The strange things that befall vagabonds on their return! The Laird of
Kinnaird found himself a rich man on his arrival in Stirlingshire. Coal
had been discovered on his properties.
A Scots laird and a travelled gentleman riding about his property on
that largest horse ever seen in Scotland, marrying again and happily,
and bringing up a family. He must have often wondered what became of
all the great folk to whom he had once been Yagoube the counsellor. Ras
Michael,—what of him? Did he ever know that the old man fought his way
back to power, and died still holding the kingdom in his hand? And Ayto
Consu, the young prince with whom he had sworn eternal friendship in the
Abyssinian phrase—“by the heart of an elephant”? And Ozoro Esther whom he
had last seen in the forest going to Jerusalem to pray for Ras Michael,
taken from her by the troops of Begemder?
His story, when he came to tell it, was but half believed. The fierce,
magnificent, passionate revelation offended the eighteenth century mind.
What had a century of laces, gallantry and candles, a century trying
to live by something known as “reason,” to do with this kingdom of the
old, dark deities? The offence to the spirit of the age presently bred
a spirit of denial. “Pshaw,” said the bewigged gentleman, “but does the
dog think to fool us all with his Abyssinian folderol?” Even wise old
Johnson took sides against “the Abyssinian.” It was “Rasselas, Prince of
Abyssinia” against the reality.
The episode of the repast of living flesh became a thing of derision.
Lord This refused to believe it; Lady That shuddered prettily, the coffee
house wits wrote mocking poetry.
“Nor have I been where men, (what loss, alas!)
Kill half a cow, and turn the rest to grass.”
sang that dull rhymester Peter Pindar, in a tedious epistle to Bruce full
of a stay-at-home’s easy jocosity. Bruce’s one official honour was a
presentation to the king; all other possible glories sank from view in a
rising tide of offended disbelief.
A lesser man, a man less able to see life as a whole, would have borne
the world a sour grudge. Not so the Laird of Kinnaird. He lived out his
years in good temper and unshaken composure. But in his later portraits
there is a look which tells the whole story of his attitude to the
polite world of disbelievers; the words can almost be heard—words
not said angrily or sneeringly, but with well-founded and humorous
conviction—“what incredible fools!”
_Six_: ARTHUR RIMBAUD
_Six_: ARTHUR RIMBAUD
I
In the Paris of the late eighties, when men of letters met for a _p’tit
verre_ or a glass of coffee at a boulevard café, a question was often
asked that had no answer but a shrug—what in heaven’s name had become
of Arthur Rimbaud, the poet? The older men remembered him well, this
overgrown, unmannerly whelp of eighteen who had suddenly appeared among
them from some dull town in the Ardennes, and had made his way into
the literary heart of things; they remembered the sensation which had
followed Verlaine’s publication of his poetry.
What liberties the boy had taken with the spirit and the forms of verse;
the young wipe-nose-on-his-sleeve had disordered the whole world of
poetry with his free rhymes, his poems in prose, his prose in poems, and
his raving sonnets on the colours of vowels. “I accustomed myself,” he
had said, “to direct hallucination, and managed quite easily to see a
mosque where stood a factory, a school of drums kept by angels, wagons
on the roads of heaven, a drawing room at the bottom of a lake; monsters
and mysteries, a whole vaudeville, in fact, lifted heads of terror
before me.” He had written of a day in spring, “Lying sprawled in the
valley one feels that the earth is nuptial and overbrims with blood.” A
strange eighteen-year-old! Some remembered the boy in his square-cut,
double-breasted jacket of the seventies, his little, flat, pancake hat,
pipe, and long, womanish hair hiding the back of his collar and touching
his shoulders.
And now the younger generation were reading him with enthusiasm, copying
his mood and manner, and annoying their elders with questions about him.
Tell us of Arthur Rimbaud. Is he still alive? Did he ever actually exist?
Is he simply a ghost whose name Verlaine has chosen as a pseudonym?
“Dead crazy, or king of a desert island,” said the bookish Vanier to
a young student stirred by the reading of Rimbaud’s _Illuminations_.
“On several occasions there have been rumors of his death,” said Paul
Verlaine. “We can not confirm the news, and would be saddened by finding
it the truth.”
[Illustration: ARTHUR RIMBAUD]
What had become of the runaway boy from the Ardennes, the boy with the
sulky mouth and hostile, insolent, and splendid eyes, the boy who ran
away from home to live like a strolling ragamuffin, cheeked his elders,
wrote astounding verses, and first made use of the new and alarming
freedoms of modern poetry?
Had an angel suddenly descended to the boulevards of Paris, grasped a
meditating literary nabob by the hair, and whisked him from his marble
table and his café au lait to the burning beach of French Somaliland,
the man of letters would have found a trader adding up the wriggling
figures of a French account. There would not have been a book about
to suggest literature; the trader was not interested in literature,—a
silly business; he was interested in figures and trade like any sensible
Frenchman with his life to gain. Figures, snaky French fives and sevens
written down in purple ink under the Somali sun, notes about coffee and
hides and firearms. The trader was M. Arthur Rimbaud. Had the nabob
rushed to tell him that all young Paris was buzzing with his name, he
probably would have been greeted with a rather unpleasant laugh.
No account exists in English of the mysterious last years of Rimbaud
turned vagabond and African trader, for the material is difficult to
assemble, and the tale has to be pieced out from notes in stray letters,
reports of the Colonial office, and even the proceedings of British
learned societies. Moreover, there exists no study of the purely vagabond
side of his unique career.
Arthur Rimbaud was born in Charleville in French Flanders on October
20th, 1854. It is a dull industrial town in a dull region given over to a
Victorian industrialism of weeds, rust, broken windows, and little brick
workshops, an industrialism without any dignity of power.
His father, an army officer, having a roving disposition, and his mother
“an authoritative air,” they agreed to separate, and the boy was brought
up by the mother. The family was not rich exactly, yet was comfortably
off in the careful French way; there were brothers and sisters for Arthur
to grow up with, and things went well enough till Arthur’s fifteenth
year. Then came to pass in that plain bourgeois house a situation quite
without a parallel. Arthur, having grown into a lank, gawky, sulky
boy with large hands and a provincial twang to his speech, began to
develop into a genius with the ripened intellect of an adult, and this
sulky child with the amazing grown-up mind remained subject to the
purse strings and parental direction of a common-place, ill-educated,
middle-aged woman who lacked acuteness of mind to see the change.
Much has been written of Mme. Rimbaud’s “domination” of the prodigy, and
its effect on the boy’s mind. Yet the mother does not appear to have been
unduly harsh or unfeeling; she simply was incapable of understanding the
mind of her son. Moreover, she was not without that sense of terror and
exasperation which consumes parents who find the children of their flesh
developing alien minds and alien ways.
From so grotesque and abnormal a situation, the boy on whom genius had
descended, escaped by running away. He accompanied his mother and sisters
for a walk, pretended to wish to go home to get a book, and disappeared.
This first vagabondage, undertaken in the disordered war-year of 1870,
landed him in the jail for strays and political suspects at Mazas. His
one understanding friend, the young schoolmaster Izambard, then rescued
him, and sent him back to his mother. Mme. Rimbaud was naturally quite
upset. “I fear the little fool will get himself arrested a second time,”
she wrote to Izambard; “he need never then return, for I swear that
never in my life should I ever receive him again. How is it possible to
understand the foolishness of the child, he who is so good and quiet
ordinarily?”
She did not want her Arthur to be a vagabond. The word has a far
different connotation in French than it has in English. In English,
it has acquired something of a poetic flavour; in French it is still
decidedly a term of reproach. The French, who plan their lives and their
children’s lives with a minuteness Englishmen and Americans can never
understand, see nothing romantic in a high road wanderer without a
definite place in life or a definite goal. The sense of the definite goal
is keen in France.
Imagine, then, the anger and despair of Mme. Rimbaud, good Frenchwoman
that she was, when her sixteen-year-old genius took to sleeping in
barns and following the road. She felt the same way about it an English
mother might feel about a son’s inclination to take spoons. There is
still another element in the relation of Arthur and his mother which
escapes the English or American student of Rimbaud’s life, and that is
the supreme place of the parent in the hierarchy of the French family.
Arthur’s escapades were a blow to Mme. Rimbaud’s authority and prestige;
in the eyes of the French neighbourhood Arthur’s vagabondage shamed the
mother as well as the son.
After his first return, the boy endured the old, impossible situation
for a week, and then fled once more from Charleville. Brussels sees him,
and Paris, a boy with worn, dusty clothes staring into the windows of
bookshops. At Paris he joined the Communist army for a while. Having been
given no uniform, he escaped the general massacre of the insurrectionary
troops, and went eastward over the road to Rheims and Château-Thierry. He
had no money, but he had youth, his dreams, and a colossal impudence. On
occasion he would invade houses while the owners were away in the fields,
and go to bed in the best bed. The manœuvre was not always as successful
as the boy might have hoped.
There rises before the mind’s eye a picture of the gawky, impudent,
runaway stripling with the insolent eyes trudging the white roads
of France with their fine, sharp surface dust and underbody hard and
relentless as a ribbon of solid stone; one sees him pass the haycocks
in the fields, the yellow-green of river meadows, the opaque, greenish
streams, the poplars, and village chimneys curling up wood smoke into the
rosy, humid dawn.
The boy enjoyed the bohemian adventure, and found a place in his mind for
its sordid side.
Through 1870 and most of 1871 he comes and goes; he writes, he sulks, he
listens to impressive lectures about the heavy necessity of beginning
to think of a profession or a career. Arthur, sulkily imprisoned in his
abominated Charleville,—“my native town leads in imbecility among small
provincial towns”—had a horror of dull labour. He saw too much of it
about him. “Masters and workmen, yokels all of them, all ignoble. The
hand with the pen is worth the hand with the plough. What a century of
hands!” Said Verlaine, “He had a high disdain for whatever he did not
wish to do or be.”
Presently comes the great change and the first real opportunity. He sends
a sheaf of poems to Paul Verlaine, and Verlaine replies inviting him to
be his guest in Paris.
From an abnormal situation the boy thus advanced to an absurd one. The
Verlaines were poor, and the poet and his seventeen-year-old wife were
living with the wife’s parents in order to save money. They may have been
prepared for the coming of a young man, even a very young man, but this
gawky, queer, unmanageable seventeen-year-old boy...! It is clear that
he soon came to be regarded as an inconvenient intruder by the practical
ladies of the poet’s family.
In spite of his difficulties, many of his own making, the year 1871-’72
was Rimbaud’s great year. He perfected his theory that the maker of
poetry should be a _seer_, and practise “the long, immense, and reasoned
disordering of the senses,” and give to the world “the supreme exaltation
arrived at through things unheard of and unnameable.” The Parisian
literary world, not knowing what to make of art so disorderly and
personal, Rimbaud took his familiar refuge in rudeness. A consciousness
of his genius strengthened the wings of his pride. In odds and ends of
time, in order to gain a little money, he hawked key rings under the
arcades of the Rue de Rivoli. Paris beginning to bore him, he actually
returned for a little time to Charleville.
While Rimbaud was at Charleville, Verlaine, beset by family troubles,
wrote to him begging him to join him in a vagabond tour. Rimbaud, whose
consciousness was melting in the flame of hallucinations and poetic
ecstasies, accepted at once, and in July, 1872, the two poets set off
together. “I sought the sea, as if it were to cleanse me from a stain,”
wrote Rimbaud. A curious pair and a curious pilgrimage. One has a
glimpse of mean lodgings, gutters, roadsides, empty pockets, visions,
exaltations, absinthe, dirt and debt. From Belgium, they went to England,
where each gathered a few pence teaching French. Returning to Brussels
in July, 1873, Verlaine, while in some kind of mental state best studied
by psychopathologists, shot his fellow poet in the wrist with a pistol,
and was promptly imprisoned by the Belgian authorities. The wound was not
serious.
Mme. Rimbaud owned a kind of farm and country house at Roche, and later
in the same month of July she suddenly saw Arthur coming towards the gate
with his arm in a sling. Now comes a problem to be answered by those who
study genius; Rimbaud ceased writing poetry forever. The verse which was
to stir France and mould a world style was thus the work of a boy in his
eighteenth year. What had taken place? Had his capricious genius flown
away to another bough? Had his poetry of visions and hallucinations begun
to uncover mysteries beyond the power of the human spirit to endure? Had
some intense satisfaction he had known in the composition of poetry begun
to fade?
Such is the tale of Arthur Rimbaud’s bizarre career as a poet. Is it a
wonder that the younger generation wished to know what had become of the
man?