Rimbaud was a contentious, bumptious, conceited, selfish, pigheaded, insensitive young hobo who in three years of his youthful life wrote the best poetry of France since Baudelaire. He printed only one book, Une Saison en Enfer, an epitome of his mind’s life. When he was eighteen he stopped writing and began wandering, scoffing at literature, regretting his part in its creation, and scorning recognition of a position among the writers of his country.
He tramped, he travelled with a circus, he was overseer in a stone quarry, and finally landed in Africa where he lived the last nineteen years of his life, pioneering, exploring, merchandising. Then, just as he was about to secure a modest competency and to see his dream of fireside and family come true, a parasite possessed him. When he reached Marseilles the surgeons amputated a leg, and he died soon after, in the odour of sanctity and in his thirty-eighth year. His devoted, pious sister, Isabelle, has told of his last days with fervid affection in a booklet Mon Frère Arthur, and Ernest Delahaye, who knew, understood, loved, and tolerated him perhaps more than any one, published in 1923 a volume which pleased both the critics and Rimbaud’s friends. About the same time an industrious critic of French letters, Maurice Coulon, published a volume, Le Problème de Rimbaud, Poète Maudit.
Rimbaud has been dead nearly thirty-five years. His literary output is the smallest on record. His poetry, although generally admitted to stand beside that of Hugo, Vigny, and Musset, has no human interest; he does not sing of love, he does not chant the virtues of his country or its people. Probably not one reader in twenty is touched by Les Illuminations, and not one in ten discerns his thesis or his philosophy in Une Saison en Enfer.
What then is the explanation of this sustained interest in him? Why does posterity extol him and neglect Gérard de Nerval, who brought to the light of day a long hidden pediment of literature: the æsthetics of symbolism? The answer is easily given. His “affair” with Verlaine is the human interest of Arthur Rimbaud. People like to read about him as they like to read Town Topics or Le Cri de Paris. Mr. Rickword is to be congratulated on rendering the theme with his foot on the soft pedal. Had he called his book The Taming by Time of an Antinomian, it would have been a comprehensive and a just title.
The wide dissemination of the Freudian theories is responsible in a measure for the keen interest of the reading public in sexual fixations, their manifestations and liberations. Rimbaud apparently got stuck on third base in the game of life, but there are many indications that he was stealing home when the bell rang.
VI
WARRIORS
Lord Wolseley, by Maj.-Gen. Sir Frederick Maurice and Sir George Arthur.
Robert E. Lee the Soldier, by Sir Frederick Maurice.
The biographies of men who make history are as a rule more remarkable for the “action” they display than for the thought they invite. History is not made by thinking about it: it requires the combination of thought and deeds. When a man is endowed with the capacity for both; when he lives at a time in which his country needs the intelligent effort of its children to carry on its traditions, and when fate has been kind enough to call one of them to service at such a time, the story of that man’s life must be inviting, instructive and inspiring. All this is true of Lord Wolseley. Early in his career, at the time of the Civil War, Wolseley was sent to Canada to prepare for a possible war with the United States, which Abraham Lincoln, in his wisdom, prevented. Garnet Wolseley, from the time of his ensign’s commission in 1852 a diligent student of warfare, availed himself of the opportunity to study it first hand which a visit to General Lee offered him. He rated Lee’s military ability very high and from this meeting dated a friendship between the two, founded on admiration, which lasted until Lee’s death. The biographer of Lord Wolseley is also the biographer of Robert Lee and some of the unqualified praise of Lee with which Sir Maurice sprinkled his book had its origin in Wolseley’s admiration of the Southern leader.
But Sir Maurice is not alone responsible for this biography of Lord Wolseley; he collaborated with Sir George Arthur, and the combination of a military man with a literary student seems to have been a happy one.
It is perhaps unjust that the present generation should know Kitchener better than it does Wolseley; that it should place the one on a high altar of martyrdom and sacrifice, and practically ignore the other. Kitchener had all the odds in his favour; he was the man when the World War started; his death or disappearance reacted on popular imagination in extraordinary fashion, and the mystery of his end appealed to our taste for the fantastic and the incredible. But what Lord Kitchener did for the British Army, was started by Lord Wolseley; Kitchener put together the stones that his predecessor in the highest military rank in Great Britain, had assembled, and he built on the foundations which Lord Wolseley dug and prepared. At least, this is the statement of his biographers who surveyed the subject with apparent impartiality and integrity. Some authoritative authors have already passed judgment on the quality of the British Army during the days of the Boer War, and it may not be in all points favourable to the memory of their Chief; but if the courage and efficiency of the Army as these qualities were displayed in the Great War, were the result of Lord Wolseley’s love for, and intelligent attention to, the needs and ethics of the Army which fought under the Union Jack, all our gratitude, our admiration and our praise should go to the man whose influence was still felt in 1914. Never could an Army, got together with the rapidity with which the British Army was formed in those days, as untrained as it was, and as large as it grew, have done what it did, in the way it did it, if some great heart and illumined mind had not been present at its early formation and at its origin. Lord Wolseley reorganised the British Army, he fought with all his power the “wicked” practice of buying commissions in the Army, he prepared a real system of mobilisation; he remodelled the machinery for supplying the Army with food and munitions; he gave a stirring impulse to military education and practical training, and he directed the attention of statesmen to the problems of national defence and made them, as well as the soldiers and sailors, concentrate on it. His activities were incessant; his public life was long in years and rich in deeds.