for the benefit of society. Similar declarations were attached to the constitution of 1793 and to that of the year III.
See E. Blum, La Déclaration des droits de l'homme et du citoyen, text with commentary (Paris, 1902); L. Bourgeois and A. Metin, Declaration des droits de l'homme et du citoyen, 1789 (Paris, 1901); G. Jellinck, Die Erklärung der Menschen und Bürgerrechte (Leipzig, 1895). This study has been translated into English by Rudolf Tombo (New York), and has aroused considerable controversy; see E. Boutmy, “ La Déclaration des droits de l'homme et du citoyen et M. Jellinck," in Annales des sciences politiques for the 15th of July 1902; also E. Walsh, La Déclaration des droits de l'homme et du citoyen et l'assemblée constituent, Travaux préparatoires (Paris, 1903 .
RIGORD (c. 1150–c. 1209), French chronicler, was probably
born near Alais in Languedoc, and became a physician. Afterwards
becoming a monk he entered the monastery of Argenteuil,
and then that of St Denis, and described himself as regis
Francorum chronographus. Rigor wrote the Gesta Philippi
Augusti, dealing with the life of the French king, Philip
Augustus, from his coronation in 1179 until 1206. The work,
which is very valuable, was abridged and continued by William the Breton (q.v.). The earlier part of the Gesta speaks of the
king in very laudatory terms, but in the latter part it is much
less flattering in its tone. It is published in tome xvii. of
Dom Bouquet's Recueil des historians des Gaules et de la France
(Paris, 1738–1876); and with introduction by H. F. Delaborde
(Paris, 1882–85). A French translation of the Gesta is in tome
xi. of Guizot's Collection des mémoires relatifs à l'histoire de
France (Paris, 1825). Rigord also wrote a short chronicle of
the kings of France.
See A. Potthast, Bibliotheca historica (Berlin, 1896); and A. Molinier, Les Sources de l'histoire de France, tome iii. (Paris, 1903).
RIGORISM (Lat. rigor, stillness, firmness), a philosophical
term applied by Kant specially to those moralists who take up
an anti-hedonist or ascetic standpoint. In general the term
is opposed to “ latitudinarianism ” or “ indifferentism,”—respectively
a morality of compromise and a morality of pure
indifference,—and signifies insistence upon the strictest interpretation
of a principle, rule or criterion. Thus, in Roman
Catholic theology, a rigorist holds that in cases of conscience
the proper course is to adhere to the strict wording of the law
in question.
RILEY, JAMES WHITCOMB (1853–), American poet,
was born in Greenfield, Indiana, in 1853. He spent several
years as an itinerant, sign-painter, actor and musician. During
this vagabond experience he had opportunities to revise plays
and compose songs, and was brought into close touch with
the rural folk of Indiana, becoming familiar with their life and
speech. About 1873 he first contributed verses, especially in
the Hoosier dialect, to the papers, and he soon became local
editor of the Anderson (Ind.) Democrat. In August 1877, over
the initials “ E.A.P.,” he printed in the Kokomo (Indiana)
Dispatch a poem, Leonainie, in the manner of Poe.[1] The press
throughout the country copied the poem, and many critics
of acknowledged authority believed it to have been actually
written by Poe, until the hoax was explained by the paper in
which it first appeared. To the Indianapolis Daily Journal
Riley contributed many poems, the best known being a series
in dialect which purported to have been written by one “ Benjamin
F. Johnson, of Boone,” a farmer. These he published
in book form, under the same pen-name, as The Old Swimmin' Hole and 'Leven More Poems (1883). He wrote short stories and
sketches, some of unusual merit, but is known almost exclusively
as a poet. Of his poems some are in conventional English, many
others in the Hoosier dialect of the Middle-West. His materials
are the homely incidents and aspects of village and country life,
especially of Indiana, and his manner is marked by delicate
imagination and naive humour and tenderness.
The bulk of his work appeared in The Boss Girl and Other Sketches (1886), republished in 1891 as Sketches in Prose; Afterwhiles (1887); Pipes o' Pan at Zekesbury (1888); Rhymes of Childhood (1890); Neighborly Poems (1891); The Flying Islands of the Night (1891), a fantastic blank verse drama; Green Fields and Running Brooks (1892); Poems Here at Home (189); Armazindy (1894), which contains the poem “ Leonainie "; A Child-World (1896), reminiscent of his own boyhood; The Rubdiyát of Doc Sifers (1897); Home Folks (1900); The Book of Joyous Children (1902); His Pa's Romance (1903); A Defective Santa Claus (1904); and in several books of selections, such as Old Fashioned Roses (1889), published in England; Child Rhymes (1898); Love Lyrics (1899); The Golden Year (1899), published in England; Farm Rhymes (1901); An Old Sweetheart of Mine (1902); Out to Old Aunt Mary's (1904); Songs o' Cheer (1905); Morning (1907); and Songs of Summer (1908).
RIMBAUD, JEAN ARTHUR (1854–1891), French poet and
adventurer, was born at Charleville, in the Ardennes, on the 20th
of October 1854. He was the second son of a captain in the
French army, who in 1860 abandoned his wife and family.
From early childhood Arthur Rimbaud, who was severely
brought up by his mother, displayed rich intellectual gifts and a
sullen, violent temperament. He began to write when he was
ten, and some of the poems which now appear in his works belong
to his fifteenth year. Before he was sixteen, in consequence of a
violent quarrel with his mother, the boy escaped from Charleville
with a packet of his verse, was arrested as a vagabond, and for a
fortnight was locked up in the Mazas prison, Paris. A few days
after being taken home Rimbaud escaped again, into Belgium,
where he lived for some time as a tramp, almost starved, but
writing verses with feverish assiduity. In February 1871 he left
his mother for a third time, and made his way to Paris, where he
knew no one, and whence, after very nearly dying of hunger and
exposure, he begged his way back to Charleville. There he wrote
in the same year the extraordinary poem of Le Bateau ire, which
is now hailed as the pioneer of the entire “ symbolist ” or
“ decadent ” movement in French literature in all its forms.
He sent it to Verlaine, who encouraged the boy of seventeen
(whom he supposed to be a man of thirty) to come again to Paris.
Rimbaud spent from October 1871 to July 1872 in the capital,
partly with Verlaine, partly as the guest of Theodore de Banville,
and served in the army of the Commune. With Verlaine he
travelled for thirteen months, after the fall of the Commune,
through England and Belgium, where in 1873 he published the
only work which he ever printed, Une Saison en Enfer, in prose;
in this he gives an allegorical account of his extravagant relations
with Verlaine, which ended at Brussels by a double attempt of
the latter to murder his young companion. On the second
occasion Rimbaud was dangerously wounded by Verlaine's
revolver, and the elder poet was imprisoned at Mons for two
years. Meanwhile Rimbaud, deeply disillusioned, determined
to abandon Europe and literature, and he ceased at the age of
nineteen to write poetry. He settled for a while at Stuttgart,
studying German, and in 1875 he disappeared. He set out on
foot for Italy, and after extraordinary adventures found employment
as a day-labourer in the docks at Leghorn. Returning to
Paris, he obtained a little money from his mother, and then
definitely vanished. For sixteen years nothing whatever was
heard of him, but it is now known that he embarked as a Dutch
soldier for the Sunda Isles, and, presently deserting, fled to
Sumatra and then to Java, where he lived for some time in the
forest. Returning to Europe, after a vagabond life in every
capital, he obtained in 1880 some menial employment in the
quarries of Cyprus, and then worked his way to Aden and up
into. Abyssinia, where he was one of the pioneers of European
commercial adventure. Here he settled, at Harrar, as a trader
in coffee and perfumes, to which he afterwards added gold and
ivory; for the next eleven years, during which he led many
commercial expeditions into unknown parts of northern Africa,
Shoa and Harrar were his headquarters, and he lived almost
entirely with the natives, and as one of themselves. From 1888
to 1891, having prospered greatly as a merchant, he became
a sort of semi-independent chieftain, intriguing for France, just
- ↑ The poem was accompanied by a statement from the editor of the paper that it was “ from the gifted pen of the erratic poet, Edgar Allan Poe," and by a circumstantial story to the effect that the poem had been found written on the fly-leaf of an old Latin-English dictionary then owned by “ an uneducated and illiterate man ” in Kokomo, who had received it from his grandfather, in whose tavern, near Richmond, Va., it had been left by “ a young man who showed plainly the marks of dissipation.”
