Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 24.djvu/248

Rh 226 V I G V I L 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, either from indolence, or from fastidious ness, or from being a &quot;barren rascal,&quot; or from fear of losing the high position which he had gained, hardly attempted anything more 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 con clusively 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 uninterest ing (far less interesting than as told in history) ; the characters want life ; and the book generally stagnates. Alfred de Vigny s admirable French and the quasi-poetical beauty of detached passages alone save it from positive dulness. 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 &quot;tour d ivoire&quot;), 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 Theatre Francais a translation or rather paraphrase of Othello, and an original piece, Marechale d Ancre. In 1832 he published the curious book Stello, and in 1835 he brought out his drama of Ckatterton, which shocked French taste even after five years of Romantic education, by the hero s suicide, but had a considerable success. The same year saw the publication of Servitude et Grandeur Jfilitaires, 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 Ckatterton 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 an English woman. 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 which fact and the kindness of casual Frenchmen who went through the list of the chief living poets of their country he was some times able to discover his daughter s husband s designation. In 1842 Alfred de Vigny was elected to the Academy, whose meetings he frequented with an assiduity rather surprising in a man of such retired habits and (still accord ing to Sainte-Beuve) rather troublesome to his colleagues. But he produced nothing save a few scraps ; and, beyond the work already enumerated, little has to be added except his Journal d un Pocte and the poems called Les Destinees, edited, with a few fragments, by M. Louis Ratisbonne im mediately after his death. Among his dramatic work, however, should be mentioned Quitte pour la .Peur and an adaptation of the Merchant of Venice called Rkylwk. Les Destinees excited no great admiration in France, but they contain some exceedingly beautiful poetry of an austere kind, such as the magnificent speech of Nature in &quot;La Maison du Berger &quot; and the remarkable poem entitled &quot;La Colere de Samson.&quot; Vigny died at Paris on 17th September 1863. The later life of Alfred de Vigny was almost wholly uneventful, and for the most part, as has been said, spent in retirement. His reputation, however, is perfect!} secure. It may, and probably will, rest only on his small volume of poems, though it will not be lessened, as far as qualified literary criticism is concerned, should the reader proceed to the rest of the work. The whole of his non- dramatic verse does not amount to 5000 lines ; it may be a good deal less. But the range of subject is comparatively wide, and ex traordinary felicity of execution, not merely in language, but in thought, is evident throughout. Vigny, as may be seen in the speech of Nature referred to above, had the secret, very uncommon with French poets, of attaining solemnity without grandiosity, by means of an almost classical precision and gravity of form. The defect of volubility, of never leaving off, which mars to some extent his great contemporary Hugo, is never present in him, and lie is equally free from the looseness and disorders of form which are sometimes blemishes in Musset, and from the effeminacy of Larnartine, while once more his nobility of thought and plentiful- ness of matter save him from the reproach which has been thought to rest on the technically perfect work of Theophile Gautier. The dramatic work is, perhaps, less likely to interest English than French readers, the local colour of Cftalterton being entirely false, the sentiment conventional in the extreme, and the real pathos of the story exchanged for a commonplace devotion on the poet s part to his host s wife. In the same way, the finest passages of OthcUo simply disappear in Vigny s version. In his remaining works the defect of skill in managing the plot and characters of prose fiction, which has been noticed in Cinq-Mars, reappears, together (in the case of the Journal d un Poetc and elsewhere) with signs of the fastidious and slightly affected temper which was Vigny s chief fault as a man. In his poems proper none of these faults appear, and he is seen wholly at his best. It should be said that of his post humous work not a little had previously appeared piecemeal in the Revue des Deux Mondcs, to which he was an occasional contributor. The prettiest of the complete editions of his works (of which there are several) is to be found in what is called the Petite Bibliothequc Charpentier. (G. SA. ) VIGO, a town of Spain, in the province of Pontevedra, 486 miles by rail north-west from Madrid, is picturesquely situated on the side of a hill (Castelo) which slopes down to the southern shore of the Ria de Vigo. The Ria is the most southerly of the great fjords by which the western coast of Galicia is so deeply indented ; Bayona at its mouth is 13 miles from the town of Vigo and Puente Sampayo at its head a somewhat shorter distance. Some of the former walls still remain, and there are two old castles on the hill behind the town ; the older streets retain their narrow, steep, and tortuous aspect. There are some fisheries at Vigo ; but the manufactures of the place are insignificant. Its activity is entirely due to its magnificent anchorage ; it is a regular port of call for several inter national lines of steamers, and has a very important trade ; the chief imports are cotton and woollen fabrics, sugar, hides, itc., while cattle, sardines, grain, and eggs are ex ported. The population within the municipal limits in 1877 was 13,416. Vigo, the ancient O&KO, (Ptolemy) or Vicus Spacorum, has in modern times been more than once attacked by the English, by Drake in 1585 and 1589, and by Cobham in 1719. The Plate fleet was destroyed by the duke of Ormond and admirals Rooke and Stanhope in Vigo Bay on 22d October 1702. VILKOMIR, or WILKOMIERZ, a district-town of Russia, in the government of Kovno, 44 miles north-east of the capital of the province, is one of the oldest cities in that part of western Russia. Founded as early as 1025, it suffered much from the attacks of the Teutonic Knights, as well as from internal wars. It flourished in the 16th century under &quot;Magdeburg law,&quot; but soon came upon ad verse times again during the Avars between Poland, Russia, and Sweden. It was annexed to Russia in 1796. Its position on the principal highway from St Petersburg to Kovno gave it some trade in flax, but this is now declining. Its population increased from 7300 in 1860 to 16,240 in