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Cornugaya Directory 02
Page 10
So, it seems to me, is the immortality we so glibly predicate of
departed artists. If they survive at all, it is but a shadowy life
they live, moving on through the gradations of slow decay to distant
but inevitable death. They can no longer, as heretofore, speak
directly to the hearts of their fellow-men, evoking their tears or
laughter, and all the pleasures, be they sad or merry, of which
imagination holds the secret. Driven from the marketplace they
become first the companions of the student, then the victims of the
specialist. He who would still hold familiar intercourse with them
must train himself to penetrate the veil which in ever-thickening
folds conceals them from the ordinary gaze; he must catch the tone
of a vanished society, he must move in a circle of alien
associations, he must think in a language not his own.
You could hardly find a better rough test of relative development in
the animal (or vegetable) world than the number of young produced and
the care bestowed upon them. The fewer the offspring, the higher the
type. Very low animals turn out thousands of eggs with reckless
profusion; but they let them look after themselves, or be devoured by
enemies, as chance will have it. The higher you go in the scale of
being, the smaller the families, but the greater amount of pains
expended upon the rearing and upbringing of the young. Large broods
mean low organization; small broods imply higher types and more care
in the nurture and education of the offspring. Primitive kinds produce
eggs wholesale, on the off chance that some two or three among them
may perhaps survive an infant mortality of ninety-nine per cent, so as
to replace their parents. Advanced kinds produce half a dozen young,
or less, but bring a large proportion of these on an average up to
years of discretion.
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