Poetry appears to have enjoyed a favoured status in the Napoleonic and Restoration societies. The officer classes in the later years of the Empire seem to have viewed the writing of verse as a fashionable accomplishment; Joseph-Leopold Sigisbert Hugo, a general in Napoleon's army and latterly governor of a province in Spain, gave his son advice on prosody when Victor was serving his apprenticeship in the art. Vigny appears to have had little difficulty in combining, in the Parisian salons around 1820, the appeal of a fashionable officer with the prestige of a promising young poet. More importantly, the society of the returned émigrés, however reactionary in politics, had expectations of a revived artistic and literary culture, and although these expectations were circumscribed by monarchist and Catholic values, enforced contact with other European cultures had produced a general awareness of the limits of the former traditions and a desire to see the forms of art adapted to the new period.

In her work De l'Allemagne (1810), Mme de Staël had underlined the main factor inhibiting the progress of French poetry in a period of changing political and religious conditions: the failure of its form and language to evolve with the mental universe of the writer, and above all to give adequate expression to the lyrical genius of the race, so that for her the great lyricists of France are not to be found among the poets, but among the great prose writers such as Bossuet, Fénelon, Buffon and Rousseau. Yet, in the years following 1815, the poets most in vogue were, for lack of new models, the masters of verse of the eighteenth century: Delille and Parny, both recently dead, Voltaire, Fontanes, Lebrun, Lemercier, Viennet, Baour Lormian and J. B. Rousseau. Little in the ideas and attitudes expressed in this poetry had direct relevance for the reading public of 1820. A restored monarchy, a restored aristocracy, automatically brought with them values which seemed new after the upheavals of the Revolution and the Empire; and legitimism and Catholic orthodoxy were the values to which the new writers subscribed. In poetry, three newcomers appeared whose impact determined the course of French poetry for several decades. These were Lamartine, Hugo and Vigny.

It is noteworthy that each initially chose poetry as his preferred form, and each appears to have considered throughout his life, despite achieving fame in other genres, that poetry was first among the literary arts, potentially the most powerful and the most universal. That potential remained, however, at the beginning of the 1820s, largely to be realised, or rediscovered….

… Vigny's development as a poet is initially associated, as in the case of Lamartine and Hugo, with the renovation and advancement of an older form of poetry. His concern was principally with the poème, a form which, in the later eighteenth century, had been used to signify a short epic or heroic poem, and Vigny's intention was to adapt it to the ideas and style of his time. His experiments with the poème lasted between 1820 and 1829, during which period he also turned, more briefly, to another form, the mystère, probably from the examples given by Byron in Cain (1821) and Heaven and Earth (1822). Two other forms, the élévation, with which he experimented for a short time around 1830, and the poème philosophique, which preoccupied him from about 1839 to the year of his death (1863), were designed to permit the expression of ideas in a more complex way than was possible with the poème and the mystère.

It was probably his intention to form individual volumes from sequences of these individual types of poem. In the event, his first major volume of verse, Poèmes antiques et modernes, slowly built up in stages (Poèmes, 1822; Poèmes antiques et modernes, 1826; Poèmes, 1829; Poèmes antiques et modernes, 1837), combined poèmes, mystères and élévations, the unity of the book being obtained from the arrangement of the pieces in a historical order, twenty in all in the 1837 edition.

Of these twenty poems, thirteen bear the subtitle poème. One or two, such as 'Le Cor', were originally written as experiments with the ballade, giving a lyrical tone and a medieval configuration and colouring, without too much concern for authenticity, to a heroic episode, in this case the stand of Roland and Oliver at Roncevaux. 'Madame de Soubise', though published as a 'poème du xvie siecle', has all the marks of a ballade in the manner of Hugo: interesting stanza and metrical forms permitting both a heroic and lyrical interpretation of the subject (an event from the Saint Bartholomew massacre) and an attractive simulation of some mannerisms of the older language. The difference occurs in the intention of the poet. Vigny goes beyond historical fancy towards the sense of events and the performance of the figures involved in them.

His poème is a historical genre. It is relatively short, rarely exceeding 200 lines in length, and presents a concentrated episode shown in its effect on one or two figures. The figures themselves represent varied human types, ranging from men of spiritual or political power (Moïse, Charlemagne) to representatives of the code of military service and honour (Roland and Oliver, the soldier-monk of the Trappist order, the Captain of the frigate La Sérieuse). The list extends further, to the victims of political persecution (the prisoner in the iron mask), to women capable of tragic action through passion (Dolorida), and to beings capable of surmounting physical frailty through acts of courage (Madame de Soubise; Emma, the young 'princesse de la Gaule' of 'La Neige'). His use of known events to provide perspectives for human action is, of course, not new, and Vigny's starting point is, typically, a familiar episode from the Scriptures ('Moïse', 'La Fille de Jephté', 'La Femme adultère'), a historical or contemporary event ('La Prison', 'Le Trappiste'), or even a fait divers of the period ('Dolorida'). His treatment of his subjects is original in the variety of the colour and tone of the episodes and in the evocation of personality in the human figures. Though some of the earlier pieces, such as 'La Neige', subscribe to the fashion of a fairly cursory local colour, others, particularly those founded on biblical episodes, combine imaginative reconstruction with a remarkable degree of detail in allusions. The four major themes of 'Moïse' are centred on four books of the Bible. Moïse's recall of the migration from Egypt to the promised land and the establishing of his leadership derives from twelve chapters of Exodus; his triumphs, miracles and final weariness of responsibility are presented by references to eight chapters from Numbers; his last acts and his death outside the promised land are based on seven chapters from Deuteronomy; the elegiac theme of complaint is a compound of allusions to eight chapters of the Book of Job. A similar technique, though less dominant in the poem, is found in 'La Femme adultère'. The most important features of Vigny's poème are found, however, elsewhere than in the external techniques. Although the control of the structure of individual pieces is impressive, their best achievement is found in the use of a spectacle to suggest important ideas concerning the human condition. The interaction of the characters and the situation in which they are found is dramatic (at times, as in 'La Prison', Vigny uses passages of dialogue). The characters react through gesture, which takes on a ritual and symbolic significance, and through action, which shows the disproportion between the individual human will and impulses on the one hand, and the ordering of events on the other, whether these events are determined by natural or providential forces. Each figure is shown at grips with a dilemma occurring either as the consequence of an action or the working of an unseen process. Occasionally, as in 'Le Bal', where the glamour of the ballroom is contrasted with the tribulations that inevitably lie ahead, the dilemma is left vague and inescapable. In most cases, it is a trial that engages the responsibility and courage of an individual: hence the action of Moïse in seeking to confront Jehovah, the unavailing effort of the priest to make contact with the mind of the dying prisoner in the iron mask, the tragic jealousy of Dolorida, the fate of the 'femme adultère', saved but not redeemed by the intervention of Christ in the processes of the Judaic law, the Christian love of Mme de Soubise, stronger than the fanatical conflicts of her century. Over this whole sequence of poèmes broods a general question concerning human responsibility and fatality: to what extent can moral strength counter the play of unpredictable forces that threaten human life?⁵ The sombre picture is relieved by one thing, the presence of sexual love, which is painted in the suave tones of amorous pleasure ('Dolorida', 'La Femme adultère') and shown briefly in its more innocent and elevated forms as a force able to illuminate and sublimate life ('La Neige', 'Madame de Soubise').

The poème, as conceived by Vigny, is valuable for its power of illustrating an idea in heroic and sentimental terms, and its symbolic capacity is considerable, since the actions and speeches of the characters are left, within the context of the events, to carry the import of the larger ideas with which he is concerned. But its objectivity is also a limitation, in that it makes the elaboration of an idea more difficult, when the poet is not free to comment directly upon it. This fact may explain to some extent his early interest in the mystère, not so much in the form of the medieval play, as met with, for example, in Gringoire's ill-fated mystère in Notre-Dame de Paris, but in a rather more modern guise. Reference has been made to the examples given by Byron, which are written in the form of plays. Vigny's two mystères are narrative pieces, combining several different techniques, of which dramatic effect is one of the most striking. 'Èloa' and 'Le Déluge' figure among seven mystères listed on the first page of his journal, under the date 1823. The heading, Les Mystères, Poèmes, shows some hesitation between the two forms, but seems to indicate a decision to keep within a strictly poetic frame. 'Le Déluge' does not differ superficially from the form of 'Moïse' or 'La Femme adultère' ('Éloa' has its own form, being written in three cantos, with ornamental devices such as simile). The difference is found in the nature of the ideas, which are more specifically concerned with the divine ordering of the world and divine intervention in the course of human history. The figures are divine or semi-divine beings. As in Byron's Mysteries, a modern and personal interpretation is given to events drawn from the Judaeo-Christian tradition. Éloa, the female angel of pity, is largely a creation of Vigny himself, though the name occurs in a passage by Klop-stock quoted by Chateaubriand in Le Génie du christianisme. The figure of Satan is probably influenced by Milton's depiction of the fallen angel, but distorted by Vigny by the prominence given to the sensual theme in the description of the ensnaring of Éloa. Both poems depict the conflict between human virtues and supernatural power. Éloa, created by God from a tear shed by Christ over the body of Lazarus, is enslaved by Satan and becomes part of fallen creation, unable to do more than strive to console a suffering world. In their meeting in the depths of Chaos, the divine innocence of Éloa stirs Satan almost to repentance:

Ah! si dans ce moment la Vierge eût pu l'entendre,
Si la célste main qu'elle eût osé lui tendre
L'eût saisi repentant, docile à remonter …
Qui sait? le mal peut-etre eût cessé d'exister.

The value of Christ's ministry in the world is ultimately in question here. The theme will appear again, in less symbolical terms, in Vigny's later poems. But at this stage his views seem dominated by a belief in a divine will, the principles and consistency of which remain concealed at all levels of creation.

'Le Déluge' is constructed on the account given in Genesis of the destruction of the world by the Flood as a divine punishment following the forbidden mingling of human beings and angels. The poem focuses on two beings—Emmanuel, half man, half angel, and Sara, of human stock—who put their human love before their lives, which could be saved by separation, and perish on Mount Ararat in the last moments of the Deluge. The Flood, frequently treated in painting and in literature, offered an opportunity for original treatment of descriptive effects, for a poignant lyricism intrinsic to the situation imagined by Vigny, and for a strong message universalising the theme. The descriptive effects of the poem are conceived in the form of a violent disruption of harmony: glimpses of the last moments of the 'perfect order' of the antediluvian landscape are followed by visual shots of the destruction of this order by the storm and the Flood, and of the behaviour of animals and men in the rising of the 'implacable sea', until the moment of ironic calm signalled by the rainbow. The lyricism is in the doomed innocence expressed in the dialogue of the lovers. The message of the poet is conveyed in a speech attributed to the angel, father of Emmanuel, who interprets the divine judgment:

La pitié du mortel n'est point celle des Cieux.
Dieu ne fait point de pacte avec la race humaine:
Qui créa sans amour fera périr sans haine.

By 1829, Vigny's Poèmes antiques et modernes had almost taken their final shape, although the title was not yet firm. The philosophical groundwork of the collection was already laid; the historical intention was apparent, but not yet developed as completely as Vigny wished. The poems were arranged as individual fragments of a sequence designed to reflect stages of moral development from the beginnings of Judaism to the formation of modern Europe. Despite the presence of 'Le Bal', 'Dolorida' and 'La Frégate la Sérieuse', Vigny was still looking for a form which would permit a more detailed presentation of the values of the modern world. An entry in his journal dated 20 May 1829 notes the difficulty of finding suitable forms of expression for modern subjects; he appears to have been thinking about the possibility of a new form from about 1827, calling it élévation. Two poems of this type were written: 'Les Amants de Montmorency' (1830) and 'Paris' (1831). Vigny defined the élévation, referring to these two pieces, in a letter to Camilla Maunoir in 1838: 'partir de la peinture d'une image toute terrestre pour s'élever à des vues d'une nature plus divine'. Both were published separately and brought into the Poèmes antiques et modernes of 1837 as the last two poems of the collection. 'Les Amants de Montmorency', based on a newspaper account of the suicide pact of two lovers, is a lyrical projection of their state of mind during the last three days of their lives; it extends the theme of condemned or tragic love, to which he gives a special place in his vision of the complex forces that assail human life. 'Paris', in which Vigny gives a detailed elaboration of his thoughts inspired by the modern capital city, starts with the 'image toute terrestre' of Paris viewed by night from a tower by the poet and a traveller. Abandoning the narrative formulation of the poèmes, he constructs this élévation on a dialogue between himself and the companion who is unfamiliar with the city. The dialogue arises from two images suggested to the traveller by the sight of its lamps and the smoke of its fires: a glowing wheel and a furnace. The poet develops the sense of these images. The wheel is the representation of the motive force transmitted by Paris to the nation, and of the radius of action of the capital. The idea of new things being forged is elaborated chiefly by reference to ideas. The work from which the shape of the future will emerge is the work of 'des Esprits', and the lamp is the symbol of their efforts. Vigny has in mind the action of four thinkers or schools of thought. Three of these, representing contemporary attitudes to religion (Lamennais), politics (Benjamin Constant) and doctrines of society (Saint-Simon), he sees as exponents of limited systems. Above them he places the effort of independent thinkers, presumably like himself, uncommitted and disinterested:

Des hommes pleins d'amour, de doute et de pitié,
Qui disaient: Je ne sais, des choses de la vie,
Dont le pouvoir ou l'or ne fut jamais l'envie.

There is no more than a hint here of the values which he himself will seek to elaborate. Such elaboration will require long reflection, not only upon ideas themselves, but on the form and expression in which the ideas can take the most permanent shape.

For the present, Vigny's poetry remains a poetry of isolated ideas on moral and theological problems, and experiments with form appear to be his chief concern: 'Concevoir et méditer une pensée philosophique; trouver dans les actions humaines celle qui en est la plus évidente preuve; la réduire à une action simple qui se puisse graver en la mémoire et représenter en quelque sorte une statue et un monument grandiose à l'imagination des hommes, voilà où doit tendre cette poésie épique et dramatique à la fois' (Journal d'un poète, 20 May 1829). Nevertheless, the qualities of his poetry are already clearly established. Statuesque and grandiose according to his own formulation, his heroic verse is distinguished from near-contemporary examples such as Théveneau's Charlemagne (1816) and La Harpe's Le Triomphe de la religion (1814) by the vitality of the effects and the adjustment of technique to the formulation, without didacticism, of an individual idea. The features of that technique are to be found in the variation of tone and perspective (this is probably the dramatic intention referred to by Vigny), and the organisation of images of physical action in such a way as to evoke both a moral crisis and a significant historical moment ('Éloa', for example, to all appearances purely symbolic in its action, also marks the destined role of the compassion brought by Christ to the world)….

Vigny … did not pursue the attempt at an epic formulation of his views on progress, though he never departed from his opinion, reaffirmed in 1839 in the Journal d'un poète: 'Il y a plus de force, de dignité et de grandeur dans les poètes objectifs, épiques et dramatiques … que dans les poètes subjectifs ou élégiaques.' But his principal intention was to use verse forms in order to express aspects of a fundamental question: how far had the Christian era freed itself from the superstitions of the ancient world, particularly from the notion of fatality? The indications are that by the end of the 1830s he had established his answer: Christ's mission in the world remained inconclusive; Christianity was a failed religion; and the modern world had to establish its own values that would lead it towards civilisation. From this period, his poetry concentrated mainly on this third point, and in elaborating his ideas, Vigny found it necessary to develop new techniques. These are the techniques of the poème philosophique, a term used by him to categorise his poems written from 1838 onwards.²⁴ Three of these were composed before 1840. They mark a turning point, a state between the poème and the poème philosophique. 'La Colère de Samson' (1839), with its diatribe against treacherous love, remains within the sentimental range of the poème, which it pushes to the limit. 'Le Mont des oliviers' (1839) would seem to belong to the Poèmes antiques et modernes by its trappings and by its sentimental formulation, but to another form of poem by the analytical scrutiny of the unsolved enigmas confronting the human mind. 'La Mort du loup' (1838), still within the narrative range of the poème with its dramatic and strongly drawn effects, marks a new departure with its foreground use of the wild animals to inculcate an idea about modern societies.

The Poème philosophique is a freer form of the poème in that the author intervenes to develop his own views in greater detail within a context of imagery, but not necessarily controlled by a narrative. Les Destinées forms an extended, if fragmentary, meditation on the values of modern civilisation, the two pieces ('Les Destinées' itself and 'Le Mont des oliviers'), 'set at the beginning of the Christian era', being presumably included for the purpose of illustrating the bleak religious situation of the modern world.

This situation is depicted sometimes by means of episodes, but also, and more effectively, by the projection of ideas through symbols, which are chosen to represent the quality of human effort: the bottle with information from the Captain's log sealed in it, returning through the ocean currents from the wreck of an expedition to map the coast of Tierra del Fuego; the diamond and the pearl, illustrating the qualities of poetry; the railway train, representing the progress of mechanical inventions. Fuller tableaux also are used. In 'La Sauvage' and 'La Mort du loup', the young Red Indian mother and the wolf are set in different ways against the values of European life. The symbolic object itself, as in 'La Flûte', can be the centre of a dialogue.

The underlying argument of Les Destinées concerns the extent to which human beings have the power to control their lives and the forces confronting them in the world. In individual poems, Vigny celebrates the modern capacity to dominate the environment, complete the exploration of the planet, open new areas for European settlement. He warns, in two apparently opposed sections of 'La Maison du berger', of the need to understand the relationship of man and nature. He is also the satirist of Louis-Philippe, the humanitarian opponent of the absolutist régime of the Tsar, and the pessimistic observer of the slow progress towards civilisation. He defends poetry, which he sees, in the 1840s, as declining in prestige, presenting it as the most powerful form in which language can be used to illuminate the minds of one's fellow citizens. 'La Maison du berger' is a meditation on the poet, on the social and intellectual independence necessary to him, and on the function of poetry. And the function of poetry is the concluding theme of his last poem, 'L'Esprit pur'. Poetry, the expression of an ideal of nobility in both senses of the term, is, as Vigny conceives it, the best symbol of a new era in which the work of the mind will take over from the disorderly conflicts of an age of wars, and in which the written word will remain the repository of the values of a civilisation.

By its themes and techniques, even more than by the late moment of its publication (1864), Les Destinées moves out of the Romantic period, although features of the sensibility of the 1820s still remain. Contemporary by its date of publication with the middle years of the Parnassian movement, it overlaps the work of the Parnassians by its quest for intellectual values in religious history and for a strong, disciplined form, which Vigny found in the seven-line stanza, used in five of the eleven poems, and which he made his own: a quatrain followed by a tercet, with a rhyming link provided between the two parts by the last line. The equation of the art of poetry with an ideal of beauty, referred to at a number of points in the Journal d'un poète, connects Vigny further with the poets of the succeeding school rather than with the Romantics of 1830, from whose concerted effort emerges the idea of a poetic language designed to increase the immediate communicative power of language, and not to strengthen its hieratic potential.

Notes

⁵ A note in the Journal d'un poète, dated 1824, summarises Vigny's general position: 'Dieu a jeté—c'est ma croyance—la terre au milieu de l'air et l'homme au milieu de la destinée. La destinée l'enveloppe et l'emporte vers le but toujours voilé.—Le vulgaire est entraîné, les grands caractères sont ceux qui luttent'.

²⁴ In 1843, Vigny published four poëmes (Vigny's spelling) in Revue des deux mondes: 'La Sauvage', 'La Mort du loup', 'La Flûte', 'Le Mont des Oliviers'. The following year, 'La Maison du berger' was presented as the 'prologue' to the poèmes philosophiques, this term having appeared as the subtitle of the four already published. A sixth poem was published, also in Revue des deux mondes, in 1854: 'La Bouteille à la mer'. Vigny's final intention appears to have been to publish a volume under the title of Les Destinées, with poèmes philosophiques as a subtitle. This intention was carried out by Louis Ratisbonne in preparing the posthumous edition. This included five hitherto unpublished poems: 'Wanda' (written 1847), 'Les Destinées' (1849), 'Les Oracles' (1862), 'L'Esprit pur' (1863), and 'La Colère de Samson', which Vigny had left unpublished for twenty-four years.