In "that hideous lout" the Scorpion he shows us a rough epitome of the shapeless head, the truncated face of the spider.
The Tachinae, those "brazen diptera" which swarm on the sunny sand on the watch for Bembex or Philanthus, in order to establish their offspring at its expense, "are bandits clad in fustian, the head wrapped in a red handkerchief, awaiting the hour of attack!"
The Languedocian Sphex, sprawling flat upon the vine leaves, grows dizzy with the heat and frisks for very pleasure; "with its feet it taps rapidly on its resting-place, and thus produces a drumming like that of a shower of rain falling thickly on the leaves." Fabre takes a keen delight in the production of these pictures, at once so exact and lifelike; but we must not therefore suppose that his mind is incapable of the detailed descriptions necessitated by the laborious processes of minute anatomy.
Like all sciences, entomology has its uninteresting aspects when we seek to study it deeply. Yet with what interest and lucidity has Fabre succeeded in expounding the complex morphoses of the obscure and miserable larva of the Sitaris, the curious intestine of the Scarabaeus, the secret of the spawning of the weevil, and the ingenious mechanisms of the musical instruments of the Decticus and the Cicada. With what subtle art he explains the song of the cricket, how the five hundred prisms of the serrated bow set the four tympana in vibration; and how the song is sometimes muffled by a process of muting. [(12/10.)]
Some of the images suggested to him by the forms of animals are so beautiful that certain of his descriptions might well serve to inspire an artist, or suggest new motives of decoration in the arts of enamelling, gem-engraving, jewellery, etc.
Instead of eternally copying ancient things, or seeking inspiration in lifeless texts, why not turn our attention to the numerous and interesting motives which are scattered all around us, whose originality consists precisely in the fact that they have never yet been employed? Why torture the mind to produce more painful elaborations of awkward, frozen, poverty-stricken combinations, when Nature herself is at hand, offering the inexhaustible casket of her living marvels, full of the profoundest logic and as yet unexamined?
If the bee by means of the hexagonal prism has anticipated all the geometers in the problem of the economy of space and matter; if the Epeïra and the mollusc have invented the logarithmic spiral and its transcendent properties; if all creatures "inspired by an aesthetic which nothing escapes, achieve the beautiful" [(12/11.)], surely human art, which can but imitate and remember, has only to employ to its profit and transfigure into ideal images the natural beauties so profusely furnished by the Unconscious.
Modern art, influenced more especially by the subtle Japanese, is already treading this path.
What artist could ever engrave on rare metals or model in precious substances a more beautiful subject than the wonderful picture of the Tarantula offering, at the length of her extended limbs, her white sac of eggs to the sun; or the transparent nymph of the Onthophagus taurus, "as though carved from a block of crystal, with its wide snout and its enormous horns like those of the Aurochs"? [(12/12.)] What an undiscovered subject he might find in the nymph of the Ergatus [(12/13.)], with its almost incorporeal grace, as though made of "translucent ivory, like a communicant in her white veils, the arms crossed upon the breast; a living symbol of mystic resignation before the accomplishment of destiny"; or in the still more mysterious nymph of the Scarabaeus sacer, first of all "a mummy of translucent amber, maintained by its linen cerements in a hieratic pose; but soon upon this background of topaz, the head, the legs, and the thorax change to a sombre red, while the rest of the body remains white, and the nymph is slowly transfigured, assuming that majestic costume which combines the red of the cardinal's mantle with the whiteness of the sacerdotal alb."
On the other hand, what Sims or Bateman ever imagined weirder caricature than the grotesque larva of the Oniticella, with its extravagant dorsal hump; or the fantastic and alarming silhouette of the Empusa, with its scaly belly raised crozierwise and mounted on four long stilts, its pointed face, turned-up moustaches, great prominent eyes, and a "stupendous mitre": the most grotesque, the most fantastic freaks that creation can ever have evolved? [(12/14.)]