudelaire, who appears to most people to have wasted his time in mystification. Even with Baudelaire we may be sure that time spent in this way was not wholly lost; some artists require a spiritual studio where they can work undisturbed by the public consciousness, and in France, where banality is better educated than elsewhere and hence more penetrating, especially thick walls are desirable. De Nerval, who pursued the same profession as Rimbaud, was insane from the start, and being thus placed by God in a world strictly his own could afford a greater geniality, and finally even the classic frankness of middle-aged suicide. Rimbaud, too, after he had gone a little forward in wizardry, became less and less concerned with externals.