Fabre, Poet of Science

by Georges Victor Legros

That the ex-schoolmaster was able to penetrate so far into this new world, and that he has been able to interest us in so many fascinating problems, was due to the fact that he had also "taken a wide bird's-eye view through all the windows of creation." His universal capabilities, his immense culture and almost encyclopaedic science have enabled him to utilize, thanks to his studies, all the knowledge allied to his subject. He is not one of those who understand only their speciality and who, knowing nothing outside their own province and their particular labours, refuse to grasp at anything beyond the narrow limits within which they stand installed.

All plants are to him so familiar that the flowers, for him, assume the airs of living persons. But without a profound knowledge of botany, who would hope to grasp the profound, perpetual, and intimate relations of the plant and the insect?

He has turned over strata and interrogated the schistous deposits, whose archives preserve the forms of vanished organizations, but "keep silence as to the origin of the instincts." Bending over his reagents, he has sought to discover, according to the phrase of a philosopher, those secret retreats in which Nature is seated before her furnaces, in the depths of her laboratory; following up the metamorphoses of matter even to the wings of the Scarabaei, and observing how life, returning to her crucible the debris and ashes of the organism, combines the elements anew, and from the elements of the urine can derive, for example, by a simple displacement of molecules, "all this dazzling magic of colours of innumerable shades: the amethystine violet of Geotrupes, the emerald of the rose-beetle, the gilded green of the Cantharides, the metallic lustre of the gardener-beetles, and all the pomp of the Buprestes and the dung-beetles." [(7/11.)]

His books are steeped in all the ideas of modern physics. The highest mathematical knowledge has been referred to with profit in his marvellous description of the hunting-net of the Epeïra. Whose "terribly scientific" combinations realize "the spiral logarithm of the geometers, so curious in its properties" [(7/12.)]; a splendid observation, in which Fabre makes us admire, in the humble web of a spider, a masterpiece as astonishing and incomprehensible as and even more sublime than the honeycomb.

This explains why Fabre has always energetically denied that he is properly speaking an entomologist; and indeed the term appears often wrongly to describe him. He loves, on the contrary, to call himself a naturalist; that is, a biologist; biology being, by definition, the study of living creatures considered as a whole and from every point of view. And as nothing in life is isolated, as all things hold together, and as each part, in all its relations, presents itself to the gaze of the observer under innumerable aspects, one cannot be a true naturalist without being at the same time a philosopher.

But it is not enough to know and to observe.

To be admitted to the spectacle of these tiny creatures, to become familiar with their habits, to grasp the mysterious threads which connect them one with another and with the vast universe: for this the cold and deliberate vision of the specialist would often be insufficient. There is an art of observation, and the gift of observation is a true function of that constantly alert intelligence, continually dominated by the need of delving untiringly down to the ultimate truth accessible, "allowing ourselves to pass over nothing without seeking its reason, and habitually following up every response with another question, until we come to the granite wall of the Unknowable." Above all we need an ardent and interested sympathy, for "we penetrate farther into the secret of things by the heart than by the reason," as Toussenel has said; and "it is only by intuition that we can know what life truly is," adds Bergson profoundly. [(7/13.)] Now Fabre loves these little peoples and knows how to make us love them. How tenderly he speaks of them; with what solicitude he observes them; with what love he follows the progress of their nurslings; the young grubs wriggling in his test-tubes, with doddering heads, are happy; and he himself is happy to see them "well-fed and shining with health." He pities the bee stabbed by the Philanthus "in the holy joys of labour." He sympathizes with the sufferings of these little creatures and their hard labours. If, in his search for ideas, he has to overturn their dwellings, "he repents of subjecting maternal love to such tribulations," and if he is constrained to put them to the question, to torment them in order to extract their secrets, he is grieved to have provoked "such miseries!" [(7/14.)] Having provided for their needs, and satisfied with the secrets which they have revealed to him, it is not without regret and difficulty that he parts from them and restores them "to the delights of liberty."

He is thoroughly convinced, moreover, that all the creatures that share the face of the earth with us are accomplishing an august and appointed task. He welcomes the swallows to his dwelling, even surrendering his workroom to them, at the risk of jeopardizing his notes and books. He pleads for the frog, and applies himself to setting forth his unknown qualities; he rehabilitates the bat, the hedgehog, and the screech-owl, persecuted, defamed, crushed, stoned, and crucified! [(7/15.)]

So intimate is the life which he leads among them all that he makes himself truly their companion, and relates his own history in narrating theirs; pleased to discover in their joys and sorrows his own trials and delights; mingling in their annals his memories and his impressions; delightful fragments of a childlike autobiography, encrusted in his learned work; moving and delightful pages in which all the ingenuity of this noble mind reveals itself with a touching sincerity, in which all the freshness of this charming and so profoundly unworldly nature is seen as through a pure crystal.

There is no real communion with nature without sentiment, without an illuminating passion: often the sole and effectual grace which enables its true meaning to appear. Neither taste, nor intelligence, nor logic, nor all the science of the schools can suffice alone. To see further there is needed something like a gift of correspondence, surpassing the limits of observation and experience, which enables us to foresee and to divine the profound secrets of life which lie beneath appearances. Those who are so gifted have often only to open their eyes in order to grasp matters in their true light.