The Size of Thoughts

by Nicholson Baker

  If from the modern or the antient Store

  He borrows ought, he always pays ’em more:

  So much improv’d, each Thought, so fine appears,

  Waller or Ovid scarce durst own ’em theirs.

  The Learned Goth has scowr’d all Europe’s Plains,

  France, Spain, and fruitful Italy he drains,

  From every Realm and every Language gains:

  His Gains a Conquest are, and not a Theft;

  He wishes still new Worlds of Wit were left…

  This is a sort of versification of Dryden’s own praise of Boileau, in the essay “On the Origin and Progress of Satire”:

  What he [Boileau] borrows from the ancients he repays with usury of his own, in coin as good and almost as universally valuable.

  Samuel Butler, a few decades earlier, came up with one of the tripier casings for this old trope:

  Our moderne Authors write Playes as they feed hogs in Westphalia, where but one eate’s peas, or akornes, and all the rest feed upon his and one anothers excrement.9

  I happened on Wesley’s Epistle to a Friend Concerning Poetry in the English Poetry Database simply because it mentions the “lumber-thoughts” of a poetical first draft. (Some you should keep, and some “the sponge should strike.”) But I liked the poem and paused over it, for it looked to be something Pope had read carefully:

  Draw the Main Strokes at first, ’twill shew your Skill,

  Life-Touches you may add whene’er you will.

  Ev’n Chance will sometimes all our Art excel,

  The angry Foam we ne’er can hit so well.

  A sudden Thought, all beautiful and bright

  Shoots in and stunns us with amazing Light;

  Secure the happy Moment e’er ’tis past,

  Not Time more swift, or Lightning flies so fast.

  Any self-respecting source-seeker who reads Wesley’s Epistle just after a fresh run-through of Pope’s Essay on Criticism will notice that some of its phrases and ideas were reset a decade later in Pope’s precocious assemblage. Indeed, Pope’s use of Wesley extends beyond phrasing, to the metaphorical structure of whole sections. Here is Wesley:10

  Style is the Dress of Thought; a modest Dress,

  Neat, but not gaudy, will true Critics please:

  Not Fleckno’s Drugget, nor a worse Extream

  All daub’d with Point and Gold at every Seam:

  Who only Antique Words affects, appears

  Like old King Harry’s Court, all Face and Ears;

  Nor in a Load of Wig thy Visage shrowd,

  Like Hairy Meteors glimm’ring through a Cloud:

  Happy are those who here the Medium know,

  We hate alike a Sloven and a Beau.

  I would not follow Fashion to the height

  Close at the Heels, nor yet be out of Sight:

  Words alter, like our Garments, every day,

  Now thrive and bloom, now wither and decay.

  Let those of greater Genius new invent,

  Be you with those in Common Use content.

  And here is Pope, as he tracks Wesley’s passage:

  Expression is the Dress of Thought, and still

  Appears more decent as more suitable;

  A vile Conceit in pompous Words exprest,

  Is like a Clown in regal Purple drest;

  For diff’rent Styles with diff’rent Subjects sort,

  As several Garbs with Country, Town, and Court.

  Some by Old Words to Fame have made Pretence;

  Ancients in Phrase, meer Moderns in their Sense!

  Such labour’d Nothings, in so strange a Style,

  Amaze th’unlearn’d, and make the Learned Smile.

  Unlucky, as Fungoso in the Play,

  These Sparks with aukward Vanity display

  What the Fine Gentleman wore Yesterday!

  And but so mimick ancient Wits at best,

  As Apes our Grandsires in their Doublets drest.

  In Words, as Fashions, the same Rule will hold;

  Alike Fantastick, if too New, or Old;

  Be not the first by whom the New are try’d,

  Nor yet the last to lay the Old aside.

  (The startling figure of the meteor-wig is taken from Boileau; Pope replaces it with the reference to Fungoso, a character in Ben Jonson’s Every Man out of his Humour.)

  So Samuel Wesley’s encomium to Dryden’s artful borrowing-skills seems to have given Pope the go-ahead to pick Wesley’s own pocket. The ingenue-poet (who later knew Wesley and his family) tries to put us off the scent by footnoting his “True Wit” couplet with a vaguely apropos tidbit from Quintilian,11 and Elwin’s commentary adduces a parallel prose passage from Boileau, but the truth is that

  True Wit is Nature to advantage drest,

  What oft was Thought, but ne’er so well Exprest

  is closer to Reverend Samuel Wesley’s good sense than anything else:

  Good Sense12 is spoild in Words unapt exprest,

  And Beauty pleases more when ’tis well drest.

  But there are all degrees of imitation and embezzlement in poetry. Wesley, too, I note, now splashing backward a decade or two in the English Poetry Database, had come up with his “sense well drest” couplet by tinkering with the following triplet from Roscommon’s Essay on Translated Verse (1684):

  Abstruse and Mystick thoughts you must express,

  With painful Care but seeming easiness,

  For truth shines brightest through the plainest dress.13

  As a matter of fact, Samuel Wesley justifies his adaptive reuse of Roscommon right in his poem:

  If English Verse you’d in Perfection see,

  Roscommon read, and Noble Normanby:14

  We borrow all from their exhaustless Store,

  Or little say they have not said before.

  And in lines that must have made Pope’s devious heart beat faster—lines that described in detail the Cave of the Muses, “a wondrous Storehouse,” with Crystal Fountains, and Labyrinths, and “rich Mosaick Work divinely fram’d”—Samuel Wesley urges the beginner to fill his head with other people’s poetry:

  Whate’er within this sacred Hall you find,

  Whate’er will lodge in your capacious Mind

  Let Judgment sort, and skilful Method bind;

  And as from these you draw your antient Store

  Daily supply the Magazine with more.

  Pope, a congenital sorter and binder, wrote very good stuff by following Wesley’s advice, which required him to do exactly what he wanted to do anyway—to fill his capacious mind with the scoria of reading. But our hero must have had some second thoughts: in 1717, when he still hadn’t reached thirty and was collecting his Works (including the Essay on Criticism)—perhaps nipped at by an agenbite or two (for nobody knew better than himself what a “mosaic”—Elwin’s word—of sources his poetry was)—he defended his method in an introduction:

  Therefore they who say our thoughts are not our own because they resemble the Ancients, may as well say our faces are not our own, because they are like our Fathers: And indeed it is very unreasonable, that people should expect us to be Scholars, and yet be angry to find us so.

  Reverend Elwin, glaring up at this sentence from a footnote, snaps:

  The sophistry is transparent. A man may be a scholar without being a plagiarist or an imitator.

  True, and worth saying—but surprisingly sharp. The real point is that Pope took his license to steal from nearby, commonplace, unexciting Samuel Wesley. He did not take it from the ancients, or from the preface to Boileau’s L’Art Poétique; not even from Dryden or Roscommon, who were too grand and prominent for systematic plunder. (Writers, D’Avenant explains, “commonly make such use of treasure found in Bookes, as of other treasure belonging to the Dead, and hidden under ground; for they dispose of both with great secrecy, defacing the shape, or images of the one, as much as of the other; through feare of having the Originall of their stealth, or aboundance discover’d.”)
Pope’s method was to begin with a minor model—either an inadequate earlier translation (or two, or three), or an original but middling poem (The Cave of Poverty)—and then, squirming in its nutrients, to leave his own unspeakably iridescent verse-frass in its husk. Wesley’s Epistle was thus ideal for his purposes: it was cast in the very form (metapoetical verse essay) in which Pope wanted to display himself, and the Reverend obviously had some talent, but, poor man, not enough of it, and he wrote too fast and erred on the side of self-deprecation15—and lacking the necessary complement of true wit, malice, arrogance, and metric tact, all of which Pope knew himself to have in abundance, Wesley, father of thirteen children, had left behind an Epistle that Pope could conveniently despise, and in despising could treat as the fly treats rotting fruit. “Next, o’er his Books his eyes began to roll,” Pope wrote in the revised Dunciad (these four lines replacing the “learned lumber” couplet that he had used in the first version), “In pleasing memory of all he stole”; and though he is not describing himself here, there is an element of tonic self-disgust:

  How here he sipp’d, how there he plunder’d snug

  And suck’d all o’er, like an industrious Bug.

  All writers are to some degree industrious Bugs—and Pope’s transfiguration of the “oft thought” commonplace is an early miracle, unsurpassed by any distich of the nineteenth century. Nonetheless, there were two serious wrongs Pope did Reverend Sam (1662–1735) as he improved upon him. The first was not to mention him in the poem, or if not in the poem itself, then at least in a note. Wesley, a principled tradesman, imported wheelbarrowsful of Roscommon’s and Dryden’s and Sheffield’s plenty into his poem, but he had the good grace to say so in verse as he went. Pope, on the other hand, only briefly mentions Roscommon at the end of the Essay on Criticism (briefly and equivocally, as being “not more learn’d than good”), alludes once to Normanby, and omits Wesley altogether. That on its own wouldn’t be so terrible. But Pope then included Wesley’s name in the first edition of The Dunciad in a ridiculing list of the dull books in Theobald’s library. “Wesley, Watts, and Blome” (or rather “W—–ly, W—–s, and Bl—–”) quickly became “Withers, Quarles, and Blome” in a subsequent printing, when one of Wesley’s sons, Samuel the Younger, a friend of Pope’s, protested:16 Pope hung a gooey footnote from the verse claiming that the slights to Wesley and Watts had appeared in “surreptitious” editions (in fact the surreptitious editions were entirely Pope’s doing), and that both men were “eminent for good life.” Wesley, Pope adds, barely repressing a snigger, “writ the Life of Christ in verse.” This is factually correct, and you can read the whole thing as it was published in 1693, including an account of Jesus at Capernaum, in the English Poetry Database.17 But there was an earlier book of poems, too. When he was twenty-three, Wesley published Maggots: or, Poems on Several Subjects, Never before Handled (1685), a lively clutch of grotesqueries and obscenities. It contains a monologue by a Methuselaian maggot who travels from brain to brain, and takes credit for inspiring various historical figures, including Virgil and Cleopatra; a 245-line “Ode to a Tobacco Pipe” that draws some startling comparisons between the tobacco pipe and the “glyster pipe,” or enema; and a “Dialogue Between a Chamber-pot and a Frying Pan,” in which the Chamber-pot begins

  Stand off! nor with rude Smut disgrace

  The Glories of my brighter face!

  Another of Wesley’s poems is “On a CHEESE: A Pastoral,” and there is a rousing one called “A Pindaricque, On the Grunting of a Hog.” (“Harmonious Hog draw near!” “Harmonious Hog! warble some Anthem out!”) Pope conceals from his readers this cheerfully indecent and commonplace-transfiguring side of Wesley (which helped him in writing the maggoty Rabelaisianisms in The Dunciad), and he is silent about the Epistle itself, which was the host corpse for his Essay. This is the sort of duplicity and unfairness to the memory of an important predecessor that makes many of Pope’s commentators eventually hate him. Coleridge plagiarized and paraphrased, and he even used decoy Latin footnotes, as Pope had, to distract readers from less impressive contemporary precedents, but he was such a patent dysfunctional, lifting the gate on a sluiceway of stagnant metaphysics for anyone who would stand for it,18 that we forgive him his thefts of Schelling; Pope on the other hand was clean and sober, a calculating wee-hour snarfer, and it doesn’t seem fair that he should also be a great poet.

  In 1709, when he was five years old, John (“Jacky”) Wesley, not yet famous as the founder of Methodism, was saved from a fire in the rectory at Epworth that burned all of his father Samuel Wesley’s books, including a valuable Hebrew collection, which Samuel had been using to compile a Latin commentary on the Book of Job.19 Samuel Wesley described the narrow escape in a letter to Sheffield:

  When I was without, I heard one of my poor lambs, left still above the stairs, about six years old, cry out dismally, “Help me!” I ran in again to go up-stairs, but the staircase was now all afire. I tried to force up through a second time, holding my breeches over my head, but the steam of fire beat me down. I thought I had done my duty; went out of the house to that part of my family I had saved, in the garden, with the killing cry of my child in my ears. I made them all kneel down, and we prayed God to receive his soul.

  A servant attempted another rescue:

  The man was fallen down from the window, and all the bed and hangings in the room where he was blazing. They helped up the man the second time, and poor Jacky leaped into his arms and was saved. I could not believe it till I had kissed him two or three times. My wife then said to me, “Are your books safe?” I told her it was not much now she and all the rest were preserved, for we lost not one soul, though I escaped with the skin of my teeth. A little lumber was saved below stairs, but not one rag or leaf above. We found some of the silver in a lump, which I shall send up to Mr. Hoare to sell for me.

  Jacky Wesley took seriously his naked delivery from the flames. It “fixed itself in his mind as a work of divine providence,” says the Dictionary of National Biography. “The day after the fire,” Southey writes (in Note V to Volume 1 of his life of John Wesley), “as Mr. [Samuel] Wesley was walking in the garden, and surveying the ruins of the house, he picked up part of a leaf of his Polyglot Bible, on which (says his son John) just these words were legible: Vade, vende omnia quae habes, et attolle crucem, et sequere me.—Go, sell all that thou hast, and take up thy cross, and follow me.” John Wesley obeyed: he took up the cross and traveled incessantly, preaching (by some accounts) forty thousand sermons and covering two hundred and fifty thousand miles before he died. The substantial sums he made from the sale of instructive works to the semiliterate, he gave away. One of these was Wesley’s Complete English Dictionary. In the preface to the second edition of the dictionary, dated October 20, 1763, John Wesley writes:

  In this Edition I have added some hundreds of words, which were omitted in the former: chiefly from Mr. Johnson’s dictionary, which I carefully looked over for that purpose. And I will now venture to affirm, that, small as it is, this dictionary is quite sufficient, for enabling any one to understand the best Writings now extant, in the English tongue.

  But Wesley’s dictionary is not sufficient. It has no entry for Lombard or lombard-house, and it skips from LU’DICROUS to A LUMINARY—even though Mr. Johnson had not shrunk from a definition of lumber, as we have seen, and even though John Wesley’s father had used a little ~ from below stairs to refer to everything besides little Jacky Wesley himself that was saved from the portentous fire. That the word isn’t there may be evidence, though, if evidence is needed, of its spoken currency among the rural poor, since John Wesley’s is essentially a hard-word dictionary for the unschooled-but-willing-to-learn.