No matter how much a writer may have striven for the unusual or have
tried to order confusing ways with intelligence and form, his fiction
does not reach the depths nor is it as tragic as this one which life
devised. The beginning is simple, the climax grandiose, of such wildness
and rising to such heights, that the end no longer could be pure
tragedy. It turned into tragi-comedy, that grotesque sensation which we
feel when destiny grows beyond human beings and over-towers them, while
they are still struggling with pigmy hands to master a monstrous force
which has long gone beyond their control.
The beginning was conventional. One day Verlaine received a letter from
an acquaintance in the provinces, in which poems by a fifteen-year-old
boy were enclosed. Verlaine's opinion was asked. The poems were:
_Les Effarés_, _Les Assis_, _Les Poètes de sept ans_, _Les Premières
communions_. Every one knows they were Arthur Rimbaud's, for the poems
of this boy are among the most precious of French literature. He began
where the best stop and then, at twenty, threw literature aside as
something irksome and unimportant. Verlaine read them and was filled with
enthusiasm. He wrote to the boy in a tone of glowing admiration. In the
meantime the poems made the rounds in Paris. Words of characteristically
French emphasis are quickly coined. Victor Hugo with his regal gesture
declared the author to be "_Shakespeare enfant_."
The provincial associations of Charleville filled Rimbaud with disgust
and unrest. Verlaine in his enthusiasm wrote to him "Come, dear great
soul, we are waiting for you, we want you." He himself was without a
position and his own life in Paris at that time was threatened with
chaos and uncertainty, but with the marvellous folly of yielding and
emotional natures he invited a stranger as guest into his shaken
destiny.
Rimbaud came. He was a big, robust fellow filled with a demonic physical
force like that which Balzac has breathed into his Vautrin types. He was
a provincial with massive red fists and the curious face of a child that
has been corrupted early in life--a gamin, but a genius. Everything in
him is force, over-abundant, wild, exceptional virility, without aim and
turned toward the infinite.
He is one of the conquistador type, who first lost his way in
literature. He pours everything into it, fire, fulness, force, more,
much more than great creators spend. Like a crater he throws out his mad
fever dreams and visions of life such as perhaps only Dante has had
before him. He hurls everything up into the infinite as if he would
shatter it to bits. Destruction teems in this creation, a force ardent
for power, a hand that would seize everything and crush it.
His poems are only sudden gestures of wrath. They resemble bloody
tatters of raw flesh that have been torn with wild teeth from the body
of reality. It is poetry "outside and above" all literature. Has there
ever been a poet of modern times who thus threw poems on paper and then
let the scraps flutter to the four winds? Without pose, unlike Stefan
George or Mallarmé, who calculate carefully, he despised the public and
literature. He never had a single line printed by his own efforts, he
was utterly regardless of the fleeting examples of his gigantic power.
At twenty he left his fame and companions behind to wander through the
world. In Africa he founded fantastic realms, he sat in prison and
there played a part in world history preparing under King Menelik for
the struggle which cost Italy her provinces. But in three years he wrote
many poems full of power and fire, including the eternal poem _Le bateau
ivre_, a staggering fever dream, into which all the colors, sounds,
forms and forces of life seem to have been poured, bubbling in curious
forms and seething in the glow of a feverish moment. His life was like a
dream, as wild, as mighty and as little subject to time.
Verlaine gladly sheltered the awkward boy. Madame Verlaine was less
enthusiastic and never concealed her dislike. Perhaps, with a woman's
instinct, she unconsciously foresaw the danger which threatened Verlaine
in this new companion.
The bond of friendship grew closer and closer. Verlaine's _gaminerie_
which was ever in contrast with his sensitivity, awakened suddenly.
His tendency toward strong, cynical and lascivious conversation met a
genial match in Rimbaud. The primitive element in Verlaine was suddenly
enchained by the primæval, purely human and brutal masculinity of
Rimbaud's personality. The feminine in his nature was feeling for
completion. As if predestined for each other for years, their
personalities dovetail. Without any affection, by necessity rather than
by friendship, their union becomes closer and closer. One day in 1872
Verlaine leaves wife, child and the world in which he lived to wander
with Rimbaud into the unknown.
Without doubt there was an element of the abnormal in the relations
between Verlaine and Rimbaud, but to understand their friendship it
is neither necessary nor essential to know whether the dangerous
potentialities that inhere in so strong a personal enthusiasm ever
became material facts.
Their path led over the highways and also through prisons. "An evil
rage for travelling" had seized the two. Through Belgium, through
Germany and England they wandered; usually they were without means.
They stayed in London for a while, supporting themselves by teaching
languages and delving deeper than ever into social politics. Rimbaud
left and returned just in time to convey the sick Verlaine home. The
terrible life which he had led had broken him down. He himself has
concealed the tragic incidents of those days in a novelette, "_Louise
Leclercq_."
There he wrote: "The few half-crowns which he earned daily in giving
lessons, they spent in the evening on Portuguese wine and Irish beer.
The stomach was forgotten, the head became affected and the lessons were
not given, and thus hunger and nervosity overcame the reason of this
brave fellow."
The patient is taken to Bouillon, a small town in the Ardennes, where
Charles van Lerberghe, the great Belgium poet, lived, but he has hardly
half recovered when he plunges out into the world again with Rimbaud.
Mental unrest is transformed into physical unrest. The lack of stability
which operated most impulsively in that crisis, appears in his external
life. There is nothing definite for which he is seeking yet he is
unsatisfied. Verlaine, man of moods _par excellence_, adjusts himself to
life in his own manner. He becomes boorish, subject to fits of passion,
violent and unaccountable. His tenderness seems to have been strangled
by hunger, drunkenness and wild destiny. The friendship for Rimbaud also
assumes evil shapes. More and more frequently they quarrel; almost every
hour Rimbaud's foaming temperament and Verlaine's temporary hard, wild
manner come in conflict. Of course, as a rule, they were drunk. Rimbaud,
who was strong, drank because of his feeling of strength and because he
yearned for the intoxication in which colors glowed, in which impulses
became wilder, and association more rapid, acute and bolder. Verlaine
fled to absinthe to drown out repentance, anguish and weakness; and from
this sweetish drink, in which all the evil forces of life seem to be
distilled, he drew brutality and feverish disorders.
Once Verlaine ran away, but became repentant and asked Rimbaud to join
him. Rimbaud followed him to Belgium. All difficulties were about to be
solved. Madame Verlaine was ready to forgive and was on her way to meet
the penitent. Then Rimbaud too declared that he would leave him. No one
knows how it happened, whether it was jealousy, anger, hatred, love or
only drunkenness, at any rate the disaster followed on the public street
of Brussels. Verlaine pursued Rimbaud and shot at him twice with a
revolver, wounding him once. The police came, and though Rimbaud
defended and excused Verlaine, the latter was arrested. The sentence
was two years in prison, and these Verlaine spent at Mons. The immediate
result was a divorce, upon which Madame Verlaine insisted with every
possible emphasis and in spite of Victor Hugo's intervention.
This conclusion, however, was too banal and trite for so heroic a
tragedy. The friendship persisted. Verlaine and Rimbaud corresponded.
Verlaine sent occasional poems from prison and told Rimbaud of his
conversion. The latter hardly pleased Rimbaud, who was at that time
cold and indifferent toward everything except that he was filled with
a thirst for something unique and infinite and looking forward to new
adventures. Verlaine had hardly been released before he tried to convert
Rimbaud to this religious life in order to link their lives anew. "Let
us love each other in Jesus Christ," he wrote in his proselyting ardor
and with the enthusiasm which in the beginning he always felt for
everything. Rimbaud smiled mockingly and finally declared that "Loyola"
should visit him in Stuttgart.
Now the moment arrived when comedy outdid the tragedy of the reunion.
Verlaine arrived at Stuttgart and attempted the conversion--unfortunately
in an inn, a place little adapted for proselytes and prophets, for both
the saint and the mocker still had in common their passion for drink. No
one witnessed the scene; only the result is known. On the way home both
were drunk, and a quarrel ensued and a unique incident in the history of
literature followed.
In the flooding moonlight by the banks of the Neckar the two greatest
living poets in France fell upon each other in wild rage with sticks and
fists. The struggle did not last long. Rimbaud, athletic, like a wild
animal, a man of passion, easily subdued the nervous, weakly Verlaine,
stumbling in drunkenness. A blow over the head knocked him down.
Bleeding and unconscious, he remained lying on the bank.
It was the last time they saw each other. Verlaine disappeared on the
next day. The episode had come to an end, but nevertheless several
letters passed back and forth. Then Rimbaud's grandiose Odyssey through
the entire world began. For many years his friends in Paris believed him
dead, and even to-day relatively little is known of his life
afterward.[2]
[2] A Biography and a volume of Rimbaud's correspondence have recently
been published by his brother-in-law, Paterne Berrichon. They throw
much light upon his remarkable career.
In Vienna he was under arrest as a vagrant, in the Balkans he was a
merchant. Then fulfilling his early prophecy in the _Bateau ivre_ he
said farewell to Europe and in Africa became discoverer, general,
conqueror. In these unexpected fields he spent to the last limits his
titanic energy, which in youthful crises had been expended on the
fragile and for him too weakly material of language and rhyme. Until the
day of his death, he, _the only true despiser of literature of these
days_, never wrote another line, and endeavored only to give form to his
wild and fantastic dreams in the material of life, dying in fever as
feverishly he lived.
For Verlaine it was an episode--the most important, it is true, in a
life which was torn to many tatters. After his conversion, which will
be discussed more fully later, he returned to Paris and literature, and
died in harness, physically in 1896, as artist much earlier.