The Life of Jean Henri Fabre 



us call g'ibberish a most learned prose, to afford a 

 pretext for repeating Voltaire's witty remark: 

 ' When the listener does not understand and the 

 speaker himself does not know what he is saying, 

 that is metaphysics.' Let us add : * And abstruse 

 science.' " 



My conviction is that we can say excellent things 

 without using a barbarous vocabulary. Lucidity 

 is the sovereign politeness of the writer. I do my 

 best to achieve it.^ 



Thanks to his love of lucidity and sim- 

 plicity, as much as to his frank and modest 

 spirit, he had a horror of verbal snobbery 

 and juggling with pretentious words. Offi- 

 cial science itself, and, as he says bluntly, 

 " official jargon," ^ find no more favour in 

 his eyes than the sins of incidental writers. 



As a boy [writes Fabre] I was always an ardent 

 reader; but the refinements of a well-balanced style 

 hardly interested me: I did not understand them. 

 A good deal later, when close upon fifteen, I began 

 vaguely to see that words have a physiognomy of 

 their own. Some pleased me better than others 

 by the distinctness of their meaning and the reso- 

 nance of their rhythm; they produced a clearer 

 image in my mind ; after their fashion, they gave 

 me a picture of the objects described. Coloured 



^ Souvenirs, x., pp. loo, loi. 

 '^ Souvenirs, vi., p. 296. 



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