the
greatest influence on the literary life of his generation.
Alfred-Victor, Count de Vigny, was born in Loches, Touraine, March 27,
1797. His father was an army officer, wounded in the Seven Years’ War.
Alfred, after having been well educated, also selected a military career
and received a commission in the “Mousquetaires Rouges,” in 1814, when
barely seventeen. He served until 1827, “twelve long years of peace,”
then resigned. Already in 1822 appeared a volume of ‘Poemes’ which was
hardly noticed, although containing poetry since become important to
the evolution of French verse: ‘La Neige, le Coy, le Deluge, Elva, la
Frigate’, etc., again collected in ‘Poemes antiques et modernes’ (1826).
Other poems were published after his death in ‘Les Destinies’ (1864).
Under the influence of Walter Scott, he wrote a historical romance in 1826, ‘Cinq-Mars, ou une Conjuration sans Louis XIII’. It met with the most brilliant and decided success and was crowned by the Academy. Cinq-Mars will always be remembered as the earliest romantic novel in France and the greatest and most dramatic picture of Richelieu now extant. De Vigny was a convinced Anglophile, well acquainted with the writings of Shakespeare and Milton, Byron, Wordsworth, Shelley, Matthew Arnold, and Leopardi. He also married an English lady in 1825—Lydia Bunbury.
Other prose works are ‘Stello’ (1832), in the manner of Sterne and Diderot, and ‘Servitude et Grandeur militaire’ (1835), the language of which is as caustic as that of Merimee. As a dramatist, De Vigny produced a translation of ‘Othello—Le More de Venice’ (1829); also ‘La Marechale d’Ancre’ (1832); both met with moderate success only. But a decided “hit” was ‘Chatterton’ (1835), an adaption from his prose-work ‘Stello, ou les Diables bleus’; it at once established his reputation on the stage; the applause was most prodigious, and in the annals of the French theatre can only be compared with that of ‘Le Cid’. It was a great victory for the Romantic School, and the type of Chatterton, the slighted poet, “the marvellous boy, the sleepless soul that perished in his pride,” became contagious as erstwhile did the type of Werther.
For twenty years before his death Alfred de Vigny wrote nothing. He lived in retirement, almost a recluse, in La Charente, rarely visiting Paris. Admitted into L’Academie Francaise in 1845, he describes in his ‘Journal d’un Poete’ his academic visits and the reception held out to him by the members of L’Institut. This work appeared posthumously in 1867.
He died in Paris, September 17, 1863.
CHARLES DE MAZADE
de l’Academie Francaise.
PREFACE
Considering Alfred de Vigny first as a writer, it is evident that he wished the public to regard him as different from the other romanticists of his day; in fact, in many respects, his method presents a striking contrast to theirs. To their brilliant facility, their prodigious abundance, and the dazzling luxury of color in their pictures of life he opposes a style always simple, pure, clear, with delicacy of touch, careful drawing of character, correct locution, and absolute chastity. Yet, even though he had this marked regard for purity in literary style, no writer had more dislike of mere pedantry. His high ideal in literary art and his self-respect inspired him with an invincible repugnance toward the artificialities of style of that period, which the romanticists—above all, Chateaubriand, their master—had so much abused.
Every one knows of the singular declaration made by Chateaubriand to Joubert, while relating the details of a nocturnal voyage: “The moon shone upon me in a slender crescent, and that prevented me from writing an untruth, for I feel sure that had not the moon been there I should have said in my letter that it was shining, and then you would have convicted me of an error in my almanac!”
This habit of sacrificing truth and exactitude of impression, for the sake of producing a harmonious phrase or a picturesque suggestion, disgusted Alfred de Vigny. “The worst thing about writers is that they care very little whether what they write is true, so long as they only write,” we read on one page of his Journal. He adds, “They should seek words only in their own consciences.” On another page he says: “The most serious lack in literary work is sincerity. Perceiving clearly that the combination of technical labor and research for effective expression, in producing literary work, often leads us to a paradox, I have resolved to sacrifice all to conviction and truth, so that this precious element of sincerity, complete and profound, shall dominate my books and give to them the sacred character which the divine presence of truth always gives.”
Besides sincerity, De Vigny possessed, in a high degree, a gift which was not less rare in that age—good taste. He had taste in the art of writing, a fine literary tact, a sense of proportion, a perception of delicate shades of expression, an instinct that told him what to say and what to suppress, to insinuate, or to be left to the understanding. Even in his innovations in form, in his boldness of style, he showed a rare discretion; never did he do violence to the genius of the French language, and one may apply to him without reserve the eulogy that Quintilian pronounced upon Horace: ‘Verbis felicissime audax’.
He cherished also a fixed principle that art implied selection. He was neither idealist nor realist, in the exclusive and opposing sense in which we understand these terms; he recommended a scrupulous observance of nature, and that every writer should draw as close to it as possible, but only in order to interpret it, to reveal it with a true feeling, yet without a too intimate analysis, and that no one should attempt to portray it exactly or servilely copy it. “Of what use is art,” he says, “if it is only a reduplication of existence? We see around us only too much of the sadness and disenchantment of reality.” The three novels that compose the volume ‘Servitude et Grandeur militaire’ are, in this respect, models of romantic composition that never will be surpassed, bearing witness to the truth of the formula followed by De Vigny in all his literary work: “Art is the chosen truth.”
If, as a versifier, Alfred de Vigny does not equal the great poets of his time, if they are his superiors in distinction and brilliancy, in richness of vocabulary, freedom of movement, and variety of rhythm, the cause is to be ascribed less to any lack of poetic genius than to the nature of his inspiration, even to the laws of poesy, and to the secret and irreducible antinomy that exists between art and thought. When, for example, Theophile Gautier reproached him with being too little impressed with the exigencies of rhyme, his criticism was not well grounded, for richness of rhyme, though indispensable in works of descriptive imagination, has no ‘raison d’etre’ in poems dominated by sentiment and thought. But, having said that, we must recognize in his poetry an element, serious, strong, and impressive, characteristic of itself alone, and admire, in the strophes of ‘Mozse’, in the imprecations of ‘Samson’, and in the ‘Destinees’, the majestic simplicity of the most beautiful Hebraic verse.
Moreover, the true originality of De Vigny does not lie in the manner of composition; it was primarily in the role of precursor that he played his part on the stage of literature. Let us imagine ourselves at the period about the beginning of the year 1822. Of the three poets who, in making their literary debuts, had just published the ‘Meditations, Poemes antiques et modernes, and Odes’, only one had, at that time, the instinct of renewal in the spirit of French poesy, and a sense of the manner in which this must be accomplished; and that one was not Lamartine, and certainly it was not Victor Hugo.
Sainte-Beuve has said, with authority, that in Lamartine there is something suggestive of Millevoye, of Voltaire (he of the charming epistles), and of Fontanes; and Victor Hugo wrote with very little variation from the technical form of his predecessors. “But with Alfred de Vigny,” he says, “we seek in vain for a resemblance