Novels Without a Purpose

NOVELS WITHOUT A PURPOSE.

BY GRANT ALLEN.

'Brain for brain, in no market can you sell your abilities to such poor advantage. Don't take to literature if you've capital enough in hand to buy a good broom, and energy enough to annex a vacant crossing' (1892)

The North American Review, Vol. 163, No. 477 (Aug., 1896), pp. 223-235

The nineteenth century has tolerated to some extent that inartistic and jejune gaud, the novel without a purpose: the twentieth century, holding higher and truer conceptions of art, will soon outgrow it.

I am well aware that to many readers at the present day this forecast will sound like a wild paradox. It is the novel with a purpose that they have heard decried as puerile and inartistic. But what is a paradox? In nine cases out of ten, is it not the bold statement of an obvious but neglected truth, too long obscured by blatant iteration of a clamorous falsehood? Now, in this matter of the object and function of fiction, a certain dominant, (though retrogressive and obscurantist) school of critics has for some twenty years been dinning into our ears a dogma wholly alien to the real tendencies which this age has displayed for at least a century. It has been preaching and vociferating its poor little formula of  “Art for Art’s sake,” in season and out of season, till most people at last have almost begun to believe it for its much speaking. It has essayed to convince us that the childish desire for a story which is no more than a story ought somehow to rank above the adult preference for a story which points a moral, besides adorning a tale. And it has done this in spite of the patent fact that all the most successful novels of the last half century, from Uncle Tom’s Cabin to Jude the Obscure, have been novels with a purpose; that the tendency to write and to read such novels with a purpose has steadily increased throughout the whole of this period; and that the purpose itself has become with each decade more and more important, relatively to the mere infantile pleasure of telling or hearing a story of adventure. In short, our critics have set out with a false theory of art, and then have attempted to twist plain facts into accordance with their theory.

In opposition to this obsolescent school of criticism I wish to show here two things: first, that as a matter of fact the tendency of the higher fiction, from beginning to end, has been all in the direction of a constantly deeper and more plainly avowed purpose; and second, that as a matter of principle the highest and truest art is and must be the art with a purpose. And I shall further suggest as a corollary the conclusion that the twentieth century—presumably one in which the ethical impulse will have even a stronger hold than it has had in the nineteenth—is likely to demand a still larger amount of purpose in its art, and a deeper conception of what purpose is adequate.

I begin with the matter of fact. I think it undeniable, to anybody who examines as a whole the fiction of the nineteenth century, compared with that of the eighteenth, that the ethical element in the newer work far outweighs that in the older. In England, especially, most of the fiction of the Georgian period precisely mirrors the essentially unprogressive thought of the epoch in which it was produced. It is either decorously dull and conventional, like Richardson; or else boisterously vulgar and human, like Fielding. It lacks inner meaning. True, in certain of its outcomes, such as Clarissa Harlowe, an attempt is made at a certain impression of a supposed moral lesson; but this moral lesson is almost always trite and commonplace—a lesson of the most trivial copybook order: “Be virtuous as your grandmother understood virtue!” It marks no advance in the ethical thought of the race; it is statical, like Adam Bede, not dynamical, like Eousseau, Shelley, Tolstoi, Ibsen. In this half-and-half category, I would place those eighteenth-century works, such as The Vicar of Wakefield, or Pamela, or even Paul et Virginie, in whose pages the accepted code of morals is enforced and accentuated by means of a story whose main interest depends upon its character and incident, or its descriptive passages, not on its position as marking progress for humanity. The literature of the eighteenth century in England knows nothing of problems.

In France, the impulses which went to make up the nine­teenth century awoke and realized themselves earlier than elsewhere. Therefore it is in France that we find the novel with a purpose already becoming a weapon of progressive thought in the powerful hands of Voltaire and Rousseau. This it is, I think, which gives to such sketches as Candide and the Nouvelle Heloise their universal and lasting value. Outside England and English-speaking America, how many people know anything of Tom Jones or of Sir Charles Grandison? But all the world, from St. Petersburg to Lima, knows Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot. And why? Because these French thinkers (oh! yes, I know that Rousseau was Swiss)—these French thinkers represent a moment in the development of human thought; they mark time for the race; what they had to say was new and interesting in all countries equally. The nineteenth century had its precursors in the eighteenth, especially in France, and it is those precursors who speak to us still with most world-wide authority.

In England, the novel with a purpose began its course feebly with Sandford and Merton and Miss Edgeworth’s stories. I acknowledge that these examples are damaging to my cause; but I have confidence enough in my case to expose them frankly to the barbed shaft of the enemy. During the early half of the present century, the movement towards purposive fiction did not make much headway either in Britain or America. Its place was taken, as we shall see a little later, by the purposive poetry of Shelley, Keats, and Wordsworth. Godwin’s Caleb Williams, however, is an example to the contrary; and so are a few others like the curious romances of Thomas Love Peacock. Yet on the whole, it must be confessed, the essentially reactionary Romanticist school, represented early by Byron, Scott, and Chateaubriand, later by Bulwer Lytton, Victor Hugo, and Tennyson (I am speaking very broadly) carried the day for awhile both in England and France as against the newer purposive and ethical literature heralded by Shelley. It is noteworthy that the dogma of “Art for Art’s sake” derives its origin from this romantic school—from Gautier and Baudelaire: it is, in fact, a legacy of the reaction of Waterloo and the evil days before 1830.

As the nineteenth century progressed, however, it became abundantly clear that the novel without a purpose was ceasing to engage the best intellects of the nations. Gradually fiction began to think and to teach, instead of merely amusing. In England Charlotte Bronte, that double-dyed Celt—half Irish, half Cornish—raised the true Celtic dragon-standard of revolt in Jane Eyre and elsewhere. The purpose as yet was not indeed obtrusive; but it was there undeniably, and it had germinal value; it set people thinking. The function of the Celt in literature, indeed, is always the same. “Have ye a government?” he asks. “Thin I’m agin it.” He is the preacher of upheaval. The popular novelists of the mid-century, it is true—Thackeray, Dickens, Trollope—did not try to think, or to make others think, either. They were content with mere passive delineation of character. But while they were in the zenith of their fame, a new and revolutionary school, beginning with the Brontes, was slowly working its way upward into favor. George Eliot did think, though in a formless way, and often with strangely reactionary results; her whole literary work seemed to those who knew her like a deliberate contradiction of the aspirations for freedom in her life and conduct; it is wonderful how a woman, who felt and acted as she did, could have stooped to write novels so unworthy of her place as a pioneer in the movement for the emancipation of women. George Meredith also dates back his beginnings to this formative period; and anyone who follows him from The Shaving of Shagpat and The Ordeal of Richard Feverel down to Diana of the Crossways, One of Our Conquerors, and Lord Ormont and his Aminta, cannot fail to observe the constant growth in import­ance of the underlying purpose. Nor is it immaterial to observe that the same world which devoured The Newcomes and Nicholas Nickleby took little note at the time of Meredith’s masterpieces.

The last decade or two in particular have given us increasing proof of the growth in popularity of the novel with a purpose, and the consequent relegation of the novel without a purpose to its proper place—the school-room or the nursery. We have been overwhelmed by stories like Mrs. Humphry Ward’s—instinct with moral lessons. Now, I do not for a moment mean to imply that Mrs. Humphry Ward’s moral lessons commend themselves to my soul. The popularity of Robert Elsmere is a marvel to those who had outgrown Robert Elsmerism before they were born; while the popularity of David Grieve, a smug exhibition of the British sense of moral superiority to those vicious Continentals, is an insult to the ethical tone of France and of enlightened England. Still, the fact remains that these essentially purposive books, be they good, bad, or mediocre, have attained an enormous circulation in our own time, and have done so mainly on the strength of their purposes. Another similar instance was that ponderous John Inglesant. Later still, the chief successes of the decade have been made by The Heavenly Twins, The Yellow Aster, Keynotes, Tess, and a dozen more equally purposive stories. Miss Marie Corelli and Edna Lyall, each in her own way, illustrate the same tendency. Even Trilby owes part at least of its singular popularity to what it may contain of widening and expanding power—it is largely accepted as a covert protest against prevalent English and American Puritanism.

If one sets against these distinctly purposive successes the success of such other writers as Rider Haggard, Anthony Hope, Stanley Weyman, and Conan Doyle, it will be clear, I think, that the former class as a whole mark the taste of adult men and women, of the more thoughtful and progressive, of the makers and moulders of the coming century; while the latter class as a whole mark the taste of boys and girls and casual readers, of the survivors from the past, of the conservative and reactionary as against the progressive and ascending element. I do not mean that Doyle and Weyman have not done admirable work of its kind; I merely mean that their work (as a rule) does not aim at the highest audience. (Even this is not true of Doyle’s work in all cases.) Books, on the other hand, like Hardy’s Tess and Jude, like Olive Schreiner’s Story of an African Farm, strike the keynote of our century. They are instinct with our hopes, our fears, our problems. They could not have been written in any age save this; while She and A Gentleman of France might almost equally have stepped out of some other century. I do not deny, of course, that the romantic temperament and the love for books of adventure (especially among the young) will always live on; but I believe that side by side with these the taste for books of thought and ethical teaching will always increase, and in an accelerated ratio. I think men and women will less and less be content, like children, with mere hearing of a story; they will demand from their novelists something that at the same time instructs and elevates them.

“But where do you put Stevenson in this gallery of recent writers?” Ah, Stevenson is—Stevenson. A great artist in his way—perhaps even more of an artist in fibre than Meredith and Hardy, though less of a thinker—he was an artist alone, and little beyond it. He had his ideas, it is true, his aperçus, his rebellions, his fancies; and those who can look an inch below the surface may often read them. Yet, on the whole, I am prepared to give Stevenson over as a free gift to the enemy—to treat him rather as a survivor from the early nineteenth than as a precursor and herald of the twentieth century. He was a semi-barbaric Scandinavian-Celt of the Western Islands, at home at Skerryvore, among the foam of the Atlantic. His boyishness, indeed, with its natural concomitant in love of adventure, was one of his most charming and lovable characteristics. Great craftsman of words as he was, he never quite grew up; he loved to sleep out in a sack in the Cevennes, to canoe on French rivers, to fraternize with Samoans on the beach of Falesá; and the childish side in him endeared him to all of us. But I cannot help thinking the adult and virile temperament of Meredith, the adult and civilized temperament of Hardy, is higher and deeper than the untamable boyishness and delicious waywardness of the hermit of Samoa.

Kipling again? Well, Kipling is undoubtedly a real force in our literature, a typical embodiment of the bulldog instincts of the Englishman. But he stands somewhat aside from either of the main currents of the day. Nor do I desire to class all writers as better or worse, simply in so far as they happen to represent or not to represent purpose in fiction. Nevertheless, I would say that, in a wider sense, Kipling too is purposive. His aim is exegetical. He does not merely put before us vivid and graphic pictures of Anglo-Indian society, of the jungle world, of military or seafaring life, of the East End of London. He has a mission of his own, in a globe that is daily becoming more and more complex. It is the mission of interpretation. He set out to a great extent as the literary exponent of the Romance of the Clash of Races. Our planet is daily shrinking—and also expand­ing. Shrinking as regards distances, and the time taken to traverse them; expanding as regards the number of nations, races, creeds, and moral codes which the average citizen now be­gins to cognize or to come in contact with. East and West have joined hands; Egypt, Japan, South Africa are part of us. Kipling has made himself, on one side of his work, the laureate of the resulting strife and intermixture. In this direction, many other writers of the day may be fairly classed with him—Stevenson in his Pacific stories; Rider Haggard in his wild South African tales; Hall Caine in his Morocco romance; Gilbert Parker in his admirable Canadian episodes. I am not here classing these writers together, of course, as regards literary merit; their planes are various; I am merely huddling them into the same rough category as exponents, each on his own plane, of the cosmopolitan ideas necessarily engendered by an age of rapid European and American expansion. For to make us grasp in its totality the vast and varied world in which we live and move and have our being is surely in itself an adequate purpose.

Closely allied with this group of quasi-purposive authors, whose vogue shows at least the interest felt by the general reading public in the wider world around them, I would place the other and overlapping or partially coincident group of authors who deal with outlying factors or minor elements in our own more domestic western civilization. Time was when English and American fiction dealt mainly with the ladies and gentlemen of England, the cultured New Englanders, the polite society of New York or Philadelphia; if more than that, then at best it concerned itself with the farmers of the Midland Counties, the rough Yorkshire moorlanders, the miners of the Western States, the grangers of the prairies. But nowadays, that intense desire of half the world to know how the other half lives has produced a new type and crop of fiction. We want to hear of kings and tinkers. Thrums and Donegal have begun to find voice. Tommy Atkins himself is no longer mute. Zangwill tells the West End all about the Jews in the slums of Whitechapel. Miss Murfree tells the North and East all about the ins and outs of life in the Tennessee mountains. We are familiar with Cape Cod and Simla, with “Brer Fox ” and “Brer Rabbit,” with Cablets Creoles, and Rolf Boldrewood’s Australians. Amelie Rives introduces us to West Virginian ginseng diggers. Thomas Hardy transports us to the old-world cabins of Wessex peasants and woodlanders; William Black to the bothies of Highland crofters. “Q,” with his Cornishmen, Mrs. Field with her Moonlighters, are other instances. There is no part of Connemara, no district of the Sierras or the Canadian West, which now lacks its vates sacer, its inspired illustrator. And I hold that this tendency to minute specialization and localization is closely bound up with the purposive tendency in fiction; both because the same men and women are engaged in either type, and because the delineation of strange undercurrents and phases of human life is in itself educational.

Hardy, for example, who gave us Under the Greenwood Tree and Far from the Madding Crowd, is also Hardy who gave us Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure. Hall Caine, who sets before us the Isle of Man and its Deemsters, is Hall Caine who though from the conservative side (as I take it), approaches those same underlying problems of sex which form the main theme of Hardy and Meredith. Moreover, the passion for the description of local, rural, and distinctively tribal or provincial life is closely bound up with the revolt of race, the seething and pervasive democratic movement which in Europe at least is bringing the Celt, the Slav, the Czech, and the Magyar to the front, as against the old dominant English, German, and Latin elements. The dregs and the scum will have their innings. Hence the modern Celtic revival in Scotland, represented by Fiona Macleod, William Sharp, Patrick Geddes, and their compeers; hence the Celtic revival in Ireland, represented by Yeats, Nora Hopper, and so many other vigorous new writers; hence the Scandinavian outburst, the fresh young Russian literature; hence Jokai and Maeterlinck; hence the flowering of the Breton in Renan, Guy de Maupassant, and seafaring Pierre Loti—the latter of whom represents for France the same roving or specializing tendencies as are represented for England by Stevenson and Kipling, for America by Bret Harte, Miss Murfree, and Cable. (I need hardly say I am speaking again not as to style but as to subject-matter.) Nay, is it not even a significant fact in the same direc­tion that England has read with deep attention Miss Mary Wilkins’s New England tales and Mr. Harold Fredericks Illumination—in which forcible story we are transported on the enchanted carpet of fiction to a village in Northern New York, where mention of Europe is not, yet where the self-same problems of faith and life meet the local minister which meet every thinker in London, Paris, Berlin, Vienna? It is the purpose that makes such localized work universally interesting.

If we take Europe as a whole, I do not think we can doubt the constant progress of its literature in purposiveness during the past half-century. Even Hugo, prince and false prophet of romanticists—poor fallen god, whom all may now rail at—showed in his own way the prevailing tendency. For what is Les Misérables but a sermon on the underlying text of socialism? What are Le Roi s’amuse, and Les Travailleurs de la Mer, but disguised social and political pamphlets? With the younger generation, however, the tendency has been still more marked. Even Alexandre Dumas fils showed it. In Zola purposiveness reigns supreme—a cold, scientific, plodding purposiveness, as wooden as French scientific work in general; yet full of meaning in every line and touch and incident. A careless reader might deny the same note to Guy de Maupassant and Bourget, who, indeed, fall largely into the same wide category as our own Stevenson. (I hope it will be borne in mind that I am everywhere dealing with all these writers from a single standpoint only—not that of technical literary criticism.) But Maupassant and Bourget themselves—especially the latter—have an underlying purposiveness that cannot be masked by their artistic conscience. As for the North, the case is clear. Ibsen more than any other man stands out for us to-day as the accepted pioneer of the twentieth century; and Ibsen never writes except because he has something in his soul to teach us. The Doll’s House, Hedda Gabler, Ghosts, The Master Builder—what does the outcry against them signify save that Ibsen had an original idea to impose upon the world, and that the world as yet was not ready to accept it? Only new principles can ever rouse such virulent opposition. And similarly with the Russians. Tolstoi’s ideas do not seem to me the ideas that are likely to rule the coming world; but at any rate they are ideas; and it is for the sake of the ideas that Tolstoi writes, not merely to give us passing pleasure.

Taking the world round, then, I say (and omitting on purpose America, with which I do not feel myself competent to deal), I see one truth standing out quite clearly. From first to last, the nineteenth century has constantly demanded, and has constantly been supplied with, more and more purposive fiction. The demand and the supply still continue to increase. Therefore I infer that the literature of the twentieth century in turn will be increasingly purposive.

And in being so, it will also be right. It will follow a law of all literary development from the beginning of all things. A broad survey of the progress of literature from its outset will show us that purpose has ever played a larger and larger part in literary work with each age in each nation.

Every literature begins with naive and somewhat childish narration—the myth, the epic, the fairy-tale, the saga. As it progresses, it grows deeper, more philosophic, more ethical, more purposive. The best never comes out of a civilized man, save when he is profoundly stirred by some overpowering social or moral emotion. Our test of the higher as opposed to the lower art is just, other things equal, the proportion of this philosophic and ethical interest to the mere aesthetic element. I do not mean to say, of course, that the highest literature, as literature, is the scientific treatise, the philosophic essay, the ethical pamphlet. To guard against that misconception, I insert above on purpose the saving clause, “other things equal.” Literature must needs above all things be literary—it must have grace of style, beauty and aptness and novelty of wording; it must appeal first of all to the aesthetic sense, not to the pure reason or the moral nature. But granting the presence of these purely literary qualities, that literature is highest which most combines with them a deeper philosophic and moral value. Why do we all feel Shelley to be far and away the greatest of English poets? (I exclude Shakespeare, who is the first of English novelists and dramatists, but not quite the first of English poets.) Clearly because we all feel that Shelley touched heights of philosophic thinking and of moral beauty never elsewhere combined with such exquisite imagery, such poetic imagination, such immortal melody. Why do we all feel Keats to stand just one degree beneath Shelley’s level? Clearly because Keats, in other respects the most poetical of English poets, the finest example of pure poetic temperament, falls short of philosophic and moral height; he is merely the perfection of the artistic nature. Why do we think Hamlet, again, a greater play than Romeo and Juliet? Clearly because we feel the deeper and more purposive thought in Hamlet. What makes Faust the chief crown of glory in German literature? Clearly, the breadth of its philosophic outlook, the vastness of its aim, the profound moral vistas of which it allows us here and there to catch passing glimpses. Height may be measured, other things equal, by the greatness of the philosophic and ethical admixture.

Take in detail a few examples. Hellenic literature begins, like all other literatures, with the mere heroic story. We admire in its first efforts the Homeric ring, the full-mouthed sonorousness; we are captivated by the remoteness from our world and its problems—by the clash of bronze arms, the naïveté and simplicity of the domestic relations, the clang of the Iliad, “the roar and thunder of the Odyssey.” We listen open-mouthed to the doughty deeds of Diomede, the song of the Sirens, the tale of Calypso, the ravings of Polyphemus. But we feel to the end that, strange and beautiful and weird as are these old-world imaginings, with their vivid pictures and their rolling music, they are childish at heart with the childishness of the barbarian; they do not in any way satisfy the longings and aspirations of civilized humanity; their interest is largely fictitious and archaeological. Indeed, it is as a relief and refuge from our “obstinate questionings of invisible things” that we most enjoy the change from our own literature to the purely objective and barbaric atmosphere of the Homeric poems.

Very different is the tone of the great Athenian tragedians. There we feel at once the conservative grandeur and solemnity of Eschylus; the philosophic doubt and ethical inquiry of Sophocles; the frank scepticism and human reconstruction in many plays of Euripides. What a gulf between the quarrels of the gods in the Iliad and the sublime suffering and patience of the bound Prometheus! What a gulf between the despotic tone of the Homeric Agamemnon or the Homeric Odysseus, say in the incident of Thersites and the paean of triumphant freedom in the Persae, the outburst of human passion in the Antigone or the Bacchae! Greek literature grows steadily from the descriptive and interesting to the profound and purposive; it finds its culminating point at last in the reasoned philosophic and ethical thinking of the Attic tragedians.

Take the three other great epics of the world, again—the AEneid, the Divina Commedia, and Paradise Lost; what comfort can the advocates of the novel or poem without a purpose derive from those great works? They must be clever indeed if they can wriggle round them. Look at the AEneid first. What made a brother bard break forth beforehand in that enthusiastic declaration,

“Cedite Romani scriptores, cedite Graii, Nescio quid majus nascitur Iliade?”

Was it not his consciousness that the AEneid was the worthy and fitting epic of a great unifying and cosmopolitanizing movement—that movement which made Rome not so much the mistress as the embodiment of a pacified and unified world, and which enabled a later poet to apostrophize her with truth in that eloquent pentameter,

“Urbem fedsti quod prius orbis erat?”

It is this overpowering sense of the majesty and the moral destiny of Rome—this conception of the organic evolution of a world-city from a small beginning—that inspired Virgil so high above even the level of the Second Georgic. This it is that makes him recur so often to the mighty future of the race of AEneas and to set in the very forefront of his noble exordium the stirring line:

“Tantae molis erat Romanam condere gentem.”

Or, look at Dante again. Can anybody deny that the main inspiring idea of Dante’s colossal work is the true mundane order, the proper relation of Church and State, of Priest and Prince, of Pope and Emperor? There, as on the frescoed wall of Santa Maria Novella, we behold the crystallized concept of the great European party to which the poet belonged—the concept of a well-organized and well-governed Europe, still regulated by the splendid Roman and Virgilian ideal, plus the new feature of the Christian religion. Whether we agree with this ideal or not, it was, at least, a large and liberal conception; it was vital in its day, and it dominates every line of the Tuscan poet’s thinking.

As for Milton, he pleads guilty to purposiveness from the very beginning—pleads guilty, and glories in it. “To vindicate the ways of God to man” is the expressed purpose of the argument in his epic. And every word the mighty Puritan wrote is intensely purposive. Paradise Lost is a theory of theology—and heretical at that. Samson Agonistes is a political pamphlet, Comus is a singularly unconvincing though beautiful and fanciful tract on the ascetic side of the question of sex—just as the essay on Freedom of Divorce is a later expression of mature opinion in favor of a particular form of laxity. From beginning to end, Milton was a glorified and ennobled pamphleteer; he wrote his pamphlets with a purpose first and a divine beauty second, for without the purpose they would never have been written.

Every other literature tells us the same tale. We start in all with sagas, stories, folk-songs, marchen. We progress to the drama and novel of character; we end with the Euripideses, the Ibsens, the Merediths. Chancer and Boccaccio form the first term in a series which goes steadily on to Shelley and Goethe. And we all instinctively feel that the greatest and truest poets and romancers are those who have taught their age somewhat: Wordsworth, not Scott; Shelley, not Byron. Even outside the more definitely purposive work, we also feel that relative height may best be gauged by intensity of purpose. Keats himself, when judged by this standard, is really purposive; for in a world too dead to the worth of pure beauty, he revived the naked Greek ideal of the simply beautiful. With Tennyson, the highest work is surely that which, like In Memoriam, Maud, and such lyrics as Wages, or The Higher Pantheism_, strives to realize some aspect of the philosophic and religious thought of the epoch he mirrored. Anybody who looks for the keynote in Bossetti and Swinburne will similarly find it in the love sonnets and in such poems as The Blessed Damosel, the Ode to Victor Hugo, Hertha, the Lines to a Crucifix, the Hymn to Proserpine, and Dolores—all of which image forth some thought of the period. I end where I began. The greatest novels and the greatest poems are thus clearly seen to be those which most mark time for humanity.

A work of art, I admit, is not a pamphlet or a proposition in Euclid, but it must enclose a truth, and a new truth, at that, if it is to find a place permanently in the front rank of its own order. Even of other arts than literature this is essentially true—as witness Botticelli, Burne Jones, Donatello, Wagner. Painting, sculpture, music, to be truly great, must crest the wave of their own epoch. In literature, however, no work can be considered as really first-rate unless it teaches us somewhat—not merely pleases us. The critic who insists on absence of purpose is shown by the greatest examples of the past, and by the working of the time-spirit, to be merely a belated and antiquated anachronism.

Thus the novel without a purpose stands condemned on its very face as belonging inherently to the second class, and to the infancy of humanity. It will continue to be written, no doubt, for the younger generation, and the inferior minds; but in the twentieth century, I venture to believe, the adult and educated public will more and more demand from its literary caterers adult interests, adult sympathies, a philosophic aim, an ethical purpose.

Grant Allen.

Carving a Cocoa-nut

Carving a Cocoa-nut (1877) Cornhill Magazine

THE MILK IN THE COCOA-NUT.

By GRANT ALLEN.

FOR many centuries the occult problem how to account for the milk in the cocoa-nut has awakened the profoundest interest alike of ingenious infancy and of maturer scientific age. Though it can not be truthfully affirmed of it, as of the cosmogony or creation of the world, in "The Vicar of Wakefield," that it "has puzzled the philosophers of all ages" (for Sanchoniathon was certainly ignorant of the very existence of that delicious juice, and Manetho doubtless went to his grave without ever having tasted it fresh from the nut under a tropical veranda), yet it may be safely asserted that for the last three hundred years the philosopher who has not at some time or other of his life meditated upon that abstruse question, is unworthy of such an exalted name. The cosmogony and the milk in the cocoa-nut are, however, a great deal closer together in thought than Sanchoniathon or Manetho, or the rogue who quoted them so glibly, is ever at all likely, in his wildest moments, to have imagined.

The cocoa-nut, in fact, is a subject well deserving of the most sympathetic treatment at the gentle hands of grateful humanity. No other plant is useful to us in so many diverse and remarkable manners. It has been truly said of that friend of man, the domestic pig, that he is all good, from the end of his snout to the tip of his tail; but even the pig, though he furnishes us with so many necessaries or luxuries—from tooth-brushes to sausages, from ham to lard, from pepsine-wine to pork pies—does not nearly approach, in the multiplicity and variety of his virtues, the all-sufficing and world-supplying cocoa-nut. A Chinese proverb says that there are as many useful properties in the cocoa-nut palm as there are days in the year; and a Polynesian saying tells us that the man who plants a cocoa-nut plants meat and drink, hearth and home, vessels and clothing, for himself and his children after him. Like the great Mr. Whiteley, the invaluable palm-tree might modestly advertise itself as a universal provider. The solid part of the nut supplies food almost alone to thousands of people daily, and the milk serves them for drink, thus acting as an efficient filter to the water absorbed by the roots in the most polluted or malarious regions. If you tap the flower-stalk you get a sweet juice, which can be boiled down into the peculiar sugar called (in the charming dialect of commerce) jaggery; or it can be fermented into a very nasty spirit known as palm-wine, toddy, or arrack; or it can be mixed with bitter herbs and roots to make that delectable compound "native beer." If you squeeze the dry nut you get cocoa-nut oil, which is as good as lard for frying when fresh, and is "an excellent substitute for butter at breakfast," on tropical tables. Under the mysterious name of copra (which most of us have seen with awe described in the market reports as "firm" or "weak," "receding" or "steady") it forms the main or only export of many oceanic islands, and is largely imported into this realm of England, where the thicker portion is called stearine, and used for making sundry candles with fanciful names, while the clear oil is employed for burning in ordinary lamps. In the process of purification, it yields glycerine; and it enters largely into the manufacture of most better-class soaps. The fiber that surrounds the nut makes up the other mysterious article of commerce known as coir, which is twisted into stout ropes, or woven into cocoa-nut matting and ordinary door-mats. Brushes and brooms are also made of it, and it is used, not always in the most honest fashion, in place of real horse-hair, in stuffing cushions. The shell, cut in half, supplies good cups, and is artistically carved by the Polynesians, Japanese, Hindoos, and other benighted heathen, who have not yet learned the true methods of civilized machine-made shoddy manufacture. The leaves serve as excellent thatch; on the flat blades, prepared like papyrus, the most famous Buddhist manuscripts are written; the long mid-ribs or branches (strictly speaking, the leaf-stalks) answer admirably for rafters, posts, or fencing; the fibrous sheath at the base is a remarkable natural imitation of cloth, employed for strainers, wrappers, and native hats; while the trunk, or stem, passes in carpentry under the name of porcupine-wood, and produces beautiful effects as a wonderfully-colored cabinet-maker's material. These are only a few selected instances out of the innumerable uses of the cocoa-nut palm.

Apart even from the manifold merits of the tree that bears it, the milk itself has many and great claims to our respect and esteem, as everybody who has ever drunk it in its native surroundings will enthusiastically admit. In England, to be sure, the white milk in the dry nuts is a very poor stuff, sickly, and strong-flavored and rather indigestible. But in the tropics, cocoa-nut milk, or, as we oftener call it there, cocoa-nut water, is a very different and vastly superior sort of beverage. At eleven o'clock every morning, when you are hot and tired with the day's work, your black servant, clad from head to foot in his cool clean white linen suit, brings you in a tall soda-glass full of a clear, light, crystal liquid, temptingly displayed against the yellow background of a chased Benares brass-work tray. The lump of ice bobs enticingly up and down in the center of the tumbler, or clinks musically against the edge of the glass as he carries it along. You take the cool cup thankfully and swallow it down at one long draught; fresh as a May morning, pure as an English hill-side spring, delicate as—well, as cocoa-nut water. None but itself can be its parallel. It is certainly the most delicious, dainty, transparent, crystal drink ever invented. How did it get there, and what is it for?

In the early green stage at which cocoa-nuts are generally picked for household use in the tropics, the shell hasn't yet solidified into a hard, stony coat, but still remains quite soft enough to be readily cut through with a sharp table-knife—just like young walnuts picked for pickling. If you cut one across while it's in this unsophisticated state, it is easy enough to see the arrangement of the interior, and the part borne by the milk in the development and growth of the mature nut. The ordinary tropical way of opening cocoa-nuts for table, indeed, is by cutting off the top of the shell and rind in successive slices, at the end where the three pores are situated, until you reach the level of the water, which fills up the whole interior. The nutty part around the inside of the shell is then extremely soft and jelly-like, so that it can be readily eaten with a spoon: but as a matter of fact very few people ever do eat the flesh at all. After their first few months in the tropics, they lose the taste for this comparatively indigestible part, and confine themselves entirely (like patients at a German spa) to drinking the water. A young cocoa-nut is thus seen to consist, first of a green outer skin, then of a fibrous coat, which afterward becomes the hair, and next of a harder shell which finally gets quite woody; while inside all comes the actual seed or unripe nut itself. The office of the cocoa-nut water is the deposition of the nutty part around the side of the shell; it is, so to speak, the mother-liquid, from which the harder eatable portion is afterward derived. This state is not uncommon in embryo seeds. In a very young pea, for example, the inside is quite watery, and only the outer skin is at all solid, as we have all observed when green peas first come into season. But the special peculiarity of the cocoa-nut consists in the fact that this liquid condition of the interior continues even after the nut is ripe, and that is the really curious point about the milk in the cocoa-nut which does actually need accounting for.

In order to understand it one ought to examine a cocoa-nut in the act of budding, and to do this it is by no means necessary to visit the West Indies or the Pacific Islands; all you need to do is to ask a Covent Garden fruit-salesman to get you a few "growers." On the voyage to England, a certain number of precocious cocoa-nuts, stimulated by the congenial warmth and damp of most ship-holds, usually begin to sprout before their time; and these waste nuts are sold by the dealers at a low rate to East End children and inquiring botanists. An examination of a "grower" very soon convinces one what is the use of the milk in the cocoa-nut.

It must be duly bone in mind, to begin with, that the prime end and object of the nut is not to be eaten raw by the ingenious monkey, or to be converted by lordly man into cocoa-nut biscuits, or cocoa-nut pudding, but simply and solely to reproduce the cocoa-nut palm in sufficient numbers to future generations. For this purpose the nut has slowly acquired by natural selection a number of protective defenses against its numerous enemies, which serve to guard it admirably in the native state from almost all possible animal depredators. First of all, the actual nut or seed itself consists of a tiny embryo plant, placed just inside the softest of the three pores or pits at the end of the shell, and surrounded by a vast quantity of nutritious pulp, destined to feed and support it during its earliest unprotected days, if not otherwise diverted by man or monkey. But, as whatever feeds a young plant will also feed an animal, and as many animals betray a felonious desire to appropriate to their own wicked ends the food-stuffs laid up by the palm for the use of its own seedling, the cocoa-nut has been compelled to inclose this particularly large and rich kernel in a very solid and defensive shell. And, once more, since the palm grows at a very great height from the ground—I have seen them up to ninety feet in favorable circumstances—this shell stands a very good chance of getting broken in tumbling to the earth, so that it has been necessary to surround it with a mass of soft and yielding fibrous material, which breaks its fall, and acts as a buffer to it when it comes in contact with the soil beneath. So many protections has the cocoa-nut gradually devised for itself by the continuous survival of the best adapted among numberless and endless spontaneous variations of all its kind in past time.

Now, when the cocoa-nut has actually reached the ground at last, and proceeds to sprout in the spot where chance (perhaps in the bodily shape of a disappointed monkey) has chosen to cast it, these numerous safeguards and solid envelopes naturally begin to prove decided nuisances to the embryo within. It starts under the great disadvantage of being hermetically sealed within a solid wooden shell, so that no water can possibly get at it to aid it as most other seeds are aided in the process of germination. Fancy yourself a seed-pea, anxious to sprout, but coated all round with a hard covering of impermeable sealing-wax, and you will be in a position faintly to appreciate the unfortunate predicament of a grower cocoa-nut. Natural selection, however—that deus ex machina of modern science, which can perform such endless wonders, if only you give it time enough to work in and variations enough to work upon—natural selection has come to the rescue of the unhappy plant by leaving it a little hole at the top of the shell, out of which it can push its feathery green head without difficulty. Everybody knows that if you look at the sharp end of a cocoa-nut you will see three little brown pits or depressions on its surface. Most people also know that two of these are firmly stopped up (for a reason to which I shall presently recur), but that the third one is only closed by a slight film or very thin shell, which can be easily bored through with a pocket-knife, so as to let the milk run off before cracking the shell. So much we have all learned during our ardent pursuit of natural knowledge on half-holidays in early life. But we probably then failed to observe that just opposite this soft hole lies a small, roundish knob, imbedded in the pulp or eatable portion, which knob is in fact the embryo palm or seedling, for whose ultimate benefit the whole arrangement (in brown and green) has been invented. That is very much the way with man: he notices what concerns his own appetite, and omits all the really important parts of the whole subject. We think the use of the hole is to let out the milk; but the nut knows that its real object is to let out the seedling. The knob grows out at last into the young plantlet, and it is by means of the soft hole that it makes its escape through the shell to the air and the sunshine which it seeks without.

This brings us really down at last to the true raison d’être for the milk in the cocoa-nut. As the seed or kernel can not easily get at much water from outside, it has a good supply of water laid up for it ready beforehand within its own encircling shell. The mother-liquid from which the pulp or nutty part has been deposited remains in the center, as the milk, till the tiny embryo begins to sprout. As soon as it does so, the little knob which was at first so very small enlarges rapidly and absorbs the water, till it grows out into a big, spongy cellular mass, which at last almost fills up the entire shell. At the same time, its other end pushes its way out through the soft hole, and then gives birth to a growing bud at the top—the future stem and leaves—and to a number of long threads beneath—the future roots. Meanwhile, the spongy mass inside begins gradually to absorb all the nutty part, using up its oils and starches for the purpose of feeding the young plant above, until it is of an age to expand its leaves to the open tropical sunlight and shift for itself in the struggle for life. It seems at first sight very hard to understand how any tissue so solid as the pulp of cocoa-nut can be thus softened and absorbed without any visible cause; but in the subtile chemistry of living vegetation such a transformation is comparatively simple and easy to perform. Nature sometimes works much greater miracles than this in the same way: for example, what is called vegetable ivory, a substance so solid that it can be carved or turned only with great difficulty, is really the kernel of another palm-nut, allied to the cocoa-palm, and its very stony particles are all similarly absorbed during germination by the dissolving power of the young seedling.

Why, however, has the cocoa-nut three pores at the top instead of one, and why are two out of the three so carefully and firmly sealed up? The explanation of this strange peculiarity is only to be found in the ancestral history of the cocoa-nut kind. Most nuts, indeed, start in their earlier stage as if they meant to produce two or more seeds each; but, as they ripen, all the seeds except one become abortive. The almond, for example, has in the flower two seeds or kernels to each nut; but in the ripe state there is generally only one, though occasionally we find an almond with two—a philopena, as we commonly call it—just to keep in memory the original arrangement of its earlier ancestors. The reason for this is that plants whose fruits have no special protection for their seeds are obliged to produce a great many of them at once, in order that one seed in a thousand may finally survive the onslaughts of their Argus-eyed enemies; but, when they learn to protect themselves by hard coverings from birds and beasts, they can dispense with some of these supernumerary seeds, and put more nutriment into each one of those that they still retain. Compare, for example, the innumerable small round seedlets of the poppy-head with the solitary large and richly-stored seed of the walnut, or the tiny black specks of mustard and cress with the single compact and well-filled seed of the filbert and the acorn. To the very end, however, most nuts begin in the flower as if they meant to produce a whole capsuleful of small unstored and unprotected seeds, like their original ancestors; it is only at the last moment that they recollect themselves, suppress all their ovules except one, and store that one with all the best and oiliest food-stuffs at their disposal. The nuts, in fact, have learned by long experience that it is better to be the only son and heir of a wealthy house, set up in life with a good capital to begin upon, than to be one of a poor family of thirteen needy and unprovided children.

Now, the cocoa-nuts are descended from a great tribe—the palms and lilies—which have as their main distinguishing peculiarity the arrangement of parts in their flowers and fruits by threes each. For example, in the most typical flowers of this great group, there are three green outer calyx-pieces, three bright-colored petals, three long outer stamens, three short inner stamens, three valves to the capsule, and three seeds or three rows of seeds in each fruit. Many palms still keep pretty well to this primitive arrangement, but a few of them which have specially protected or highly developed fruits or nuts have lost in their later stages the threefold disposition in the fruit, and possess only one seed, often a very large one. There is no better and more typical nut in the whole world than a cocoa-nut—that is to say, from our present point of view at least, though the fear of that awful person, the botanical Smelfungus, compels me to add that this is not quite technically true. Smelfungus, indeed, would insist upon it that the cocoa-nut is not a nut at all, and would thrill us with the delightful information, innocently conveyed in that delicious dialect of which he is so great a master, that it is really "a drupaceous fruit with a fibrous mesocarp." Still, in spite of Smelfungus with his nice, hair-splitting distinctions, it remains true that humanity at large will still call a nut a nut, and that the cocoa-nut is the highest known development of the peculiar nutty tactics. It has the largest and most richly stored seed of any known plant; and this seed is surrounded by one of the hardest and most unmanageable of any known shells. Hence the cocoa-nut has readily been able to dispense with the three kernels which each nut used in its earlier and less developed days to produce. But though the palm has thus taken to reducing the number of its seeds in each fruit to the lowest possible point consistent with its continued existence at all, it still goes on retaining many signs of its ancient threefold arrangement. The ancestral and most deeply ingrained habits persist in the earlier stages; it is only in the mature form that the later acquired habits begin fully to predominate. Even so our own boys pass through an essentially savage childhood of ogres and fairies, bows and arrows, sugar-plums and barbaric nursery tales, as well as a romantic boyhood of mediaeval chivalry and adventure, before they steady down into that crowning glory of our race, the solid, sober, matter-of-fact, commercial British Philistine. Hence the cocoa-nut in its unstripped state is roughly triangular in form, its angles answering to the separate three fruits of simpler palms; and it has three pits or weak places in the shell, through which the embryos of the three original kernels used to force their way out. But as only one of them is now needed, that one alone is left soft; the other two, which would be merely a source of weakness to the plant if unprotected, are covered in the existing nut by harder shell. Doubtless they serve in part to deceive the too inquisitive monkey or other enemy, who probably concludes that, if one of the pits is hard and impermeable, the other two are so likewise.

Though I have now, I hope, satisfactorily accounted for the milk in the cocoa-nut, and incidentally for some other matters in its economy as well, I am loath to leave the young seedling, whom I have brought so far on his way, to the tender mercies of the winds and storms and tropical animals, some of whom are extremely fond of his juicy and delicate shoots. Indeed, the growing point or bud of most palms is a very pleasant succulent vegetable, and one kind—the West Indian mountain-cabbage—deserves a better and more justly descriptive name, for it is really much more like seakale or asparagus. I shall try to follow our young seedling on in life, therefore, so as to give, while I am about it, a fairly comprehensive and complete biography of a single flourishing cocoa-nut palm.

Beginning, then, with the fall of the nut from the parent-tree, the troubles of the future palm confront it at once in the shape of the nut-eating crab. This evil-disposed crustacean is common around the sea-coast of the Eastern tropical islands, which is also the region mainly affected by the cocoa-nut palm; for cocoa-nuts are essentially shore-loving trees, and thrive best in the immediate neighborhood of the sea. Among the fallen nuts, the clumsy-looking thief of a crab (his appropriate Latin name is Birgus latro) makes great and dreaded havoc. To assist him in his unlawful object he has developed a pair of front legs, with specially strong and heavy claws, supplemented by a last or tail-end pair armed only with very narrow and slender pincers. He subsists entirely upon a cocoa-nut diet. Setting to work upon a big fallen nut—with the husk on, cocoa-nuts measure in the raw state about twelve inches the long way—he tears off all the coarse fiber bit by bit, and gets down at last to the hard shell. Then he hammers away with his heavy claw on the softest eye-hole till he has pounded an opening right through it. This done he twists round his body so as to turn his back upon the cocoa-nut he is operating upon (crabs are never famous either for good manners or gracefulness) and proceeds awkwardly but effectually to extract all the white kernel or pulp through the breach with his narrow pair of hind pincers. Like man, too, the robber-crab knows the value of the outer husk as well as of the eatable nut itself, for he collects the fiber in surprising quantities to line his burrow and lies upon it, the clumsy sybarite, for a luxurious couch. Alas, however, for the helplessness of crabs and the rapacity and cunning of all-appropriating man! The spoil-sport Malay digs up the nest for the sake of the fiber it contains, which spares him the trouble of picking junk on his own account, and then he eats the industrious crab who has laid it all up, while he melts down the great lump of fat under the robber's capacious tail, and sometimes gets from it as much as a good quart of what may be practically considered as limpid cocoa-nut oil. Sic vos non vobis is certainly the melancholy refrain of all natural history. The cocoa-nut palm intends the oil for the nourishment of its own seedling; the crab feloniously appropriates it and stores it up under his capacious tail for future personal use; the Malay steals it again from the thief for his own purposes; and ten to one the Dutch or English merchant beguiles it from him with sized calico or poisoned rum, and transmits it to Europe, where it serves to lighten our nights and assist at our matutinal tub, to point a moral and adorn the present tale.

If, however, our cocoa-nut is lucky enough to escape the robber-crabs, the pigs, and the monkeys, as well as to avoid falling into the hands of man, and being converted into the copra of commerce, or sold from a costermonger's barrow in the chilly streets of ungenial London at a penny a slice, it may very probably succeed in germinating after the fashion I have already described, and pushing up its head through the surrounding foliage to the sunlight above. As a rule, the cocoa-nut has been dropped by its mother-tree on the sandy soil of a sea-beach; and this is the spot it best loves, and where it grows to the stateliest height. Sometimes, however, it falls into the sea itself, and then the loose husk buoys it up, so that it floats away bravely till it is cast by the waves upon some distant coral reef or desert island. It is this power of floating and surviving a long voyage that has dispersed the cocoa-nut so widely among oceanic islands, where so few plants are generally to be found. Indeed, on many atolls or isolated reefs (for example, on Keeling Island) it is the only tree or shrub that grows in any quantity, and on it the pigs, the poultry, the ducks, and the land-crabs of the place entirely subsist. In any case, wherever it happens to strike, the young cocoa-nut sends up at first a fine rosette of big, spreading leaves, not raised as afterward on a tall stem, but springing direct from the ground in a wide circle, something like a very big and graceful fern. In this early stage nothing can be more beautiful or more essentially tropical in appearance than a plantation of young cocoa-nuts. Their long, feathery leaves spreading out in great clumps from the buried stock, and waving with lithe motion before the strong sea-breeze of the Indies, are the very embodiment of those deceptive ideal tropics which, alas! are to be found in actual reality nowhere on earth save in the artificial palm-houses at Kew, and the Casino Gardens at too entrancing Monte Carlo.

For the first two or three years the young palms must be well watered, and the soil around them opened; after which the tall, graceful stem begins to rise rapidly into the open air. In this condition it may be literally said to make the tropics—those fallacious tropics, I mean, of painters and poets, of "Enoch Arden" and of "Locksley Hall." You may observe that, whenever an artist wants to make a tropical picture, he puts a group of cocoa-nut palms in the foreground, as much as to say, "You see there's no deception; these are the genuine, unadulterated tropics." But as to painting the tropics without the palms, he might just as well think of painting the desert without the camels. At eight or ten years old the tree flowers, bearing blossoms of the ordinary palm-type, degraded likenesses of the lilies and yuccas, greenish and inconspicuous, but visited by insects for the sake of their pollen. The flower, however, is fertilized by the wind, which carries the pollen-grains from one bunch of blossoms to another. Then the nuts gradually swell out to an enormous size, and ripen very slowly, even under the brilliant tropical sun. (I will admit that the tropics are hot, though in other respects I hold them to be arrant impostors, like that precocious American youth who announced on his tenth birthday that in his opinion life wasn't all that it was cracked up to be.) But the worst thing about the cocoa-nut palm, the missionaries always say, is the fatal fact that, when once fairly started, it goes on bearing fruit uninterruptedly for forty years. This is very immoral and wrong of the ill-conditioned tree, because it encourages the idyllic Polynesian to lie under the palms all day long, cooling his limbs in the sea occasionally, sporting with Amaryllis in the shade, or with the tangles of Neæra's hair, and waiting for the nuts to drop down in due time, when he ought (according to European notions) to be killing himself with hard work under a blazing sky, raising cotton, sugar, indigo, and coffee, for the immediate benefit of the white merchant,and the ultimate advantage of the British public. It doesn't enforce habits of steady industry and perseverance, the good missionaries say; it doesn't induce the native to feel that burning desire for Manchester piece-goods and the other blessings of civilization which ought properly to accompany the propagation of the missionary in foreign parts. You stick your nut in the sand; you sit by a few years and watch it growing; you pick up the ripe fruits as they fall from the tree; and you sell them at last for illimitable red cloth to the Manchester piece-goods merchant. Nothing could be more simple or more satisfactory. And yet it is difficult to see the precise moral distinction between the owner of a cocoa-nut grove in the South-Sea Islands and the owner of a coal-mine or a big estate in commercial England. Each lounges decorously through life after his own fashion; only the one lounges in a Russia-leather chair at a club in Pall Mall, while the other lounges in a nice soft dust-heap beside a rolling surf in Tahiti or the Hawaiian Archipelago.

Curiously enough, at a little distance from the sandy levels or alluvial flats of the sea-shore, the sea-loving cocoa-nut will not bring its nuts to perfection. It will grow, indeed, but it will not thrive or fruit in due season. On the coast-line of Southern India, immense groves of cocoa-nuts fringe the shore for miles and miles together; and in some parts, as in Travancore, they form the chief agricultural staple of the whole country. "The state has hence facetiously been called Cocoanutcore," says its historian; which charmingly illustrates the true Anglo-Indian notion of what constitutes facetiousness, and ought to strike the last nail into the coffin of a competitive examination system. A good tree in full bearing should produce one hundred and twenty cocoa-nuts in a season; so that a very small grove is quite sufficient to maintain a respectable family in decency and comfort. Ah, what a mistake the English climate made when it left off its primitive warmth of the Tertiary period, and got chilled by the ice and snow of the Glacial epoch down to its present misty and dreary wheat-growing condition! If it were not for that, those odious habits of steady industry and perseverance might never have been developed in ourselves at all, and we might be lazily picking copra off our own cocoa-palms, to this day, to export in return for the piece-goods of some Arctic Manchester situated somewhere about the north of Spitzbergen or the New Siberian Islands.

Even as things stand at the present day, however, it is wonderful how much use we modern Englishmen now make in our own houses of this far Eastern nut, whose very name still bears upon its face the impress of its originally savage origin. From morning to night we never leave off being indebted to it. We wash with it as old brown Windsor or glycerine soap the moment we leave our beds. We walk across our passages on the mats made from its fiber. We sweep our rooms with its brushes, and wipe our feet on it as we enter our doors. As rope, it ties up our trunks and packages; in the hands of the house-maids it scrubs our floors; or else, woven into coarse cloth, it acts as a covering for bales and furniture sent by rail or steamboat. The confectioner undermines our digestion in early life with cocoanut candy; the cook tempts us later on with cocoa-nut cake; and Messrs. Huntley and Palmer cordially invite us to complete the ruin with cocoa-nut biscuits. We anoint our chapped hands with one of its preparations after washing; and grease the wheels of our carriages with another to make them run smoothly. Finally, we use the oil to burn in our reading-lamps, and light ourselves at last to bed with stearine-candles. Altogether, an amateur census of a single small English cottage results in the startling discovery that it contains twenty-seven distinct articles which owe their origin in one way or another to the cocoa-nut palm. And yet we affect, in our black ingratitude, to despise the question of the milk in the cocoa-nut.—Cornhill Magazine.