He cherished also a fixed principle that art implied selection.  He was neither idealist nor realist, in the exclusive and opposing sense in which we understand these terms; he recommended a scrupulous observance of nature, and that every writer should draw as close to it as possible, but only in order to interpret it, to reveal it with a true feeling, yet without a too intimate analysis, and that no one should attempt to portray it exactly or servilely copy it.  “Of what use is art,” he says, “if it is only a reduplication of existence?  We see around us only too much of the sadness and disenchantment of reality.”  The three novels that compose the volume ‘Servitude et Grandeur militaire’ are, in this respect, models of romantic composition that never will be surpassed, bearing witness to the truth of the formula followed by De Vigny in all his literary work:  “Art is the chosen truth.”

If, as a versifier, Alfred de Vigny does not equal the great poets of his time, if they are his superiors in distinction and brilliancy, in richness of vocabulary, freedom of movement, and variety of rhythm, the cause is to be ascribed less to any lack of poetic genius than to the nature of his inspiration, even to the laws of poesy, and to the secret and irreducible antinomy that exists between art and thought.  When, for example, Theophile Gautier reproached him with being too little impressed with the exigencies of rhyme, his criticism was not well grounded, for richness of rhyme, though indispensable in works of descriptive imagination, has no ‘raison d’etre’ in poems dominated by sentiment and thought.  But, having said that, we must recognize in his poetry an element, serious, strong, and impressive, characteristic of itself alone, and admire, in the strophes of ‘Mozse’, in the imprecations of ‘Samson’, and in the ‘Destinees’, the majestic simplicity of the most beautiful Hebraic verse.

Moreover, the true originality of De Vigny does not lie in the manner of composition; it was primarily in the role of precursor that he played his part on the stage of literature.  Let us imagine ourselves at the period about the beginning of the year 1822.  Of the three poets who, in making their literary debuts, had just published the ’Meditations, Poemes antiques et modernes, and Odes’, only one had, at that time, the instinct of renewal in the spirit of French poesy, and a sense of the manner in which this must be accomplished; and that one was not Lamartine, and certainly it was not Victor Hugo.

Sainte-Beuve has said, with authority, that in Lamartine there is something suggestive of Millevoye, of Voltaire (he of the charming epistles), and of Fontanes; and Victor Hugo wrote with very little variation from the technical form of his predecessors.  “But with Alfred de Vigny,” he says, “we seek in vain for a resemblance to any French poetry preceding his work.  For example, where can we find anything resembling ‘Moise, Eloa, Doloeida’?  Where did he find his inspiration for style and composition in these poems?  If the poets of the Pleiades of the Restoration seem to have found their inspiration within themselves, showing no trace of connection with the literature of the past, thus throwing into confusion old habits of taste and of routine, certain it is that among them Alfred de Vigny should be ranked first.”