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.