Dare I say that I am attempting herein to open new routes to the imagination? If that is too great an ambition, I ought to accuse myself of it in the very first line.
The plan of this work was made nearly thirty years ago. I was thoroughly imbued with the traditions of our ancient French poetry, then unpublished. I thought that one might still be able to renew the French imagination in its national sources. That idea never left me. Merlin, the first patron of France, became mine.
What I conceived in youth I have executed in maturity. Perhaps it is for that reason that more than one joyful thought concludes in a grave tone. However, all things considered, serenity holds sway; the initial hope was not vanquished.
For an epoch that prefers improvisation to anything else, I fear dooming myself in the mind of the reader by confessing how much time, how many scruples and various cares I have put into a purely literary work. Begun in Belgium at the end of 1853, Merlin was finished in Switzerland at the beginning of 1860. During that long interval, I scarcely ceased—in the midst of very different occupations, it is true—to return to the work on which I ought to be judged, for I have not put as much of myself into any other.
The legend of the human soul until death, and beyond death: that is my subject. There is none greater. I will perhaps be excused for having employed so many days in it if I add that Milton wanted to devote his life to it.
To reconcile all legends by combining them into one alone; to find in the human heart the intimate thread of all popular and national traditions; to bind them into a single serene action, reconnecting the discordant worlds that the imagination of peoples has enchanted: that is what I have dared to attempt.
A true theory of the world would be one that took account of all the facts of the physical order. A true literary conception would be one that found the harmony of all the facts of the ideal or imaginary world, and combined them in a single drama vast enough to contain them all effortlessly.
We have before us a great lyre whose strings have been slackened and falsified by time; it is a matter of retuning them.
Why should the French, who created the vastest inventions in the Middle Ages, no longer be capable of doing so? Why should they resign themselves to creating nothing but fragments? Whence comes that condemnation? What is its basis? Why should the century pass without even attempting the great paths on which the imaginations of the majority of other peoples are engaged? Why that exception for the French? The public, it is said, is too enfeebled, too corrupted, too worn out; it can no longer bear or follow great compositions; it lacks the breath to travel extended horizons. What do we know? Let’s try.
The tradition of Merlin, which plunges into our primal origins, has extended from the Middle Ages to our days, reflecting the colors of every age. I have taken up that common foundation, and I have developed it with the same freedom as my predecessors.
This is the soul of French tradition: everything France possesses with which to augment herself, rejuvenate herself and revivify herself with a new sap. What I have said toward the end of my work is no vain ornament of the imagination. It is in all verity that I leave the reader the branch that has made me penetrate the world of Merlin.
You, who are reading me, take possession in your turn of the hazel-branch that I am handing to you. Take the fruits that I have abandoned voluntarily on the branch, in order to leave you the pleasure of picking them yourself. Take, above all, this work, to which I owe so many serene and regretted days, which has given me the strength to live, and to communicate with others as with myself.
I separate myself from it with difficulty, as if from a comforter.
Edgar Quinet
Veytaux, canton of Vaud,
26 June 1860.