13. De Banana - Page 2

and Indian corn
to the American negro, that is the muse of sages (I translate literally
from the immortal Swede) to African savages and Brazilian slaves.
Humboldt calculated that an acre of bananas would supply a greater
quantity of solid food to hungry humanity than could possibly be
extracted from the same extent of cultivated ground by any other known
plant. So you see the question is no small one; to sing the praise of
this Linnæan muse is a task well worthy of the Pierian muses.

Do you know the outer look and aspect of the banana plant? If not, then
you have never voyaged to those delusive tropics. Tropical vegetation,
as ordinarily understood by poets and painters, consists entirely of the
coco-nut palm and the banana bush. Do you wish to paint a beautiful
picture of a rich ambrosial tropical island, _à la_ Tennyson--a summer
isle of Eden lying in dark purple spheres of sea?--then you introduce a
group of coco-nuts, whispering in odorous heights of even, in the very
foreground of your pretty sketch, just to let your public understand at
a glance that these are the delicious poetical tropics. Do you desire to
create an ideal paradise, _à la_ Bernardin de St. Pierre, where idyllic
Virginies die of pure modesty rather than appear before the eyes of
their beloved but unwedded Pauls in a lace-bedraped _peignoir_?--then
you strike the keynote by sticking in the middle distance a hut or
cottage, overshadowed by the broad and graceful foliage of the
picturesque banana. ('Hut' is a poor and chilly word for these glowing
descriptions, far inferior to the pretty and high-sounding original
_chaumière_.) That is how we do the tropics when we want to work upon
the emotions of the reader. But it is all a delicate theatrical
illusion; a trick of art meant to deceive and impose upon the unwary who
have never been there, and would like to think it all genuine. In
reality, nine times out of ten, you might cast your eyes casually around
you in any tropical valley, and, if there didn't happen to be a native
cottage with a coco-nut grove and banana patch anywhere in the
neighbourhood, you would see nothing in the way of vegetation which you
mightn't see at home any day in Europe. But what painter would ever
venture to paint the tropics without the palm trees? He might just as
well try to paint the desert without the camels, or to represent St.
Sebastian without a sheaf of arrows sticking unperceived in the calm
centre of his unruffled bosom, to mark and emphasise his Sebastianic
personality.

Still, I will frankly admit that the banana itself, with its practically
almost identical relation, the plantain, is a real bit of tropical
foliage. I confess to a settled prejudice against the tropics