The Life of the Spider 



be acquired, certain of those innate good 

 poetic virtues which cause his sure and supple 

 prose, devoid of artificial ornament and yet 

 adorned with simple and as it were uninten- 

 tional charm, to take its place among the ex- 

 cellent and lasting prose of the day, prose 

 of the kind that has its own atmosphere, in 

 which we breathe gratefully and tranquilly 

 and which we find only around masterpieces. 

 Lastly, there was needed — and this was not 

 the least requirement of the work — a mind 

 ever ready to cope with the riddles which, 

 among those little objects, rise up at every 

 step, as enormous as those which fill the 

 skies and perhaps more numerous, more im- 

 perious and more strange, as though nature 

 had here given a freer scope to her last wishes 

 and an easier outlet to her secret thoughts. 

 He shrinks from none of those boundless 

 problems which are persistently put to us by 

 all the inhabitants of that tiny world where 

 mysteries are heaped up in a denser and more 

 bewildering fashion than in any other. He 

 thus meets and faces, turn by turn, the re- 

 doubtable questions of instinct and intelli- 

 gence, of the origin of species, of the 

 harmony or the accidents of the universe, of 

 32 



