The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Edgar Allan Poe [752]
Let us, by way of exemplification, imagine one of these gentlemen reviewing — as he calls it — the Paradise Lost. He would discourse of it thus: "The Paradise Lost is the earnest outpouring of the oneness of the psychological MAN. It has the individuality of the true singleness. It is not to be regarded as a poem — but as a work — as a multiple Theogony — as a manifestation of the Works and the Days. It is a pinion for the Progress — a wheel in the Movement that moveth ever and goeth alway — a mirror of Self-Inspection, held up by the Seer of the Age essential — of the Age in esse — for the Seers of the Ages possible — in posse. We hail a brother in the Work." Of the mere opinions of the donkeys who brag thus — of their mere dogmas and doctrines, literary, aesthetical, or what not — we know little, and, upon our honor, we wish to know less. Occupied, laputically, in their great work of a Progress that never progresses, we take it for granted, also, that they care as little about ours. But whatever the opinions of these people may be — however portentous the "IDEA" which they have been so long threatening to "evolve" — we still think it clear that they take a very roundabout way of evolving it. The use of language is in the promulgation of thought. If a man, or a SEER, or whatever else he may choose to call himself, while the rest of the world calls him an ass — if he have an idea which he does not understand himself, the least thing he can do is to say nothing about it; for, of course, he can entertain no hope that what he, the SEER cannot comprehend, should be comprehended by the mass of common humanity; but if he have an idea which is actually intelligible to himself, and if he really wish to render it intelligible to others, we then hold it as indisputable that he should employ those forms of speech which are the best adapted to further his object. He should speak to the people in that people's ordinary tongue. He should arrange words, such as are habitually employed, in collocations, such as those in which we are accustomed to see those words arranged. But to all this the orphicist thus replies: " I am a SEER. My IDEA — the idea which by Providence I am especially commissioned to evolve — is one so vast — so novel — that ordinary words, in ordinary collocations, will be insufficient for its comfortable evolution." Very true. We grant the vastness of the IDEA. But, then, if ordinary language be insufficient — the ordinary language which men understand — à fortiori will be insufficient that inordinate language which no man has ever understood, and which any well-educated baboon would blush in being accused of understanding. The SEER, therefore, has no resource but to oblige mankind by holding his tongue, and suffering his IDEA to remain quietly "unevolved," until some mesmeric mode of intercommunication shall be invented, whereby the antipodil brains of the SEER and of the man of common sense, shall be brought into the necessary rapport. Meantime, we " earnestly". ask if bread and butter be the vast IDEA in question — if bread and butter be any portion of this vast IDEA — for we have often observed that when a SEER has to speak of even so usual a thing as bread and butter, he can never be induced to mention it outright. He will, if you choose, say anything and everything, but bread or butter. He will consent to hint at buckwheat cake. He may even accommodate you so far as to insinuate oatmeal porridge — but if bread and butter be really the matter intended, we never yet met the gentleman of this peculiar school who could get out the three individual words — bread and butter.
And of our Quarterlies what shall we say? — of the aid which they are likely to afford us in investigating the condition of our