s it existed four centuries prior to the Christian era. It was an
ideal Greece--the Greece of Winckelmann and Goethe--unalterably
gracious, radiantly calm, which was discovered by the eighteenth
century; but it served the imaginative needs of the age. We trace
its influence in the harmonious forms of Bernardin's and
Chateaubriand's imagining, and in the marbles of Canova. A poet, the
offspring of a Greek mother and a French father--Andre Chenier--a
latter-day Greek or demi-Greek himself, and yet truly a man of his
own century, interpreted this new ideal in literary art.

Born at Constantinople in 1762, ANDRE CHENIER was educated in France,
travelled in Switzerland and Italy, resided as secretary to the French
Ambassador for three weary years in England--land of mists, land of
dull aristocrats--returned to France in 1790, ardent in the cause
of constitutional freedom, and defended his opinions and his friends
as a journalist. The violences of the Revolution drove him into
opposition to the Jacobin party. In March 1794 he was arrested; on
the 25th July, two days before the overthrow of Robespierre, Andre
Chenier's head fell on the scaffold.

Only two poems, the _Jeu de Paume_ and the _Hymne aux Suisses_, were
published by Chenier; after his death appeared in journals the _Jeune
Captive_ and the _Jeune Tarentine_; his collected poems, already
known in manuscript to lovers of literature, many of them fragmentary,
were issued in 1819. The romantic school had come into existence
without his aid; but under Sainte-Beuve's influence it chose to regard
him as a predecessor, and during the years about 1830 he was studied
and imitated as a master.

He belongs, however, essentially to the eighteenth century, to its
graceful sensuality, its revival of antiquity, its faith in human
reason, its comprehensive science of nature and of society. In certain
of his poems suggested by public occasions he is little more than
a disciple of Lebrun. His _Elegies_ are rather Franco-Roman than
Greek; these, together with beauties of their own, have the
characteristic rhetoric, the conventional graces, the mundane
voluptuousness of their age. His philosophical poem _Hermes_, of
which we have designs and fragments, would have been the _De Rerum
Natura_ of an admiring student of Buffon.

In his _Eglogues_ and his epic fragments he is a Greek or a demi-Greek,
who has learnt directly from Homer, from the pastoral and idyllic
poets of antiquity, and