All is, and ought to be, changed. The legs will not again be the legs. It will need lighter organs. What can the child of the air, which can balance on the point of a blade of grass, do with those coarse short feet, armed with hooks, vent-holes, and so many heavy implements?
The head will not be the head; at least, the enormous apparatus of mandibles will disappear, and also that of the muscles by which they were energetically moved. All is thrown aside with the mask. A colossal change! From a masticator the animal becomes a sucker. A flexible proboscis emerges.
If anything in the grub appeared of a fundamental character, it was the digestive apparatus. Ah, well! this basis of its being is no more. The absorbing throat—the powerful stomach—the greedy entrails,—all are suppressed, or reduced nearly to nothing. What would they avail the new being which, in certain species of butterflies, dispenses with sustenance, has no mouth but by agreement, and is so completely freed from digestion that frequently it has not even an inferior orifice? It abandons without difficulty its thenceforth useless furniture, and expectorates the skin of its stomach!
This is grand and magnificent,—no spectacle is grander! For life at such a point to change, to dominate over the organs, to rise victorious, so entirely free of the ancient Ego! To those who have revealed to us such a prodigy of transfiguration, from the bottom of my heart I say, "Thanks!"
How marvellous the security in this being which abandons everything, which unhesitatingly dismisses its strong and solid existence, the complicated organism which just now was itself, its own individuality! We call it its larva, its mask; but why? The personality seems at least as energetic in the vigorous grub as in the delicate butterfly. And, therefore, it is most indubitably its individual being which it courageously leaves to shrivel up and perish, to become—what? Nothing reassuring, nothing but a little, soft, whitish substance.
Open the nymph soon after it has spun its cocoon: in its shroud you shall find nothing but a kind of milky fluid, wherein you see, or fancy you see, certain dubious lineaments. After awhile you may, with a fine needle, separate these I know not what,—and figure to yourself that they are the limbs of the future butterfly. A frightful lacuna! For many species a moment occurs when nothing of the old any longer appears, and nothing of the new as yet has come. When Æson, cut in pieces, was thrown, in order to rejuvenate him, into the caldron of Medea, you would have found, on groping there, the limbs of Æson. But here there is nothing parallel.
Trustfully, nevertheless, the mummy surrounds its body with its bands, docilely accepting the shadows, the inertness, and the captivity of the sepulchre. It feels in itself a force, a raison d'être, a causa vivendi,—a reason for living still. And what reason? What cause? The vitality accumulated by its previous toil. All that, like a laborious grub, it has accumulated, is its obstacle to death,—its incapability of perishing,—the reason why it will immediately live again; and not only live, but with a light and tender existence, whose facility is proportioned exactly to the efforts which it makes in its anterior condition of life.
Admirable compensation! When penetrating so deep down into life, I expected to encounter certain physical fatalities. And I found justice, immortality, and hope.
Yes, antiquity was right, and modern science is right. It is death, and yet it is not death; let us call it if you will partial death. Is death ever otherwise? Is it not a new birth?
Throughout my life I have remarked that each day I died and was born again; I have undergone many painful strugglings and laborious transformations. One more does not astonish me. Many and many times I have passed from the larva into the chrysalis, and into a more complete condition; the which, after awhile, incomplete under other relations, has put me in the way of accomplishing a new circle of metamorphoses.