The Size of Thoughts
Page 34
And there I’m going to have to stop. The long-overdue English Poetry disks, housed in their plastic jewel-boxes, must be returned to Chadwyck-Healey. One book after another I have sliced in half and jammed down on the juicing hub—at times my roistered brain-shaft has groaned like a tiny electric god in pain with the effort of noshing and filtering all this verbal pulp. No doubt there are other important early lumber-formations waiting to be found—I never got around to checking Jeremy Taylor’s Holy Dying (1651), and I was only cursory in my scan of The Compleat Angler (1653)—but I’m stopping anyway. I have poked through verbal burial mounds, I have overemphasized minor borrowings, I have placed myself deep in the debt of every accessible work of reference, and I have overquoted and overquibbled—of course I have: that is what always happens when you pay a visit to the longbeards’ dusty chamber. Lumber-room loans the short-sold world back to the reader, while storing all of poetry and prose within as a shrouded pledge. It contains the notion of containment; it keeps in mind how little we can successfully keep in mind. I will miss looking upon every author as the potential employer of a single perversely chosen unit of vocabulary. All the pages I have flipped and copied and underlined will turn gray again and pull back into the shadows, and have no bearing on one another. Lumber becomes treasure only temporarily, through study, and then it lapses into lumber again. Books open, and then they close.
(1995)
1 Except for a use by John Ozell in 1708, to be footnoted shortly. Without artificial retrieval-tools, I also found this ante-Papal line from the Prologue to Book IV of the Urquhart-Motteux translation of Rabelais (1694): “Since tools without their hafts are useless lumber.” And in Book IV, chapter 59, Rabelais’s Gastrolators offer their god some “lumber pies with hot sauce,” a translation of “pastéz à la saulce chaulde.” But I saw no instance of the word in Book III, chapters 3–5, in which Panurge and Pantagruel debate the advantages of debt. In translating pastéz (Book II, chapter 5 and elsewhere) Sir Thomas Urquhart (1611–1660) seems generally to have employed “pasties”; Peter Motteux, his successor (and Wesley’s acquaintance), introduced the lumber into the pie. Pastissage, Montaigne’s curious word, does not appear anywhere in Rabelais, according to Dixon and Dawson’s Concordance des Oeuvres de François Rabelais (1992).
2 De hammer dat John Henry swung,
It weighed over nine pound;
He broke a rib in his lef’-han’ side,
An’ his intrels fell on de groun’,
Lawd, Lawd, an’ his intrels fell on de groun’.
(“John Henry,” in Auden, The Oxford Book of Light Verse)
3 But here the learned Lombard whom I trace
My forward Pen by slower Method stays …
Pope’s first published poem, a translation of Chaucer’s “Merchant’s Tale” that was published in 1709, begins in Lombardy, too:
There liv’d in Lombardy, as Authors write
In Days of old, a wise and worthy Knight…
4 Denham’s parody, contained in Disk 1 of the English Poetry Database, is reprinted in an appendix to David Gladish’s edition of Gondibert, 1971, where there are also some lines about D’Avenant’s “sad mis-haps, / Of drinking, riming, and of claps.”
5 Un Pědant enyvrě de sa vaine science,
Tout herissé de Grec, tout bouffi d’arrogance,
Et qui, de mille Auteurs retenus mot pour mot,
Dans sa teste entassez, n’a souvent fait qu’un Sot,
Croit qu’un livre fait tout …
Entasser des écus is a common phrase for hoarding money, according to the Concise Oxford French Dictionary—maybe the anonymous Englisher is trying to preserve the financial clink in “entassez” with “lumber-office.” The translation is from the Poems on Affairs of State (1697), vol. 1, p. 210, entitled “The Fourth Satyr of Boileau to W.K.”—it was left out of the modern edition of the Poems on Affairs of State, but it is on the EPFTD.
6 Garth’s heavy use of lumber was infectious: Geoffrey Tillotson, in his introduction to the Twickenham edition of Pope’s The Rape of the Lock (1940, rev. ed, 1954, p. 113), writes: “Among the medical lumber of [Garth’s] poem are satiric references to the ‘beau monde’ (the phrase of the time) which provide Pope with hints and materials.”
7 P—p’s = Sir John Philipps, who, according to Ellis’s note, introduced a bill in 1699 for the suppression of “all sorts of Debauchery.… Adultery was propos’d to be punished with Death.” The bill died in committee. Defoe, in “An Encomium Upon a Parliament” (1699) wrote:
’Twas voted once, that for the Sin
Of Whoring Men should die all;
But then ’twas wisely thought again,
The House would quickly grow so thin,
They durst not stand the Tryal.
(See Poems on Affairs of State, vol. 6, pp. 56, 121.) There is a “W—–” attacked in Canto 5 of the 1699 edition of The Dispensary, who is none other than Samuel Wesley:
Had W—– never aim’d in Verse to please,
We had not rank’d him with our Ogilbys.
To this unprovoked and stupid libel (John Ogilby, who died in 1676, was evidently a clunky translator of Homer and Virgil and the object of much ridicule-reçu), Wesley responded a year later in his Epistle in a restrained passage about the pasteboard poetical machinery of the sort Garth used in The Dispensary:
And G—h, tho barren is his Theme and mean,
By this has reach’d at least the fam’d Lutrine.
Wesley alludes here to charges by Blackmore, Defoe, and others that Garth took his idea for The Dispensary from Boileau’s Le Lutrin (the story of a disputed reading-desk)—charges that Pope would later encounter in connection with his Rape of the Lock. The couplet is also, by virtue of the mispronunciation of lutrin forced by the rhyme-word mean, a pun on latrine, apt because of the internecine urinal-throwing in Garth’s poem.
8 M—– looks to be Luke Milbourne (1649–1720), who attacked Dryden’s Virgil in 1698, and attempted what Sir Walter Scott later called “a rickety translation of his own.” I made this tentative identification by looking through the two-syllable trochaic surnames under M in the index to Ellis’s Affairs of State volume; there is a note about Milbourne on p. 164, in explication of a passage in Daniel Defoe’s exuberant The Pacificator (1700), one of many poems by Defoe that aren’t included in the English Poetry Database. (Defoe devotes a whole page to the opposition between Wit and Sense in poetry; e.g., “Wit is a King without a Parliament, / And Sense a Democratick Government.”)
9 John Ozell’s important 1708 verse translation of Boileau’s Le Lutrin (not a part of Chadwyck-Healey’s gathering) includes, in Canto III, a very close imitation of Garth’s 1706 passage:
There undisturb’d volum’nous H—–sleeps,
Him under Twenty faithful Locks he keeps;
Secure from Chandlers, and devouring Fire,
The learned Lumber there remains intire.
(I don’t know who “H—–” is.) L’amas (“heap,” “hoard,” “load”) is the curt original in Boileau that Ozell expands into the Garthian “learned Lumber.” Nicholas Rowe, in his introduction to Ozell’s translation, writes: “Those who will take the Trouble to compare ’em now they are both in one Language, will be best able to judge, how near the Translator of the Lutrin comes to the Beauties which all the World has so justly admired in Dr. Garth.” Indeed. Since Ozell (whom Pope disliked enough to write a short, nasty epigram against the English Lutrin, published in 1727) had already stolen Garth’s “Learned Lumber” by 1708, Pope may have felt that it had become public property. (The first covert quoter is a thief; the second is merely well read.) The difficulty (for Pope) is that we tolerate a higher degree of importation in a translation like Ozell’s than in a professedly original poem like Pope’s Essay.
10 Alexander Pope: A Life, p. 103.
11“Tennysonian” is stretching it—I’m thinking of:
And Enoch Arden, a rough sailor’s lad
Made orphan
by a winter shipwreck, play’d
Among the waste and lumber of the shore …
See the Tennyson concordance by “Arthur E. Baker, F.R.Hist.S., F.L.A., Secretary and Librarian, Taunton. Author of ‘A Brief Account of the Public Library Movement in Taunton,’ etc.,” which gives only that one lumber, as against six uses of luminous that immediately follow. Richard Blackmore (an enemy of Garth and eventually of Pope), in his Creation (1712), offers a beautiful intermediating image. Without the winds, he writes, a ship would
lye a lazy and a useless Load,
The Forest’s wasted Spoils, the Lumber of the Flood.
12 “Creeps” also sounds Popish; unfortunately, though, Pope’s famous prosodic precept about monosyllables—“And ten low Words oft creep in one dull Line”—happens to be, as the Twickenhamites note, straight from Dryden’s “Essay of Dramatic Poesy”: “he creeps along with ten little words in every line.” The presence of Milbourne in the new passage (if it is he) does perhaps attest to Pope’s authorship, though: Pope went on to condemn Milbourne several times, e.g., in The Essay on Criticism (1. 463), and in The Dunciad (Book II and Appendix). Milbourne came to be thought of by Pope as Dryden’s Theobald.
13 Apropos of word-frequency: of those writers whose careers preceded or overlapped Pope’s, Edward (“Ned”) Ward, the one who mentioned “lumber pies” some sections back, is the one who, according to the English Poetry Database, employs lumber the most frequently—eight times. He is followed by Pope himself: six unique lumbers and one lumberhouse (which must be searched for separately), after you subtract the duplicate lines from Dunciad I and Dunciad II. Dryden is next with five lumbers, if you add in the one from Mr. Limberham that the concordance gives, but which isn’t in the EPFTD because it’s from a play. Butler, Garth, Oldham, and Swift (though Swift isn’t on the disks) are next with four apiece; Denham has three; while underachievers like John Byrom, Aaron Hill, William Meston, and Samuel Wesley have career totals of only two lumbers. A relatively lumber-rich poetical loam, then, seems to be a good predictor of literary merit. Based on the statistics, it may be time for a revaluation of Ned Ward.
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