We have noted the essential features of his precise and unfailing vision
and the value of the documents which record the work of Fabre, but the
writer merits no less attention than the observer and the philosopher.
In the domain of things positive, it is not always sufficient to gather the
facts, to record them, and to codify in bare formulae the results of
inquiry. Doubtless every essential discovery is able to stand by itself; in
what would an inventor profit, for example, by raising himself to the level
of the artist? "For the theorem lucidity suffices; truth issues naked from
the bottom of a well."
But the manner of speaking, describing, and depicting is none the less an
integral part of the truth when it is a matter of expounding and
transmitting the latter. To express it feebly is often to compromise it, to
diminish it; and even to betray it. There are terms which say better than
others what has to be said. "Words have their physiognomy; if there are
lifeless words, there are also picturesque and richly-coloured words,
comparable to the brush strokes which scatter flecks of light on the grey
background of the picture." There are particular terms of expression,
felicities which present things in a better light, and the writer must
search in his memory, his imagination, and his heart, for the fitting
accent; for the flexibility of language and the wealth of words which are
needful if he would fully succeed in the portrayal of living creatures; if
he would tender the living truth, reproduce in all its light and shade the
spectacle of the world, arouse the imagination, and faithfully interpret
the mysterious spirit which impregnates matter and is reflected in thought.
The artist then comes forward to co-ordinate all these scattered fragments,
to assemble them, to breathe vitality into them, to restore these inert
truths to life.
But what a strange manner of working was Fabre's; what a curious method of
composition! However full of ideas his mind might be, he was incapable of
expressing them if he remained in one place and assumed the ordinary
preliminary attitude of a man preparing to write. Seated and motionless,
his limbs at rest, pen in hand, with a blank page before him, it seemed to
him that all his faculties became of a sudden paralysed. He must first move
about; activity helped him to pursue his ideas; it was in action that he
recovered his ardour and uncovered the sources of inspiration. Just as he
never observed without enthusiasm, so he found it impossible to write
without exaltation, and it was precisely because he so ardently loved the
truth that he felt himself compelled to show it in all its beauty.
Moving like a circus-horse about the great table of his laboratory, he
would begin to tramp indefatigably round and round, so that his steps have
worn in the tiles of the floor an ineffaceable record of the concentric
track in which they moved incessantly for thirty years.
His mind would grow clear and active as he walked, smoking his pipe and
"using his marrow-bones." (12/1.) He was already at work; he was
"hammering" his future chapters in his brain; for the idea would be all the
more precise as the form was more finished and more irreproachable, more
closely identified with the thought; he would wait until the word quivered,
palpitated, and lived; until the transcription was no longer an illusion, a
phantom, a vision devoid of reality, but a faithful echo, a sincere
translation, a finished interpretation, reflecting entire the fundamental
essence of the thing; in a word, a work of art, a parallel to nature.
Then only would he sit before the little walnut-wood table "spotted with
ink and scarred with knife-cuts, just big enough to hold the inkstand, a
halfpenny bottle, and his open notebook": that same little table at which,
in other days, by force of meditation, he achieved his first degrees.
Then he would begin to write, "his pen dipped not in ink only" but in his
heart's blood (12/2.); first of all in ordinary ruled notebooks bound in
black cloth, in which he noted, day by day, hour by hour, the observations
of every moment, the results of his experiments, together with his thoughts
and reflections. Little by little those documents would come together which
elucidated and completed one another, and at last the book was written.
These notebooks, these copious records, are remarkable for the regularity
of the writing and the often impeccable finish of the first draught.
Although here and there the same data are transcribed several times in
succession, and each time struck through with a vigorous stroke of the pen,
there are whole pages, and many pages together, without a single erasure.
The handwriting, excessively small--one might think it had been traced by
the feet of a fly--becomes in later years so minute that one almost needs a
magnifying glass to decipher it.
These notebooks are not the final manuscript. The entomologist would write
a new and more perfect copy on loose sheets of paper, making one draught
after another, patiently fashioning his style and polishing his work,
although many passages were included without revision as they were written
in the first instance.
The greatest magician of modern letters, versed in all the artifices of the
French language, speaking one day of Fabre and his writings, made in my
hearing the assertion that he was not, properly speaking, an artist. He
might well be a great naturalist, a veteran of science, an observer of
genius, but he was by no means and would never be a writer according to the
canons of the craft.
But how many others, like him, in their time regarded as "pitiable in
respect of their language," charm us to-day, simply because they were
gifted with imagination and the power of giving life to their work! (12/3.)
To tell the truth, Fabre is absolutely careless of all literary procedure,
and solely preoccupied with bringing his style into harmony with his
thoughts; he is not in the least a manufacturer of literary phrases. There
is no trace of artistic writing in his books, and it is only his manner of
feeling and of expressing himself that makes him so dear to us.
What touches us in him is the accent, the simplicity, the measure, the good
sense, and the perfect equilibrium of each of these pages: simple, often
commonplace, even incorrect or trivial, but so alive, so human, that the
blood seems to flow in them. It is the lover in Fabre that draws us to him;
nothing quite like his work has been seen since the days of Jean de La
Fontaine.
He has liberated science; he laughs at the specialists who take refuge
behind their "barbarian terminologies," at the "jargon" of those "who see
the world only through the wrong end of the glass"; at the exaggerated
importance which they attribute to insignificant details, the narrowness of
classifications, and the chaos of systems; all that incoherent, remote, and
inaccessible science, which he, on the contrary, strives to render pleasant
and attractive.
This is why the great scientist has endeavoured to speak like other people,
preferring, to the harsh consonants of technical phrases which sound "like
insults" or have the air of "a magical invocation, which make certain
scientific works read like so much gibberish," the "naive and picturesque
appellation, the familiar, trivial name, the popular, living term which
directly interprets the exact signification of the habits of an insect, or
informs us fully of its dominant characteristic, or which, at least, leaves
nothing to conjecture."
He considers it useless and even inconvenient to abandon many charming
expressions, appropriate and significant as they are, which may be borrowed
from the good old French tongue; and in this he resembles the immortal de
Jussieu, who in his botanical classifications was careful not to discard
the old popular denominations which Theophrastus, Virgil, and Linnaeus had
thought fit to bestow upon plant and tree.
It is for the same reasons that he loves the Provençal tongue; that
beautiful idiom, that superb language, rich in music, in sonorous words, so
suggestive and so full of colour, many of whose terms, saying precisely
what they intend to say, have no equivalent in French. He has learned the
language, and reads it: in particular Roumanille, whose easy, familiar
style pleases him better than the grandiloquence of Mistral, although he
delights also in Calendal, whose lyrical powers fill him with enthusiasm.
>From this ancient tongue, which was early as familiar to him as the French,
he borrowed certain mannerisms, certain tricks of style, certain
neologisms, and also, to some extent, his simplicity of manner and the
cadence of his prose.
It was not without difficulty that he attained this mastery. Measure the
gulf between his first volumes and his last; in the first the style is
slightly nerveless and indefinite: it was only as he gradually advanced in
his career that he acquired what may be called his final manner, or
achieved, in his narratives, a perfect literary style. The most
substantially constructed, the most happily expressed of his pages were
written principally in his extreme old age. Not only is there no sign of
failing in these, but in his latest "Souvenirs" the perfection of form is
perhaps even more remarkable than the wealth of matter.
How vitally his scrupulous records impress the mind's eye; how firmly they
establish themselves in the memory!
Even if one has never seen the Pelopaeus, one readily conceives an
impression of "her wasp-like costume, and curving abdomen, suspended at the
end of a long thread." What exactitude in this snapshot, taken at the
moment when the insect is occupied in scooping out of the mire the lump of
mud intended for the construction of her nest: "like a skilled housekeeper,
with her clothing carefully tucked up that it may not be soiled, the wings
vibrating, the limbs rigidly straightened, the black abdomen well raised on
the end of its yellow stalk, she rakes the mud with the points of her
mandibles, skimming the shining surface." (12/4.)
He draws, in passing, this charming sketch of the gadfly, the pest of
horses, which nourishes itself with their blood:
"Gadflies of several species used to take refuge under the silken dome of
my umbrella, and there they would quietly rest, one here, one there, on the
tightly stretched fabric; I rarely lacked their company when the heat was
overpowering. To while away the hours of waiting, I used to love to watch
their great golden eyes, which would shine like carbuncles on the vaulted
ceiling of my shelter; I used to love to watch them slowly change their
stations, when the excessive heat of some point of the ceiling would force
them to move a little." (12/5.)
We follow all the manoeuvres of the Balaninus, the acorn-weevil, "burying
her drill" which "operates by means of little bites." The narrator calls
our attention to the slightest episodes, even to those accidents which
sometimes surprise the worker in the course of her labours; when, with the
rostrum buried deep in the acorn, her feet suddenly lose their hold. Then
the unhappy creature, unable to free herself, finds herself suspended in
the air, at right angles to her proboscis, far from any foothold or point
of vantage, at the extremity of her disproportionately long pike, that
"fatal stake." (12/6.)
As for the poplar-weevil, we can almost see it moving "in the subtlest
equilibrium, clinging with its hooked talons to the slippery surface of the
leaf"; we watch all the details of its methods and the progress of its
labours. We see the flexed leaf assume the vertical under the awl-stroke
which the insect applies to the pedicle, "when, partially deprived of sap,
the leaf becomes more flexible, more malleable; it is in a sense partly
paralysed, only half alive." Then we follow the rolling process; "the
imperturbable deliberation of the worker as it rolls its cigar, which
finally hangs perpendicularly at the end of the bent and wounded stem."
(12/7.)
Fabre, like a true artist, finds all sorts of expressions to describe the
tiny, fragile eggs of his insects; little shining pearls, delicious coffers
of nickel or amber, miniature pots of translucid alabaster, "which we might
think were stolen from the cupboard of a fairy."
He opens the enchanted alcoves wherein the puny grubs lie slumbering, "fat,
rounded puppets"; the tender larvae which "gape and swing their heads to
and fro" when the mother returns to the nest with her toothsome mouthful or
her crop swollen with honey.
What compassion, what tenderness, what sensitiveness in the affecting
picture of the mother Halictus, abandoned, deprived of her offspring,
bewildered and lost, when the terrible spring fly has destroyed her house:
bald, emaciated, shabby, careworn, already dogged by the small grey lizard!
(12/8.)
The tragedy of the wasps' nest at the approach of the first chills of
winter is the final fragment of an epic. At first there is a sort of
uneasiness, "a species of indifference and anxiety which broods over the
city"; already it has a presentiment of coming misfortune, of an
approaching catastrophe. Presently a wild excitement ensues; the foster-
mothers, "frightened, fierce, and restless," as though suddenly attacked by
an incomprehensible insanity, conceive an aversion for the young; "the
neuters extirpate the larvae and drag them out of the nest," and the drama
of destruction draws to a close with "the final catastrophe; the infirm and
the dying are dismembered, eviscerated, dissected in a heap in the
catacombs by maggots, woodlice, and centipedes." Finally the moth comes
upon the scene, its larvae "attacking the dwelling itself; gnawing and
destroying the joists and rafters, until all is reduced to a few pinches of
dust and shreds of grey paper." (12/9.)
What picturesque expressions he employs to depict, by means of some
significant feature, the striking peculiarities of the insect physiognomy!
"The gipsy who night and day for seven months goes to and fro with her
brats upon her back" is the Lycosa, the Tarantula with the black stomach,
the great spider of the wastes.
The larva of the great Capricornis, which gnaws the interior of old oak-
trees, "leaving behind it, in the form of dry-rot, the refuse of its
digestive processes," is "a scrap of intestine which eats its way as it
goes."
In "that hideous lout" the Scorpion he shows us a rough epitome of the
shapeless head, the truncated face of the spider.
The Tachinae, those "brazen diptera" which swarm on the sunny sand on the
watch for Bembex or Philanthus, in order to establish their offspring at
its expense, "are bandits clad in fustian, the head wrapped in a red
handkerchief, awaiting the hour of attack!"
The Languedocian Sphex, sprawling flat upon the vine leaves, grows dizzy
with the heat and frisks for very pleasure; "with its feet it taps rapidly
on its resting-place, and thus produces a drumming like that of a shower of
rain falling thickly on the leaves." Fabre takes a keen delight in the
production of these pictures, at once so exact and lifelike; but we must
not therefore suppose that his mind is incapable of the detailed
descriptions necessitated by the laborious processes of minute anatomy.
Like all sciences, entomology has its uninteresting aspects when we seek to
study it deeply. Yet with what interest and lucidity has Fabre succeeded in
expounding the complex morphoses of the obscure and miserable larva of the
Sitaris, the curious intestine of the Scarabaeus, the secret of the
spawning of the weevil, and the ingenious mechanisms of the musical
instruments of the Decticus and the Cicada. With what subtle art he
explains the song of the cricket, how the five hundred prisms of the
serrated bow set the four tympana in vibration; and how the song is
sometimes muffled by a process of muting. (12/10.)
Some of the images suggested to him by the forms of animals are so
beautiful that certain of his descriptions might well serve to inspire an
artist, or suggest new motives of decoration in the arts of enamelling,
gem-engraving, jewellery, etc.
Instead of eternally copying ancient things, or seeking inspiration in
lifeless texts, why not turn our attention to the numerous and interesting
motives which are scattered all around us, whose originality consists
precisely in the fact that they have never yet been employed? Why torture
the mind to produce more painful elaborations of awkward, frozen, poverty-
stricken combinations, when Nature herself is at hand, offering the
inexhaustible casket of her living marvels, full of the profoundest logic
and as yet unexamined?
If the bee by means of the hexagonal prism has anticipated all the
geometers in the problem of the economy of space and matter; if the Epeïra
and the mollusc have invented the logarithmic spiral and its transcendent
properties; if all creatures "inspired by an aesthetic which nothing
escapes, achieve the beautiful" (12/11.), surely human art, which can but
imitate and remember, has only to employ to its profit and transfigure into
ideal images the natural beauties so profusely furnished by the
Unconscious.
Modern art, influenced more especially by the subtle Japanese, is already
treading this path.
What artist could ever engrave on rare metals or model in precious
substances a more beautiful subject than the wonderful picture of the
Tarantula offering, at the length of her extended limbs, her white sac of
eggs to the sun; or the transparent nymph of the Onthophagus taurus, "as
though carved from a block of crystal, with its wide snout and its enormous
horns like those of the Aurochs"? (12/12.) What an undiscovered subject he
might find in the nymph of the Ergatus (12/13.), with its almost
incorporeal grace, as though made of "translucent ivory, like a communicant
in her white veils, the arms crossed upon the breast; a living symbol of
mystic resignation before the accomplishment of destiny"; or in the still
more mysterious nymph of the Scarabaeus sacer, first of all "a mummy of
translucent amber, maintained by its linen cerements in a hieratic pose;
but soon upon this background of topaz, the head, the legs, and the thorax
change to a sombre red, while the rest of the body remains white, and the
nymph is slowly transfigured, assuming that majestic costume which combines
the red of the cardinal's mantle with the whiteness of the sacerdotal alb."
On the other hand, what Sims or Bateman ever imagined weirder caricature
than the grotesque larva of the Oniticella, with its extravagant dorsal
hump; or the fantastic and alarming silhouette of the Empusa, with its
scaly belly raised crozierwise and mounted on four long stilts, its pointed
face, turned-up moustaches, great prominent eyes, and a "stupendous mitre":
the most grotesque, the most fantastic freaks that creation can ever have
evolved? (12/14.)