Chénier's works are the most pathetic commentary on his brief life - almost all fragments. His method of working was to construct a sort of tessellated pavement for which he had prepared the bits of marble, the designs, the harmonious colors. There they all are, heaped up in their unfinished pathos, monuments of loving toil, snatched from his full hands at the moment when they were about to be cunningly put together-pieces of a bell in each of which sleeps the wonderful tune that might have become far more perfect if wedded into a marriage-bell of sweet sounds. It is almost like turning over the leaves of an ancient-these Poésies d'André Chénier; you almost expect to look for foot-notes, annotations, glossary, a prolegomenon, or the mystic references to old Dutch or Venetian issues with which modern editions of the classics abound. Fragments from Sappho, Pindar, Bion, Ovid, Propertius, Plato, Euripides, Oppian — at one time "a little idyll of Meleager on the Spring, and then a single verse of Moschus," a paraphrase of some rich thought of Plato's or a distich from Tibullus abound, all so inextricably tangled and braided together that it is next to impossible to discern. between the original and the borrowed, between the warp and the weft. You see the artist behind the Gobelin tapestry; you watch the twinkle of his nimble fingers; you admire their deft cunning; you wonder at the sly grace of the figures that start up in such magical profusion under his hand; but you cannot tell where thread joins thread, or how the violets become burning scarlets, or how the colors take form and life and stand before you in such inimitable daintiness. In a poetical epistle to a friend he gives some interesting particulars of his proceeding; how he would take a phrase or a turn from an old author, and by a twist as a Spanish caballero his cigarette-charge it with a new thought, give it new being, breathe a soul into it, give it a tongue and limbs, touch its lips with flame, make it eloquent and alive. His effort was, we are told, to engraft the Greek genius on French poetry; to go beyond the Louis XIV. bombast, and do over again, more perfectly, the work of Ronsard. There was much in his way the road was barricaded with the mighty peruke of Racine that frowned from beneath its mountains of curl and powder on every innovator; there was the ferule of the grammarian Malherbe, the stony epic of Chapelain, the buffoonery of Panurge, the obstacles of a national temper whose truest representative Guy seemed the clipt and emasculated nature of the park of Versailles; a language always kept clean-shaven, ruffled, starched, powdered, in the blue-and-gold of Louis XIV. uniform; a gay, sprightly, godless, prosaic people, full of insouciance and empty of responsibility. Truly, no light-armed opponents! It might well be a labor to frighten the stoutest-hearted. Chénier went almost unconsciously to work, following the bent of his nature, doing all the more successfully from absence of purpose what two hundred years of stock-jobbing with the "vieilles filles d'Olympe" had come far short of.

To the foreigner there is still a little stiffness, a little flesh about some of these poems. We see the elaborately frisured heads of the tritons of the Grandes Eaux, the belted and sworded sea-monsters spouting rivers of water from throats that belong to Middle-Age

griffins. It is hard for the orthodox Gaul to cast off the incubus of the age of Louis Quatorze; it sits upon the whole literature like a monster owl. a sort of Michel-Ange dome hovering over St. Peter's. Until this pitiless bugbear is ousted with huge outcry and wing-flapping, Frenchmen will always write as if they had Boileau's knife at their throats. There is no end to the worshippers of this portentous bird that nods its spectral head at every innovation, and breaks into wild laughter when the young owlets depart from the ancient usage. Starving penny-a-liners refer with pride and regret to the Grand Monarque, to the amplitude and bounty of the royal hand, to the mighty folios of the accountant-general, wherein stand armies of pensioners and beneficiaries, among whom good, dear, stupid Chapelain gets thousands of crowns, and poor Molière this notice: "Sa morale est bonne, et il n'a qu'à se garder de sa scurrilité." Almost the solitary instance of independence of mind in that century came from Richelieu, who suggested to the poet Colletet to change the word s'humecter for the picturesque verb barbotter in the monologue to a tirade on the king's palace (Les Tuileries).

- La canne s'humecter de la bourbe de l'eau !

Such novelty, such use of the right word in the right place was never heard of before. Poor Colletet almost swooned — and stuck closer than a brother to his nonsense. The hankering of the French mind after an epic has caused the world untold misery. Every French poetaster with an ounce of genius considered an epos of twelve thousand verses absolutely essential to his salvation. It is said there are no less than two dozen in the frightful period between Chapelain and Voltaire. So the La Pucelles, the Franciades, the Henriades, the very mention of which creates a yawn.

For

Chénier happily confined himself to more modest themes. twenty-five years he remained an "unedited glory." M. Latouche, in his touching notice of Chénier's life, recounts the difficulties that he experienced in obtaining the MSS. that contained his literary remains. Little was published during the life-time of the poet: he shrank from venturing his thought before the world during that era of madness and fanaticism, as if the delicate blossoms would wither under the breath of revolution. The bad of misgovernment had become the worse of anarchy and rebellion. It was a spectacle for men and angels-this great France, with its sunny vineyards, its happy tempers, its eloquent past, its bright social philosophy, suddenly in wan eclipse, sun-darkened, tempest-tossed, weltering in blood, the fable of nations, the victim of the malign Eumenides. It is inconceivable to us to-day, even under the blaze of a hundred histories. In the first days of the Terror, Chénier was prevailed upon to quit Paris and withdraw to Rouen. He had made himself odious to the reigning party by a stern and vigorous opposition to the principles of the Jacobins; he had celebrated Charlotte Corday in verse; he had attacked Robespierre; he had even entered the lists for the amiable and defenceless king. Through the Journal de Paris, established by himself and his friends, he continually preached tolerance, concord, forbearance; he was equally averse to democratic violence and feudal

iniquities, to brigands with pikes and brigands with red heels, the tyranny of patriots and the tyranny of Bastilles, the privileges of court-dames and the prerogatives of market-women. Enlightened, just, dispassionate, he did everything to ward off the sombre policy of the Red Club and its irremediable consequence. Bleeding as it were from being torn so rudely from his beloved studies, he threw himself with glowing feeling into the vanguard of those who had France earnestly at heart, and wrought with enthusiasm for the maintenance of order. Nothing could be more unpalatable to the "friends of the constitution."

At Rouen and Versailles he remained quiet for a while, when the sudden news that one of his friends had been arrested at Passy made him fly to Paris. Here he was surprised, detained, judged suspect, and dragged to prison. Paris, we are told, was meanwhile in mourning through the decrees of the revolutionary tribunal. The only safety for prisoners, says M. Latouche, was the oblivion into which they fell by reason of their very multitude. Chénier's brother, the author of the history of French literature, had become the object of Robespierre's particular hatred. There was therefore no hope for André himself after he had set foot within the fateful precincts of St Lazare. In prison he retouched many of his poems, and composed others through which we see heaven's light as through the loophole of a dungeon. Even here that marvellous serenity was preserved, a store of which he seems to have laid up from his tranquil and noble intercourse with the ancients. There are few sights more affecting than this young poet giving in prison and in heaviness the last touches to a fame that has since won for itself such tender sympathy. We are reminded of many examples where immortal works have gone on despite misery and depression: Diderot at Vincennes, Voltaire in the Bastille, Bunyan in Bedford jail, Cervantes in Barbary; none affects us like this. Heroism has seldom given an instance of more generous or more high-born fortitude.

He left three portfolios of MSS., which have been published by the great Faubourg St. Germain house of Charpentier. The first in their unachieved state might be likened to the legends cut with pain and tears into the solid walls of prisons; abrupt, pregnant, a story that has no visible end, unfinished from very weariness; a date, a name, a strange, sharp cry that wrings the heart, a line from some forgotten book, a sentence that ended with its author on the scaffold or the rack. They shut like a sensitive-plant when you attempt to unriddle their meaning. In these brief elliptical sketches lie the materials for the lapidary that, like the opal, as some one says, owe their chief beauty to a defect. Brief as they are, they have "the grace of Lafontaine, the fire of Tibullus, the delicacy of Theocritus."

The second portfolio is the half-open flower, more than the bud, less than the blossom in its radiant ampleness; a little dew, a little sunlight, a few whiffs of warm vaporous summer would push apart the leaflets and unveil the throbbing and sweet-breathed interior. But the wan prison-light did not suffice; the fair summer-time did not come; the pale little verselets remained embryonic, like the tiny angels in Correggio's frescoes that only have heads and wings. Of

these might be enumerated the idyllic fragments, many of the elegies, the philosophic poem Hermes in imitation of Lucretius, and others, all replete with striking imagery, keen realistic painting, strong feeling for the objective, vivid reproduction of fact. There are some through which the moonshine trembles as through the Coliseum on an August night, full of glow-worms, full of mystery and tenderness. They come in contact with life at a thousand points and sparkle wherever they touch it. At times you stumble upon a little fragment that may prove to be a piece of a Roman amphitheatre, or a column with flowered capital, or a frieze covered with bassi-relievi. It is always worth while to stop and examine. This division of Chénier's work forms a museum, a Hôtel de Cluny, where objects stand not so much in their rightful places as massed together for class-effect. There is more than antiquarian research, more than mere display of archæological vanity; there is genius, order, informing spirit. The statues all stand in living and breathing attitudes, as if they had just ceased the most delightful of revels on your entrance and were still palpitating with secret happiness; the faun dances, the Graces cling lovingly together, the pallid huntresses have their bows bent, the drapery is just slipping from the voluptuous limbs of a bathing nymph, the wealth of turreted curling hair has just burst the fillet and is streaming down over the shoulders of the Bacchante - all is abandon, frolic, lissome merriment.

The third portfolio holds what is most interesting to us the fruit, the flower expanded into a cup for all sweet dews and odors to dwell in. There is the Pyrrha sub antro, the tomb of Vergil overlooking the blue Neapolitan sea, the tell-tale jar that smells of stolen Falernian. Even the antique has seldom reached extremer beauty than is found in "The Blind Man" (L'Aveugle), perhaps scarcely the noble hymn to Apollo itself. Oaristys might be rendered into Doric and pass for a Sicilian pastoral. "The Young Patient" (Le Jeune Malade) is a simple, bright, touching picture thrown off by an adroit hand; no meagre silhouette, but a canvas full of bright profiles. "The Beggar" is himself an eloquent alms to literature. It was claimed for Chénier that he did for France what Homer did for Rome: as a translator he equals the original. In Horace we see the sunken piers, the broad Greek basis on which the superstructure rests - the luminous perspective of poet behind poet, as in the Valley of Tessin mountain beyond mountain. We enjoy a double feast: there is a remote sweetness that is wafted to us from the maker of the poem, faint, delightful; then the nearer and intenser enjoyment which the translator conveys through his own kindled sense - the hurrying rapture of possession and communication. So in Chénier's verse. You see the little Memories ever busy at his elbow; but they are clad in light. There is no anger at such genial appropriations. It is a joy to see the "Student Anselmus coming out of his bottle." The smirking marionnettes that used to trip forth with their wooden legs and curtsy to the world as "O Muse!" in the invocations to heroic poems, have lost their wooden souls and become transformed into a troop of sparkling sylvan creatures of the gloaming fresh from some quest of Pan. We are grateful for the transformation. It is the

magic of sympathetic talent creative in spite of itself, sprinkling the juice of love-in-idleness into our eyes and transporting us to a pagan fairy-land. So round a poor, paltry "Pyramus and Thisbe " gathers the bewitchingly quaint elfin drama, leaping from it like a sprite from an acorn. So from a handful of commonplace fables Chénier deftly evokes a swarm of lovely images that float airily around us and tickle the imagination like a straw.

Chénier accompanied the Comte de la Luzerne to England, where, like Heine, he passed many despondent weeks. He did not fancy the English, whom he calls as "sad as their cloud-girt sky." The "sweet name of France was always on his lips." Ever since that tender plaint

"Adieu, plaisant pays de France,
O ma patrie
La plus chérie,

Qui a nourri ma jeune enfance "

this longing has been coining itself into golden ballads. So with de Musset. What is there in this "plaisant pays" that is so attractive? Even in the prison of St. Lazare Chénier felt it, heard the ranz des vaches, was smitten with a strange yearning to be free. Vain efforts were made by his gray-haired father to secure his release. On the 7th Thermidor, 1794, only two days before France became free forever from the dominion of Robespierre, his death-warrant was signed. He appeared before the tribunal, says M. Latouche, without deigning to speak or defend himself. He was declared the "people's enemy,' convicted of having written "against liberty" and defended "tyranny," and was finally accused of the crime of trying to escape. There were some of the noblest of France in the car that bore him forth to the guillotine-Montalembert, de Montmorency, Baron de Trenck, and Loiserolles, who died to save his son. On the way their last talk was about poetry, "for them the most beautiful thing on earth." Racine was the subject of this last conversation. They began to repeat favorite passages from the tragedies. André thought of the first scene in the Andromaque; he died with this in his heart.

J. A. H.