Page:The Strand Magazine (Volume 2).djvu/538

 tures who live upon one another. Do you need all these massacres and all these stupidities to make us a muck-heap? I can understand their not being good for anything else, but I can't understand a creation so rich in animated forms to do nothing and to leave nothing worth anything behind it."

"Manure is something, if it is not everything; the conditions it will create will be favourable to different beings who will succeed those on which you are looking."

"And which will disappear in their turn, I know that. I know that creation will go on improving itself up to the creation of Man—at least, that is, I think, what I have been told. But I had not pictured to myself this prodigality of life and destruction, which terrifies me and fills me with repugnance; these hideous forms, these gigantic amphibia, these monstrous crocodiles, and all these crawling or swimming beasts which seem to live only to use their teeth and devour one another."

My indignation highly amused Fairy Dust.

"Matter is matter," she replied, "it is always logical in its operations. The human mind is not—and you have proved it—you who live by eating charming birds, and a crowd of creatures more beautiful and intelligent than these. Have I to teach you that there is no production possible without permanent destruction, and would you like to reverse the order of nature?"

"Yes, I would—I should like that all should go well from the first day. If Nature is a great fairy she might have done without all these abominable experiments, and made a world in which we should all have been angels, living by mind only, in the bosom of an unchangeable and always beautiful creation."

"The great fairy Nature has higher views," replied Dame Dust. "She does not intend to stop at the things of which you know. She is always at work and inventing. For her, for whom there is no such thing as the suspension of life, rest would be death. If things did not change the work of the King of the Genii would be ended, and this king, who is incessant and supreme activity, would end with his work. The world which you see, and to which you will return presently when your vision of the past has faded away, this world of man, which you think is better than that of the ancient animals, this world with which you yet are not satisfied, since you wish to live eternally in a pure spiritual condition, this poor planet, still in a state of infancy, is destined to transform itself infinitely. The future will make of you all—feeble human creatures that you are—fairies and genii possessing science, reason, and goodness. You have seen what I have shown to you, that these first drafts of life, representing simply instinct, are nearer to you than you are to that which will some day be the reign of mind in the earth which you inhabit. The occupants of that future world will then have the right to despise you, as you now despise the world of the great saurians."

"Oh! if that is so," I replied, "if all that I have seen of the past will make me think the better of the future, let me see more that is new."

"And, above all," said the Fairy, "don't let us too much despise the past, for fear of committing the ingratitude of despising the present. When the great Spirit of life used the materials which furnished it, it did marvels from the first day. Look at the eyes of this monster which your learned men have called the ichthyosaurus."

"They are as large as my head, and frighten me."

"They are very superior to yours. They are at once long and short-sighted at will. They see prey at great distances as with a telescope, and when it is quite near, by a simple change of action, they see it perfectly at its true distance without needing spectacles. At that moment of creation nature had but one purpose: to make a thinking animal. It gave to this creature organs marvellously appropriate to its wants. Don't you think it made a very pretty beginning—are you not struck by it? In this way it will proceed from better to better, with all the beings which are to succeed those you now see. Those which appear to you poor, ugly, pitiful, are yet prodigies of adaptation to the place in the midst of which they have manifested themselves."

"And, like the others, they think of nothing but eating!"

"Of what would you have them think? The earth has no wish to be admired. The sky, which exists to-day and for ever, will continue to exist without the aspirations and prayers of tiny living creatures adding anything to the splendour and majesty of its laws. The fairy of your little planet, no doubt, knows the great First Cause; but if she is ordered to make a being who shall