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This is a book intended for young and lively-minded children—which implies, as I believe, that it might win a larger number of readers in proportion to the host available than if it were intended solely for intelligent adults. But there is no more precarious merchandise than books. What we most need and pine for in this we may, by ill chance, easily fail to come across. This is particularly likely to happen when we are young—and it is a disaster. The Insect Man is also a book of an unusual kind and quality—a statement which suggests that I am familiar with every kind of children’s book. But of course one can only speak from one’s own experience. Unlike, at any rate, numerous books aimed at children, this one clearly was not written either at or down to anybody, but straightforwardly. Its purpose is flawless—that of sharing an intense interest and delight in a man of extraordinary character and of an astonishing zeal which burned on in him undimmed throughout a lifetime ninety-two years long. After reading these pages—or hearing them read—a child of any imagination will have vividly shared his strange company, the villages, houses and very rooms in which he lived his simple and devoted life, and will have won to something at least of his inmost self and spirit.

A good school book clearly and concisely imparts knowledge and information—a process not necessarily so petrifying as it sounds. That information may be invaluable. “What matters in learning,” however, and this is Fabre’s sovereign wisdom, “is not to be taught, but to wake up.” The Insect Man also imparts invaluable information, but in the process it should unquestionably wake any reader up; since it reveals a love and joy in acquiring knowledge (and that as it happens of an outlandish and unbelievably romantic order), which even the youngest of children may have in a fountain-like abundance—as his incessant rain of questions proves—until, alas, perhaps, he goes to school.

Here the fact that Penelope, who is the informer, is called Penèl for love and brevity by Giles and Geraldine is one small proof that she is no mere preceptress. Nor are the children who share her pilgrimage to the tropical, arid, fascinating Fabre country in the least degree “childish”. They talk good English, and good sense, at times tinged with the imaginative. And their company is an unfailing delight.

As for the Insect Man and his ineffable “little beasts” and his childhood and his poverty and his obsession and his triumph and his devotions and hatreds, there is enough of all this here to reveal what riches are awaiting those who care to follow Miss Eleanor Doorly’s enticing lead—with the list on page 173 to help them.

Fabre was of course not by any means the first observer of the insect universe. As far back, indeed, as 1835, when he himself was twelve years old, Emily Shore, for but one example, as a girl of fifteen was not only in her own bedroom keeping steadfast watch for hours at a stretch on a no less intensely industrious mason-wasp (Odynerus mucarius), but recording its wayfarings in her Journal. And recently the appalling economy of the dark-devoted termites has been exposed. Most such books, those for instance on the honey bee, are placid and pleasing. And, in general, all “scientific facts” should be welcomed with a vigilant and quiet interest. “Appalling” therefore is a word wholly out of keeping. Nevertheless Fabre introduces us not only into the insect world itself, a universe almost as aloof from Man’s as that of an inhabitant of Aldebaran and one (as Mr. H. G. Wells has demonstrated in The Food of the Gods) which only mere human size has precluded apparently from effecting his final eclipse, but also, as it seems to me, into a unique region of human fantasy. One’s astounded intelligence can scarcely credit, much less attempt to explain—or to justify!—the habits of some of these creatures of Fabre’s fanatical interest. Nothing, for example, created by man’s imagination has exceeded in blind effortless ingenuity the fly’s grub that is destined to prey on the bee’s grub, or in horror the activities of the tarantula or of the scorpion or (and this even in mere looks alone) of the praying mantis. These utterly “impossible she’s”! What, on the other hand, of the sheer marvel of the secret invocation to her suitors (as it is recorded on page 167) from that few-hours-old enchantress, a female Great Peacock moth: “I cloister her at once, damp with the moistures of her birth under a wire-net bell”? Or of the banded minim butterfly, bought by Fabre for two sous from his potato boy. Indeed, the infatuation of these exquisite creatures, which have not even an apparatus for digesting food, just perish for and “in” love, and yet appear to be unaware of Helen herself in her man-made glass fortress—well, that sets us thinking about ourselves and our own little way of heart and mind with extreme dubiety if not positive confusion. In view of these and similar phenomena, “poor stupid Spider” is perhaps a perfectly rational and merited comment. And yet, no less clearly, reason here won’t fit the case, and even intuition fails us. As might, say, a tarantula’s in his attempt face to face to fathom the less attractive habits of mankind. For even an angel infancy may reveal at times the contrariest hints of a little beast.

Walter de la Mare.