Page:EB1911 - Volume 06.djvu/91

 Paris. Grenié’s invention, perfected by Alexandre and Debain about 1840, produced the harmonium. Kratzenstein (see under ) of St Petersburg was the first to apply the free reed to the organ in the second half of the 18th century. Inventions of similar instruments, which after a short life were relegated to oblivion, followed at the beginning of the 19th century. An interesting reproduction of a Persian cheng dating from the 10th or 11th century is to be seen on a Persian vase described and illustrated together with a shawm in the Gazette archéologique (tome xi., 1886).

CHÊN-HAI [], 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° 58′ N., 121° 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.

CHÉNIER, ANDRÉ DE (1762–1794), French poet, was born at Constantinople on the 30th of October 1762. His father, Louis Chénier, 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 André was the third son, and Marie-Joseph (see below) the fourth, remained in France; and after a few years, during which André ran wild with “la tante de Carcasonne,” he distinguished himself as a verse-translator from the classics at the Collège 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 Chénier 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-Pindaré, 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 Chénier 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, Chénier also experimented from early youth in didactic and philosophic verse, and when he commenced his Hermès in 1783 his ambition was to condense the Encyclopédie 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 Chénier’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, André 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 Chénier family, and he offered to take André with him as his secretary. The offer was too good to be refused, but the poet hated himself on the banks of the fière Tamise, and wrote in bitter ridicule of

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 Cléry.

The France that he plunged into with such impetuosity was upon the verge of anarchy. A strong constitutionalist, Chénier 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 français (August 24, 1790) was followed by the rhetorical Jeu de paume, a somewhat declamatory moral ode addressed “à 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 révoltés du regiment de Châteauvieux. 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. André’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 à Charlotte Corday congratulating France that “Un scélérat 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 à 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 André, 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, Chénier’s agony found expression almost to the last in these murderous Iambes which he launched against the