I hope that the life of Léon Cladel by his daughter Judith, which
Lemerre has brought out in a pleasant volume, will do something for the
fame of one of the most original writers of our time. Cladel had the
good fortune to be recognised in his lifetime by those whose approval
mattered most, beginning with Baudelaire, who discovered him before
he had printed his first book, and helped to teach him the craft of
letters. But so exceptional an artist could never be popular, though he
worked in living stuff and put the whole savour of his countryside into
his tragic and passionate stories. A peasant, who writes about peasants
and poor people, with a curiosity of style which not only packs his
vocabulary with difficult words, old or local, and with unheard of
rhythms, chosen to give voice to some never yet articulated emotion,
but which drives him into oddities of printing, of punctuation, of the
very shape of his accents! A page of Cladel has a certain visible
uncouthness, and at first this seems in keeping with his matter; but
the uncouthness, when you look into it, turns out to be itself a
refinement, and what has seemed a confused whirl, an improvisation, to
be the result really of reiterated labour, whose whole aim has been to
bring the spontaneity of the first impulse back into the laboriously
finished work.
In this just, sensitive, and admirable book, written by one who has
inherited a not less passionate curiosity about life, but with more
patience in waiting upon it, watching it, noting its surprises, we
have a simple and sufficient commentary upon the books and upon the
man. The narrative has warmth and reserve, and is at once tender and
clear-sighted. _J'entrevois nettement,_ she says with truth, _combien
seront précieux pour les futurs historiens de la littérature du XIXe
siècle, les mémoires tracés au contact immédiat de l'artiste, exposés
de ses faits et gestes particuliers, de ses origines, de la germination
de ses croyances et de son talent; ses critiques à venir y trouveront
de solides matériaux, ses admirateurs un aliment à leur piété et les
philosophes un des aspects de l'Ame française._
The man is shown to us, _les élans de cette âme toujours grondante
et fulgurante comme une forge, et les nuances de ce fiévreux visage
d'apôtre, brun, fin et sinueux,_ and we see the inevitable growth,
out of the hard soil of Quercy and out of the fertilising contact of
Paris and Baudelaire, of this whole literature, these books no less
astonishing than their titles: _Ompdrailles-le-Tombeau-des-Lutteurs,
Celui de la Croix-aux-Bœufs, La Fête Votive de
Saint-Bartholomée-Porte-Glaive._ The very titles are an excitement. I
can remember how mysterious and alluring they used to seem to me when
I first saw them on the cover of what was perhaps his best book, _Les
Va-Nu-Pieds._
It is by one of the stories, and the shortest, in _Les Va-Nu-Pieds,_
that I remember Cladel. I read it when I was a boy, and I cannot think
of it now without a shiver. It is called _L'Hercule,_ and it is about
a Sandow of the streets, a professional strong man, who kills himself
by an overstrain; it is not a story at all, it is the record of an
incident, and there is only the strong man in it and his friend the
zany, who makes the jokes while the strong man juggles with bars and
cannon-balls. It is all told in a breath, without a pause, as if
someone who had just seen it poured it out in a flood of hot words.
Such vehemence, such pity, such a sense of the cruelty of the spectacle
of a man driven to death like a beast, for a few pence and the pleasure
of a few children; such an evocation of the sun and the streets and
this sordid tragic thing happening to the sound of drum and cymbals;
such a vision in sunlight of a barbarous and ridiculous and horrible
accident, lifted by the telling of it into a new and unforgettable
beauty, I have never felt or seen in any other story of a like
grotesque tragedy. It realises an ideal, it does for once what many
artists have tried and failed to do; it wrings the last drop of agony
out of that subject which it is so easy to make pathetic and effective.
Dickens could not have done it, Bret Harte could not have done it,
Kipling could not do it: Cladel did it only once, with this perfection.
Something like it he did over and over again, with unflagging
vehemence, with splendid variations, in stories of peasants and
wrestlers and thieves and prostitutes. They are all, as his daughter
says, epic; she calls them Homeric, but there is none of the Homeric
simplicity in this tumult of coloured and clotted speech, in which the
language is tortured to make it speak. The comparison with Rabelais
is nearer. _La recherche du terme vivant, sa mise en valeur et en
saveur, la surabondance des vocables puisés à toutes sources ... la
condensation de l'action autour de ces quelques motifs éternels de
l'épopée: combat, ripaille, palabre et luxure,_ there, as she sees
justly, are links with Rabelais. Goncourt, himself always aiming at an
impossible closeness of written to spoken speech, noted with admiration
_la vraie photographie de la parole avec ses tours, ses abbreviations
ses ellipses, son essoufflement presque._ Speech out of breath, that
is what Cladel's is always; his words, never the likely ones, do not
so much speak as cry, gesticulate, overtake one another. _L'âme de
Léon Cladel,_ says his daughter, _était dans un constant et flamboyant
automne._ Something of the colour and fever of autumn is in all he
wrote. Another writer since Cladel, who has probably never heard of
him, has made heroes of peasants and vagabonds. But Maxim Gorki makes
heroes of them, consciously, with a mental self-assertion, giving them
ideas which he has found in Nietzsche. Cladel put into all his people
some of his own passionate way of seeing "scarlet," to use Barbey
d'Aurevilly's epithet: _un rural écarlate._ Vehement and voluminous,
he overflowed: his whole aim as an artist, as a pupil of Baudelaire,
was to concentrate, to hold himself back; and the effort added impetus
to the checked overflow. To the realists he seemed merely extravagant;
he saw certainly what they could not see; and his romance was always a
fruit of the soil. The artist in him, seeming to be in conflict with
the peasant, fortified, clarified the peasant, extracted from that hard
soil a rare fruit. You see in his face an extraordinary mingling of the
peasant, the visionary, and the dandy: the long hair and beard, the
sensitive mouth and nose, the fierce brooding eyes, in which wildness
and delicacy, strength and a kind of stealthiness, seem to be grafted
on an inflexible peasant stock.
1906.