Vigny, Alfred de

VIGNY, ALFRED de. - French poet, b. at Loches on 27 March 1797 of a noble family, d. at Maine-Guiraud on 17 Sept. 1863. He belonged to the army for a decade (1816-27), but rather than by the monotony of garrison life he felt attracted by the literary circles that in Paris gathered around V. Hugo and Ch. Nodier, and he acquired singular fame and prominence in the first phase of the Romantic vogue in France.

To the reminiscences of Chénier in the first Poèmes (1822), a composite of poems of biblical and contemporary inspiration (even the three cantos Féléna refer to the Greek war of independence), to those of Byron and Moore in Eloa ou la soeur des anges (1824), and of Walter Scott in the novel Cinq Mars (1826), there is joined a poetic flowering tinged at once with pessimism and religious torment, whose best fruit is gathered in the Poèmes critiques et modernes (1826). To his historical novel V. added in '27 a kind of aesthetic theorization with the Réflexions sur la vérité dans l'art, claiming for the artist the right to subordinate historical truth to his own idea; and he took part in the Romantic battles for the theater with Shakespearean translations (Roméo et Juliette, 1827; Othello, and Shylock ou le marchand de Venise, 1829) and by bringing to the stage the disgrace and death of Concini with La maréchale d'Ancre (1831), the protest against marriages of convenience (Quitte pour la peur, 1833) and the condition of the poet isolated and overwhelmed amid the indifference of bourgeois society

(Chatterton, 1835). He had long since detached himself from his youthful legitimist sympathies, while yet remaining faithful to an aristocratic conception of life, expressed precisely in these considerations on the artist in the face of society, already narrated together with other examples (Gilbert, Chénier) in the novel Stello (1832), the first consultation of the mysterious Docteur noir, continued later by a seconde consultation left interrupted at the episode of Daphné, centered on the story of Julian the Apostate (1836-37). Less exalted and more sincerely moving are the examples told in Servitude et grandeur militaires (1835).

It is from the same years that the violent passion of V. for the actress Maria Dorval dates, and a little later his major lyric production, published however with a certain delay and far less followed and fortunate than his youthful one: La mort du loup (1838), La colère de Samson, Le mont des Oliviers (1839, imbued with an entirely symbolic and human conception of Christianity), La flûte, (1840), La sauvage (1832), La maison du berger (1842-44) La bouteille à la mer (1847), Les destinées (1849), L'esprit pur (1863: a pessimistic observation, on the eve of death, of the vanity of artistic work precisely insofar as it has something elevated and opposed to brutality). The greatest resonance of this and in general of all of V.'s poetry came late, and perhaps more abroad, and especially in Italy, than in France.

Enzo Bottasso