FABRE’S WRITINGS
My study-table, the size of a pocket-handkerchief, occupied on the
right by the inkstand—a penny bottle—and on the left by the open
exercise-book, gives me just the room which I need to wield the
pen. I love that little piece of furniture, one of the first
acquisitions of my early married life. It is easily moved where you
wish: in front of the window, when the sky is cloudy; into the
discreet light of a corner, when the sun is tiresome. In winter it
allows you to come close to the hearth, where a log is blazing.
Poor little walnut board, I have been faithful to you for half a
century and more. Ink-stained, cut and scarred with the pen-knife,
you know how to lend your support to my prose as you once did to my
equations. This variation in employment leaves you indifferent;
your patient back extends the same welcome to my formulæ of algebra
and the formulæ of thought. I cannot boast this placidity; I find
that the change has not increased my peace of mind: the hunt for
ideas troubles the brain even more than does the hunt for the roots
of an equation.
You would never recognise me, little friend, if you could give a
glance at my grey mane. Where is the cheerful face of former days,
bright with enthusiasm and hope? I have aged, I have aged. And you,
what a falling off, since you came to me from the dealer’s,
gleaming and polished and smelling so good with your beeswax! Like
your master, you have wrinkles, often my work, I admit; for how
many times, in my impatience, have I not dug my pen into you, when,
after its dip in the muddy inkpot, the nib refused to write
decently!
One of your corners is broken off; the boards are beginning to come
loose. Inside you, I hear, from time to time, the plane of the
Death-watch, who despoils old furniture. From year to year new
galleries are excavated, endangering your solidity. The old ones
show on the outside in the shape of tiny round holes. A stranger
has seized upon the latter, excellent quarters, obtained without
trouble. I see the impudent intruder run nimbly under my elbow and
penetrate forthwith into the tunnel abandoned by the Death-watch.
She is after game, this slender huntress, clad in black, busy
collecting Wood-lice for her grubs. A whole nation is devouring
you, you old table; I am writing on a swarm of insects! No support
could be more appropriate to my entomological notes.
What will become of you when your master is gone? Will you be
knocked down for a franc, when the family come to apportion my poor
spoils? Will you be turned into a stand for the pitcher beside the
kitchen-sink? Will you be the plank on which the cabbages are
shredded? Or will my children, on the contrary, agree among
themselves and say:
“Let us preserve the relic. It was where he toiled so hard to teach
himself and make himself capable of teaching others; it was where
he so long consumed his strength to find food for us when we were
little. Let us keep the sacred plank.”
I dare not believe in such a future for you. You will pass into
strange hands, O my old friend; you will become a bedside-table
laden with bowl after bowl of linseed-tea, until, decrepit,
rickety, and broken-down, you are chopped up to feed the flames for
a brief moment under the simmering saucepan. You will vanish in
smoke to join my labours in that other smoke, oblivion, the
ultimate resting-place of our vain agitations. [145]
The little table protests to-day. It has no desire whatever to go up in
smoke with the labour in which it has borne its part; it flatters
itself, on the contrary, with the hope that having shared in the toil
it may also have some chance of sharing the honour. Rather than this
unjust sentence of death, it seems to hear a summons to life:
“Let us go back, O my table, to the days of our youth, the days of your
French polish and my smiling illusions,” and it stands proudly upon its
legs, as though to serve as a support for these pages destined to
recapitulate Fabre’s written work, all that work which it has helped
him to compose, from the first line to the last.
Of the first literary or scientific exercises of the youthful Fabre and
the first quivers of the little table under the nervous, valiant,
indefatigable pen of the young Carpentras schoolmaster, we shall say
nothing, unless that there was really some excuse for trembling before
the audacious and strenuous toil of the beginning, and all the
exercise-books stuffed with figures and formulæ, diagrams and texts
which represent the solitary and strictly personal work of preparation
for two bachelor’s degrees, quickly followed by those of the licentiate
and the doctor. It was an anatomical work, a memoir on the reproductive
organs of the Myriapods, or Centipedes, that won for Fabre the degree
of Doctor of Science.
Fabre’s first contribution to the Press was a memoir on the Predatory
Hymenoptera, published in the Annales des sciences naturelles. This
attracted great attention among the masters of science. The Institute
of France awarded him a prize for experimental physiology. Darwin, then
at the height of his fame, saluted him with amazed and rather uneasy
admiration. Léon Dufour, the patriarch of entomology in those days,
wrote the author a most eulogistic and encouraging letter; happy to
have directed his researches toward discoveries which he himself had
not suspected, the venerable scientist emphatically exhorted his young
friend to continue his journey along the path that was opening before
him, a path so full of promise.
Some time after this he published another entomological work which was
by no means calculated to disappoint the hopes aroused by the first. It
dealt with an insect related to the Cantharides, the Sitaris humeralis,
and it contained matter no less unsuspected and no less astonishing
than the first.
The impression produced was all the more profound in that the miracle
of instinct was here accompanied by a physiological miracle, a
phenomenon of metamorphosis wholly unknown, to describe which Fabre hit
upon the very happy term hypermetamorphosis. To the ordinary series of
transformations through which the insect passes in proceeding from the
larval condition to that of the nymph and the perfect insect, this
strange little beast adds another as a prelude to the first, so that
the larva of the Sitaris passes through four different forms, known as
the primary larva, the secondary larva, the pseudo-chrysalis, and the
tertiary larva, and these resemble one another so little that only the
most sustained attention on the observer’s part enables him to believe
the testimony of his eyes.
All these revelations keenly stimulated the curiosity and emulation of
the specialists, and set them “on the track of the history, hitherto
mysterious, of the Cantharides and all the insects resembling them....
A number of naturalists, Beauregard, Riley, Valéry-Mayet, Künckel
d’Herculais, Lichtenstein, and others began to study the insects more
or less adapted to the preparation of blisters: the Mylabres, the
Meloës, the Cantharides. Lichtenstein even carried the larvæ of the
Cantharides in his watch pocket, enclosed in small glass tubes, so that
he could keep them warm and observe them at any moment.”
It was by reading the memoir on the peregrinations and metamorphoses of
the Sitaris that M. Perrier [146] made the acquaintance of Fabre’s
work, of which he was to become one of the most competent judges and
fervent and eloquent admirers. He referred to this essay last year in
his speech at the Sérignan jubilee:
It was in 1868. I had only just left the Higher Normal College, and
was a very youthful assistant naturalist at the Museum. I can still
see myself on the box-seat of an omnibus, crossing the Place de la
Concorde, with an open book on my knees; I was reading the history
of the Sitaris humeralis; I was marvelling at its complicated
metamorphoses and its ruses for making its way into the nest of the
solitary Bee. [147]
These early essays were followed by many others, also published in the
Annales des sciences naturelles, and were always received with the same
favour by all the notable scientists of the time.
While he was soaring toward the heights, and making his way into
unexplored regions, under the astounded gaze of the most eminent
authorities, who saw themselves suddenly equalled and even surpassed,
his scientific genius loved also to look downwards, to approach the
beginners, to return, as it were, to the starting-point, in order to
hold out his hand to them, and to trace out for them, through all the
stages of science, the path that he had opened up for himself in the
face of unheard-of difficulties.
He laboured to give them what he himself had felt the lack of almost as
much as the help of masters: the assistance of luminous, living books,
capable of teaching without fatigue and without tedium. His class books
are, in fact, models of their kind. In them you will find no vague
phraseology, but the simplest, most precise, yet most natural language;
no idle excess of erudition, but the most perfect lucidity of text as
of diagram; no dryness, nothing commonplace, but everywhere something
picturesque, original, and full of life, giving charm and relief to all
that is learned; and above all the constant care never to isolate
oneself from life, to keep in touch with reality, by leading the
youthful mind from the spectacles which are most familiar to it to the
conceptions of science and from these to such of their applications as
are most usual and most familiar.
To sum up, a rare talent for simply and clearly expounding the most
difficult theories in such a way as to render them accessible to the
youngest minds; a wonderful power of capturing the attention from all
sides, of breaking down the water-tight partition which too often
exists between the mind and the heart, between science and life,
between theory and practice: such are the essential characteristics
which earned Fabre the title of “the incomparable populariser.”
About 1866 and 1867, at the Normal College of Rodez, one of our
professors used to read to us and teach us to admire certain little
books by our as yet but little known compatriot, J. H. Fabre, who
was born at Saint-Léons, so he told us, and had graduated from the
Normal College of Avignon.
Such is the information recently given us by M. François Fabié, as “a
detail that might perhaps give us pleasure, and which proves, in any
case, that not all the inhabitants of the Rouergue, as was mistakenly
said of late, were ignorant of the name, origin, and talent of J. H.
Fabre.” [148]
We are, indeed, glad to think that if he was unduly overlooked at a
later time, he was at least known and admired at an early period in
Aveyron, and that as early as 1866 his class books were especially
recommended to the attention of our young schoolmasters at the Normal
College of Rodez. They could have had none better conceived or
compiled. Would to heaven our public schoolmasters had always been as
happily inspired or as well advised in the choice of their textbooks!
Would to heaven that, instead of the dismal and misleading suggestions
of materialism and impiety, there were still a place in the manuals of
science, put in the hands of our children, for reflections as sane and
as lofty as these. “By their practical side the sciences verge upon
agriculture, medicine, and industry; but they have before all a moral
advantage which is not shared in the same degree by any other branch of
human knowledge: in that by giving us a knowledge of the created
universe they uplift the soul and nourish the mind with noble and
salutary thoughts.” [149]
The study of the heavenly bodies in particular has this inestimable
result: “The things that we are told by stellar astronomy overwhelm the
understanding and leave no room in our minds except for an impulse of
religious wonder at the author of these marvels, the God whose
unlimited power has peopled the abysses of space with immeasurable
heaps of suns.” [150] But the divine work “perhaps appears more
marvellous still in the infinity of littleness than in the infinity of
magnitude: Magnus in magnis, it has been said of God, maximus in
minimis.” [151] This fine saying is verified and more or less
explicitly confirmed in a thousand passages of the Souvenirs.
Fabre’s works of popularisation are very numerous: they include no less
than seventy to eighty volumes; they embrace all the elements of the
sciences learned and taught by the author: arithmetic, algebra,
geometry, trigonometry, mechanics, physics, chemistry, etc.; but their
principal aim was to teach the natural sciences, which furnish the
material of more than fifty volumes intended for the primary or
secondary degree of education.
In his favourite domain of the natural sciences, as in that of the
other sciences, the practical tendency of his teaching was by
preference directed toward agricultural applications, as is shown by
the very titles of many of his books: Eléments usuels des sciences
physiques et naturelles, avec applications à l’hygiène et a
l’agriculture—Le Livre des Champs—Les Auxiliaires—Les
Ravageurs—Arithmétique agricole—Chimie agricole: indeed it was with the
last volume that he inaugurated his series of initiatory textbooks. For
the use of young girls and future housewives, he published books on Le
Ménage, Hygiène and Economie domestique.
And all these little books are presented in a picturesque and
attractive form. The very titles have nothing austere about them:
Entretien de l’oncle Paul avec ses neveux sur les choses
d’agriculture—Chimie de l’oncle Paul. There is also The Livre de Maître
Paul, the Histoire des Bêtes, the Leçons des choses, the Livre
d’Histoires and the Livre des Champs. Under different titles the other
volumes evoke, like these, a sort of family atmosphere; they display
the same concrete style of narrative and the same lifelike charm of
dialogue.
Evidently Fabre was not one of these whose “life was strangled,” and
his initiative stifled by the springes of University methods and the
programmes beloved of the bureaucrats. On every side there was little
but disdain for animals and plants; and it was these above all that he
strove to popularise. When they are studied, it is only to dissect them
or reduce them to abstract formulæ; but he considers them rather as
they are in themselves and in their relations with human life. And
while others speak of them as dead objects or as indifferent objects,
to indifferent readers, Fabre speaks of them with sympathy and feeling,
with the tenderness and geniality of an uncle speaking to his nephews,
and he excels in communicating to his hearers the sacred fire which
inspires him—the passionate love which he feels for all natural things.
It was Fabre’s fine independence that made him a pioneer. Certain of
his manuals may no longer be sufficiently up to date, but his methods
and his tendencies are precisely those that best respond to the needs
and aspirations of the present time. For a wave of serious public
opinion is revealing itself in favour of a renewal of our public
education.
A time will come, let us hope, when the schools will be less artificial
and removed from real life, and will no longer systematically ignore
religion, the family, the country and the vocation of the pupils. When
that time comes, the schoolmasters will turn again to the classic Fabre
handbooks, or at all events to books modelled upon his, in order to
teach the little peasant boys to love their fields, their beasts, their
agricultural and pastoral labours; to teach them also sometimes to lift
their heads from the furrows in order to look up at the returning
stars.
Begun in 1862 by the publication of a book on agricultural chemistry,
Fabre’s work of popularisation was continued until the appearance in
1879 of his first volume of the Souvenirs. It forms as it were a
preface to the great entomological masterpiece. Thanks to the deserved
success of the series, rather than to his wretched emoluments as
professor, he achieved the security and independence necessary to the
accomplishment of his mission. His class-books were the ransom that set
him free. They enabled him to leave the town and escape into the
fields. They even enabled him to realise his dream of a solitary corner
of the earth and a life of leisure wholly dedicated to the patient and
disinterested study of his beloved insects.
From another point of view this long and patient effort of scientific
popularisation and intense literary production was not without its
results as regard his later work. It enabled him to obtain a mastery of
his medium, to exercise his faculty of expression and his mind, to vary
and mature his observations, and finally to realise that tour de force
of writing, for specialists, books that he who runs may read, and of
performing the miracle of arousing the enthusiasm of men of letters for
books that compel the admiration of scientists, and attracting the
attention of the scientists to books that delight the man of letters.
The brilliance, colour, and vitality which enhance without ever
diminishing the high scientific value of his Souvenirs are due, no
doubt, to his native qualities, to the limpid and harmonious Gallic
genius of which he affords so admirable a type; he owes them also, as
we have said, to all those tiny lives, so vibrant with diligence, and
so picturesque, whose lights and shades and naïve emotions seem to have
found their way into his own heart, into his style; but he owes them
still more to his young friends, the primary school-children, to the
pains which he took, the ingenuity which he expended in bringing within
the grasp of the child’s mind, in impressing upon his imagination and
sensibility as well as his understanding, the creatures and the doings
of the living world.
As we have recorded, it was only in 1879 that Fabre inaugurated his
great and immortal collection of Souvenirs entomologiques.
From this same year dates the acquisition, so greatly desired, of the
open-air laboratory and his installation in the cherished solitude of
Sérignan, where he was able to give free play to his entomological
tastes, and to continue to add to the Souvenirs.
Henri Fabre was then fifty-five years of age, and apparently broken by
fatigue and suffering. This did not prevent him from undertaking and
accomplishing a task in which we know not which to admire the most: the
acuteness of observation or the vigour of thought, the enthusiasm of
the investigator or the animation of the writer. Here is a wonderful
example to all those whom advancing age and life have already cruelly
bruised; to all those who might be tempted to give up or to flinch
under the burden of grief or disappointment, instead of listening to
the voice of their talents, the appeal of their friends, the summons of
God Himself to generous and devoted action, and to the great harvest of
souls and ideas.
For forty years [says Fabre] I have struggled with unshakable
courage against the sordid miseries of life; and the corner of
earth I have dreamed of has come at last.
The wish is realised. It is a little late, O my pretty insects! I
greatly fear that the peach is offered to me when I am beginning to
have no teeth wherewith to eat it. Yes, it is a little late; the
wide horizons of the outset have shrunk into a low and stifling
canopy, more and more straitened day by day. Regretting nothing in
the past, save those whom I have lost; regretting nothing, not even
my first youth; hoping nothing either, I have reached the point at
which, worn out by the experience of things, we ask ourselves if
life be worth the living. [152]
In the touching, desolate accents of these lives we may, no doubt, hear
the echoes of a whole lifetime of toil and trial; but above all they
express the cruel grief which had just wrung the kindly, tender heart
of the great scientist. He was still suffering from the blow dealt him
by the death of his beloved son Jules at the moment of writing these
lines on the first page of the second volume of the Souvenirs, piously
dedicated to the memory of the lost child.
Happily he found in his “insuperable faith in the Beyond” [153] a the
courage to overcome his grief and in his “love of scientific truth” the
possibility of taking up his life again and resuming his work.
Amid the ruins that surround me, one strip of wall remains
standing, immovable upon its solid base; my passion for scientific
youth. Is that enough, O my busy insects, to enable me to add yet a
few seemly pages to your history? Will my strength not cheat my
good intentions? Why, indeed, did I forsake you so long? Friends
have reproached me for it. Ah, tell them, tell those friends, who
are yours as well as mine, tell them that it was not forgetfulness
on my part, not weariness, nor neglect: I thought of you; I was
convinced that the Cerceris’ cave had more fair secrets to reveal
to us, that the chase of the Sphex held fresh surprises in store.
But time failed me; I was alone, deserted, struggling against
misfortune. Before philosophising, one had to live. Tell them that;
and they will pardon me. [154]
From the very beginning of his great entomological work Fabre sought to
free himself from another reproach, which wounded him to the quick,
because it struck at his fidelity to his chosen study, and, what is
more, to scientific truth:
Others again have reproached me with my style, which has not the
solemnity, nay, better, the dryness of the schools. They fear lest
a page that is read without fatigue should not always be the
expression of the truth. Were I to take their word for it, we are
profound only on condition of being obscure. Come here, one and all
of you—you, the sting-bearers, and you, the wing-cased
armour-clads—take up my defence and bear witness in my favour. Tell
of the intimate terms on which I live with you, of the patience
with which I observe you, of the care with which I record your
actions. Your evidence is unanimous: yes, my pages, though they
bristle not with hollow formulæ nor learned smatterings, are the
exact narrative of facts observed, neither more nor less; and whoso
cares to question you in his turn will obtain the same replies.
And then, my dear insects, if you cannot convince those good
people, because you do not carry the weight of tedium, I, in my
turn, will say to them:
“You rip up the animal and I study it alive; you turn it into an
object of horror and pity, whereas I cause it to be loved; you
labour in a torture-chamber and dissecting-room, I make my
observations under the blue sky, to the song of the Cicadas; [155]
you subject cell and protoplasm to chemical tests, I study instinct
in its loftiest manifestations; you pry into death, I pry into
life.”
Our author’s strong personality is revealed no less in the bulk of his
work than in this declaration of principles which might serve as a
prologue to the latter.
“With the originality of genius he is from the first totally opposed to
the point of view of those naturalists who are fascinated by morphology
and anatomy.” [156] He believes that the characteristics of life are to
be found in life itself, and that if we wish truly to know the insect,
nothing will help us so much as seeing it at work. “Mere common sense,
the reader will say, yet it is by no means common”; and it usually
happens that writers “forget to take performance into their reckoning
when they are describing life.” [157]
To study living entomology, that is, to study the insect living its
life and in the highest manifestations of its life, in its instincts
and its habits, in its aptitudes and its passions, in a word, in its
psychic faculties; to replace the dominant standpoint of morphology and
physiology by the standpoint of biology and psychology; such is the
essential programme of the writer of the Souvenirs.
And he adheres to it all the more strictly the more he sees it
neglected by those about him, judging it to be of still greater
importance for one who is seeking to know the insect, more advantageous
to practice and speculation, more essential to the open-air life and
the most abstruse inquiries of the human mind. By curiously
interrogating the life of the insects one may render inestimable
services to agriculture, as Pasteur did in his investigation of
sericulture; one may also “furnish general psychology with data of
inestimable value,” and this in particular was what he proposed to do.
M. Fabre’s restless mind is for ever haunted by the most abstruse
problems, which, indicated here and there, enable us to understand the
motives that urge him on. With reference to these the insect is no
longer an end: it becomes a means. Above all, M. Fabre wishes to define
instinct; to establish the line of demarcation which divides it from
intelligence, and to demonstrate whether human reason is an irreducible
faculty or whether it is only a degree higher on a scale whose base
descends into the depths of animality. More generally he propounds the
question of the identity or the difference between the animal mind and
the human. He also seeks to examine the problem of evolution; finally,
to discover whether geometry rules over all things, and whether it
tells us of a Universal Geometer, or whether “the strictly beautiful,
the domain of reason, that is, order, is the inevitable result of a
blind mechanism.” [158]
And to tell the whole story in a few words, the essential object, the
general impulse of this curious and powerful mind, which refuses to
divide science from philosophy, is to consider the insect, how it
lives; to note its actions and its movements; to reach its inner from
its outer life; its inward impulse from its external action; and then
to climb upwards from the insect to man and from man to God.
Fabre never attempts to solve the problems which he propounds a priori.
Before thinking as a philosopher he observes as a scientist. His method
is strictly experimental. “To observe the crude fact, to record it,
then to ask what conclusion may be based upon this solid foundation,
such is M. Fabre’s only rule; and if we oppose him with arguments he
demands observations.” [159]
“See first; you can argue afterwards.” “The precise facts are alone
worthy of science. They cast premature theories into oblivion.”
He always makes direct for the facts as Nature presents them. The books
fail him or are not to his liking. Most of them dissect the insect; he
wants it alive and acting. The best contain but the shadow of life; he
prefers life itself. If he happens to quote them, it is usually to
deplore their deficiencies or to correct their errors, or perhaps to do
homage to a precursor or a rival, but not to borrow from them the
history of an insect.
This history he wishes to take from life, and he refuses to write
except according to Nature and the data provided by the living subject.
His narratives are always the result of strictly conscientious and
objective inquiries: he records nothing that he has not seen, and if he
has sometimes heightened his pictures by somewhat vivid hues, he has
only given his style the relief and the colour of his subject. The
danger of such scientific records when they are written by a man of
letters and a poet like Fabre into the bargain is that there is a
danger of their being written with more art than exactitude. And it is
apparently this that causes so many scientists to distrust science that
also claims to be literature. Fabre was not always immune from this
species of discredit which the writer may so easily cast upon the
scientist. But this unjust accusation was long ago withdrawn, and
to-day all are agreed as to the absolute truthfulness of his portraits
and his records. He has talent and imagination, it is true, but he has
applied his talent to the sincere investigation of the facts, and his
imagination only to achieve the more complete and faithful expression
of the reality. A great thinker once uttered this profound saying:
“Things are perceived in their truth only when they are perceived in
their poetry.” This saying might serve as a motto for the whole of
Fabre’s entomological work.
To collect the data which he requires for the foundation of his
philosophical structures, Fabre is not content with observing the
insect as it lives and labours when left to itself, writing down, so to
speak, at its dictation the data which it deigns to give him as it
would give them to any one who possessed the same patience and the same
gift for observation. After these first overtures, he seeks more
confidential information; to obtain this he inverts the parts played by
observer and insect; from being passive he becomes active; he provokes
and interrogates, and by different experiments, often of wonderful
ingenuity, he enables and even compels the insect to confide to him
what it would never have divulged in the normal course of its life and
occupations. Fabre is the first to think of introducing this kind of
artificial observation, which he calls experiment, into the study of
the animal “soul.”
To practise it more readily, he needs the insect close within his
reach; more than that, he needs it under his hand, at his discretion,
so to say. Neither the great museum of the fields nor the place of
observation where the insects “roam at will amid the thyme and
lavender” quite answers the requirements of this part of his programme.
So at various points of the harmas all those appliances which we have
already described were set up, “rustic achievements, clumsy
combinations of trivial things.” In addition to these appliances in the
open air, there are those inside the house: some are installed in the
study, so that the experimenter “can see his insects working on the
very table upon which he is writing their history”; [160] others are
arranged in a separate room known as the “animal laboratory.”
It is a great, silent, isolated room, brilliantly lighted by two
windows facing south, upon the garden, one of which at least is
always open that the insects may come and go at liberty.... The
middle of the room is entirely occupied by a great table of
walnut-wood, on which are arranged bottles, test-tubes, and old
sardine boxes, which Fabre employs in order to watch the evolution
of a thousand nameless or doubtful eggs, to observe the labours of
their larvæ, the creation and hatching of cocoons, and the little
miracles of metamorphosis, after a germination more wonderful than
that of the acorn which makes the oak.
Covers of metallic gauze resting on earthenware saucers full of
sand, a few carboys and flower-pots or sweetmeat jars closed with a
square of glass; these serve for observation or experimental cages
in which the progress and the actions of these tiny, living
machines can be investigated. [161]
Fabre reveals a consummate skill in this difficult and delicate art of
experimentation and inducing the insect to speak. The smallest
incident, insignificant to a mind less alert than his, suggests further
questions or gives rise to sudden intuitions and preconceived ideas
which are immediately subjected to the test of experiment. But it is
not enough to question the insect; one must understand its replies; it
is not enough to collect or even to provoke data. One must know how to
interpret them.
And here truly we come to the prodigy; for his sympathy for animals
gives M. Fabre a sort of special sense, which enables him to grasp
the meaning of its actions, as though there were between it and
himself some actual means of communication, something in the nature
of a language. [162]
But there is something even more remarkable than this penetration and
certainty of analysis; it is the prudence with which he goes forward
step by step, without leaving anything vague or doubtful; the reserve
with which he pronounces upon all that goes beyond the obvious meaning
of the facts; the frankness and modesty with which he admits that he
hesitates or does not know. It often happens that this scrupulous
spirit leads to doubt. “The more I observe and experiment, the more I
feel rising before me, in the cloudy blackness of the possible, a vast
note of interrogation.” We might even find that on certain occasions
the fear of going astray has caused him to limit to excess the range of
his interpretation. But this is done only to give greater weight to his
assertions, wherever they are expressed firmly and with quiet
assurance. In short, there is reason to subscribe to the flattering
judgment of his first biographer, who sees in the Souvenirs not only
the most wonderful entomological repertory, but a true “essay upon
method,” which should be read by every naturalist, and the most
interesting, instructive, familiar, and delightful course of training
that has ever been known. [163]
The most interesting, instructive, and delightful course of training:
his books are this, not only in virtue of the writer’s method and point
of view, but in virtue of his language. For the living scenes of the
Souvenirs, as well as the interpretations interspersed between them,
are expressed in words so simple and so well chosen that they are
realised without effort and in the most striking relief in the reader’s
mind and imagination.
Fabre hates to see science make use of pedantic and pseudo-scholastic
terminology. Apart from the fact that it may repel the reader, all this
idle apparatus of obscurity serves only too often to mask error or
vagueness of thought.
By seasoning the matter with indigestible terms, useful for
dissimulating vagueness of thought, one might represent the Cione
as a superb example of the change brought about by the centuries in
the habits of an insect. It would be very scientific, but would it
be very clear? I doubt it. When my eyes fall upon a page bristling
with barbarous locutions, supposedly scientific, I say to myself:
“Take care! The author does not properly understand what he is
saying, or he would have found, in the vocabulary which so many
clever minds have hammered out, some means of clearly stating his
thought.”
Boileau, who is denied the poetic afflatus, but who certainly
possessed common sense, and plenty of it, informs us:
“Ce que l’on conçoit bien s’énonce clairement.”
(That which is clearly grasped is plainly said.)
“Just so, Nicolas! Yes, clearness, always clearness. He calls a cat
a cat. Let us do the same: let us call gibberish a most learned
prose, to afford a pretext for repeating Voltaire’s witty remark:
‘When the listener does not understand and the speaker himself does
not know what he is saying, that is metaphysics.’ Let us add: ‘And
abstruse science.’”
My conviction is that we can say excellent things without using a
barbarous vocabulary. Lucidity is the sovereign politeness of the
writer. I do my best to achieve it. [164]
Thanks to his love of lucidity and simplicity, as much as to his frank
and modest spirit, he had a horror of verbal snobbery and juggling with
pretentious words. Official science itself, and, as he says bluntly,
“official jargon,” [165] find no more favour in his eyes than the sins
of incidental writers.
As a boy [writes Fabre] I was always an ardent reader; but the
refinements of a well-balanced style hardly interested me: I did
not understand them. A good deal later, when close upon fifteen, I
began vaguely to see that words have a physiognomy of their own.
Some pleased me better than others by the distinctness of their
meaning and the resonance of their rhythm; they produced a clearer
image in my mind; after their fashion, they gave me a picture of
the objects described. Coloured by its adjective and vivified by
its verb, the name became a living reality: what it said I saw. And
thus, gradually, was the magic of words revealed to me, when the
chances of my undirected reading placed a few easy standard pages
in my way. [166]
The magic of words! He has done more than discover it in the pages of
other writers. He has illustrated it on every page of his own writings,
adapting it so exactly to the magic of things that it delights the
scientist as Nature herself would, and enchants the poet and the man of
letters as only the masterpieces of art and literature have power to
do.