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.