"From this, without doubt, sprang the fable. Man created it thus, because it was not given him to see more than himself and nature, which surrounds him; but he created it true with a truth all its own"
About this Quote
Vigny is doing something sly: he defends fiction by admitting its fraudulence. The “fable” is born not from divine revelation or historical record, but from a hard limit in human perception: we can see ourselves and the natural world “which surrounds” us, and not much else. That constraint could sound like an accusation of narcissism, yet Vigny turns it into an aesthetic principle. If our knowledge is bounded, storytelling isn’t a childish escape; it’s the mind’s most honest workaround.
The key move is the pivot from “created” to “true.” He concedes the fable is manufactured, then insists it carries “a truth all its own.” That phrase refuses the modern courtroom demand that truth must be factual. Vigny is arguing for a parallel jurisdiction: myth and poetry don’t testify to events, they testify to experience. The “truth” is internal, pattern-based, psychological, moral - the kind that survives even when the plot is patently impossible.
Context matters: early-to-mid 19th-century France is wrestling with Romanticism’s bid to restore the imagination after Enlightenment confidence in reason, while industrial modernity narrows the world into measurable systems. Vigny, often branded a stoic Romantic, meets that squeeze with a principled defense of fabrication. The subtext is almost combative: don’t mock the fable for being invented; invention is precisely how finite creatures reach for meaning beyond what their senses can certify. In Vigny’s formulation, the lie isn’t the story. The lie is pretending we don’t need it.
The key move is the pivot from “created” to “true.” He concedes the fable is manufactured, then insists it carries “a truth all its own.” That phrase refuses the modern courtroom demand that truth must be factual. Vigny is arguing for a parallel jurisdiction: myth and poetry don’t testify to events, they testify to experience. The “truth” is internal, pattern-based, psychological, moral - the kind that survives even when the plot is patently impossible.
Context matters: early-to-mid 19th-century France is wrestling with Romanticism’s bid to restore the imagination after Enlightenment confidence in reason, while industrial modernity narrows the world into measurable systems. Vigny, often branded a stoic Romantic, meets that squeeze with a principled defense of fabrication. The subtext is almost combative: don’t mock the fable for being invented; invention is precisely how finite creatures reach for meaning beyond what their senses can certify. In Vigny’s formulation, the lie isn’t the story. The lie is pretending we don’t need it.
Quote Details
| Topic | Truth |
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