Page:EB1911 - Volume 28.djvu/76

Rh opposed the duke’s scheme of extortion, and sought to induce Philip himself to visit the Low Countries. His health was now impaired and his work was nearly over. Having suffered a short imprisonment with the other members of the state council in 1576, he died at Brussels on the 5th of May 1577, and was buried in the abbey of St Bavon.

Viglius was an advocate of peace and moderation, and as such could not expect support or sympathy from men engaged in a life-and-death struggle for liberty, or from their relentless enemies. He was undoubtedly avaricious, and accumulated great wealth, part of which he left to found a hospital at his native place, Zwichem, and a college at the university of Louvain. He married a rich lady, Jacqueline Damant, but had no children.

He wrote a Tagebuch des Schmalkaldischen Donaukriegs, edited by A. von Druffel (Munich, 1877), and some of his lectures were published under the title Commentarii in decem Institutionum titulos (Lyons, 1564). His Vita et opera historica are given in the Analecta Belgica of C. P. Hoynck van Papendrecht (the Hague, 1743). See L. P. Gachard, ''Correspondance de Philippe II. sur les affaires'' des Pays-Bas (Brussels, 1848–79); and Correspondance de Marguerite d’Autriche, duchesse de Parme, avec Philippe II. (Brussels, 1867–81); and E. Poullet, Correspondance de cardinal de Granvelle (Brussels, 1877–81). 

VIGNE, PAUL DE (1843–1901), Belgian sculptor, was born at Ghent. He was trained by his father, a statuary, and began by exhibiting his “Fra Angelico da Fiesole” at the Ghent Salon in 1868. In 1872 he exhibited at the Brussels Salon a marble statue, “Heliotrope” (Ghent Gallery), and in 1875, at Brussels, “Beatrix” and “Domenica.” He was employed by the government to execute caryatides for the conservatoire at Brussels. In 1876 at the Antwerp Salon he had busts of E. Hiel and W. Wilson, which were afterwards placed in the communal museum at Brussels. Until 1882 he lived in Paris, where he produced the marble statue “Immortality” (Brussels Gallery), and “The Crowning of Art,” a bronze group on the façade of the Palais des Beaux-Arts at Brussels. His monument to the popular heroes, Jean Breydel and Pierre de Coninck, was unveiled at Bruges in 1887. At his death he left unfinished his principal work, the Anspach monument, which was erected at Brussels under the direction of the architect Janlet with the co-operation of various sculptors. Among other notable works by De Vigne may be mentioned “Volumnia” (1875); “Poverella” (1878); a bronze bust of “Psyche” (Brussels Gallery), of which there is an ivory replica; the marble statue of Marnix de Ste Aldegonde in the Square du Sablon, Brussels; the Metdepenningen monument in the cemetery at Ghent; and the monument to Canon de Haerne at Courtrai.

See E. L. Detage, Les Artistes Belges contemporains (Brussels), and O. G. Destrée, The Renaissance of Sculpture in Belgium (London, 1895). 

VIGNETTE (Fr. for “little vine”), in architecture, a running ornament, representing, as its name imports, a little vine, with branches, leaves and grapes. It is common in the Tudor period, and runs or roves in a large hollow or casement. It is also called trayle. From the transference of the term to book-illustration resulted the sense of a small picture, vanishing gradually at the edge.

VIGNY, ALFRED DE (1797–1863), French poet, was born at Loches (Indre-et-Loire) on the 27th of March 1797. Sainte-Beuve, in the rather ill-natured essay which he devoted to Vigny after his death, expresses a doubt whether the title of count which the poet bore was well authenticated, and hints that no very ancient proofs of the nobility of the family were forthcoming; but it is certain that in the 18th century persons of the name occupied positions which were not open to any but men of noble birth. For generations the ancestors of Alfred de Vigny had been soldiers, and he himself joined the army, with a commission in the Household Troops, at the age of sixteen. But the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars were over, and after twelve years of life in barracks he retired, preserving, however, a very high estimate of the duties and career of the soldier. While still serving he had made his

mark, if as yet unrecognized, by the publication in 1822 of a volume of poems, and in 1826 by another, together with the famous prose romance of Cinq-Mars. Sainte-Beuve asserts that the poet antedated some of his most remarkable work. This may or may not be the case; he certainly could not antedate the publication. And it so happens that some of his most celebrated pieces—Eloa, Dolorida, Möise—appeared (1822–23) before the work of younger members of the Romantic school whose productions strongly resemble these poems. Nor is this originality limited to the point which he himself claimed in the Preface to his collected Poems in 1837—that they were “the first of their kind in France, in which philosophic thought is clothed in epic or dramatic form.” Indeed this claim is disputable in itself, and has misled not a few of Vigny’s recent critics. It is in poetic, not philosophic quality, that his idiosyncrasy and precursorship are most remarkable. It is quite certain that the other Alfred—Alfred de Musset—felt the influence of his elder namesake, and an impartial critic might discern no insignificant marks of the same effect in the work of Hugo himself. Even Lamartine, considerably Vigny’s elder and his predecessor in poetry, seems rather to have been guided by Vigny than Vigny by him. No one can read Dolorida or Le Cor without seeing that the author had little to learn from any of his French contemporaries and much to teach them. At the same time Vigny, from whatever cause, hardly made any further public appearance in poetry proper during the more than thirty years of his life, and his entire poems, including posthumous fragments, form but one very small pocket volume. Cinq-Mars, which at least equalled the poems in popularity, will hardly stand the judgment of posterity so well. It had in its favour the support of the Royalist party, the immense vogue of the novels of Walter Scott, on which it was evidently modelled, the advantages of an exquisite style, and the taste of the day for the romance as opposed to the novel of analysis. It therefore gained a great name both in France and abroad. But any one who has read it critically must acknowledge it to be disappointing. The action is said to be dramatic; if it be so, it can only be said that this proves very conclusively that the action of drama and the action of the novel are two quite different things. To the reader who knows Scott or Dumas the story is singularly uninteresting (far less interesting than as told in history); the characters want life; and the book generally stagnates.

Its author, though always as a kind of outsider (the phrase constantly applied to him in French literary essays and histories being that he shut himself up in a tour d’ivoire), attached himself more or less to the Romantic movement of 1830 and the years immediately preceding and following it, and was stimulated by this movement both to drama and to novel-writing. In the year before the revolution of July he produced at the Théâtre Français a translation, or rather paraphrase, of Othello, and an original piece, La Maréchale d'Ancre. In 1832 he published the curious book Stello, containing studies of unlucky youthful poets—Gilbert, Chatterton, Chénier—and in 1835 he brought out his drama of Chatterton, which, by the hero’s suicide, shocked French taste even after five years of Romantic education, but had a considerable success. The same year saw the publication of Servitude et grandeur militaires, a singular collection of sketches rather than a connected work in which Vigny’s military experience, his idea of the soldier’s duties, and his rather poetical views of history were all worked in. The subjects of Chatterton and Othello naturally suggest a certain familiarity with English, and in fact Alfred de Vigny knew English well, lived in England for some time and married in 1828 an Englishwoman, Lydia Bunbury. His father-in-law was, according to French gossip, so conspicuous an example of insular eccentricity that he never could remember his son-in-law’s name or anything about him, except that he was a poet. By this fact, and the kindness of casual Frenchmen who went through the list of the chief living poets of their country, he was sometimes able to discover his daughter’s husband’s designation. In 1845 Alfred de