The Size of Thoughts
Page 33
The haughty Pedant, swoln with Frothy Name
Of Learned Man, big with his Classick Fame;
A thousand Books read o’re and o’re again,
Does word for word most perfectly retain,
Heap’d in the Lumber-Office of his Brain;
Yet this cram’d Skull, this undigested Mass,
Does very often prove an arrant Ass;
Believes all Knowledge is to Books confin’d,
That reading only can inform the Mind.…
The “lumber-office” here—a colorful pawnbrokering of what is merely a “teste entassez” (a heaped head) in the original5—was perhaps the first time the lumber-room metaphor was applied inside the skull.
These poetical uses—“learned Lombard,” “Ill Poets by their Lumber known,” “book-learned blockheads,” and “the Lumber-Office of his Brain”—in addition to others by Dryden, Butler, Rochester, Oldham, and Swift, supplemented by Locke’s figure of the contents of the mind-magazine as “a Collection of Lumber not reduc’d to Use or Order”—were the various tributary strands, I theorized, that Pope boondoggled into the great keychain of his couplet.
But then in December of 1994, more knowledgeable by this time about Pope’s habits, I went through the hundred-odd instances of lumber from 1660 to 1800 one more time, onscreen. I stopped again at the four lumber-uses in Samuel Garth’s Dispensary, more than in any other single poem. Here was a poet who really liked the word.6 One lumber comes in a description of Chaos’s underground home:
To these dark Realms much learned Lumber creeps.
Up till then I had dismissed this particular “learned ~” as a straightforward borrowing by Garth from Pope—just as Samuel Boyce’s “With loads of lumber treasur’d in his head” (1757), and Paul Whitehead’s “Loads of dull lumber, all inspir’d by Pay” (1733), and Thomas Paget’s “Much hoarded Learning but like Lumber lies” (1735), and George Ogle et al.’s. “Small Store of learned Lumber fills my Head” (1741) were all borrowings—since on the bibliographical screen of the database, Garth’s work (a popular and much discussed mock-heroic satire on uncharitable apothecaries) was dated 1714, three years after the Essay on Criticism. But Chadwyck-Healey is in the business of text-conversion, not literary history: the year they so scrupulously associate with each electrified book is the year of the edition from which they keyed their text, which is not necessarily the year that the text was first published. Presented with a poem published sometime in the seventeenth century, but transcribed from an edition published in 1908, you know, of course, not to trust 1908 as your rough date of original appearance, but in the case of poems that went through multiple editions in close succession, the nearly correct year can sometimes throw you off. Here (through simple ignorance on my part: Samuel Garth was one of the best-known poets of the period) I had been thrown off badly. The Dispensary first came out in 1699, and was “universally and liberally applauded,” according to Samuel Johnson, in his “Life of Garth.” Chadwyck-Healey had worked from the seventh edition, advertised on the title page as having “several Descriptions and Episodes never before printed.” What I had to find out, then, and what the database couldn’t tell me, was whether Garth’s “learned lumber” had appeared in one of the editions prior to the 1711 publication of Pope’s Essay on Criticism, or in one of the editions subsequent to it.
There would, however, be no difficulty in establishing that Pope could have read Garth’s “learned lumber” if Garth’s use of the phrase did precede Pope’s. It was not possible, in other words, that the two poets discovered it independently, for Pope and Garth were friends and collaborators. Garth read Pope’s early Pastorals (1709) in manuscript, and “Summer,” the second pastoral, was dedicated “To Dr. Garth” in editions after 1717. Later still, Pope (anxious to show the world that he didn’t feud with everyone) added this note:
Dr. Samuel Garth, Author of the Dispensary, was one of the first friends of the author, whose acquaintance with him began at fourteen or fifteen. Their friendship continu’d from the year 1703, to 1718, which was that of his death.
Both poets’ biographers (John F. Sena and Maynard Mack) are cautious about accepting the 1703 date as marking the inception of the friendship. Fifteen seems a trifle early, and Pope was childishly vain about his literary precocity, confusing and falsifying the epistolary record whenever he could, and even in middle age decking his reissued poems with boy-wonder dates and testimonials in the most pathetic way. (“Written in the Year 1704,” “Written at sixteen years of age,” etc.) John Sena thinks Garth may have met Pope at Will’s Coffee House—1706 or 1707 might be a better date than 1703. Whatever the circumstances, they knew each other several years before Pope published the Essay on Criticism, and remained friends after it was published. (Garth was probably fortunate in dying before Pope had a chance to become infuriated at some imagined slight and draw-and-quarto him in verse, as he was wont to do with old friends and allies.)
Moreover Pope owned at least two different editions of The Dispensary—that of 1703, in which he wrote his name and a note that the book was a “Donum Autoris,” and that of 1706, with annotations that Frank H. Ellis (who edited the poem in Poems on Affairs of State, Volume 6) called “disappointing.” In his “Life of Garth,” Samuel Johnson wrote that “It was remarked by Pope that The Dispensary had been corrected in every edition, and that every change was an improvement.” This fact Johnson got (according to G. Birkbeck Hill’s footnote) from Jonathan Richardson’s Richardsoniana:
Mr. Pope told me himself that “there was hardly an alteration of the innumerable ones through every edition that was not for the better.”
All right, then—was “learned lumber” one of those innumerable alterations for the better that came about before 1711, or after 1711? Unaware of Ellis’s excellent modern scholarly collation of all the Dispensary editions, I went (on December 14, 1994) to the Bancroft Library at Berkeley, and examined their fragile 1699 edition. It uses lumber, but not learned lumber:
With sordid Age his Features are defac’d;
His Lands unpeopl’d, and his Countries waste.
Here Lumber, undeserving Light, is kept,
A P—p’s7 Bill to this dark Region’s swept:
Where Mushroom Libels silently retire;
And, soon as born, with Decency expire.
“Lumber, undeserving Light” is not at all bad—its scansion is identical with Pope’s “Blockhead, ignorantly read” and it has the L-iteration-alliteration that is important to Pope’s couplet. But apparently it wasn’t good enough for Garth, since by 1706 (as I determined at the Special Collection of the Green Library at Stanford, which fortunately owns a Sixth Edition Dispensary), Garth had updated it to:
A grifly Wight, and hideous to the Eye;
An aukward Lump of fhapelefs Anarchy.
With fordid Age his Features are defac’d;
His Lands unpeopl’d, and his Countries wafte.
To these dark Realms much learned Lumber creeps,
There copious M—–8 fafe in Silence fleeps
Where Mufhroom Libels in Oblivion lye,
And, foon as born, like other Monfters die.
Therefore 1706 is the crucial publication date in the history of learned lumber; the point at which all dull, voluminous commentary receives its most succinct dismissal. The Yale Medical Library, as it happens, owns an interleaved Fifth Edition Dispensary (1703), in which (as Frank Ellis writes in his Affairs of State collation) “extensive manuscript revisions have been made, in a hand not Garth’s, both on the blank leaves and in the text itself.” This marked-up 1703 edition, which Ellis calls 1703A, is probably, as he says, “a fair copy of the text that actually went to the printer” of the 1706 edition; one of the manuscript revisions is “To these dark Realms much learned Lumber creeps.” We deduce, then, that “learned lumber” was a molecule successfully synthesized by Garth in his mock-epic alembic at some point between 1703 and 1706—five years, at the very least, before it appeared in
Pope’s published patch-box of an Essay. Of the two men, sad to say, Garth was the one who fused all the Lombardic antecedents into “learned lumber”; Pope merely made a more pointed use of Garth’s condensation.9 “Pope’s admirer,” writes Peter Quennell, in his biography of Pope,
if he troubles to study [The Dispensary], is often haunted by a vague suspicion that he has met a line or couplet elsewhere, in a very different, much more spacious context; and it soon occurs to him that, although Pope may not have borrowed from Garth … his old friend’s poem may have lingered in the background of his mind, and that, while he was imagining and writing, he was also unconsciously remembering.
On the evidence, “may not have borrowed” is much too charitable, as is “unconsciously remembering”: throughout his life, Pope’s mimicry and mosaicry has every sign of being entirely conscious—brilliant and beautiful, but at the same time contemptible.
Why, though, an untutored twentieth-century reader might ask, wouldn’t Garth put up some sort of minor fuss about Pope’s many petty thefts? Because he was good-natured? Bolingbroke said Garth was “the best-natured ingenious wild man I ever knew,” and Pope in “The Epistle to Arbuthnot” calls him “well-natur’d Garth,” and he is quoted in Spence’s Anecdotes as saying that Garth was “one of the best natured men in the world.” In an age of wig-wearers, Garth wore one of unusual magnitude and copiousness (his portrait was painted in it)—and it could be that Pope, whose praise always came at the end of a long series of calculations, thought so highly of Garth’s character because Garth didn’t get angry and shriek, as Belinda did in The Rape of the Lock (a poem about plagiarism), upon seeing his flowing curls so expertly forfexed. Reverend Wesley’s phrase about overdressed style-wigs “Like Hairy Meteors glimm’ring through a Cloud” may supply a hint as to what Pope is doing: he’s snipping Garth’s locks in The Rape of the Lock, but because he is writing a better poem than The Dispensary, Pope’s appropriations will immortalize and meteorize the wiggy victim (Garth), who would otherwise be forgotten:
But trust the Muse—she saw it upward rise,
Tho’ mark’d by none but quick Poetic Eyes:…
A sudden Star, it shot thro’ liquid Air,
And drew behind a radiant Trail of Hair.
(Rape of the Lock, Canto V)
I may have come up with this theory (Pope as hairdresser) because not far from where I live is a hair-styling salon called simply Alexander Pope. I haven’t had a haircut there yet.
Maybe all this talk of Pope’s theft is unfair to him. Yet even Maynard Mack, who is sympathetic to his lifelong poet, brings himself to say that “there remains a reserve in him that in some circumstances can edge over into evasiveness, deceit, or chicanery.”10 Professor Mack tentatively attributes the chicanery to Pope’s being a Catholic in a Catholic-hating age, an only child, and a hunchback, which doesn’t seem fair to all the good-hearted siblingless Catholic hunchbacks who have ever lived. Pope was bad because it helped him to write to be bad—he snuck things from other writers without thanking them, and then, having wronged them that way, he took offense at them publicly, too. One after another, he unjustly attacked the figures in or at the periphery of his circle, from John Dennis to Lewis Theobald to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, not because he cared to right wrongs and expose incom-petencies, but because the glove-flinging, spittle-spraying indignation that accompanied an autochthonous squabble was his best muse. He hated being hated, but he found he liked being angry, and he loved versifying his revenge.
In the early case of “learned lumber,” though, there is another way the derivation might have worked. Say a seventeen-year-old, vastly talented but still byline-shy Pope, encouraged by his reception at Will’s, offered to comment on some of the less successful passages in Garth’s gift to him, The Dispensary. Say that Pope, in the course of going over the poem, came up with some fine alternative lines and outright interpolations and showed them to Garth, who, very impressed (and confusing self-interest with generosity toward lyric youth), stuck them in his poem. Under this supposition, the reason why Pope said that each edition of The Dispensary was an improvement over the last was that Pope had himself supplied some of the improvements. Here is the whole “learned lumber” passage from the Essay on Criticism, italics included this time for variety. Notice that it goes on to mention Samuel Garth by name:
The Bookful Blockhead, ignorantly read,
With Loads of Learned Lumber in his Head,
With his own Tongue still edifies his Ears,
And always List’ning to Himself appears.
All Books he reads, and all he reads assails,
From Dryden’s Fables down to Durfey’s Tales.
With him, most Authors steal their Works, or buy;
Garth did not write his own Dispensary.
Near the end of his life, Pope added a self-congratulating footnote to this last line:
A common slander at that time in prejudice of that deserving author. Our poet [i.e., Pope] did him this justice, when that slander most prevail’d; and it is now (perhaps the sooner for this very verse) dead and forgotten.
Perhaps the “justice” Pope is doing Garth with that line is rather a trickier kind of betrayal. Pope is pretending to be holding a false charge up to ridicule—the charge that Garth stole or bought his creation—while actually saying what he in fact literally says: that Garth did not write his own Dispensary. He is spreading gossip without spreading it—hiding his true confession behind a pretend-sneer at a blockhead critic. One can speculate that Pope got paid, either in amazed respect or in actual cash, for his contributions to Garth’s poem, just as, later on, Pope paid (underpaid) the poets who quietly helped him translate The Odyssey. I haven’t seen the marked-up Yale copy, 1703A, in which those 414 added and 82 revised lines are included “in a hand not Garth’s”—but even if the modifications aren’t in Pope’s handwriting, and they probably aren’t, it is entirely possible that Pope was responsible for some of the added couplets, including the Tennysonian moment that G. Birkbeck Hill and Peter Quennell choose to quote:
To Die, is landing on some silent Shoar,
Where Billows never break, nor Tempests roar.11
The sparkling line in The Dispensary about the healing Pine that will “Lament your Fate in tears of Turpentine” is a post-1703 addition, too. Both of these passages sound to me like Pope at his precocious best—and if Pope was capable of introducing these improvements into Garth’s cantos, he could also have thought up “To these dark Realms much learned Lumber creeps / There copious M[ilbourne] safe in Silence sleeps” and given it to Garth as well.12
What we can earnestly strive to believe, then (although it may well not be true), is that Pope, who is after all the greater poet, slipped Garth the “learned lumber” under the tabula rasa around 1705, and then found he liked it so much that he wished he hadn’t, and used it in his own poem in 1711, reclaiming it from Ozell’s Lutrin. Garth didn’t protest these and other later borrowings, because Pope was a friend and Garth was good-natured, and because if he did, he would then have had to admit that some number of lines in the revised and amplified poem were not from his own pen. I don’t know whether to subscribe to this sequence of events or not. Either the young Pope stole his learned lumber outright from Garth (and Ozell), which would diminish him forever in my eyes, since I thought of him, when I began my lumberjahr, as being at the center of the metaphor of study that I had chosen to study, or the young Pope first loaned it to Garth and then repossessed it, which adds to the picture of his tiresome sneakiness, but leaves his original talents unim-peached. At the moment, I can’t help reading the following additions in the 1706 Dispensary as being the stealthy work of a teenage Pope, a warm up for his Rape of the Lock, rather than the work of a secure and successful forty-five-year-old Garth:
But still the offspring of your Brain shall prove
The Grocer’s care, and brave the Rage of Jove.
When Bonfires blaze, your vagrant Works shall rise
In Rockets, till they reach the wondring Skyes.
The lines sound so young, so ambitious (though ironic), and in their “you” address, so like the last four lines of the Rape—
When those fair Suns shall sett, as sett they must,
And all those Tresses shall be laid in Dust;
This Lock, the Muse shall consecrate to Fame,
And mid’st the Stars inscribe Belinda’s Name!
Pope learned what he had in him to say by helping Garth say things he didn’t know he wanted to say, but was happy to be thought to have said. Surely Garth had help: the fact that there are four lumbers in The Dispensary’s final version is, I now see, an argument not for Garth’s uncontrollable enthusiasm for lumber as a word, but rather for the existence of multiple contributors to his poem (one of whom was Pope): helped by one or more hands, Garth lost track of what he had and was no longer able to suppress unwanted repetitions.13