[Illustration: ANDRE CHENIER]
There are some reputations which seem to depend upon their environment.
Certain names are surrounded by a halo of romance, through which all
outlines are enlarged and heightened in effect until it becomes
difficult to discern their true proportions through the golden mist.
When we think of Andre Chenier we see a youthful figure among a crowd of
fellow-prisoners, the light of genius in his eyes, the dark shadow of
impending death already enveloping him and climbing slowly upwards, as
the mist of the Highland second-sight rises higher as death draws near.
The pathetic character of his fate touches the heart, and disposes us to
judge the poems he wrote with that bias of personal interest which is so
apt to warp the verdict of the critical mind. Had Andre Chenier died
comfortably in his bed at a good old age, would Sainte-Beuve have been
so apt to call him "our greatest classic poet since Racine and Boileau"?
unless indeed he had vainly racked his memory to think of any other.
Andre-Marie de Chenier--as he was called until 1790 swept away all
ornamental particles--was born amid picturesque surroundings at
Constantinople, October 30th, 1762, where his father then held the
office of Consul-General. He had married a young Greek girl, a
Mademoiselle Santi-l'Homaka, whose family came originally from the
island of Cyprus. A Languedocian father, a Cyprian mother, an Oriental
birthplace,--it was no wonder that the passionate fire of his blood
flamed somewhat too hotly through his verse. Andre was the third of four
sons, and four daughters were also born to M. de Chenier. In 1765, when
he was but three years old, his father returned to France; but two years
afterwards left his native country again to fill a diplomatic position
in Morocco, while his wife remained in Paris with their children.
Andre seems to have always looked back with pleasure to his Eastern
birthplace, and long cherished the hope of revisiting it, but he never
got farther on the way than Italy. Madame de Chenier, who was a refined
and cultivated woman with much taste for art and literature, gave him
his first lessons; but he was soon sent with his brothers to the College
of Navarre. There he made many friendships that lasted to the end of his
short life, and his school-fellows, some of whom belonged to noble and
wealthy families, often took him to spend his holidays at their
country-houses.
At the age of sixteen he carried off a first prize in rhetoric; and from
that time began his apprenticeship to the trade of the Muses, as Ronsard
would say, by writing translations of Greek and Latin verse. He does not
seem to have been particularly precocious as a poet, and his imitations
of Sappho were even then considered rather feeble. His mother's salon
was thronged with artists, poets, writers, and men of the world, among
whom Andre might have found many indulgent listeners, were it not that
his reserve and fastidious taste made him rather chary of exhibiting his
youthful efforts. His mind was already full of ambitious projects for
future epics, and his leisure was spent very much as his classic models
had spent theirs, in light and facile pleasures and loves.
M. de Chenier, who watched over his family from afar, was ambitious for
the future of his sons; Constantine, the eldest, was already in the
diplomatic service; the other three were destined for the army. Andre
joined his regiment when he was twenty, and went to Strasbourg to learn
his new duties; but the life of a soldier was not congenial to him, and
although he made one or two dear friends in the garrison, the six months
that he spent there seemed interminable, and he returned to Paris to
resume his life of elegant dissipation among his rich and titled
acquaintances. But his health began to give way, and the hope of relief
from a change of climate induced him to join his old friends, the
brothers Louis and Charles Trudaine, in a journey they projected through
Switzerland and Italy to Constantinople. The three friends started
together in the summer of 1784, passed through Switzerland, and spent
the autumn and winter in Italy; but although they remained away a year,
they never got any further.
This journey and its experiences did much to educate and enrich the mind
of Andre, and he continued to devote much time to study and poetic
composition to the elaboration of vast schemes for dramas and epics, and
to the imitation of the Greek and Latin poets he loved and copied so
well. He wished to enlarge the province of the idyl, and to give to it
more variety than even Theocritus had succeeded in doing; to make it
more dramatic, less rustic, and in short if we may judge from the
assertions of his countrymen, a more perfect picture of that elegant and
aristocratic world in which he moved. The idyls of Andre Chenier are to
poetry very much what the pictures of Watteau and Boucher are to
painting. The variety he wished so much to impart to them is after all
confined to the grouping of the figures, and their greatest beauty is
the classic elegance of their style; as one of his French biographers
says, "The style of these poems makes up for what the sentiment lacks of
ideality, and lends a sort of purity to details which from any other pen
would have run great risk of coarseness." Sainte-Beuve speaks of "his
boxwood flute, his ivory lute"; but all this beauty of diction, this
smoothness and grace of verse, can hardly blind the unprejudiced critic
to the fact that "a sort of purity" will hardly make up for his too
frequent choice of subjects that appeal only to the grossest tastes. His
highest ideals, like those of most poets, were never reached. He had
lofty visions of writing a poem called 'Hermes,' which should be an
exposition of natural and social laws, principles, and progress; a
system of philosophy in heroic couplets, beginning with the birth of
humanity and its first questioning of natural phenomena, its first
efforts to solve the problems of the universe, and coming down to the
latest discoveries of physical and political science. He never succeeded
in completing the preliminary studies necessary to the carrying out of
this vast conception, and the 'Hermes' remains a mass of incoherent
fragments.
Andre de Chenier had not the robust common-sense that underlay all the
poetic eccentricities of the poet whom in many ways he so much
resembled,--Alfred de Musset. The latter knew and recognized his
limitations. "My glass is not large, but I drink from my own glass," he
said, and what he did attempt was well within his possibilities and was
exquisitely done. Not so with Chenier. With a genius like that of De
Musset, pre-eminently lyrical, but with infinitely less variety and
richness, he laboriously accumulated vast piles of materials for dramas
and for epics that if ever completed must have but added another page to
the list of literary soporifics. He made a colossal sketch of another
poem, to be called 'America,'--a sort of geographical and historical
encyclopedia, M. Joubert calls it, whose enormous mass of detail could
scarcely be floated by any one current of interest, but whose principal
motive seemed meant to be the conquest of Peru.
In the midst of these enterprises he suddenly conceived what one of his
biographers calls "the amiable intention" of writing a poem on the story
of 'Susannah and the Elders,' but only completed a prose sketch with two
or three short passages in verse. He also began one or two tragedies
which were to be after AEschylus, a comedy called 'The Charlatans,' poems
on the literary life, and many other subjects; and at the same time he
was keeping up his relations with many of his distinguished
contemporaries;--the Polish poet Niemcewicz; Mrs. Cosway, the charming
young wife of the well-known English painter, and an artist herself; the
Italian poet Alfieri; and the Countess of Albany.
In 1787 his father, who had returned to Paris, was anxious that Andre
should begin his diplomatic career; and he was appointed attache to M.
de la Luzerne, just sent as ambassador to England. The poet went to
London in December,--a most unpropitious season,--and naturally nothing
pleased him there; he found the climate detestable, the manners of the
English rude and cold, their literature of a barbaric richness, and in
fact he approved of nothing in England but its Constitution, which he
thought not only good but worthy of imitation.
He had been in London about sixteen months when the first rumors of the
French Revolution reached him and turned all his thoughts towards the
great political questions of the moment. The project of a rule of
liberty and justice for France appealed to the noblest side of his
nature; and while passionately opposed to all excess and violence, he
was eager to assist any movement that promised to help the people.
With his friends the brothers Trudaine, he joined the Society of '89,
when it was a centre for varying shades of opinion, reconciled by a
common love of liberty and hatred of anarchy. He returned to Paris
definitely in the summer of 1790, and wrote independent and impassioned
articles in the Journal of the Society of 1789, warning the people
against their real enemies, the fomenters of anarchy, while he expressed
much the same ideas in one of the most celebrated of his poems, the ode
to David's picture called 'Le Jeu de Paume,' representing the deputies
taking their famous oath in the Hall of the Jeu de Paume at Versailles.
Lacretelle, in his reminiscences published half a century later, spoke
of Andre Chenier as a fellow-member of the club called Friends of the
Constitution, as a man of great talent and great force of
character:--"The most decided and the most eloquently expressed opinions
always came from him. His strongly marked features, his athletic though
not lofty stature, his dark complexion, his glowing eyes, enforced and
illuminated his words. Demosthenes as well as Pindar had been the object
of his study."
But moderate opinions and a horror of the excesses of the Revolution
were very unsafe things to hold. Although Andre took refuge in 1793 in a
quiet little house at Versailles, he could not stay there altogether,
but made frequent visits to Paris; and an unfortunate chance caused his
arrest at the house of M. Pastoret at Passy, where he was accused of
having gone to warn his friend of his own danger. Chenier was first
taken to the prison of the Luxembourg, which was too full to receive
him, and then to St. Lazare, where he was registered on the 8th of
March, 1794.
Apart from the suspicion which caused his arrest, he could hardly have
escaped much longer; his fellow editor of the Journal de Paris had
already been in St. Lazare for several months, and his friends the
Trudaines joined him there before long. M. de Chenier exerted all his
influence to procure his son's liberation, but was put off with promises
and polite evasions; and not long after, his second son, Sauveur, was
imprisoned in the Conciergerie.
By this time there were nearly eight thousand persons in the prisons of
Paris; about eight hundred in St. Lazare, where Chenier found many of
his friends, and among the ladies there the beautiful and charming young
Duchess of Fleury. It was she who inspired the poet with the idea of his
poem called 'The Young Captive,' perhaps the most beautiful, as it is
the most touching, of all his poems.
Shortly before Chenier was arrested he had formed a close friendship
with Madame Pourrat of Luciennes and her two daughters, the Countess
Hocquart and Madame Laurent Lecoulteux. To the latter, under the name of
Fanny, he addressed many charming verses; one ode in particular, that
seems to have been intended to accompany the gift of a necklace, is
almost worthy of Ronsard, although like many of Chenier's poems it was
never finished.
His last poems were written in a very fine hand on some narrow strips of
paper that had escaped the vigilance of his jailers, and were smuggled
out of prison with the linen that went to the wash.
On the flimsy pretext of a conspiracy among the prisoners, Andre
Chenier, then only thirty-one, was condemned with twenty-five others as
"an enemy of the people, and for having shared in all the crimes
perpetrated by the tyrant, his wife, and his family; of writing against
liberty and in favor of tyranny; of corresponding with enemies of the
republic abroad and at home; and finally of conspiring, in the prison of
St. Lazare, to murder the members of the committees of general safety,
etc., and to re-establish royalty in France."
The twenty-five victims went through the mockery of their trial in the
morning of the 25th of July, 1794, and at six the same evening were
executed at the Barriere de Vincennes. Three days afterward, Robespierre
and many of his accomplices perished upon the scaffold, and the Reign of
Terror was at an end.
Very little of Andre Chenier's poetry was left in a state fit for
publication; he began so many vast enterprises of which he left but the
merest fragments, and he wrote so much that his literary executors
feared would shock the public taste. His brother published 'The Young
Captive' and one or two other poems some seven years after his death,
which were quoted by Chateaubriand in 1802 and warmly admired by him.
The first complete edition of his poems did not appear till 1819, a year
before Lamartine's 'Meditations' came out, and three years before Victor
Hugo's first collection was printed. He was not considered a great poet
by his first readers, and he would be almost a forgotten one now, were
it not for the romance of his short life and his early death. He was the
precursor of Byron and De Musset, having the ardent love of liberty of
the former and the sensuous grace of the latter; but he lacked the
strength for a sustained flight, and he did not know the measure of his
powers. He had saturated himself too completely with the honey of Greek
verse, and was prisoned in its cloying sweetness. When he would soar
into the empyrean, his wings were clogged, and he soon fell back again
among the flowers. But he will always be a notable figure in French
literature, although we may not consider him, with his French admirers,
as one of the masters among the poets of our own time.
[Signature: Katharine Hillard]