Alfred-Victor, comte de Vigny
born
March 27, 1797, Loches, Fr.
died Sept. 17, 1863, Paris
(count
of )
poet, dramatist, and novelist who was
the most philosophical of the French
Romantic writers.
Youth
and Romantic works.
Vigny was born into an aristocratic
family that had been reduced to modest
circumstances by the French Revolution.
His father, a 60-year-old retired
soldier at the time of his son’s birth,
was a veteran of the Seven Years’ War;
and his maternal grandfather, the
Marquis de Baraudin, had served as
commodore in the royal navy. Vigny grew
up in Paris and took preparatory studies
for the École Polytechnique at the Lycée
Bonaparte, where he conceived an
“inordinate love for the glory of
bearing arms,” a passion common to the
young men of his generation. Attached to
the monarchy by family tradition, he
became a second lieutenant in the king’s
guard when the Bourbons returned to
power in 1814 and when he was only 17
years old.
Though
he was promoted to first lieutenant in
1822 and to captain the following year,
the military profession, limited to
garrison duty rather than pursued on the
battlefield, bored the young officer,
who preferred the adventures of a
literary career. After several leaves of
absence, he abandoned military life in
1827. In the meantime, he had published
his first poem, “Le Bal,” in 1820. Two
years later his first collection of
verse was published as Poèmes, along
with contributions to Victor Hugo’s
politically conservative literary
periodical La Muse Française. Salons and
reviews in Paris hailed the birth of a
poet who combined grace with a strength
and depth that was totally Romantic.
Vigny’s expanded version of Poèmes under
the title Poèmes antiques et modernes
(1826) was also a success.
Vigny,
however, was not content to excel merely
in poetry, and he revealed his narrative
talent in Cinq-Mars (1826), a historical
novel centred around the conspiracy of
Louis XIII’s favourite, the Marquis de
Cinq-Mars, against the Cardinal de
Richelieu. Cinq-Mars was the first
important historical novel in French,
and it derived much of its popularity at
the time from the enormous vogue of the
novels of Sir Walter Scott. Vigny also
showed a typically Romantic interest in
William Shakespeare, freely adapting
Othello (Le More de Venise, first
performed 1829) as well as The Merchant
of Venice (Shylock, 1829). During these
years Vigny was regarded as a literary
leader of the Romantic movement in
France. The Romantic poet Alphonse de
Lamartine recognized his talents, and
Hugo and Charles Sainte-Beuve treated
him as a friend. Vigny and the writer
Delphine Gay, the “muse of the country”
as she was called—for her beauty as well
as her literary talents—formed a
striking couple before his marriage in
February 1825 to Lydia Bunbury, daughter
of a wealthy Englishman.
Maturity and disillusionment.
By 1830 Vigny’s temperament had become
more sombre. The July Revolution
engendered in him a political pessimism
inspired by the repeated faults of the
French monarchy, an issue that had
become evident already in Cinq-Mars. As
a point of honour he, like
Chateaubriand, sought to remain faithful
to the monarchy, but he did not conceal
the fact that the cause of the Bourbon
king Charles X was worth no more than
that of Louis-Philippe, who had been
placed on the throne by the moneyed
bourgeoisie. He searched unsuccessfully
for a political creed and studied every
shade of opinion without giving his
allegiance to any. From this time on he
closely followed current affairs,
grasping them with a clarity that was at
times prophetic, though his overt
political activity remained erratic.
He
acknowledged his disillusionment as
early as 1831 in “Paris,” a poem of a
new genre that he termed élévations. He
felt all the more tormented, for he
could no longer count on the religious
faith of his childhood. His feelings on
this score are evident in another poem
(1832) in which he contemplated suicide:
“And God? Such were the times, they no
longer thought about Him.” The only
thing left for him to doubt was love
itself, a trauma he painfully
experienced in the course of his liaison
(1831–38) with the actress Marie Dorval,
for whom he was to create the role of
Kitty Bell in the play Chatterton in
1835. He accused Dorval of deceiving him
and of having maintained an
overaffectionate friendship with the
writer George Sand. His relationship
with Dorval left Vigny profoundly
embittered.
In
Stello (1832) Vigny put together a
series of consultations, or dialogues,
between two symbolic figures: Doctor
Noir (the Black Doctor), who represents
Vigny’s own intellect; and Stello, who
represents the poet’s desire for an
active part in the public arena. In
seeking to preserve Stello from the
dangers of his imprudent enthusiasm,
Doctor Noir tells him three anecdotes.
In these three short stories Vigny
examines the poet in his dealings with
political authority: the levity of Louis
XV condemns Nicolas Gilbert to die in
privation; the fanaticism of the
republican tyrant Robespierre leads
André Chénier to the scaffold; the
egoism of William Beckford, lord mayor
of London, provokes the suicide of the
poet Thomas Chatterton; all political
regimes inflict on the poet the
harshness of “perpetual ostracism.” What
then is this evil malaise? Vigny
questions himself on the nature of it.
He submits Stello to a sort of
psychoanalytic examination, as confided
to Doctor Noir. After having listened to
Stello, the doctor prescribes a remedy
of “separating poetic life from
political life” and advises the poet
against direct involvement in politics
in order to preserve the dignity of his
art and escape the horrible cruelties
that characterize every kind of
fanaticism.
Vigny
adapted the part of Stello dealing with
the suicide of Chatterton into a prose
drama in three acts, Chatterton (1835).
In presenting the last moments of
Chatterton’s life, he exalts the
nobility and suffering of a
misunderstood genius in a pitiless and
materialistic society. The triumph of
Vigny’s career as a playwright,
Chatterton remains one of the best
Romantic dramas. It is far superior to
La Maréchale d’Ancre (first performed
1831) and expresses Vigny’s melancholy
genius more seasonably than does his
spiritual comedy Quitte pour la peur
(first performed 1833).
Vigny’s
novel Servitude et grandeur militaires
(1835; “Servitude and Military
Greatness”; Eng. trans. The Military
Necessity) is also a consultation. The
book’s three stories, linked by personal
comment, deal with the dignity and
suffering of the soldier, who is obliged
by his profession to kill yet who is
condemned by it to passive obedience as
well. The first and third stories in
this volume are Vigny’s masterpieces in
prose, and the third story’s portrait of
Captain Renaud, an old Napoleonic
soldier, is a profound portrait of human
greatness. Vigny began another ambitious
consultation dealing with the religious
prophet, but only one story, Daphné
(published 1912), about the Roman
emperor Julian the Apostate, survives.
Vigny’s
consultations enlarged upon his
philosophy, formulated theories about
the fate of man, and defined the
principles that he thought should govern
human conduct. To give these ideas the
finish they required, he turned again,
between 1838 and his death, to poetry,
slowly composing the 11 poems that were
later collected under the title Les
Destinées (1864). The early poems are
very pessimistic, but the later ones are
increasingly confident affirmations of
the imperishable nature of human
spiritual powers.
In
middle age Vigny gradually withdrew into
a curious silence and retired, according
to the famous expression of
Sainte-Beuve, to an “ivory tower.” He
rarely went out, preferring the calm of
his country manor to the excitement of
Paris. In 1841 he stood as a candidate
to the Académie Française, but he was
elected only in 1845, after five checks,
and was received there with a perfidious
speech by Count Molé. His wife, Lydia,
whose longtime invalidism had caused him
constant anxiety, died in 1862, and
Vigny himself died of cancer of the
stomach after much suffering the
following year. He left several unedited
works whose posthumous publication
enhanced his reputation: Les Destinées,
Le Journal d’un poète (1867), Daphné,
and Mémoires inédits (1958).
Assessment.
Vigny’s literary art is uneven. He does
not possess great technical facility,
and when not profoundly inspired, he is
prosaic; there are long passages in Les
Destinées that are laborious and dull.
His austere imagination soberly
developed a few symbols of the human
condition and condensed them to achieve
what he called a “hard, brilliant
diamond.”
It is
Les Destinées above all that has earned
Vigny his reputation as a
philosopher-poet. His work is a poignant
plea against all that is inhumane in the
forces that rule the world: expedience (Cinq-Mars),
governments and the mob (Stello and
Daphné), and the treacherous love of
women (“La Colère de Samson”). Vigny is
particularly critical of the
equivocality of Providence, which is
silent in the face of suffering (“Le
Mont des Oliviers”) and as coldly
insensitive as nature (“La Maison du
Berger”). Vigny’s belief in God is just
strong enough for Vigny to reproach him.
As a tormented skeptic, he proposes that
strictly human values—honour, pity, and
the love of beauty—should be adopted.
His last poem celebrates the apotheosis
of a Holy Spirit (“L’Esprit pur”) that
is essentially human and takes over the
place of God.
It
would be unjust, however, to regard
Vigny solely as a philosopher. His
literary creations spring less from a
system of thought than from a
spontaneously tragic conception of
existence. Thwarted love, unrecognized
goodwill, humiliated greatness, the
tormented conscience of the soldier who
detests war but fights on
energetically—these are more than just
general ideas: they express a wounded
sensitivity and a soul torn by moral
scruples. Under the anonymous cloak of
symbols, Vigny extends to the whole of
humanity his own conflicts and agonies,
and his work is an effort to resolve
them. Therein lies the poignancy of his
work.
Paul Viallaneix
Pierre-Georges Castex
