The Life of the Spider. Jean-Henri Casimir Fabre. Читать онлайн. Hotlib. HOTLIB.NET

ORANGE and Sérignan, the latter a little Provençal village that should be as widely celebrated as Maillane,^[1] have of late years rendered honour to a man whose brow deserves to be girt with a double and radiant crown. But fame—at least that which is not the true nor the great fame, but her illegitimate sister, and which creates more noise than durable work in the morning and evening papers—fame is often forgetful, negligent, behindhand or unjust; and the crowd is almost ignorant of the name of J. H. Fabre, who is one of the most profound and inventive scholars and also one of the purest writers and, I was going to add, one of the finest poets of the century that is just past.

J. H. Fabre, as some few people know, is the author of half a score of well-filled volumes in which, under the title of Souvenirs Entomologiques, he has set down the results of fifty years of observation, study and experiment on the insects that seem to us the best-known and the most familiar: different species of wasps and wild bees, a few gnats, flies, beetles and caterpillars; in a word, all those vague, unconscious, rudimentary and almost nameless little lives which surround us on every side and which we contemplate with eyes that are amused, but already thinking of other things, when we open our window to welcome the first hours of spring, or when we go into the gardens or the fields to bask in the blue summer days.

We take up at random one of these bulky volumes and naturally expect to find first of all the very learned and rather dry lists of names, the very fastidious and exceedingly quaint specifications of those huge, dusty graveyards of which all the entomological treatises that we have read so far seem almost wholly to consist. We therefore open the book without zest and without unreasonable expectations; and forthwith, from between the open leaves, there rises and unfolds itself, without hesitation, without interruption and almost without remission to the end of the four thousand pages, the most extraordinary of tragic fairy plays that it is possible for the human imagination, not to create or to conceive, but to admit and to acclimatize within itself.

Indeed, there is no question here of the human imagination. The insect does not belong to our world. The other animals, the plants even, notwithstanding their dumb life and the great secrets which they cherish, do not seem wholly foreign to us. In spite of all, we feel a certain earthly brotherhood in them. They often surprise and amaze our intelligence, but do not utterly upset it. There is something, on the other hand, about the insect that does not seem to belong to the habits, the ethics, the psychology of our globe. One would be inclined to say that the insect comes from another planet, more monstrous, more energetic, more insane, more atrocious, more infernal than our own. One would think that it was born of some comet that had lost its course and died demented in space. In vain does it seize upon life with an authority, a fecundity unequalled here below; we cannot accustom ourselves to the idea that it is a thought of that nature of whom we fondly believe ourselves to be the privileged children and probably the ideal to which all the earth's efforts tend. Only the infinitely small disconcerts us still more greatly; but what, in reality, is the infinitely small other than an insect which our eyes do not see? There is, no doubt, in this astonishment and lack of understanding a certain instinctive and profound uneasiness inspired by those existences incomparably better-armed, better-equipped than our own, by those creatures made up of a sort of compressed energy and activity in whom we suspect our most mysterious adversaries, our ultimate rivals and, perhaps, our successors.

But it is time, under the conduct of an admirable guide, to penetrate behind the scenes of our fairy play and to study at close quarters the actors and supernumeraries, loathsome or magnificent, as the case may be, grotesque or sinister, heroic or appalling, genial or stupid and almost always improbable and unintelligible.

And here, to begin with, taking the first that comes, is one of those individuals, frequent in the South, where we can see it prowling around the abundant manna which the mule scatters heedlessly along the white roads and the stony paths: I mean the Sacred Scarab of the Egyptians, or, more simply, the Dung-beetle, the brother of our northern Geotrupes, a big Coleopteron all clad in black, whose mission in this world is to shape the more savoury parts of the prize into an enormous ball which he must

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