TEE GREAT TROPICAL FALLACY. 



205 



tional in our colder region, are of nightly occur- 

 rence on tropical seas and mountains. Moreover, 

 there are certain mysterious undertones of faint 

 green, delicate blue, and melting violet, in south- 

 ern sunsets which never appear, to my fancy, in 

 any other earthly object. Then the ferns, again, 

 must be frankly conceded by a conscientious 

 critic. The more isolated the tropical islands 

 with which one has to deal, the greater the 

 wealth of maiden-hairs, adder's-tongues, spleen- 

 worts, and club-mosses. Even in Jamaica, the 

 number of graceful, waving fronds which clothe 

 the grottoes on the road-side cannot fail to at- 

 tract the notice of the most prosaic traveler; 

 while the Pacific islands yield masses of green, 

 ferny vegetation unknown in any other portion 

 of the world. Yet we must remember that ferns 

 and club-mosses bear no flowers, and so, just in 

 proportion as they predominate among the flora, 

 must brilliant blossoms be at a discount. This 

 fact obtrudes itself most conspicuously on our 

 notice in New Zealand, where the palms, tree- 

 ferns, pines, and other plants with spores, cones, 

 or green inflorescences, form striking features in 

 every landscape ; while red, blue, orange, or yel- 

 low flowers are almost entirely wanting from the 

 perpetual sea of glossy green. 



On the other hand, if candor compels me to 

 admit these few good qualities in the boasted trop- 

 ics, I can safely assert that Europeans generally 

 overlook most of their discomforts the moment 

 they begin to think rapturously of their supposed 

 beauties. For example, there is the single fact 

 of the unceasing heat. " Regions of perpetual 

 summer," the poets say, but what becomes of 

 your poetry if we just alter it more truthfully to 

 " regions of perpetual broiling ? " When you 

 think of the tropics in your own comfortable 

 Belgravian drawing-room, you may for a mo- 

 ment take the heat into consideration ; but as 

 soon as you turn mentally to the scenery, you 

 have dropped the heat out of the account alto- 

 gether. Not so, however, in real life ; you can 

 never enjoy those cool-looking mountains except 

 under the scorching blaze of a red-hot sun ; you 

 can never separate those lovely rocks, covered 

 with gold and silver ferns, from the flood of 

 " molecular motion " which not even Prof. Tyn- 

 dall can render once more into its desirable latent 

 and potential form. Down it beats forever, with 

 unceasing energy, destroying all the pleasure of 

 waterfall, hill, and ocean, for the weary and pant- 

 ing spectator. 



Then look again at the mosquitoes. A small 

 pest, it is true, but ever-present, watchful, thirst- 



ing for blood day and night, maddening your 

 sleepy ears with their detestable humming, dis- 

 turbing your literary enjoyment with constant at- 

 tentions to your nose or your forehead ; imper- 

 turbable, invincible, insatiable, pitiless ; genuine 

 vampires, who surround you in organized flocks, 

 and so numerous that to kill one is only to lay 

 yourself at the mercy of another. You forget 

 these minor torments, too, as you lie back in 

 your easy-chair at home and gaze dreamily at 

 that imaginative picture on the wall ; but, if you 

 have ever tried to read Tennyson on the cliffs at 

 Scarborough with a blue bottle and a horse-fly 

 alternating their visits to your bitten veins, you 

 can form some faint conception of the miseries 

 which man experiences when he lies down on the 

 sofa or in the hammock for a quiet afternoon's 

 reading under the veranda of an Indian bunga- 

 low, or on the piazza of a Brazilian cottage. 



Yet all such little vexations sink into nothing- 

 ness compared with the absolute exile from every 

 serious interest or habit of one's being. For, 

 disguise it as you may, life in the tropics is an 

 exile. The political world disappears. What 

 matters the Eastern question or the last general 

 election to a man who sees European newspapers 

 once a month ? What unselfish or cosmopolitan 

 feeling can a person nourish who finds his own 

 dinner the only serious difficulty of the day ? In 

 that utter famine of books, pictures, music, thea- 

 tres, society, science, thought, all the pursuits 

 that make life worth living to a civilized and ra- 

 tional being, what can one find to arrest one's 

 attention or to occupy one's brain? The little 

 routine of official business once completed for 

 the day, there is no club where one may inter- 

 change ideas on politics, art, or social topics, no 

 institute where one may hear the latest conquests 

 of scientific research, no opera where one may 

 drink in sweet sounds to echo through the brain 

 during every brief interval of to-morrow's toil. 

 The educated and cultivated European, who finds 

 himself suddenly cast upon that ocean of squalid 

 misery and crass ignorance which composes a 

 tropical colony, discovers to his surprise that half 

 his life has been cut away from under him, and 

 learns for the first time how large a part of his 

 existence was filled up by literary, political, and 

 sesthetic interests. 



I know we are apt at home to ridicule such 

 ideas, to laugh them down as sentimentality, to 

 pillory them in our Pall Mall cynicism, to assert 

 that life is really made up of nothing more than 

 dinners, cigars, billiards, money, position, fame, 

 titles, and high-stepping horses. Everybody at 



