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 [[310]]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”[9] 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.[10]
[[311]]
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 [[312]]under the blue sky, to the song of the Cicadas;[11] 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.”[12] 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.”[13]
To study living entomology, that is, to study the insect living its life and in the [[313]]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 [[314]]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.”[14]