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. [[306]]
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 [[307]]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 [[308]]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 [[309]]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.[8]