Vigny, Alfred Victor, Comte de, French author, born of ancient family during his parents' imprisonment in the prison at Loches (Indre-et-Loire), 27th March 1797, entered the army at the Restoration, and served fourteen years. Garrison life wearied a soul athirst for glory, but his pride found a solitary consolation in verse. As early as 1822 he published anonymously a small volume of verse, followed in 1824 by Eloa, ou la Sœur d'un Ange, an exquisite piece of mystic phantasy. Before the Revolution of July he had published his collected Poèmes antiques et modernes (1826), containing Moïse and Dolorida; Cinq Mars (1826), a historical romance; a translation of Othello (1829); and a drama, La Maréchal d'Ancre (1830). After that year he published only works in prose: Stello (1832), Grandeur et Servitude Militaires (1835), and a drama, Chatterton (1835)—the highest moment of his fame. From that time he ceased not to write but to print. He left a volume of verse—Destinées—published in 1864, which contains some of his finest and most virile work, and a collection of personal notes, printed with doubtful wisdom by Louis Ratisbonne under the title Journal d'un Poète (1867). While still young he attached himself to the Romanticists, with Hugo, Deschamps, Mme. Desbordes-Valmore, and Mdlle. Delphine Gay. But he was never a militant or thorough-going member of the party—'he retired,' says Sainte-Beuve, 'to his ivory tower before the heat of the day.' His Cinq Mars was a romance based on the most tragic of the crimes of Richelieu, inspired by Scott, but intended to be minutely true to history throughout. The author's connection with the theatre led to an equivocal friendship with Mme. Dorval, commencing about the close of 1830, but the woman's heart soon found poetry a poor substitute for passion, and the tragedy left the poor idealist stripped of his last illusion. In 1845 Vigny was gratified by election to the Academy, on which occasion he made a long and wearisome address, which was listened to with unconcealed impatience. Thereafter till the close he lived but little in the world, in familiarity with no one, not even himself, his thoughts wrapped up in a pessimistic gloom from which he found escape only by the avenues of art. His was that profoundest kind of moral misery which needs no external reason for its being, incurable because itself its own poison. He died at Paris after the long agony of cancer, 17th September 1863. Vigny's work was elegant but cold. No poet has had grander conceptions than the few fundamental ideas that inform his work, and it is not so much inspiration as meditation that gives the key-note to all his poetry. 'It is formed,' says M. Montégut, 'not as beautiful living things are born, by fervent generation, but in the way those lovely, precious, and cold things are produced—pearls, coral, the diamonds, to which they have a close affinity—by agglutination, slow cohesion, invisible condensation.' His fundamental defect as a poet has been well stated by M. Faguet to be not by any means want of imagination, but rather a certain richness and suppleness of imagination, the result of which is not only that one of the most vigorous thinkers amongst poets has produced so little, but also that his most perfect work is ever marred by incompleteness and inequality. Vigny the artist is inferior to Vigny the poet; his poetic execution to his creation of poetic ideas. Quite unlike Hugo, whose magnificent execution casts a splendid veil over a certain fundamental poverty of ideas. But if a poet's domain be small, it is something if it be all his own, and Alfred de Vigny the poet was at least original. Perhaps, when all is said, Montégut is right in putting the three novels which compose Servitude et Grandeur Militaires as his finest work.
'The form of this book is noble as its thought, and simple as the souls whose silent sacrifice and obscure heroism it relates. . . . The day on which he wrote it he took counsel only with his own inborn nobility of nature, and gave their congé to all his feelings of bitterness and melancholy, as if to a troop of importunate and troublesome guests who hindered him from discovering his true self. Is it not piquant to see given by the mouth of a misanthrope himself, to the pessimistic doctrines of the misanthropes on human nature, the most eloquent denial they have received in our time?' An exquisite if uncertain artist, Vigny remained true to his fundamental definition, 'L'art est la vérité choisie.' To him genius was a sublime and fatal gift, which imprisoned him in grandeur, solitude, and sadness; the whole universe an arena of infamy and wrong; the stern decrees of fate to be endured with stoicism if possible; their individual victims to be regarded with a pity, profound indeed, although half begotten of contempt. Vigny married an Englishwoman (Lydia Bunbury) in 1828, and the influence of English taste is as marked in his work as in that of his contemporary, Alfred de Musset; indeed Gautier, in speaking of what he calls 'the intellectual fatherland' of his contemporaries, expressly says 'Musset and Vigny are English.'
See the monographs by Maurice Paléologue, in 'Les Grands Écrivains Français' (1891), and M. Dorison (1892); and the earlier studies by Sainte-Beuve, Portraits Contemporains (vol. ii.), Portraits Littéraires (vol. iii.), and Nouveaux Lundis (vol. vi.); and Caro, Poètes et Romanciers; but especially Émile Montégut, Nos Morts Contemporains (série i.), and Émile Faguet, Dix-Neuvième Siècle: Études Littéraires.