One might say of this achievement what the author of Lettres Persanes said of his book: Proles sine matre. It is a child without a mother. It is, in short, unprecedented.[3] It has not its fellow, either in the Machal of Solomon, or the apologues of the old fabulists, or the treatises on natural history written by our modern scientists. The fabulists look to find man in the animal, which for them is little more than a pretext for comparisons and moral narratives, and the scientists commonly confine their curiosity to the dissection of the insect’s organs, the analysis of its functions, and the classification of species. We might even say that the insect is the least of their cares, for, like Solomon, [[3]]they delight in holding forth upon all the creatures upon the earth or in the heavens above, and all the plants “from the cedar tree that is in Lebanon even unto the hyssop that springeth out of the wall” (1 Kings iv: 32–33).
Fabre, on the contrary, has eyes only for the insect. He observes it by and for itself, in the most trivial manifestations of its life: the living, active insect, with its labours and its habits, is the thing that interests him before all else, guiding his investigation of the infinite host of these tiny lives, which claim his attention on every hand; and in this world of insects wealth of artifice and capacities of the mental order seem to be in an inverse ratio to beauty of form and brilliance of colour. For this reason Fabre learns to disdain the magnificent Butterfly, applying himself by preference to the modest Fly: the two-winged Flies, which are relatives of our common House-fly, or the four-winged Flies, the numerous and infinitely various cousins of the Wasps and Bees; the Spiders, ugly indeed, but such skilful spinners, and even the Dung-beetles and Scarabæidæ of every species, those wonderful agents of terrestrial purification.
In this singular world, which affords him [[4]]the society which he prefers, he has gathered an ample harvest of unexpected facts and highly perplexing actions on the part of these little so-called inferior animals. No one has excelled him in detecting their slightest movements, and in surprising all the secrets of their lives. Darwin declared, and many others have repeated his words, that Fabre was “an incomparable observer.” The verdict is all the more significant in that the French entomologist did not scruple to oppose his observations to the theories of the famous English naturalist.
Not only in the certainty and the detailed nature of his facts, but also in the colour and reality of his descriptions is his mastery revealed. In him the naturalist is reduplicated by a man of letters and a poet, who “understands how to cast over the naked truth the magic mantle of his picturesque language,”[4] making each of his humble protagonists live again before our eyes, each with its characteristic achievements. So striking is this power of his that Victor Hugo described him as “the insects’ Homer,” while one of the most accomplished of our [[5]]scientists, Mr. Edmond Perrier, Director of the Museum of Natural History, not content with saluting him as “one of the princes of natural history,” speaks of his literary work in the following terms:
The ten volumes of his Souvenirs Entomologiques will remain one of the most intensely interesting works which have ever been written concerning the habits of insects, and also one of the most remarkable records of the psychology of a great observer of the latter part of the nineteenth century. In them the author depicts to the life not only the habits and the instincts of the insects; he gives us a full-length portrait of himself. He makes us share his busy life, amid the subjects of observation which incessantly claim his attention. The world of insects hums and buzzes about him, obsesses him, calling his attention from all directions, exciting his curiosity; he does not know which way to turn. Overwhelmed by the innumerable winged army of the drinkers of nectar who, on the fine summer days, invade his field of observation, he calls to his aid his whole household: his daughters, Claire, Aglaé, and Anna, his son Paul, his workmen, and above all his man-servant Favier, an old countryman who has spent his life in the barracks of the French colonies, a man of a thousand expedients, who watches his master with an incredulous yet admiring eye, listening to him but refusing to be convinced, and shocking him by [[6]]the assertion, which nothing will induce him to retract, that the bat is a rat which has grown wings, the slug an old snail which has lost its shell, the night-jar a toad with a passion for milk, which has sprouted feathers the better to suck the goats’ udders at night, and so forth. The cats and the dog join the company at times, and one almost regrets that one is not within reach of the sturdy old man, so that one might respond to his call.
See him lying on the sand where everything is grilling in the burning rays of the sun, watching some wasp that is digging its burrow, noting its least movement, trying to divine its intentions, to make it confess the secret of its actions, following the labours of the innumerable Scarabaei that clean the surface of the soil of all that might defile it—the droppings of large animals, the decomposing bodies of small birds, moles, or water-rats; putting unexpected difficulties in their way, slily giving these tiny life-companions of his problems of his own devising to solve.[5]
That is well-expressed, and it gives us a fairly correct idea of the vital and poetic charm of the Souvenirs.
The same writer asks, speaking of the well-defined tasks performed by all these little creatures beloved of the worthy biologist of [[7]]Sérignan: “Who has taught each one its trade, to the exclusion of any other, and allotted the parts which they fill, as a rule with a completeness unequalled, save by ‘their absolute unconsciousness of the goal at which they are aiming?’ This is a very important problem: it is the problem of the origin of things. Henri Fabre has no desire to grapple with it. Living in perpetual amazement, amid the miracles revealed by his genius, he observes, but he does not explain.”
For the moment we can no longer subscribe to the assertions of the learned Academician,[6] nor to his fashion of writing history, which is decidedly too free. The truth is that Fabre, who delights in the pageant of the living world, does not always confine himself to recording it; he readily passes from the smallest details of observation to the wide purviews of reason, and he is at times as much a philosopher as a poet and a naturalist. The truth is that he often considers the question of the origins of life, and he answers it unequivocally like the believer that he is. It is enough to cite one passage among others, a passage which testifies to a brief uplifting of the heart that presupposes many [[8]]others: “The eternal question, if one does not rise above the doctrine of dust to dust: how did the insect acquire so discerning an art?” And the following lines from the close of the same chapter: “The pill-maker’s work confronts the reflective mind with a serious problem. It offers us these alternatives: either we must grant the flattened cranium of the Dung-beetle the distinguished honour of having solved for itself the geometrical problem of the alimentary pill, or we must refer it to a harmony that governs all things beneath the eye of an Intelligence which, knowing all things, has provided for all?”[7]
And indeed, when we consider closely, with the author of the Souvenirs, all the prodigies of art, all the marks of ingenuity displayed by these sorry creatures, so inept in other respects, then, whatever hypothesis we may prefer as to the formation of species, whether with Fabre we believe them fixed and unchanging, or whether with Gaudry[8] [[9]]we believe in their evolution, we cannot refrain from proclaiming the necessity of a sovereign Mind, the creator and instigator of order and harmony, and we are quite naturally led to repeat, to the glory of God the Creator, the beautiful saying of Saint Augustine: “Fecit in cœlis angelos et in terris vermiculos, nec major in illis nec minor in istis.”