CHAPTER VIII.
ON THE RENOVATION OF OUR ARTS BY THE STUDY OF THE INSECT.
The Arts properly so called, the Fine Arts, should profit much more than the Industrial, by the study of insects. The goldsmith and the lapidary would do well to seek in them models and instruction. The soft insects, the flies, specially possess in their eyes truly magical irises, with which no casket of gems can bear comparison. In passing from one species to another, and even, if I mistake not, from one individual to another, new combinations may be observed. Remark that the flies with brilliant wings are not always the most richly endowed, as far as their optical organs are concerned. Take the dull, gray, dusty, odious horse-fly, which lives on warm blood; its eye, to the magnifying-glass, offers the strange faëry spectacle of a mosaic of jewels, such as all the art of Froment-Meurice has scarcely invented.
If you descend still lower, insects which do not live, like this fly, upon living but upon dead matter, ordure, and decomposition, astonish us by the richness of their reflections, which our enamel ought to endeavour to reproduce. The dunghill beetle, an ungainly black insect if we look only at the upper part of its body, is, underneath, of a deep sapphire-blue which no kingly diadem ever equalled! And what shall we say of the son of the dead, of the Egyptian scarabæus,--a living emerald, but far superior to that jewel in the gravity, opulence, and magic of its lustre? The imagination is impressed, and one does not feel astonished that a people so tender and devout, so in love with death, so full of the dreams of eternity, took for a symbol the little miraculous animal,--a burning jet of life springing from the grave!
A certain skill in examination, and a choice of day and of light, are necessary. You cannot properly study the insect of the tropics and that of our colder climates on the same day or at the same hour. The former should be examined only in favourable weather, under a pure sky and a strong sun,--a vivid and genial ray, analogous to the light which bathes it in its own country. The other, frequently uninteresting to the naked eye, but of great beauty under the microscope, may reserve its grand illuminating effects for the evening, or for artificial light. Little is promised by the cockchafer, at first sight so coarse and prosaic in appearance. Yet its scaly wing, when submitted to the focus of the microscope, and well lighted up beneath the little mirror, so that it is seen by transparency, presents a noble winter stuff, a dead leaf, where meander veins of a very beautiful brown. And in the evening it becomes quite another thing: the yellowish part of the scale has got the best of it, and in the light shines forth like gold--(a poor comparison!)--the strange, magical gold of paradise, which we dream of for the walls of the heavenly Jerusalem, or for the robes of light worn by saints and spirits before the Throne! A sun softer and tenderer than the orb of day, and one which, we know not why, charms and affects the heart.
A strange mirage! And yet nothing but a cockchafer's wing!
Perhaps it may next be an insect which neither by day nor night, neither to the naked eye nor under the microscope, could excite a feeling of interest; but if you take the trouble to lift up, with a delicate and patient scalpel, the laminæ which compose the thickness of its scaly wing, you will find there, in most instances, a variety of unexpected designs, sometimes vegetable curves,--sometimes airy ramifications,--sometimes angular striated figures, like hieroglyphics, which remind you of certain Oriental languages; and compose, in truth, a genuine necromancer's book, that can neither be referred to, nor compared with, any known form.
These singular characters, while strongly attracting the eye and disquieting the mind, are fully worthy of the interest they excite. What they express, and give utterance to, in their emphatic language, is the circulation of life. Some are tubes through which the air enters the wing, and distends it for flight; others are tiny veins where circulate the powerful liquids that endow the imperceptible organism with its colours and its energy.
The most attractive forms are living forms. Take a drop of blood, and submit it to the microscope. This drop, as it spreads, rewards you with a delightful arborescence,--with the delicacy and lightness of certain winter trees, when revealed in their actual figure, and no longer encumbered with leaves.
Thus, Nature's infinite potency of beauty is not limited to the surface, as antiquity supposed. It does not trouble itself about human eyesight, but labours for its own behoof, and on its own work. From the surface to the interior, it frequently increases in beauty as in depth. It invests with surpassing loveliness things which are absolutely hidden, and which death alone can unveil. Sometimes, as if to contradict and confound our ideas, it clothes in ravishing forms the organs which, from our point of view, accomplish the vilest functions. I am thinking of the exquisite beauty and delicate tenderness of that coral-tree which incessantly pours out the chyle of our intestines.
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To return to the insects: beauty abounds in them both externally and internally. One need not search far in order to discover it. Take an insect, not very rare, which I constantly meet with on the sandy soil of Fontainebleau, in localities well open to the sun. Take--but not without precaution, for it is well armed--the brilliant cicindela. Even to the naked eye it is an agreeable object; but under the microscope it appears to be perhaps the richest and the most varied which art could study. These are truly surprising creatures! Each individual differs; all are enamelled, and decorated to an excess, without resembling one another. In each, if taken and separately studied, new discoveries may be made.
It is the ardent and murderous hunter of other insects, and endowed with formidable weapons,--having for its two anterior mandibles a couple of sickles which close in upon one another, and transfix deeply, on both sides, their unfortunate victim. Its rich and living aliment apparently communicates to the cicindela its glowing colours. Its entire body is embellished with them. On the wings, a changeful besprinkling of peacock's eyes. On the fore parts, numerous meanders, diversely and softly shaded, are trailed over a dark ground. Abdomen and legs are glazed with such rich hues that no enamel can sustain a comparison with them; the eye can scarcely endure their vivacity. The singular thing is, that beside these enamels you find the dead tones of flowers and the butterfly's wing. To all these various elements add some singularities, which you would suppose to be the work of human art, in the Oriental styles, Persian and Turkish, or as in the Indian shawl, where the colours, slightly subdued, have found an admirable basis; time having gradually lent a grave tone to their sweet harmony.
Frankly, is there aught approaching such a degree of excellence in our human arts? How great the necessity that, in their apparently fatigued and languid condition, they should gain life and strength from these living sources!
In general, instead of going straight to Nature, to the inexhaustible fountain of beauty and invention, they have solicited help from the erudition, the history, and the antiquity of man.
We have copied ancient jewels; sometimes those of the barbarous peoples which first procured them from our own merchants. We have copied the old robes and the stuffs of our ancestors. We have copied, especially, the painted-glass windows of Gothic architecture, whose colours and forms have been selected hap-hazard, and transplanted to objects utterly discordant and unsuitable,--as, for instance, to shawls!
If we were desirous of comprehending and rehabilitating these ancient windows, we might have taken a lesson from the enamels of certain scarabæi. Seen beneath the microscope, they present very analogous effects, simply because they possess the same elements of beauty. The thirteenth century glass-windows (you may see them at Bourges, and especially in the Museum of that city) were double. The light therefore remained in them, did not pass through them, gave them the magical effects of precious stones. And of a similar character are those insect wings composed of numerous leaves, between which you may detect, with the microscope, a network of mysterious hieroglyphics.
Gothic, so little in harmony with either our wants or our ideas, has passed out of our furniture, but it still lingers in the shawl-manufacture; a rich and costly industry, which, having once adopted the fantastic method of imitating in opaque wools those windows whose transparency was their special merit, can hardly emancipate itself from the bondage.
Men have not consulted women. In order to weave complex designs, heap up a medley of arches and oriels, and condemn our wives to carry churches on their backs, men have provided a heavy groundwork of the stoutest wools; the whole being despatched from London and Paris to be servilely woven by the Indians who have unlearned their own arts.
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Our intelligent Parisian merchants, who have reluctantly followed in the path traced out for them by the great producers, may very well escape from these _rich_ and heavy styles. Let some one lose patience, and turning his back on the copyists of antique absurdities, go to Nature herself in search of advice,--to the great insect collections and the conservatories of the Jardin des Plantes.
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Nature, being feminine, will tell him that if he would fitly decorate his sister in the soft and airy tissue of the ancient cashmere, he must delineate thereupon--not the towers of Notre-Dame,[N] but a hundred charming creatures--that little, but, if you will, very common marvel of the cicindela, in which all styles are combined;--or the purple scarabæus glorified in its lily;--or the emerald chrysomela, which this very morning I found sensually reposing at the bottom of a rose.
[Footnote N: Notre-Dame is the metropolitan cathedral of Paris.]
Do I mean that you should copy these? Not at all. I should call these living creatures, in their robe of love, from which they derive all their charm, an animated aureola, which cannot be translated. We must be content to love and contemplate them, to draw our inspiration from them, to convert them into ideal forms, and new rainbows of colours, and exquisite posies of blossoms. Thus transformed, they will become, not what they are in Nature, but fantastic and wonderful,--as the child who pants for them sees them in its slumber, or the maiden yearning after a beautiful attire, or as the young pregnant wife when dreaming of them in her hours of longing.