Madame de Mérian, then, started from the silkworm. But her curiosity and artistic eagerness embraced everything. Contrasted with her dull and sombre Germany, Holland, with its rich American and Oriental collections, appeared to her like the great museum of the tropics. There she established herself, and with her pencil made its collections her own. Those faëry cemeteries, glittering with the beauty of the dead, did but whet in her the desire to investigate life in the region where it most luxuriates. At the age of fifty-four she set out for Guiana; and, during a two years' residence in its dangerous climate, collected the drawings and paintings which were to inaugurate art in natural history.
In this branch of labour, the stumbling-block of the artist, who is an artist and nothing more, is that he may do very well, but make Nature coquettish, add the pretty to the beautiful, and flourish those graces and daintinesses which secure for a scientific treatise the favour of fashionable ladies. Nothing of this kind is discernible in the work of Sybille de Mérian, but on every page a noble vigour, a masculine gravity, a courageous simplicity. At the same time, a close inspection, especially of the illustrations coloured by her own hand, discovers in the softness, breadth, and fulness of the plants, their lustrous and velvety freshness,—the tones either dead or enamelled, and, as it were, flowered, which the insects offer,—the tender, conscientious hand of a woman who has laboured upon the whole with a reverence inspired by love.
We have seen ([p. 180]), in our chapter on the Fire-Flies, the astonishment of the timid German in a world so new, when the savages brought her its living materials,—venomous herbs, lizards, and snakes, and fantastic serpents. But the very strangeness of this nature, the emotions of the painter trembling before her models, the restless attention with which she sought to seize the changeful physiognomy and mysterious manners, while keenly agitating her heart, did but awaken her genius. Never satisfied by her representations of fugitive realities, she believed she could make each insect properly known only by painting it under all its forms (caterpillar, nymph, butterfly). And this not contenting her, she placed beneath it the vegetable on which it fed, and by its side the lizard, serpent, or spider which fed upon it. Thus, the mutuality and exchange of nature was clearly shown; you saw clearly that formidable circulation, which, in tropical climates, is so rapid. Each of those fine plates, so harmonious and so complete, instructs not only by its truthful details, but inspires a profound sympathy with life, which is a very different and much more valuable teaching.
One thing strikes me, which, however, this love explains. She has painted side by side those creatures which devour one another. They draw close together, each faces its antagonist, and you conclude that a frightful duel is imminent. But she has generally concealed the tragic struggle. She has shrunk from painting death.
How much more terrible would have been her task had she advanced further, had she opened and dissected her models, and forced her feminine pencil to the lugubrious painting of anatomical detail!
And here we recognize the precise limit at which women are arrested in the study of the natural sciences. They are incapable of confronting it on both sides. Michael Angelo has finely said:—"Death and life are but one. They are the work of the same master and the same hand." But women do not submit. Between them and death no compact is possible. This is very easily understood; they themselves are life in all its prolific charm. They are born to give it. Whatever breaks the charm is a horror to them. Death, and especially pain, are not only antipathic, but almost incomprehensible. They feel that only happiness and joy should attend upon woman. Pain inflicted by a woman's hand appears to them very justly as a horrible contradiction.
In the natural sciences there are three things they may master, the three things of life: the incubation of the new being,—that is, the tenderness of its earliest care; the education, the nourishment (to speak as our fathers did) of the young adults; finally, the observation of manners, and the subtle intelligence of means of inter-communication with all species. By the aid of these three woman's arts, man may conciliate and gradually appropriate the inferior species, and even many of the insect species. To them belong entirely the arts of domestication. If childhood were less cruel, or at least not harshly insensible, it might share these womanly cares. For Woman, as a soft and tender child, full of pity, is the mediator of all nature.
But as for death, as for pain, as for the lights which science draws from them, do not speak of them to Woman. Here she halts, leaves you on the road, and will go no further forward.
She asserts—and the assertion may appear of some real weight, even to the sedatest minds—that science, of late years, has marched by two contrary roads: on the one hand, demonstrating by the study of manners and of organs that animals are not a world apart, but far more like ourselves than had been generally supposed; and on the other, when it has so clearly proved their great resemblance, and consequently their capacity of suffering, it ordains that we shall inflict upon them the most exquisite and most cruelly protracted agonies.
Science, on this terrible side, closes itself more and more against women. Nature, while inviting them to penetrate it, checks them at the same time by their excessive tenderness of feeling, and by the reverence for life with which she herself has inspired them.