[1] _Memoire sur la musique des Chinois_ (Paris, 1779), pp. 78 and
82, pl. vi., or _Memoire sur les Chinois_, tome vi. pl. vi.
[2] _Catalogue descriptif_, vol. ii. (Ghent, 1896), p. 91; also vol.
i. (1880), pp. 29, 44, 154.
[3] "Weitere Nachrichten von dem ... chinesischen Blasinstrumente
Tscheng oder Tschiang," in _Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung_
(Leipzig, 1821), Bd. xxiii. No. 22, pp. 369, 374 et seq., and
illustration appendix ii.
[4] _Il Costume anticho e moderno_ (Milan, 1816), pl. 66, vol. i.
[5] See _Allg. mus. Zt._ (Leipzig, 1821), Bd. xxiii. Nos. 9 and 10,
pp. 133 and 149 et seq.
CHEN-HAI [CHINHAI], a district town of China, in the province of
Cheh-kiang, at the mouth of the Yung-kiang, 12 m. N.E. of Ningpo, in 29
deg. 58' N., 121 deg. 45' E. It lies at the foot of a hill on a tongue
of land, and is partly protected from the sea on the N. by a dike about
3 m. long, composed entirely of large blocks of hewn granite. The walls
are 20 ft. high and 3 m. in circumference. The defences were formerly of
considerable strength, and included a well-built but now dismantled
citadel on a precipitous cliff, 250 ft. high, at the extremity of the
tongue of land on which the town is built. In the neighbourhood an
engagement took place between the English and Chinese in 1841.
CHENIER, ANDRE DE (1762-1794), French poet, was born at Constantinople
on the 30th of October 1762. His father, Louis Chenier, a native of
Languedoc, after twenty years of successful commerce in the Levant as a
cloth-merchant, was appointed to a position equivalent to that of French
consul at Constantinople. His mother, Elisabeth Santi-Lomaca, whose
sister was grandmother of A. Thiers, was a Greek. When the poet was
three years old his father returned to France, and subsequently from
1768 to 1775 served as consul-general of France in Morocco. The family,
of which Andre was the third son, and Marie-Joseph (see below) the
fourth, remained in France; and after a few years, during which Andre
ran wild with "la tante de Carcasonne," he distinguished himself as a
verse-translator from the classics at the College de Navarre (the school
in former days of Gerson and Bossuet) in Paris. In 1783 he obtained a
cadetship in a French regiment at Strassburg. But the glamour of the
military life was as soon exhausted by Chenier as it was by Coleridge.
He returned to Paris before the end of the year, was well received by
his family, and mixed in the cultivated circle which frequented the
salon of his mother, among them Lebrun-Pindare, Lavoisier, Lesueur,
Dorat, Parmy, and a little later the painter David. He was already a
poet by predilection, an idyllist and steeped in the classical archaism
of the time, when, in 1784, his taste for the antique was confirmed by a
visit to Rome made in the company of two schoolfellows, the brothers
Trudaine. From Naples, after visiting Pompeii, he returned to Paris, his
mind fermenting with poetical images and projects, few of which he was
destined to realize. For nearly three years, however, he was enabled to
study and to experiment in verse without any active pressure or
interruption from his family--three precious years in which the first
phase of his art as a writer of idylls and bucolics, imitated to a large
extent from Theocritus, Bion and the Greek anthologists, was elaborated.
Among the poems written or at least sketched during this period were
_L'Oaristys_, _L'Aveugle_, _La Jeune Malade_, _Bacchus_, _Euphrosine_
and _La Jeune Tarentine_, the last a synthesis of his purest manner,
mosaic though it is of reminiscences of at least a dozen classical
poets. As in glyptic so in poetic art, the Hellenism of the time was
decadent and Alexandrine rather than Attic of the best period. But
Chenier is always far more than an imitator. _La Jeune Tarentine_ is a
work of personal emotion and inspiration. The colouring is that of
classic mythology, but the spiritual element is as individual as that of
any classical poem by Milton, Gray, Keats or Tennyson. Apart from his
idylls and his elegies, Chenier also experimented from early youth in
didactic and philosophic verse, and when he commenced his _Hermes_ in
1783 his ambition was to condense the _Encyclopedie_ of Diderot into a
poem somewhat after the manner of Lucretius. This poem was to treat of
man's position in the Universe, first in an isolated state, and then in
society. It remains fragmentary, and though some of the fragments are
fine, its attempt at scientific exposition approximates too closely to
the manner of Erasmus Darwin to suit a modern ear. Another fragment
called _L'Invention_ sums Chenier's _Ars Poetica_ in the verse "Sur des
pensers nouveaux, faisons des vers antiques." _Suzanne_ represents the
torso of a Biblical poem on a very large scale, in six cantos.
In the meantime, Andre had published nothing, and some of these last
pieces were in fact not yet written, when in November 1787 an
opportunity of a fresh career presented itself. The new ambassador at
the court of St James's, M. de la Luzerne, was connected in some way
with the Chenier family, and he offered to take Andre with him as his
secretary. The offer was too good to be refused, but the poet hated
himself on the banks of the _fiere Tamise_, and wrote in bitter ridicule
of
"Ces Anglais.
Nation toute a vendre a qui peut la payer.
De contree en contree allant au monde entier,
Offrir sa joie ignoble et son faste grossier."
He seems to have been interested in the poetic diction of Milton and
Thomson, and a few of his verses are remotely inspired by Shakespeare
and Gray. To say, however, that he studied English literature would be
an exaggeration. The events of 1789 and the startling success of his
younger brother, Marie-Joseph, as political playwright and pamphleteer,
concentrated all his thoughts upon France. In April 1790 he could stand
London no longer, and once more joined his parents at Paris in the rue
de Clery.
The France that he plunged into with such impetuosity was upon the verge
of anarchy. A strong constitutionalist, Chenier took the view that the
Revolution was already complete and that all that remained to be done
was the inauguration of the reign of law. Moderate as were his views and
disinterested as were his motives, his tactics were passionately and
dangerously aggressive. From an idyllist and elegist we find him
suddenly transformed into an unsparing master of poetical satire. His
prose _Avis au peuple francais_ (August 24, 1790) was followed by the
rhetorical _Jeu de paume_, a somewhat declamatory moral ode addressed "a
Louis David, peintre." In the meantime he orated at the Feuillants Club,
and contributed frequently to the _Journal de Paris_ from November 1791
to July 1792, when he wrote his scorching _Iambes_ to Collot d'Herbois,
_Sur les Suisses revoltes du regiment de Chateauvieux_. The 10th of
August uprooted his party, his paper and his friends, and the management
of relatives who kept him out of the way in Normandy alone saved him
from the massacre of September. In the month following these events his
democratic brother, Marie-Joseph, had entered the Convention. Andre's
sombre rage against the course of events found vent in the line on the
Maenads who mutilated the king's Swiss Guard, and in the _Ode a
Charlotte Corday_ congratulating France that "Un scelerat de moins rampe
dans cette fange." At the express request of Malesherbes he furnished
some arguments to the materials collected for the defence of the king.
After the execution he sought a secluded retreat on the Plateau de
Satory at Versailles and took exercise after nightfall. There he wrote
the poems inspired by Fanny (Mme Laurent Lecoulteux), including the
exquisite _Ode a Versailles_, one of his freshest, noblest and most
varied poems.
His solitary life at Versailles lasted nearly a year. On the 7th of
March 1794 he was taken at the house of Mme Piscatory at Passy. Two
obscure agents of the committee of public safety were in search of a
marquise who had flown, but an unknown stranger was found in the house
and arrested on suspicion. This was Andre, who had come on a visit of
sympathy. He was taken to the Luxembourg and afterwards to Saint-Lazare.
During the 140 days of his imprisonment there he wrote the marvellous
_Iambes_ (in alternate lines of 12 and 8 syllables), which hiss and stab
like poisoned bullets, and which were transmitted to his family by a
venal gaoler. There he wrote the best known of all his verses, the
pathetic _Jeune captive_, a poem at once of enchantment and of despair.
Suffocating in an atmosphere of cruelty and baseness, Chenier's agony
found expression almost to the last in these murderous _Iambes_ which he
launched against the Convention. Ten days before the end, the painter
J.B. Suvee executed the well-known portrait. He might have been
overlooked but for the well-meant, indignant officiousness of his
father. Marie-Joseph had done his best to prevent this, but he could do
nothing more. Robespierre, who was himself on the brink of the volcano,
remembered the venomous sallies in the _Journal de Paris_. At sundown on
the 25th of July 1794, the very day of his condemnation on a bogus
charge of conspiracy, Andre Chenier was guillotined. The record of his
last moments by La Touche is rather melodramatic and is certainly not
above suspicion.
Incomplete as was his career--he was not quite thirty-two--his life was
cut short in a crescendo of all its nobler elements. Exquisite as was
already his susceptibility to beauty and his mastership of the rarest
poetic material, we cannot doubt that Chenier was preparing for still
higher flights of lyric passion and poetic intensity. Nothing that he
had yet done could be said to compare in promise of assured greatness
with the _Iambes_, the _Odes_ and the _Jeune Captive_. At the moment he
left practically nothing to tell the world of his transcendent genius,
and his reputation has had to be retrieved from oblivion page by page,
and almost poem by poem. During his lifetime only his _Jeu de paume_
(1791) and _Hymne sur les Suisses_ (1792) had been given to the world.
The _Jeune Captive_ appeared in the _Decade philosophique_, Jan. 9,
1795; _La Jeune Tarentine_ in the _Mercure_ of March 22, 1801.
Chateaubriand quoted three or four passages in his _Genie du
christianisme_. Fayette and Lefeuvre-Deumier also gave a few fragments;
but it was not until 1819 that a first imperfect attempt was made by H.
de la Touche to collect the poems in a substantive volume. Since the
appearance of the _editio princeps_ of Chenier's poems in La Touche's
volume, many additional poems and fragments have been discovered, and an
edition of the complete works of the poet, collated with the MSS.
bequeathed to the Bibliotheque Nationale by Mme Elisa de Chenier in
1892, has been edited by Paul Dimoff and published by Delagrave. During
the same period the critical estimates of the poet have fluctuated in a
truly extraordinary manner. Sainte-Beuve in his _Tableau_ of 1828 sang
the praises of Chenier as an heroic forerunner of the Romantic movement
and a precursor of Victor Hugo. Chenier, he said, had "inspired and
determined" Romanticism. This suggestion of modernity in Chenier was
echoed by a chorus of critics who worked the idea to death; in the
meantime, the standard edition of Chenier's works was being prepared by
M. Becq de Fouquieres and was issued in 1862, but rearranged and greatly
improved by the editor in 1872. The same patient investigator gave his
New Documents on Andre Chenier to the world in 1875.
In the second volume of _La Vie litteraire_ Anatole France contests the
theory of Sainte-Beuve. Far from being an initiator, he maintains that
Chenier's poetry is the last expression of an expiring form of art. His
matter and his form belong of right to the classic spirit of the 18th
century. He is a contemporary, not of Hugo and Leconte de Lisle, but of
Suard and Morellet. M. Faguet sums up on the side of M. France in his
volume on the 18th century (1890). Chenier's real disciples, according
to the latest view, are Leconte de Lisle and M. de Heredia, _mosaistes_
who have at heart the cult of antique and pagan beauty, of "pure art"
and of "objective poetry." Heredia himself reverted to the judgment of
Sainte-Beuve to the effect that Chenier was the first to make modern
verses, and he adds, "I do not know in the French language a more
exquisite fragment than the three hundred verses of the _Bucoliques_."
Chenier's influence has been specially remarkable in Russia, where
Pushkin imitated him, Kogloff translated _La Jeune Captive_, _La jeune
Tarentine_ and other famous pieces, while the critic Vesselovsky
pronounces "Il a retabli le lyrisme pur dans la poesie francaise." The
general French verdict on his work is in the main well summed by
Morillot, when he says that, judged by the usual tests of the Romantic
movement of the 'twenties (love for strange literatures of the North,
medievalism, novelties and experiments), Chenier would inevitably have
been excluded from the _cenacle_ of 1827. On the other hand, he exhibits
a decided tendency to the world-ennui and melancholy which was one of
the earlier symptoms of the movement, and he has experimented in French
verse in a manner which would have led to his excommunication by the
typical performers of the 18th century. What is universally admitted is
that Chenier was a very great artist, who like Ronsard opened up sources
of poetry in France which had long seemed dried up. In England it is
easier to feel his attraction than that of some far greater reputations
in French poetry, for, rhetorical though he nearly always is, he yet
reveals something of that quality which to the Northern mind has always
been of the very essence of poetry, that quality which made Sainte-Beuve
say of him that he was the first great poet "personnel et reveur" in
France since La Fontaine. His diction is still very artificial, the
poetic diction of Delille transformed in the direction of Hugo, but not
very much. On the other hand, his descriptive power in treating of
nature shows far more art than the Trianin school ever attained. His
love of the woodland and his political fervour often remind us of
Shelley, and his delicate perception of Hellenic beauty, and the perfume
of Greek legend, give us almost a foretaste of Keats. For these reasons,
among others, Chenier, whose art is destined to so many vicissitudes of
criticism in his own country, seems assured among English readers of a
place among the Dii Majores of French poetry.
The Chenier literature of late years has become enormous. His fate has
been commemorated in numerous plays, pictures and poems, notably in
the fine epilogue of Sully Prudhomme, the _Stello_ of A. de Vigny, the
delicate statue by Puech in the Luxembourg, and the well-known
portrait in the centre of the "Last Days of the Terror." The best
editions are still those of Becq de Fouquieres (Paris, 1862, 1872 and
1881), though these are now supplemented by those of L. Moland (2
vols., 1889) and R. Guillard (2 vols., 1899). (T. SE.)
CHENIER, MARIE-JOSEPH BLAISE DE (1764-1811), French poet, dramatist and
politician, younger brother of Andre de Chenier, was born at
Constantinople on the 11th of February 1764.[1] He was brought up at
Carcassonne, and educated in Paris at the College de Navarre. Entering
the army at seventeen, he left it two years afterwards; and at nineteen
he produced _Azemire_, a two-act drama (acted in 1786), and _Edgar, ou
le page suppose_, a comedy (acted in 1785), which were failures. His
_Charles IX_ was kept back for nearly two years by the censor. Chenier
attacked the censorship in three pamphlets, and the commotion aroused by
the controversy raised keen interest in the piece. When it was at last
produced on the 4th of November 1789, it achieved an immense success,
due in part to its political suggestion, and in part to Talma's
magnificent impersonation of Charles IX. Camille Desmoulins said that
the piece had done more for the Revolution than the days of October, and
a contemporary memoir-writer, the marquis de Ferriere, says that the
audience came away "ivre de vengeance et tourmente d'une soif de sang."
The performance was the occasion of a split among the actors of the
Comedie Francaise, and the new theatre in the Palais Royal, established
by the dissidents, was inaugurated with _Henri VIII_ (1791), generally
recognized as Chenier's masterpiece; _Jean Calas, ou l'ecole des juges_
followed in the same year. In 1792 he produced his _Caius Gracchus_,
which was even more revolutionary in tone than its predecessors. It was
nevertheless proscribed in the next year at the instance of the
Montagnard deputy Albitte, for an anti-anarchical hemistich (_Des lois
et non du sang!_); _Fenelon_ (1793) was suspended after a few
representations; and in 1794 his _Timoleon_, set to Etienne Mehul's
music, was also proscribed. This piece was played after the fall of the
Terror, but the fratricide of Timoleon became the text for insinuations
to the effect that by his silence Joseph de Chenier had connived at the
judicial murder of Andre, whom Joseph's enemies alluded to as _Abel_.
There is absolutely nothing to support the calumny, which has often been
repeated since. In fact, after some fruitless attempts to save his
brother, variously related by his biographers, Joseph became aware that
Andre's only chance of safety lay in being forgotten by the authorities,
and that ill-advised intervention would only hasten the end. Joseph
Chenier had been a member of the Convention and of the Council of Five
Hundred, and had voted for the death of Louis XVI.; he had a seat in the
tribunate; he belonged to the committees of public instruction, of
general security, and of public safety. He was, nevertheless, suspected
of moderate sentiments, and before the end of the Terror had become a
marked man. His purely political career ended in 1802, when he was
eliminated with others from the tribunate for his opposition to
Napoleon. In 1801 he was one of the educational jury for the Seine; from
1803 to 1806 he was inspector-general of public instruction. He had
allowed himself to be reconciled with Napoleon's government, and
_Cyrus_, represented in 1804, was written in his honour, but he was
temporarily disgraced in 1806 for his _Epitre a Voltaire_. In 1806 and
1807 he delivered a course of lectures at the Athenee on the language
and literature of France from the earliest years; and in 1808 at the
emperor's request, he prepared his _Tableau historique de l'etat et du
progres de la litterature francaise depuis 1789 jusqu'a 1808_, a book
containing some good criticism, though marred by the violent prejudices
of its author. He died on the 10th of January 1811. The list of his
works includes hymns and national songs--among others, the famous _Chant
du depart_; odes, _Sur la mort de Mirabeau_, _Sur l'oligarchie de
Robespierre_, &c.; tragedies which never reached the stage, _Brutus et
Cassius_, _Philippe deux_, _Tibere_; translations from Sophocles and
Lessing, from Gray and Horace, from Tacitus and Aristotle; with elegies,
dithyrambics and Ossianic rhapsodies. As a satirist he possessed great
merit, though he sins from an excess of severity, and is sometimes
malignant and unjust. He is the chief tragic poet of the revolutionary
period, and as Camille Desmoulins expressed it, he decorated Melpomene
with the tricolour cockade.
See the _Oeuvres completes de Joseph Chenier_ (8 vols., Paris,
1823-1826), containing notices of the poet by Arnault and Daunou;
Charles Labitte, _Etudes litteraires_ (1846); Henri Welschinger, _Le
Theatre revolutionnaire, 1789-1799_ (1881); and A. Lieby, _Etude sur
le theatre de Marie-Joseph Chenier_(1902).