Читать книгу Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature - 5. The Romantic School in France - Георг Брандес - Страница 10

But the renascence of literature in France was not due chiefly to foreign influences. It was upon the soil of their native country that the new men built.

The work accomplished by a great literary school such as the Romantic School in France may be compared to the building of a town, only that the town of literature is invariably built upon land which is protected merely by slight and leaky embankments from the waters of forgetfulness. Water at the foundations is soon discovered; it rises slowly but steadily; at last the lower buildings disappear, and only the loftiest monuments remain towering, eternally visible, above the level of the Lethean stream.

What gives these highest literary monuments their proud position is partly the profundity of the thoughts which support them, partly the exact conformity of the perfect artistic expression to the idea; but, unless the author is really a creative thinker, what is of conclusive importance is that his mind should, consciously or unconsciously, be permeated by the most advanced ideas of his age; for it is the spirit which "maketh alive" and preserves from destruction.

Romanticism in France displays three main tendencies:

1. The endeavour to reproduce faithfully either some real piece of past history or some phase of modern life—the tendency towards the true.

2. The endeavour after perfection of form, whether apprehended as plasticity and picturesqueness of expression, as severe metrical harmony, or as a prose style imperishable from its concise simplicity—the tendency towards the beautiful.

3. Enthusiasm for great religious or social reformatory ideas, an ethic aim in art—the tendency towards the good.

These three main tendencies define the nature of this vigorous and talented school as the three dimensions define space; and each of them produced works of great and enduring value.

The last two, as resultant from French influences, occupy our attention first.

Although there were to be found in the Romantic School authors who, like Mérimée and Gautier, retained to the last a natural or artificial indifference to the social and political aims of the age, it numbered far more who were strongly appealed to and affected by the endeavours made to organise the future of their country and of the whole human race. Poetry, literature, has two main developments. It is either of the nature of representation based upon psychological observation—in which form it approaches science—or it bears the character of an annunciation, an inspired appeal—in which form it approaches religion. Many writers of the generation of 1830 show that they apprehended it in the latter manner. The critics who have tried to depreciate these men by calling their productions works with a purpose, or problem literature, have done them wrong. For what such critics condemn is nought else but the spirit of the age—its ideas; and these ideas are the life-blood of all true literature. All that we have a right to demand in the interest of art is, that the veins through which this life-blood flows shall only show blue under the skin, not rise black and swollen as they do in the case of a sick or angry man.

During the course of the Thirties reformatory ideas make their way into French Romanticism from all sides. If we try to trace them back to their source, it is not possible to stop before Saint-Simon. In Count Claude Henri de Saint-Simon (born in 1760), the only descendant of the famous Duke de Saint-Simon who wrote the private chronicles of the court of Louis XIV., France, which showed so little interest in the drama of Faust, herself produced a nineteenth-century Faust, a genuine Faust in the matter of restless genius and irresistible craving after both theoretical and practical knowledge of everything in the universe. He is less acute and sagacious than the hero of Goethe's famous poem, but his mental horizon is wider, his aim a grander one, and his whole endeavour of a higher nature. He begins where Faust ends. His plans for cutting a canal through the Isthmus of Panama, and for the canalisation of Spain, remind us of the undertakings of the latter years of Faust's life. Saint-Simon was in turn soldier, man of fashion, engineer, company-projector, philosopher, scientist, political economist, and founder of a religion; he was a man who possessed almost every talent. In his youth he spent a large fortune, believing himself to be heir to the dignities of peer of France and grandee of Spain and a capital of 500,000 francs; but his father and the Duke de Saint-Simon quarrelled, and he inherited nothing. He sank into abject poverty, worked as a copyist nine hours a day for a thousand francs a year, and in 1812 was reduced to living on bread and water. In despair, he one day made an attempt at suicide; he shot out one of his eyes, but recovered. The attempt at suicide, too, reminds us of Faust.

Disciples came to his assistance, supported him, were instructed by him, and founded one periodical after another to propagate his ideas.

At the time of Saint-Simon's death, which happened five years before the Revolution of July, these ideas were only known to and adopted by a small circle, but during the reign of Louis Philippe they spread rapidly, undergoing various alterations during the process. A Saint-Simonist sect was founded, a sect with a high-priest and with eminent men of all classes and professions amongst its numbers, such men as Isaac Péreire, the financier, and Félicien David, the musical composer. In the end the Saint-Simonist ideas penetrated the whole of French society; through Michel Chevalier they became elements of political economy; they inspired the most eminent historian of the day, Augustin Thierry; they lay at the foundation of the philosophy of the greatest French thinker of the century, Auguste Comte; with certain modifications they won, in Pierre Leroux and Lamennais, influential philosophic and religious apostles; and at the same time they made their way into poetry. And there was nothing marvellous in all this, for, in spite of his extravagances, Saint-Simon undoubtedly had something of the prophetic instinct of the great poet.

He was in advance of his age; for his philosophy is one of the signs of the great European reaction against the eighteenth century, which he regarded as a purely critical, purely disintegrative period, whilst he denominated the nineteenth an organic, directly productive period. He disagreed as entirely with those who imagined that the happiness of humanity can be produced by a mere change in the forms of government as with those who, like the church party, exalted the past in order to bring it back again. He was not the friend of the past, but the herald of the future; the aims and endeavours of the reaction appeared to him only in so far reasonable and right as they arose from a perception of the truth that mankind cannot be civilised by mere reason, that religion is indispensable to civilisation—the religion desiderated by Saint-Simon being, however, one divested of the conventions and externalities of all the existing religions. Possessed, as he was, not with the spirit of doubt, but with the reformer's enthusiasm, the liberty which consisted in emancipation from restraints seemed to him of little value if it were not complemented and completed by true, perfect liberty, that is to say, by an ever greater, wider capability. The work of the last, the critical, centuries had been the destruction of the medieval power of the priest and the warrior; now the time had come to establish the reign of science and industry. In the new order of society science was destined to take the place of faith, industry of war.

The first thing to be done was to "organise" science and industry.

In Saint-Simon's Lettres d'un habitant de Genève, any who are interested in his projects for the organisation of science may read his scheme of starting a subscription at the tomb of Sir Isaac Newton for the purpose of enabling all the greatest scientists and artists to devote themselves to their professions, not only freed from all pecuniary anxieties, but with the certainty of being well paid for their work—a scheme which Alfred de Vigny, as author of Chatterton, must have read with enthusiastic approbation, if he ever did read it. But he would learn with perhaps more surprise than approbation that these geniuses were in return to undertake the supervision of all the spiritual interests of humanity, in accordance with a definite, carefully detailed plan.

Saint-Simon's Parable is the document which gives most information about the proposed organisation of industry. As this parable, from the fact that it is written in a laconic style and with glimpses of a wit which the author displays on no other occasion, is probably the only one of his writings which will continue to be read, I reproduce it in a condensed form.

Suppose, says Saint-Simon, that France were to lose from the ranks of its scientists, painters, poets, mechanicians, physicians, surgeons, &c., the fifty best in each class—say its 3000 best scientific men, artists, and mechanicians—what would be the result?

Since these men are the real productive power of the country, the flower of the French nation, at least another whole generation would be required to repair the misfortune. For the human beings whose life-work is unmistakably of use are exceptions, and nature is not prodigal of these exceptions.

Let us suppose another case. Let us suppose that France keeps all her gifted scientists, artists, industrial and mechanical geniuses, but has the misfortune to lose his Royal Highness the King's brother, their Royal Highnesses the Dukes of Berry, Orléans, and Bourbon, the Duchess of Angoulême, the Duchess of Bourbon, and the young Duchess of Condé. She at the same time loses all the great officers of the crown, all the ministers of state, chamberlains, masters of the hunt, marshals, cardinals, archbishops, bishops, deans, and canons, all the prefects and sub-prefects, all the judges, and into the bargain 10,000 of the richest of those landed proprietors who live in great style.

The event would undoubtedly cause grief to the nation, because the French are a good-hearted people, and not capable of regarding with indifference the sudden disappearance of such a number of their fellow-citizens. But this loss of not fewer than 30,000 of the persons who are esteemed the first in the state could occasion sorrow only on purely sentimental grounds; for no serious harm to the state as state would arise from it. It would be very easy to fill the vacant places. There are any number of Frenchmen who could occupy the position of His Majesty the King's brother quite as well as that august prince, any number who could fill the place of prince of the blood royal, &c., &c. The anterooms of the court are crowded with aspirants ready and fit to be invested with the rank of officers of the crown. The army possesses any number of officers who are quite as good generals as our present marshals; and how many commercial travellers are cleverer men than our ministers of state, how many priests quite as devout and capable as our cardinals, archbishops, deans, and canons! As regards the 10,000 landed proprietors, their heirs would scarcely need any apprenticeship to make quite as charming hosts.

The idea underlying this jest, for which, by the way, Saint-Simon had to answer to the authorities, is, of course, that only the productive class of citizens is in reality useful. Before the Revolution the conflict was between the nobility and the bourgeoisie; now that a part of the bourgeoisie is elevated to the same position as the nobility and shares its privileges, the division is between the unproductive and the productive class; the future belongs to industry, labour, the deeds of peace and utility. But whereas contemporary French political economists only went the length of granting the individual the greatest possible amount of liberty to develop his powers, Saint-Simon demanded the interference of the state. It was, according to him, the province of the state to organise labour and production; it alone could ensure that for the future man should utilise nature only, and not his fellow-man. The state ought, while fully acknowledging the natural differences between man and man, to do its utmost to abolish the artificial differences—ought, therefore, to abolish all hereditary privileges, and to annul or modify the law of succession.

In Saint-Simon's writings we find, then, in the first place, the fundamental ideas of modern socialism—distrust of the consequences of free competition and the demand that productive labour shall receive the recompense and the honour which are its due—ideas which prompted his famous dictum, that every member of society ought to hold the place in it to which his abilities entitle him and receive the due reward of his labour (à chacun selon sa capacité!). In the second place we find, as a result of this demand, the inculcation, for the first time in the writings of a French author, of the doctrine of the complete equality of woman and man as members of society. And, lastly, we have, in the matter of religion, rejection of all dogma, not with the aim of destroying religion, but for the purpose of rescuing from the grave of orthodoxy the one command: Love one another! This is the Christianity which Saint-Simon expounded in his last important work, Le nouveau Christianisme, a Christianity with only one doctrine, which may be expressed as follows: The task of religion is to help society to accomplish that great object, the speediest possible improvement of the condition of the poorest and most numerous class.

There was something in Saint-Simon's personality which could not but be congenial to the more simple-minded among the Romanticists. He had the unbounded self-confidence which inspires others with confidence; the philosopher's inclination to self-examination formed no part of his nature; he was dogmatic; he was a prophet. He was, moreover, possessed by the Romantic desire to experience everything, to feel everything. The lines of conduct which he prescribed as indispensable to progress in philosophy do not differ materially from those which a young Romantic poet would have named as requisite for poetical production. They are: (1) to lead during one's vigorous years as active and independent a life as possible; (2) to make one's self thoroughly acquainted with every variety of theory and every variety of practice; (3) to study all classes of society and to insinuate one's self into the most varied social positions; (4) to sum up one's observations and draw a conclusion from them.

In Saint-Simon's philosophy there was one outstanding feature that, as a rule, repelled the Romantic authors, namely, his enthusiasm for industrial pursuits, which, as merely useful, were repugnant to most of them. But the philosophy was by no means destitute of poetry. Its revolutionary, its fantastic, and its Utopian elements were certain to appeal to a Romanticist, as also its insistence upon natural inequality, its idolisation of genius, and its leaning to religion. It was poetical, too, in its solicitude for the welfare of woman and its affectionate interest in the most unfortunate classes of society.

And it was not until after 1830 that Saint-Simonism began to be a social power. Saint-Simon himself, like most founders of religions, was both prophet and exemplar; he made of his disciples real apostles; regarding him in sober earnest as the modern Messiah, they went out into the world as his messengers. It was through these men and their intellectual kin that society in general made acquaintance with the doctrines of Saint-Simon during the reign of Louis Philippe, though some of the intellectually vigilant had before this read the master's own writings. There is a memorandum in Victor Hugo's diary for 1830 (Littérature et Philosophie mêlées I.) which shows that he, for one, was already acquainted with Saint-Simon.

A year after Saint-Simon's death, his organ, Le Producteur, had to be given up; but this very circumstance brought his disciples into more personal and intimate relations with their adherents. And when Enfantin, the St. Paul of the new faith, a man of imposing appearance, a sacerdotal genius of the first rank, with something of a Brigham Young's capacity for rule and leadership, became the real head of the sect, it made proselytes of numbers of clever young men and cultivated, high-spirited women. Large sums were voluntarily contributed towards the support of the Saint-Simonist "family"; in 1831 alone they amounted to 330,000 francs. A new weekly paper, L'Organisateur was started, and from 1830 onwards Paul Leroux edited the Globe. But the doctrines propagated deviated ever more and more from Saint-Simon's original system. In his scheme of organisation an important rôle was assigned to the capitalists; one of the three Chambers proposed by him was to consist exclusively of capitalists. But now capital was attacked. Saint-Simon had distinctly reprobated every species of communism; now, in the "family," community of goods was the order of the day, and state communism was considered desirable. One particular conclusion deduced from Saint-Simon's doctrines led to the downfall of the system and the break-up of the sect. The master had taught that, since the old Christianity had put enmity between the flesh and the spirit, it was the task of the new to reconcile them. The old Christianity had made self-denial and mortification of the flesh man's aim, the new ought to make it well-being and universal happiness. Employing other words we may express his thought thus:—The Christianity of renunciation has been a sharp and violent remedy for that indulgence in the satisfaction of every desire which was the order of the day under the empire of Rome; but the remedy has shown itself to be quite as dangerous as the disease. We have got rid of the disease, but what can free us from the remedy without exposing us to a relapse? No power except that of the new Christianity.

From this comparatively sensible idea Enfantin deduced doctrines the practical application of which would have resulted in much such a state of matters as prevailed amongst Jan van Leiden's Anabaptists. One of the original doctrines of Saint-Simonism was that now, in the new era, man, the individual, was superseded by the individual, man-woman, whose constituent parts possessed equal rights and full liberty to dissolve an unsatisfactory marriage, it being in the double, not the single, being that true humanity is realised. From this doctrine Enfantin drew the conclusion that there are two kinds of marriage, the one the marriage of monogamists, the other the marriage of those who in course of time become polygamists—that is to say, the enduring and the ephemeral marriage; actual, simultaneous polygamy was to be the prerogative only of the priests and priestesses. Although little could be advanced, either in general discussion or in the court of justice, against the Saint-Simonists' argument that the inauguration of this order of things would have no other consequence than the confirming and legalising of relations which at present existed illegally, this particular practical conclusion sufficiently showed the entire incapacity of the young enthusiasts to judge what was possible and what impossible of realisation in the existing, state of society; it proved them to be of the number of those who believe that society can be reformed by a stroke of the pen. Their excuse is to be found in the circumstance that, with the exception of Enfantin and Bazard, all the Saint-Simonists of 1830 (as also all Lamennais' disciples) were about twenty years of age. Ridicule cooled their ardour for the spread of the faith. In the summer of 1832 the heads of the "family" were sentenced, Enfantin to a year's imprisonment, Michel, Chevalier, and Duveyrier to a trifling fine. The young enthusiasts of whom the little sect was composed were scattered; but almost all of them distinguished themselves in later life, either in the domain of science, of industry, or of art. Their exaggerations of the theories of Saint-Simon had, like the Utopian schemes of Fourier which belong to the same period, no influence upon literature. It was influenced only by the original ideas.

The air of the day became impregnated with these ideas; minds were infected by them; they seized upon some soft, impressionable character, and this impressionable character influenced a strong one; they gained possession of a woman through a man, or of a man through a woman, of a poet through a priest, or of a young student through a poet. And after the manner of ideas, they summoned up other ideas—socialistically democratic ideas which had lain dormant since the end of the previous century, like Louis Blanc's; philosophico-historic humanitarian ideas like those of Pierre Leroux's maturer period, which recalled Schelling and were inimical to plutocracy; ideas like Lamennais', which recalled the thoughts and feelings with which, during the peasant revolts of the Middle Ages, the priests who bore the crucifix in front of the rebel armies inspired the proletariat, making them ready to risk their lives.

If the source of the Romantic School's reformatory desires and endeavours (what we have called its tendency towards the good) is to be found in the doctrines of Saint-Simon, its tendency towards the beautiful is to be traced to the influence of another great Frenchman.

Nothing contributed more to the remarkable artistic advance noticeable in French literature, and especially French lyric poetry, at this period, than the discovery, the recovery, of a French genius of whose existence no one had any idea. As, at the beginning of the modern era, the impulse to Italian humanism was given by the excavation of the first antique sculptures from the soil which had so long concealed them, so now the impulse to a regular revolution in French poetry was given by the discovery and publication, in 1819, of André Chénier's works. Scales fell, as it were, from men's eyes when, twenty-six years after their author's death, these soulful Ionic poems were brought to the light of day; all the literary idols of the Empire, Delille and all the didactic descriptive poets, fell and were broken to pieces. A fresh spring breeze from ancient Hellas, the true, the real Greece, blew over France and fertilised the ground. The Alexandrine, which in the eighteenth century had been so flaccid and feeble, in the seventeenth so stiff and symmetrical, revealed mysterious harmonies, a delicate, flexible force, an audacious, sensuous charm, and (now that the cæsura no longer came inevitably after the sixth foot and the clause no longer ended with the line) a versatility hitherto undreamt of. The ideas and emotions were modern, but the artistic spirit which dictated the expression given them was antique. In this combination lay concealed the motive power that produced a whole literary development of the same species as that to which Ronsard, by adopting a similar standpoint, gave the impulse in the sixteenth century. In this new literature the ancient and the modern spirit met; and their meeting-place was at a great distance from their rendezvous in the days of Louis XIV. The clear radiance of the name of André Chénier extinguished the light of all the names that had hitherto shone brightly. A poet with the light of genius on his brow and the martyr's aureole round his head, had risen from the grave to lead the young generation into the promised land of the new literature.

André Marie Chénier, born in Constantinople (Galata) in 1762, was the 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.