ARTHUR RIMBAUD.

Youthful Genius.

There is one curious difference between the early manifestation of genius in literature and other aesthetic endeavours (writes Professor W. A. Osborne, in The Melbourne Argus). In music and in art we almost expect precocity, whereas in literature adolescent achievements have, with the rarest exceptions, been callow and unprophetic of subsequent success. Byron and Tennyson entered vigorous protests against their reviews of their early published poems; but one must in fairness ask whether the reviewers had material, before them which would warrant eulogy and prophecy of greatness. The early published poems of Shakespeare and Shelley, it must be confessed, displayed little promise of the supreme position these authors would afterwards occupy. Milton was 21 before he gave us the Nativity Ode. We have Chatterton, whose unhappy career ended when he was aged 18 years, but pity for his misfortunes is a stronger sentiment with us than admiration for his achievement. Wordsworth's reference to the "marvellous boy" will assuredly, keep Chatterton's memory greener, than the pseudo-antique poetry with which Chatterton tried to delude his contemporaries.
With Arthur Rimbaud matters were very different. Here we have a boy as proud and as unhappy as Chatterton and as much out of his element, but he has given us deathless poetry. He created a movement in French literature, and, as Arthur Symons has pointed out, he made a disciple of Verlaine, 10 years his senior; he evolved a new technique in both prose and poetry which others, such as Laforgue, were pleased to adopt.
Into Parisian literary circles he brought a spirit of exasperated anarchism which led him to fling abuse, not always savoury, at many of the idols of the time. There were three years of intense mental excitement, three years of creative artistic inspiration, and then, before he was 20 the eclipse came. He died? He did nothing of the sort; he neither died nor lost his reason; he simply abandoned literature, and became a man of action, roughing it in travel in all sorts of strange lands, a merchant adventurer in Abyssinia, a soldier, in Java, a sailor in an English ship, a rouseabout in a German circus, and a quarryman in Ceylon. The desire to travel and to learn the ways of mankind had become as imperious as the desire to write; and so literature passed out of his life. There, is one curious element in Rimbaud's defection from poetry; it was not merely a cessation of effort, but a violent dislike of all that he had written. One can only suggest that his poems awakened memories of acts of which he was heartily ashamed; there are circumstances in the story of his association with Verlaine that make this possible.

Undelivered Messages.

Now a rapid decline an mental energy in early manhood and a disappointing non-fulfilment of brilliant promise is common enough. I am not speaking of adolescent versifying, the rule rather than the exception, and of which the young man becomes ashamed when he meets the realities of life. Rimbaud's efforts were finished artistic triumphs. In some cases of declension we expect to find vicious habits grafted on a pathological stock; in others a disease like malaria, or hookworm, will reduce a sound, energetic mind to listlessness. History affords us examples of early promise and subsequent failure, the classic instance being Richard II. who, as a boy stood up to Wat Tyler, and showed superb presence of mind when facing the mob, and who later became the effeminate creature, who could not keep the crown on his head. But Rimbaud was not one of these; for after his renunciation of poetry his virility was unbounded. His intellectual powers and his quest of aesthetic gratification had apparently found another channel. Yet had Rimbaud died at 19, without doubt we should have deplored the loss if a very great poet whose message had just begun.
His story sets one thinking of the many great literary artists who have died young. Were their careers really cut short, or had they delivered their message? Had Keats and Stevenson been spared their fatal disease, one ventures to think that they could have enriched the world still further, for Stevenson was cut off in the middle of his best work, and Keats's agony at the unharvested riches of his brain is well known. But had Shelley lyrics still unuttered when he was drowned, and had Byron passion unproclaimed when he was fatally stricken with fever? I often think that Byron, like Rimbaud, would have chosen action rather than versifying and possibly might have made a flutter in the political dovecots. Shelley seemed to be drifting into chronic neurasthenia some time before his tragic voyage. Robert Burns was a spent force, more through toil and rheumatism than through alcohol, as has recently been pointed out.
We can only speculate, but the strange story of Arthur Rimbaud tells us that a poetic career may be eclipsed by the fascination of adventure and action. I have no doubt that there is a physiological explanation of such deviations of genius, but it is not so easy to indicate exactly what such may be. Assuredly Rimbaud the wanderer and explorer, was a different personality from the founder of the symbolist movement in French literature; it was not a matter of age, but of transportation of faculties, unexampled, I think, in literary history.

 The Register 7/8/1926,