The arrangement of the poems announced in this Preface is tripartite, like that of the ’Legende des Siecles:  Poemes antiques, poemes judaiques, poemes modernes.—­Livre mystique, livre antique, livre moderne’.  But the name of precursor would be a vain title if all that were necessary to merit it was the fact that one had been the first to perceive a new path to literary glory, to salute it from a distance, yet never attempt to make a nearer approach.

In one direction at least, Alfred de Vigny was a true innovator, in the broadest and most meritorious sense of the word:  he was the creator of philosophic poetry in France.  Until Jocelyn appeared, in 1836, the form of poetic expression was confined chiefly to the ode, the ballad, and the elegy; and no poet, with the exception of the author of ‘Moise’ and ‘Eloa’, ever dreamed that abstract ideas and themes dealing with the moralities could be expressed in the melody of verse.

To this priority, of which he knew the full value, Alfred de Vigny laid insistent claim.  “The only merit,” he says in one of his prefaces, “that any one ever has disputed with me in this sort of composition is the honor of having promulgated in France all works of the kind in which philosophic thought is presented in either epic or dramatic form.”

But it was not alone priority in the sense of time that gave him right of way over his contemporaries; he was the most distinguished representative of poetic philosophy of his generation.  If the phrases of Lamartine seem richer, if his flight is more majestic, De Vigny’s range is surer and more powerful.  While the philosophy of the creator of ‘Les Harmonies’ is uncertain and inconsistent, that of the poet of ‘Les Destinees’ is strong and substantial, for the reason that the former inspires more sentiment than ideas, while the latter, soaring far above the narrow sphere of personal emotion, writes of everything that occupies the intellect of man.

Thus, by his vigor and breadth of thought, by his profound understanding of life, by the intensity of his dreams, Alfred de Vigny is superior to Victor Hugo, whose genius was quite different, in his power to portray picturesque scenes, in his remarkable fecundity of imagination, and in his sovereign mastery of technique.

But nowhere in De Vigny’s work is that superiority of poetic thought so clearly shown as in those productions wherein the point of departure was farthest from the domain of intellect, and better than any other has he understood that truth proclaimed by Hegel:  “The passions of the soul and the affections of the heart are matter for poetic expression only in so far as they are general, solid, and eternal.”

De Vigny was also the only one among our poets that had a lofty ideal of woman and of love.  And in order to convince one’s self of this it is sufficient to reread successively the four great love-poems of that period:  ’Le Lac, La Tristesse d’Olympio, Le Souvenir, and La Colere de Samson’.