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 puises a toutes sources ... la condensation de l'action autour
de ces quelques motifs eternels de l'epopee: 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'ame de Leon Cladel_, says his daughter, _etait
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 ecarlate_.
Vehement and voluminous, he overflowed: his whole aim as an artist, as a
pupil of Baudelaire, was to concent