Alfred de Vigny was elected to a chair in the French Academy in 1846 and died at Paris, September 17, 1863.

                  GastonBOISSIER
          Secretaire Perpetuel de l’Academie Francaise.

TRUTH IN ART

The study of social progress is to-day not less needed in literature than is the analysis of the human heart.  We live in an age of universal investigation, and of exploration of the sources of all movements.  France, for example, loves at the same time history and the drama, because the one explores the vast destinies of humanity, and the other the individual lot of man.  These embrace the whole of life.  But it is the province of religion, of philosophy, of pure poetry only, to go beyond life, beyond time, into eternity.

Of late years (perhaps as a result of our political changes) art has borrowed from history more than ever.  All of us have our eyes fixed on our chronicles, as though, having reached manhood while going on toward greater things, we had stopped a moment to cast up the account of our youth and its errors.  We have had to double the interest by adding to it recollection.

As France has carried farther than other nations this love of facts, and as I had chosen a recent and well-remembered epoch, it seemed to me that I ought not to imitate those foreigners who in their pictures barely show in the horizon the men who dominate their history.  I placed ours in the foreground of the scene; I made them leading actors in this tragedy, wherever I endeavored to represent the three kinds of ambition by which we are influenced, and with them the beauty of self-sacrifice to a noble ideal.  A treatise on the fall of the feudal system; on the position, at home and abroad, of France in the seventeenth century; on foreign alliances; on the justice of parliaments or of secret commissions, or on accusations of sorcery, would not perhaps have been read.  But the romance was read.

I do not mean to defend this last form of historical composition, being convinced that the real greatness of a work lies in the substance of the author’s ideas and sentiments, and not in the literary form in which they are dressed.  The choice of a certain epoch necessitates a certain treatment—­to another epoch it would be unsuitable; these are mere secrets of the workshop of thought which there is no need of disclosing.  What is the use of theorizing as to wherein lies the charm that moves us?  We hear the tones of the harp, but its graceful form conceals from us its frame of iron.  Nevertheless, since I have been convinced that this book possesses vitality, I can not help throwing out some reflections on the liberty which the imagination should employ in weaving into its tapestry all the leading figures of an age, and, to give more consistency to their acts, in making the reality of fact give way to the idea which each of them should represent in the eyes of posterity; in short, on the difference which I find between Truth in art and the True in fact.