To tell the truth, Fabre is absolutely careless of all literary procedure, and solely preoccupied with bringing his style into harmony with his thoughts; he is not in the least a manufacturer of literary phrases. There is no trace of artistic writing in his books, and it is only his manner of feeling and of expressing himself that makes him so dear to us.
What touches us in him is the accent, the simplicity, the measure, the good sense, and the perfect equilibrium of each of these pages: simple, often commonplace, even incorrect or trivial, but so alive, so human, that the blood seems to flow in them. It is the lover in Fabre that draws us to him; nothing quite like his work has been seen since the days of Jean de La Fontaine.
He has liberated science; he laughs at the specialists who take refuge behind their "barbarian terminologies," at the "jargon" of those "who see the world only through the wrong end of the glass"; at the exaggerated importance which they attribute to insignificant details, the narrowness of classifications, and the chaos of systems; all that incoherent, remote, and inaccessible science, which he, on the contrary, strives to render pleasant and attractive.
This is why the great scientist has endeavoured to speak like other people, preferring, to the harsh consonants of technical phrases which sound "like insults" or have the air of "a magical invocation, which make certain scientific works read like so much gibberish," the "naive and picturesque appellation, the familiar, trivial name, the popular, living term which directly interprets the exact signification of the habits of an insect, or informs us fully of its dominant characteristic, or which, at least, leaves nothing to conjecture."
He considers it useless and even inconvenient to abandon many charming expressions, appropriate and significant as they are, which may be borrowed from the good old French tongue; and in this he resembles the immortal de Jussieu, who in his botanical classifications was careful not to discard the old popular denominations which Theophrastus, Virgil, and Linnaeus had thought fit to bestow upon plant and tree.
It is for the same reasons that he loves the Provençal tongue; that beautiful idiom, that superb language, rich in music, in sonorous words, so suggestive and so full of colour, many of whose terms, saying precisely what they intend to say, have no equivalent in French. He has learned the language, and reads it: in particular Roumanille, whose easy, familiar style pleases him better than the grandiloquence of Mistral, although he delights also in Calendal, whose lyrical powers fill him with enthusiasm. From this ancient tongue, which was early as familiar to him as the French, he borrowed certain mannerisms, certain tricks of style, certain neologisms, and also, to some extent, his simplicity of manner and the cadence of his prose.
It was not without difficulty that he attained this mastery. Measure the gulf between his first volumes and his last; in the first the style is slightly nerveless and indefinite: it was only as he gradually advanced in his career that he acquired what may be called his final manner, or achieved, in his narratives, a perfect literary style. The most substantially constructed, the most happily expressed of his pages were written principally in his extreme old age. Not only is there no sign of failing in these, but in his latest "Souvenirs" the perfection of form is perhaps even more remarkable than the wealth of matter.
How vitally his scrupulous records impress the mind's eye; how firmly they establish themselves in the memory!
Even if one has never seen the Pelopaeus, one readily conceives an impression of "her wasp-like costume, and curving abdomen, suspended at the end of a long thread." What exactitude in this snapshot, taken at the moment when the insect is occupied in scooping out of the mire the lump of mud intended for the construction of her nest: "like a skilled housekeeper, with her clothing carefully tucked up that it may not be soiled, the wings vibrating, the limbs rigidly straightened, the black abdomen well raised on the end of its yellow stalk, she rakes the mud with the points of her mandibles, skimming the shining surface." [(12/4.)]
He draws, in passing, this charming sketch of the gadfly, the pest of horses, which nourishes itself with their blood: