That story of the Arabian Nights, which is at the same time a true
story, the life of Rimbaud, has been told, for the first time, in
the extravagant but valuable book of an anarchist of letters, who
writes under the name of Paterne Berrichon, and who has since married
Rimbaud's sister. _La Vie de Jean-Arthur Rimbaud_ is full of curiosity
for those who have been mystified by I know not what legends, invented
to give wonder to a career itself more wonderful than any of the
inventions. The man who died at Marseilles, at the Hospital of the
Conception, on March 10 1891, at the age of thirty-seven, _négociant,_
as the register of his death describes him, was a writer of genius,
an innovator in verse and prose, who had written all his poetry by
the age of nineteen, and all his prose by a year or two later. He had
given up literature to travel hither and thither, first in Europe, then
in Africa; he had been an engineer, a leader of caravans, a merchant
of precious merchandise. And this man, who had never written down a
line after those astonishing early experiments, was heard, in his last
delirium, talking of precisely such visions as those which had haunted
his youth, and using, says his sister, "expressions of a singular and
penetrating charm" to render these sensations of visionary countries.
Here certainly is one of the most curious problems of literature: is it
a problem of which we can discover the secret?
Jean-Nicolas-Arthur Rimbaud was born at Charleville, in the Ardennes,
October 28, 1854. His father, of whom he saw little, was a captain
in the army; his mother, of peasant origin, was severe, rigid and
unsympathetic. At school he was an unwilling but brilliant scholar,
and by his fifteenth year was well acquainted with Latin literature
and intimately with French literature. It was in that year that he
began to write poems from the first curiously original: eleven poems
dating from that year are to be found in his collected works. When he
was sixteen he decided that he had had enough of school, and enough
of home. Only Paris existed: he must go to Paris. The first time he
went without a ticket; he spent, indeed, fifteen days in Paris, but
he spent them in Mazas, from which he was released and restored to
his home by his schoolmaster. The second time, a few days later, he
sold his watch, which paid for his railway ticket. This time he threw
himself on the hospitality of André Gill, a painter and verse-writer,
of some little notoriety then, whose address he had happened to come
across. The uninvited guest was not welcomed, and after some penniless
days in Paris he tramped back to Charleville. The third time (he had
waited five months, writing poems, and discontented to be only writing
poems) he made his way to Paris on foot, in a heat of revolutionary
sympathy, to offer himself to the insurgents of the Commune. Again he
had to return on foot. Finally, having learnt with difficulty that a
man is not taken at his own valuation until he has proved his right to
be so accepted, he sent up the manuscript of his poems to Verlaine.
The manuscript contained _Le Bateau Ivre, Les Premières Communions, Ma
Bohème, Roman, Les Effarés,_ and, indeed, all but a few of the poems
he ever wrote. Verlaine was overwhelmed with delight, and invited him
to Paris. A local admirer lent him the money to get there, and from
October, 1871, to July, 1872, he was Verlaine's guest.
The boy of seventeen, already a perfectly original poet, and beginning
to be an equally original prose-writer, astonished the whole Parnasse,
Banville, Hugo himself. On Verlaine his influence was more profound.
The meeting brought about one of those lamentable and admirable
disasters which make and unmake careers. Verlaine has told us in his
_Confessions_ that, "in the beginning, there was no question of any
sort of affection or sympathy between two natures so different as
that of the poet of the _Assis_ and mine, but simply of an extreme
admiration and astonishment before this boy of sixteen, who had already
written things, as Fénéon has excellently said, 'perhaps outside
literature.'" This admiration and astonishment passed gradually into
a more personal feeling, and it was under the influence of Rimbaud
that the long vagabondage of Verlaine's life began. The two poets
wandered together through Belgium, England, and again Belgium, from
July, 1872, to August, 1873, when there occurred that tragic parting at
Brussels which left Verlaine a prisoner for eighteen months, and sent
Rimbaud back to his family. He had already written all the poetry and
prose that he was ever to write, and in 1873 he printed at Brussels
_Une Saison en Enfer._ It was the only book he himself ever gave to
the press, and no sooner was it printed than he destroyed the whole
edition, with the exception of a few copies, of which only Verlaine's
copy, I believe, still exists. Soon began new wanderings, with their
invariable return to the starting-point of Charleville: a few days
in Paris, a year in England, four months in Stuttgart (where he was
visited by Verlaine), Italy, France again, Vienna, Java, Holland,
Sweden, Egypt, Cyprus, Abyssinia, and then nothing but Africa, until
the final return to France. He had been a teacher of French in England,
a seller of key-rings in the streets of Paris, had unloaded vessels
in the ports, and helped to gather in the harvest in the country;
he had been a volunteer in the Dutch army, a military engineer, a
trader; and now physical sciences had begun to attract his insatiable
curiosity, and dreams of the fabulous East began to resolve themselves
into dreams of a romantic commerce with the real East. He became a
merchant of coffee, perfumes, ivory, and gold, in the interior of
Africa; then an explorer, a predecessor, and in his own regions, of
Marchand. After twelve years' wandering and exposure in Africa he was
attacked by a malady of the knee, which rapidly became worse. He was
transported first to Aden, then to Marseilles, where, in May, 1891, his
leg was amputated. Further complications set in. He insisted, first,
on being removed to his home, then on being taken back to Marseilles.
His sufferings were an intolerable torment, and more cruel to him was
the torment of his desire to live. He died inch by inch, fighting
every inch; and his sister's quiet narrative of those last months is
agonising. He died at Marseilles in November, "prophesying," says his
sister, and repeating, "Allah Kerim! Allah Kerim!"
The secret of Rimbaud, I think, and the reason why he was able to do
the unique thing in literature which he did, and then to disappear
quietly and become a legend in the East, is that his mind was not
the mind of the artist but of the man of action. He was a dreamer,
but all his dreams were discoveries. To him it was an identical act
of his temperament to write the sonnet of the _Vowels_ and to trade
in ivory and frankincense with the Arabs. He lived with all his
faculties at every instant of his life, abandoning himself to himself
with a confidence which was at once his strength and (looking at
things less absolutely) his weakness. To the student of success, and
what is relative in achievement, he illustrates the danger of one's
over-possession by one's own genius, just as aptly as the saint in the
cloister does, or the mystic too full of God to speak intelligibly to
the world, or the spilt wisdom of the drunkard. The artist who is above
all, things an artist cultivates a little choice corner of himself
with elaborate care; he brings miraculous flowers to growth there, but
the rest of the garden is but mown grass or tangled bushes. That is
why many excellent writers very many painters, and most musicians are
so tedious on any subject but their own. Is it not tempting, does it
not seem a devotion rather than a superstition, to worship the golden
chalice in which the wine has been made God, as if the chalice were the
reality, and the Real Presence the symbol? The artist, who is only an
artist, circumscribes his intelligence into almost such a fiction, as
he reverences the work of his own hands. But there are certain natures
(great or small, Shakespeare or Rimbaud, it makes no difference) to
whom the work is nothing; the act of working, everything. Rimbaud was
a small, narrow, hard, precipitate nature, which had the will to live,
and nothing but the will to live; and his verses, and his follies,
and his wanderings, and his traffickings were but the breathing of
different hours in his day.
That is why he is so swift, definite, and quickly exhausted in vision;
why he had his few things to say, each an action with consequences.
He invents new ways of saying things, not because he is a learned
artist, but because he is burning to say them, and he has none of
the hesitations of knowledge. He leaps right over or through the
conventions that had been standing in everybody's way; he has no time
to go round, and no respect for trespass-boards, and so he becomes the
_enfant terrible_ of literature, playing pranks (as in that sonnet of
the _Vowels),_ knocking down barriers for the mere amusement of the
thing, getting all the possible advantage of his barbarisms in mind
and conduct. And so, in life, he is first of all conspicuous as a
disorderly liver, a révolter against morals as against prosody, though
we may imagine that, in his heart, morals meant as little to him, one
way or the other, as prosody. Later on, his revolt seems to be against
civilisation itself, as he disappears into the deserts of Africa. And
it is, if you like, a revolt against civilisation, but the revolt is
instinctive, a need of the organism; it is not doctrinal, cynical, a
conviction, a sentiment.
Always, as he says _rêvant univers fantastiques,_ he is conscious
of the danger as well as the ecstasy of that divine imitation; for
he says: "My life will always be too vast to be given up wholly to
force and beauty." _J'attends Dieu avec gourmandise,_ he cries, in a
fine rapture; and then, sadly enough: "I have created all the feasts,
all the triumphs, all the dramas of the world. I have set myself to
invent new flowers, a new flesh, a new language. I have fancied that
I have attained supernatural power. Well, I have now only to put my
imagination and my memories in the grave. What a fine artist's and
story-teller's fame thrown away!" See how completely he is conscious,
and how completely he is at the mercy, of that hallucinatory rage of
vision, vision to him being always force, power, creation, which, on
some of his pages, seems to become sheer madness, and on others a
kind of wild but absolute insight. He will be silent, he tells us,
as to all that he contains within his mind, "greedy as the sea," for
otherwise poets and visionaries would envy him his fantastic wealth.
And, in that _Nuit d'Enfer,_ which does not bear that title in vain,
he exalts himself as a kind of saviour; he is in the circle of pride
in Dante's hell, and he has lost all sense of limit, really believes
himself to be "no one and some one." Then, in the _Alchimie du Verbe,_
he becomes the analyst of his own hallucinations. "I believe in all
the enchantments," he tells us; "I invented the colour of the vowels;
A, black; E, white; I, red; O, blue; U, green. I regulated the form
and the movement of every consonant, and, with instinctive rhythms, I
flattered myself that I had invented a poetic language accessible, one
day or another, to every shade of meaning. I reserved to myself the
right of translation."[1]
Coincidence or origin, it has lately been pointed out that Rimbaud may
formerly have seen an old ABC book in which the vowels are coloured
for the most part as his are (A, black; E, white; I, red; O, blue; U,
green). In the little illustrative pictures around them some are oddly
in keeping with the image of Rimbaud.
"... I accustomed myself to simple hallucination: I saw, quite frankly,
a mosque in place of a factory, a school of drums kept by the angels,
post-chaises on the roads of heaven, a drawing-room at the bottom of a
lake; monsters, mysteries; the title of a vaudeville raised up horrors
before me. Then I explained my magical sophisms by the hallucination of
words! I ended by finding something sacred in the disorder of my mind."
Then he makes the great discovery. Action, one sees, this fraudulent
and insistent will to live, has been at the root of all these mental
and verbal orgies, in which he has been wasting the "very substance of
his thought." Well, "action," he discovers, "is not life, but a way of
spoiling something." Even this is a form of enervation, and must be
rejected from the absolute. _Mon devoir m'est remis. Il ne faut plus
songer à cela. Je suis réellement d'outre-tombe, et pas de commissions._
It is for the absolute that he seeks, always; the absolute which the
great artist, with his careful wisdom, has renounced seeking. And,
he is content with nothing less; hence his own contempt for what he
has done, after all, so easily; for what has come to him, perhaps
through his impatience, but imperfectly. He is a dreamer in whom dream
is swift, hard in outline, coming suddenly and going suddenly, a real
thing, but seen only in passing. Visions rush past him, he cannot
arrest them; they rush forth from him, he cannot restrain their haste
to be gone, as he creates them in the mere indiscriminate idleness
of energy. And so this seeker after the absolute leaves but a broken
medley of fragments, into each of which he has put a little of his
personality, which he is forever dramatising, by multiplying one facet,
so to speak, after another. Very genuinely, he is now a beaten and
wandering ship, flying in a sort of intoxication before the wind, over
undiscovered seas; now a starving child outside a baker's window, in
the very ecstasy of hunger; now _la victime et la petite épouse_ of the
first communion; now:
Je ne parlerai pas, je ne penserai rien;
Mais l'amour infini me montera dans l'âme,
Et j'irai loin, bien loin, comme un bohémien,
Par la Nature, heureux comme avec une femme!
He catches at verse, at prose, invents a sort of _vers libre_ before
any one else, not quite knowing what to do with it, invents a quite
new way of writing prose, which Laforgue will turn to account later on;
and having suggested, with some impatience, half the things that his
own and the next generation are to busy themselves with developing, he
gives up writing, as an inadequate form, to which he is also inadequate.
What, then, is the actual value of Rimbaud's work, in verse and prose,
apart from its relative values of so many kinds? I think, considerable;
though it will probably come to rest on two or three pieces of verse,
and a still vaguer accomplishment in prose. He brought into French
verse something of that "gipsy way of going with nature, as with a
woman"; a very young, very crude, very defiant and sometimes very
masterly sense of just these real things which are too close to us to
be seen by most people with any clearness. He could render physical
sensation, of the subtlest kind, without making any compromise with
language, forcing language to speak straight, taming it as one would
tame a dangerous animal. And he kneaded prose as he kneaded verse,
making it a disarticulated, abstract, mathematically lyrical thing. In
verse, he pointed the way to certain new splendours, as to certain new
_naïvetés;_ there is the _Bateau Ivre,_ without which we might never
have had Verlaine's _Crimen Amoris._ And, intertangled with what is
ingenuous, and with what is splendid, there is a certain irony, which
comes into that youthful work as if youth were already reminiscent
of itself, so conscious is it that youth is youth, and that youth is
passing.
In all these ways, Rimbaud had his influence upon Verlaine, and his
influence upon Verlaine was above all the influence of the man of
action upon the man of sensation; the influence of what is simple,
narrow, emphatic, upon what is subtle, complex, growing. Verlaine's
rich, sensitive nature was just then trying to realise itself. Just
because it had such delicate possibilities, because there were so many
directions in which it could grow, it was not at first quite sure of
its way. Rimbaud came into the life and, art of Verlaine, troubling
both, with that trouble which reveals a man to himself. Having helped
to make Verlaine a great poet, he could go. Note that he himself could
never have developed: writing had been one of his discoveries; he could
but make other discoveries, personal ones. Even in literature he had
his future; but his future was Verlaine.
[1] Here is the famous sonnet, which must be taken, as it was meant,
without undue seriousness, and yet as something more than a mere joke.