Léon Cladel—Les Va-nu-pieds, etc.
At more times in my life than one I have striven to like—or at any rate to take an interest in—Les Va-nu-pieds. Long ago it had for me the passport of the admiration of Baudelaire,[439] to whom and to Victor Hugo (this latter circumstance an important visa to the former) Cladel announced himself a pupil. But an absolute, if perhaps unfortunate, inability to follow anything but my own genuine opinion prevented me from enjoying it. And I cannot enjoy it now. It is not a commonplace book, nor is anything else of its author's; but the price paid for the absence of commonplaceness is excessive. A person possessing genius, and sure of it, does not tell you that he has been rewriting his book (not for correction of fact, but for improvement of style) for ten years, and that now he doesn't care anything for critics, and endorses it Ne Varietur (sic).[440] The style itself is a mosaic of preciousness, literary jargon, and positive argot—not quite contemptible, but, like some actual mosaic, unattractive; and the matter does not attract me, though it may attract people who like tiger-taming scenes, crimes, grimes, etc. The address of the dedication, "Mienne," and nothing more, is rather nice, and some of the local scenes (Cladel was passionately patriotic towards his remote province of Quercy-Rouergue) are worth reading. But this devotion is better shown in the short single book (Les Va-nu-pieds is a collection) called Crête-Rouge—the regimental nickname of the heroine (an Amazon), who actually serves in the war of the Terrible Year, and comes off much better, when her sex is discovered by the Prussians, than she would have done forty and odd years later. The end-scenes of this book, with her Druid-stone marriage to a comrade, are really good. Of Le Bouscassié, Titi-Froissac IV, and La Fête Votive de Saint-Bartholomée Porte-Glaive I shall not say much. The "province," which is strong in them, saves them sometimes. But Cladel's hopeless lack of self-criticism shows itself in the fact of his actually reprinting in full an article of Veuillot's (by no means uncomplimentary) on himself, as a prelude in the book last mentioned, and adding a long reply. The proceeding was honest, but rather suicidal. One may not wholly admire the famous editor of the Univers.[441] But nothing could better throw up his clear, vigorous, classical French and trenchant logic, than the verbose and ambaginous preciousness, and the cabbage-stick cudgel-play, of Cladel.[442]
Barbey d'Aurevilly—his criticism of novels.
Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly, also a favourite of Baudelaire's, is a writer of an altogether greater clan—indeed one of those who come short but a little, and one does not quite know how, of individual greatness. Something has been said of his criticism, but a volume of it which was not within my reach when I wrote what is there quoted, Le Roman Contemporain, is a closer introduction to a notice of him as a novelist. As of all his work it may be said of this, that anybody who does not know the subjects will probably go away with a wrong idea of them, but that anybody who does know them will receive some very valuable cross-lights. The book consists[443] of a belittlement, slightly redressed at the end, of Feuillet as a feeble person and an impertinent patroniser of religion; of a rather "magpie" survey of the Goncourts; of a violent and quite blind attack on Flaubert (the worst criticism of Barbey's that I have ever read); of a somewhat unexpectedly appreciative notice of Daudet; of an almost obligatory panegyric of Fabre; of another éreintement, at great length, of Zola; and of shorter articles, again "magpied" of praise and blame, on MM. Richepin, Catulle Mendès, and Huysmans.[444]
His novels themselves—Les Diaboliques and others.
His merits.
All this is interesting, but I fear it confirms a variation of the title of a famous Elizabethan play—"Novelists beware novelists." Poets have a worse reputation in this way, or course; but, I think, unjustly. Perhaps the reason is that the quality of poetry is more definite, if not more definable, than that of prose fiction, or else that poets are more really sure of themselves. Barbey d'Aurevilly[445] had an apparently undoubting mind, but perhaps there were unacknowledged doubts, which transformed themselves into jealousies, in his heart of hearts. For myself, I sympathise with his political and religious (if not exactly with his ecclesiastical) views pretty decidedly; I think (speaking as usual with the due hesitation of a foreigner) that he writes excellent French; and I am sure—a point of some consequence with me, and not too commonly met—that he generally writes (when he does not get too angry) like a gentleman. He sometimes has phrases which please me very much, as when he describes two lovers embracing so long that they "must have drunk a whole bottle of kisses," or when he speaks of the voice of a preacher "tombant de la chaire dans cette église où pleuvaient les ténèbres du soir," where the opposition-combination of "tombant" and "pleuvaient," and the image it arouses, seem to me of a most absolute fancy. He can write scenes—the finale of his best book, L'Ensorcelée; the overture of Un Prêtre Marié; and nearly the whole of the last and best Diabolique, "Une Vengeance de Femme"—which very closely approach the first class. And, whether he meant me to do so or not, I like him when in "Un Dîner d'Athées" he makes one of them "swig off" (lamper) a bumper of Picardan, the one wine in all my experience which I should consider fit only for an atheist.[446] But a good novelist I cannot hold him.
The inability does not come from any mere "unpleasantness" in his subjects, though few pleasant ones seem to have lain in his way, and he certainly did not go out of that way to find them. But L'Ensorcelée can only be objected to on this score by an absurdly fastidious person, and I do not myself want any more rose-pink and sky-blue in Un Prêtre Marié;[447] while the last Diabolique, already mentioned, is a capital example of grime made more than tolerable.[448] Indeed, nothing of the sort can be more unmistakable than the sincerity of Barbey's "horrors." They mark, in that respect, nearly the apex of the triangle, the almost disappearing lower angles of which may be said to be represented by the crude and clumsy vulgarities of Janin's Âne Mort, and the more craftsmanlike, indeed in a way almost artistic, but unconvinced and unconvincing atrocities of Borel's Champavert.
And defects.