son of a beautiful, bright, and intellectual Greek woman, whose maiden
name was Santi l'Homaka.[1] His father was the French consul-general
for Turkey, an eminent savant. While still a little child, André was
taken to France, to a beautiful part of Languedoc. During the years
that he passed there he forgot his native language, but when he began
to learn it again at school in Paris, he picked it up so fast that at
the age of sixteen he had completely mastered it. He devoted himself
eagerly to the study of its literature, with which he was as well
acquainted as with that of France. At the age of twenty he entered the
army as a _cadet gentilhomme_, a kind of second lieutenant, and went
into garrison with his regiment at Strasburg. He spent all his spare
time in studying languages. But the garrison life, with its utter want
of intellectual interests, was very irksome to him; after six months
of it he returned to Paris; and as he at this time developed a malady
the only cure for which was a regular and quiet life, he threw up his
commission. But abstinence and inaction were little to the taste of a
young man in whose case the eager passions of youth were combined with
the restless artistic and scientific bent of the genius. In company
with friends he travelled for two years in Switzerland and Italy,
making a long stay in Rome. He fell ill in Naples and was unable to
reach Greece, the goal of the journey, the country he longed to see.
When he returned to Paris in the beginning of 1785, he mixed with the
best society of the day in his parents' house. He made acquaintance
with Le Brun, the poet, David, the painter, Lavoisier, the chemist, and
numbers of diplomatists and public officials whom the Revolution was to
make famous. Besides these he had his own private circle of friends,
most of whom were talented young noblemen. Dividing his time pretty
equally between study and pleasure, he was also much in the company
of the most frivolous and dissipated set of the day, which consisted
of fine gentlemen (the Duke of Montmorency, Prince Czartoryski, &c.),
ladies of rank (the Duchesse de Mailly, the Princesse de Chalais, &c.),
artists and authors (Beaumarchais, Mercier, &c), and beautiful young
courtesans (the Rose, Glycère, Amélie of Chénier's poems)--a mixed
company whose ways and doings Rétif de la Bretonne has described to us,
and the majority of whom fell victims to the guillotine. At this period
of his life Chénier made acquaintance with a man who, sharing to the
full his love of liberty and hatred of all terrorism, at once became
his friend; this was the Italian poet Alfieri, who had just arrived
in Paris accompanied by the Duchess of Albany. And almost at the same
time he became acquainted with the woman who is extolled and bitterly
accused in many of his poems under the name of Camille--Madame de
Bonneuil, the love of his youth, to whom he was long and passionately
attached. Often in her country home did young André kneel at this
lady's feet whilst she played the harp and sang one of the fashionable
romances recounting the pains and joys of love.
In 1787 he was appointed attaché to the embassy in London, where he
felt miserably lonely and dependent. Electrified by the news of the
outbreak of the Revolution, he returned, full of hope, to Paris. Ere
this he had become conscious of his poetic gifts; he now began to
plan and write poetic works, varying very much in character, but all
severely antique in style. Twice before had French literature returned
to the antique. The first time was in the days of Ronsard, when men
decked antiquity with the gaudy tinsel of the Italian Renaissance;
the second was in the days of Louis XIV., when they invested it with
court pomp and conventions. André Chénier, who had Greek blood in his
veins, who read and wrote his mother's tongue as easily as French, and
who perhaps alone among Frenchmen saw ancient Hellas neither through
Latin spectacles nor through the dust of seventeenth-century perruques,
André Chénier calmly and simply, like a young Apollo, put an end to the
existing conception of the antique, and, consequently, of the nature
of poetry. He realised that the poets of Greece had spoken and written
in the language of the people, and that their perfection of form, the
result of self-restraint, was something widely different from reverence
for arbitrary, conventional directions and prohibitions. He represents
a reaction against the eighteenth-century poetic style which resembles
Thorvaldsen's reaction against eighteenth-century sculpture; like
Thorvaldsen, he frequently imitated and made use of the antique; he
surpasses the Dane in ardour, sensuous warmth, and pathos.
Before 1789 André Chénier was the elegiac, idyllic, and erotic poet. He
developed marvellously both as poet and man after the French Revolution
broke out and filled the air with its thunders and lightnings. He had
been educated in the philosophic spirit with which Voltaire had imbued
the aristocracy of intellect; he had shared in the feelings which led
distinguished Frenchmen to support the cause of the free states of
North America; now he hailed with the purest enthusiasm the new era of
liberty which he had so long desired to see. His idea of liberty was
absolute freedom in the domains of thought and religion. Instructed
"by the eighteen centuries which theological follies have stained with
blood, devoid of respect for the priesthood of any creed whatsoever,"
because he is convinced that they have one and all "conspired against
the happiness and peace of humanity," he desires "to break the yoke of
despotism and priestcraft." He was so inexperienced and enthusiastic
as to believe it possible that this result could be attained without
overstepping the limits of the strictly lawful.
During the first year of the Revolution he still devoted most of his
time to poetry. He conceived a short-lived passion for a young and
beautiful lady, Madame Gouy d'Arcy, whose praises he has sung in a
famous poem. But politics soon drove all other occupations and passions
into the background. In 1792, with a prevision of the approaching Reign
of Terror, André made a violent attack on the Jacobins in a newspaper
article. When his younger brother, the famous revolutionary poet,
Marie-Joseph Chénier, who was an active member of the Jacobin Club,
felt obliged to defend his fellow-members, André proudly and recklessly
took up the gauntlet thrown down. Mutual friends of the brothers
managed to bring the painful controversy to a speedy close, but the
strained relations lasted for some time. Before this the brothers
had been warmly attached. But it was with André as with the ancient
Romans; the ties of blood had to give way to the political idea. In
the early days of the Revolution he had allowed his brother's tragedy,
_Brutus and Cassius_, to be dedicated to him, and in acknowledging this
dedication had, with the naïveté of the day, declared his conviction
that the great Brutus had expressed himself exactly as he was made to
do in the drama. He called the heroes of the play "noble murderers,
great tyrannicides, whom the phrase-makers of our day are incapable
of understanding"--in short, expressed his approval of regicide when
necessary. But the trial of Louis XVI. roused his unbounded wrath; he
solicited permission to assist in the King's defence; he wrote a series
of articles in his favour; and when the sentence of death had been
passed, it was André Chénier who composed the beautiful and dignified
letter in which the King demanded the permission of the National
Assembly to appeal to the nation. It is (as Becq de Fouquières has
remarked) significant that three of Europe's best poets, André Chénier,
Schiller, and Alfieri, who were all equally antagonistic to the old
autocratic government, and had all hailed the Revolution with joy,
should all in 1792 desire to defend King Louis.
Marie-Joseph Chénier was a less gifted and less seriously minded man
than his brother; he followed with the stream and rejoiced in the
popularity which a talent exactly suited to the requirements of the
time procured him. André had the courage which on occasion manifests
itself in proud defiance; he was of the stuff of which martyrs are
made. Obvious danger only made him bolder in his attacks upon the
men who, in his opinion, were disgracing France. He published in his
own name his extremely sarcastic ode on the occasion of the fête
given by the Jacobins to the amnestied soldiers of the Chateauvieux
regiment, who had with perfect justice been sentenced to the galleys
for ordinary, mean crimes. And after Marat's assassination, when 44,000
altars were erected to "the friend of the people," André Chénier
was the one French poet who felt constrained to sing the praises of
Charlotte Corday--a much more daring deed at that time than afterwards.
He exclaims:
"La Grèce, ô fille illustre, admirant ton courage,
Épuiserait Paros pour placer ton image
Auprès d'Harmodius, auprès de son ami;
Et des chœurs sur ta tombe, en une sainte ivresse,
Chanterait Némésis, la tardive déesse,
Qui frappe le méchant sur son trône endormi.
Mais la France à la hache abandonne ta tête.
C'est au monstre égorgé qu'on prépare une fête
Parmi ses compagnons, tous dignes de son sort
Oh! quel noble dédain fît sourire ta bouche,
Quand un brigand, vengeur de ce brigand farouche,
Crut te faire pâlir aux menaces de mort."
After the death of the King it was impossible for André to remain in
Paris. His brother found a refuge for him in a small house in a retired
part of Versailles. Here he lived for some time in quiet and solitude.
He worked at his long poem _Hermès_, of which he had as yet only
produced fragments, though it had occupied his thoughts more or less
for the last ten years, and wrote to Fanny (Madame Laurent Lecoulteux),
a lady who lived in the same neighbourhood, his last love poems, which
are distinguished by an emotion new in André Chénier's writings--the
melancholy of a purely spiritual love. The nobility and charm of a
peculiarly beautiful feminine character communicated themselves to
these sad, chaste verses.
But this peaceful life at Versailles was only the lull before the
storm. Andre's efforts to prevent an arrest (of a lady) for which
orders had been given by the Committee of Public Safety, led to his
own imprisonment. He spent his time in Saint-Lazare in revising his
manuscripts and writing some of his grandest and most beautiful poems,
among others the two famous ones to the Duchesse de Fleury, née Coigny
(_La jeune Captive_, and the lines incorrectly entitled _Mademoiselle
de Coigny_), and the beautiful fragment which begins "Comme un dernier
rayon." He was denounced before the tribunal of the Revolution as an
enemy of the people, and was condemned to death for having "written
against liberty and in defence of tyranny." The day before this
happened he had written the lines:
"Comme un dernier rayon, comme un dernier zéphyre
Anime la fin d'un beau jour,
Au pied de l'échafaud j'essaye encor ma lyre.
Peut-être est-ce bientôt mon tour.
Peut-être avant que l'heure en cercle promenée
Ait posé sur l'émail brillant,
Dans les soixante pas où sa route est bornée.
Son pied sonore et vigilant,
Le sommeil du tombeau pressera ma paupière.
Avant que de ses deux moitiés
Ce vers que je commence ait atteint la dernière,
Peut-être en ces murs effrayés
Le messager de mort, noir recruteur des ombres
Escorté d'infâmes soldats,
Remplira de mon nom ces longs corridors sombres."
On the evening of the 7th Thermidor 1794, the eve of Robespierre's
fall, which, if it had happened a day earlier, would have saved him,
André Chénier mounted the scaffold. As they were being driven to the
place of execution, he said despondently to Roucher, the painter,
who was guillotined along with him: "Alas! I have done nothing for
posterity." Tradition tells that on the scaffold he struck his
forehead, exclaiming: "Yet I had something there!"
Although André Chénier's prose articles had aroused much attention,
even abroad--Wieland sent him greetings, the King of Poland sent him a
medal--he won no fame as a poet during his lifetime. He had published
only two of his poems, the Ode to David on the occasion of the scene in
the Tennis Court, and the ironic Ode to the Chateauvieux Regiment; and
from that July day in 1794 when his head was severed from his body, his
name was forgotten; the memory of him vanished.
Then one fine day in 1819 a firm of Paris publishers who were bringing
out a new edition of Marie-Joseph Chénier's (now perfectly antiquated)
dramatic works, were offered some poems by "an unknown brother of
Chénier's" to fill up the last volume with. They requested a well-known
writer of that day, Henri de Latouche, to look through these poems.
Struck by their beauty, this man began to make inquiry after the rest
of Andre's manuscripts. He brought one old packet, one little yellow
book after another to light, made a careful, tasteful selection, and by
its publication produced a revolution in the poetic doctrines of his
country. The name of André Chénier was soon known throughout the land,
and the youth of the provinces as well as the youth of Paris received
the new poetic revelation with enthusiasm. (See the description of this
enthusiasm in Balzac's _Les deux Poètes_, the introduction to _Les
Illusions perdues_.)
This poet, who had now been so long dead, not only made all the lyric
poetry that had been written in the last generation seem antiquated
and impossible, but actually threw Lamartine's first _Meditations
Poétiques_, which were published about this time, completely into
the shade. For the scene of Chénier's poetry is not the clouds or
the region above the clouds, but the earth; his is poetry that is
pure without being pious, soulful without being sentimental; it has
nothing to do with the infinite and the abstract, is not mystic and not
irreligious.
The pagan youth of André Chénier's earlier works, who believed in
Apollo and Artemis, but, above all, in Aphrodite, was brought face
to face with the founder of the Seraphic school; the Epicurean (in
the antique sense of the word) with the spiritualist. The first women
whose praises Chénier sang were not intellectual, consumptive Elviras
like Lamartine's, but warm-blooded, truly loving women, or young
and beautiful courtesans of the days of Louis XVI.--only that his
sensuousness never degenerated into the voluptuousness, still less into
the wantonness of that period. The wild orgy, when he described it
(see, for example, the 28th Elegy), produced the effect of a bas-relief
of the noblest Greek period. The young woman with the flowing locks is
described with a chasteness of style which makes of her a dancing Greek
mænad, and the sober serenity of its representation transforms the
drinking scene into an Athenian Bacchanalian feast, executed in Parian
marble. All this life bore the imprint of pure beauty and perfect
simplicity. The element of ugliness which Hugo was to introduce into
lyric poetry, and to the attraction of which Lamartine at a future
period succumbed, was as entirely absent as devoutness or mysticism.
But the man, too, who loomed through the works and fragments of André
Chénier's maturer years, formed a suggestive temperamental antithesis
to those lyric outpourings which aroused enthusiasm in 1819. The women
whom he celebrated in unforgettable poems were heroines or victims of
the Revolution. There was a manly pathos in his iambics which recalled
the old Greek iambic poets, and the fragments of his long poem,
_Hermès_, revealed a philosophy of life, the antique sincerity and
scientific sobriety of which formed the strongest possible contrast to
the romantic emotionalism of Lamartine. To André the stars are not the
flowers in the fields of heaven, but simply worlds revolving in floods
of ether; he writes of their weight, their shapes, their distances,
and their law of gravitation, which he feels influencing his own soul.
Providence does not send its voice down from them to men, prayers do
not ascend from men to them; the result of reflection is a profound
impression of the unity of nature and its subjection to law.
But André Chénier's poetry, which in so many ways anticipates that of
the nineteenth century--it is distinctly lyrical, and in France the
eighteenth century produced no other real lyric poet--is also marked by
the influence of the two leading spirits of his own age, Rousseau and
Voltaire. The idyllic element in it is due to Rousseau; the pastoral
scenes may owe much to Theocritus, but Chénier drew from this source
only because Rousseau had led the way back to natural conditions. To
Voltaire is due that passion for inquiry into what lies at the root
of everything, which led André to study and borrow from Newton and to
compete with Lucretius in a didactic poem on Nature.
It was, however, especially by his purely artistic, nay, in a manner
his purely technical, merits that André Chénier produced such an
emancipating, reviving effect upon the poetry of the second generation
after his own. The Alexandrine of his poetry is no longer Racine's;
by pruning or adding to this last at will he made it a far suppler,
freer, more varied measure; the result of the still more astonishing
new application of the cæsura in his dithyrambic poetry was a hitherto
unknown lyric passion and vigour. Most of these metrical reforms had
indeed been attempted by Lamartine, but, as it were, unconsciously, and
without that decision or precision which the young men admired so much
in Chénier. All who were capable of appreciating plasticity and vigour
in style swore by his name. They involuntarily divided the writers of
the day into two great groups, one descending from Madame de Staël,
the voluble, prolific improvisatrice, who poured forth a whirlwind
of words and ideas without troubling herself much about shaping them
into a whole, and the other the school now in process of formation,
which, taking André Chénier as its model, made the strictest artistic
conscientiousness its guiding principle.
Along with the metrical improvements in André Chénier's poetry we
have great progress in colouring. Until now poets had preferred the
idealistic, sentimental, transcendental expression to the realistically
descriptive word. They had written of "The heavens in their wrath;"
André wrote, "A black and cloudy sky;" they wrote of "delicate
fingers;" André Chénier preferred to say "long, white fingers." And
this realistic exactness in certain kinds of description does not
exclude another novelty, a sort of chiaroscuro of words and expressions
which by their mysterious or enigmatic or fantastic quality suddenly
open out wide, unexpected vistas.
When we regard this beautiful poetry more from the human than the
artistic standpoint, what we miss in it is the expression of personal
grief. In spite of its fire and its Frenchness it is too measured, too
Attic. The ugly is too systematically excluded; and among ugly and
unclean things, the poet has, in genuine Greek fashion, reckoned his
own melancholy, his private sufferings and calamities. It is only from
some prose memoranda and a few letters that we learn, for instance,
how much he suffered from his dependent position in London. He does
not give this suffering expression in his poetry. Occasionally at
an earlier period he alluded in a roundabout fashion to the irksome
restraints imposed on him by his poverty--in such a poem, for instance,
as _La Liberté_, an idyll in the style of Theocritus, in which the
shepherd breaks his flute and shuns the dance and song of the young
maidens, rejecting all consolation because he is a slave.[2]
As a fine specimen of André Chénier's writing take _Le Malade_, a poem
which, like most of his, is made out of almost nothing, yet which
produces an unextinguishable impression. In its composition it reminds
one of the third scene in the first act of Racine's _Phèdre_, which
seems to have been its far-away model. The mother prays:
"Apollon, Dieu sauveur, dieux des savants mystères,
Dieu de la vie, et dieu des plantes solitaires,
Dieu vainqueur de Python, dieu jeune et triomphant,
Prends pitié de mon fils, de mon unique enfant!
Prends pitié de sa mère aux larmes condamnée,
Qui ne vit que pour lui, qui meurt abandonnée,
Qui n'a pas dû rester pour voir mourir son fils;
Dieu jeune, viens aider sa jeunesse. Assoupis,
Assoupis dans son sein cette fièvre brûlante
Qui dévore la fleur de sa vie innocente.
Apollon, si jamais, échappé du tombeau,
Il retourne au Ménale avoir soin du troupeau,
Ces mains, ces vieilles mains orneront ta statue
De ma coupe d'onyx à tes pieds suspendue;
Et, chaque été nouveau, d'un jeune taureau blanc
La hache à ton autel fera couler le sang.
Et bien, mon fils, es-tu toujours impitoyable?
Ton funeste silence est-il inexorable?
Enfant, tu veux mourir? Tu veux, dans ses vieux ans,
Laisser ta mère seule avec ses cheveux blancs?
Tu veux que ce soit moi qui ferme ta paupière?
Que j'unisse ta cendre à celle de ton père?
C'est toi qui me devais ces soins religieux,
Et ma tombe attendait tes pleurs et tes adieux.
Parle, parle, mon fils, quel chagrin te consume?
Les maux qu'on dissimule en ont plus d'amertume.
Ne lèveras-tu point ces yeux appesantis?
---Ma mère, adieu; je meurs, et tu n'as plus de fils.
Non, tu n'as plus de fils, ma mère bien-aimée.
Je te perds. Une plaie ardente, envenimée,
Me ronge; avec effort je respire, et je crois
Chaque fois respirer pour la dernière fois.
Je ne parlerai pas. Adieu; ce lit me blesse;
Ce tapis qui me couvre accable ma faiblesse,
Tout me pèse et me lasse. Aide-moi, je me meurs,
Tourne-moi sur le flanc. Ah! j'expire! ô douleurs!"
In vain she gives him a healing draught brewed with magic arts by a
Thessalian woman. But he speaks again:
"----O coteaux d'Érymanthe! ô vallons! ô bocage!
O vent sonore et frais qui troublais le feuillage,
Et faisais frémir l'onde, et sur leur jeune sein
Agitais les replis de leur robe de lin!
De légères beautés troupe agile et dansante....
Tu sais, tu sais, ma mère? aux bords de l'Érymanthe....
Là, ni loups ravisseurs, ni serpents, ni poisons....
O visage divin! ô fêtes! ô chansons!
Des pas entrelacés, des fleurs, une onde pure,
Aucun lieu n'est si beau dans toute la nature.
Dieux! ces bras et ces flancs, ces cheveux, ces pieds nus,
Si blancs, si délicats.... Je ne te verrai plus!"
When the mother learns that it is of hopeless love her son is dying,
she says:
"Mais mon fils, mais dis-moi, quelle belle dansante,
Quelle vierge as-tu vu au bord de l'Érymanthe?
N'est-tu pas riche et beau? du moins quand la douleur
N'avait point de ta joue éteint la jeune fleur?
Parie. Est-ce cette Églé, fille du roi des ondes,
Ou cette jeune Irène aux longues tresses blondes?
Ou ne sera-ce point cette fière beauté
Dont j'entends le beau nom chaque jour répété,
Dont j'apprends que partout les belles sont jalouses?
Qu'aux temples, aux festins, les mères, les épouses,
Ne sauraient voir, dit-on, sans peine et sans effroi?
Cette belle Daphné?...--Dieux! ma mère, tais-toi,
Tais-toi. Dieux! Qu'as-tu dit? Elle est fière, inflexible;
Comme les immortels elle est belle et terrible!
Mille amants l'ont aimée; ils l'ont aimée en vain.
Comme eux j'aurais trouvé quelque refus hautain.
Non, garde que jamais elle soit informée ...
Mais, ô mort! ô tourment! ô mère bien-aimée!
Tu vois dans quels ennuis dépérissent mes jours.
Ma mère bien-aimée, ah! viens à mon secours:
Je meurs; va la trouver: que tes traits, que ton âge,
De sa mère à ses yeux offrent la sainte image.
Tiens, prends cette corbeille et nos fruits les plus beaux,
Prends notre Amour d'ivoire, honneur de ces hameaux;
Prends la coupe d'onyx à Corinthe ravie,
Prends mes jeunes chevreaux, prends mon cœur, prends ma vie,
Jette tout à ses pieds; apprends-lui qui je suis;
Dis-lui que je me meurs, que tu n'as plus de fils.
Tombe aux pieds du vieillard, gémis, implore, presse;
Adjure cieux et mers, dieu, temple, autel, déesse;
Pars, et si tu reviens sans les avoir fléchis
Adieu, ma mère, adieu, tu n'auras plus de fils.
--J'aurai toujours un fils; va, la belle espérance
Me dit ... Elle s'incline, et, dans un doux silence,
Elle couvre ce front, terni par les douleurs,
De baisers maternels entremêlés de pleurs.
Puis elle sort en hâte, inquiète et tremblante,
Sa démarche est de crainte et d'âge chancelante.
Elle arrive; et bientôt revenant sur ses pas,
Haletante, de loin: 'Mon cher fils, tu vivras,
Tu vivras.' Elle vient s'asseoir près de la couche:
Le vieillard la suivait, le sourire à la bouche.
La jeune belle aussi, rouge et le front baissé,
Vient, jette sur le lit un coup d'œil. L'insensé
Tremble; sous ses tapis il veut cacher la tête.
'Ami, depuis trois jours tu n'es d'aucune fête,
Dit-elle; que fais-tu? pourquoi veux-tu mourir?
Tu souffres. On me dit que je peux te guérir.
Vis, et formons ensemble une seule famille;
Que mon père ait un fils, et ta mère un fille.'"
One cannot imagine more simplicity, less attempt at effect, in the
solution of such a situation.
It was a foundation of this kind which the new Romantic School found to
build upon--noble simplicity of language, correct drawing, a Grecian
rhythm in all the transitions, the beautiful lines of the bas-relief,
pure colour, and austere form.
[1] Thiers was the grandson of this lady's sister.