ABSTRACT
There is a story current or adrift somewhere of a certain missionary who went among the savages and there inculcated divine or other truth to such a sensibly insufferable degree that the leading converts, discreetly tempering justice with indulgence, cut off exactly one half of his tongue and sent him back with the other half unextracted. The regrettable result of such untimely mercy was this; that being quite unable to hold the tongue which remained to him he went about talking in a dialect of which no mortal could make anything. Whether or not men in general suffered much loss or expressed much anguish in consequence of this privation, we cannot now say: but the missionary could by no means endure it for them. In the general interest of creation, he went to a surgeon who proved ingenious. This philanthropist, by judicious extirpation of what tongue was left, enabled (it is said) the patient to speak thenceforward in an audible intelligible manner, by a select use of gutturals and labials: to what purpose we can only conjecture. It has long since been evident to the select and compassionate reader that a poet now living has for his auditor’s sins and his own been judicially afflicted by the severe and inscrutable fates with the visitation which human barbarity inflicted on this missionary. With the relic of his tongue chafed perpetually from root to tip with a fruitless irritation or itch for impossible speech, this memorable though mournful example of strenuous human perseverance has now been uttering for the last twenty or thirty years the inarticulate vocal appeal of a tongueless though verbose eloquence. The amount of pure noise produced is really, when one thinks of it, a praiseworthy thing. For a man with organs unimpaired it would
ear becomes to a compassionate mind almost melodious when one reflects that to the tympanum of the afflictive but innocent being which produced it, it may carry the music of a sweet significance. Moreover, if for no cause that man can tell the singer of inarticulate discords takes pleasure in afflicting men, has not Providence for no cause visible to the sufferer taken pleasure in afflicting it? There is even a certain relief to reader as listener in coming upon these audible syllables which do hiss and grind, clash and shriek, in a consecutive manner and to some given tune of meaning. They are indeed too infrequent; and a scientific charity would fain hope that the invaluable surgeon may yet turn up with curative lancet to do all parties a good turn. For a good turn we believe it would be: however incalculably small may be the infinitesimal grain of a message worth delivering which lies presumably latent in the minstrel of Gigadibs and Bombastes,1 it must be better worth hearing than mere inarticulations jerked up by painful fits out of the noisy verbal whirlpools of a clamorous chaos.
