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.