The Size of Thoughts
Page 32
My discovery, in Samuel Wesley’s letter, of a casual l.–phrase20 was, I think, the happiest para-scholarly moment I experienced while working on this entire piece of laxicography. It will be years before Samuel Wesley’s letters are searchable electronically, if they ever are, which means that I can safely cast myself as a philological John Henry, holding my own against the tireless steam-drill in the railroad song: the steam-powered English Poetry Full-Text Database located Wesley’s use of “lumber-thoughts” (and the EPFTD is steam-turbine-powered, assuming the usual sources of electric power), but I alone—steamed-milk-and-espresso-powered manual rhabdomancer—have found the humbler, below-stairs epistolary use (a use that demonstrates unpremeditated currency, no fossil of poetic diction) with my own untooled hands, by paging through a small-press book that lacks an index. I don’t seem to tire of Muriel Spark’s transfiguration: Wesley’s letter-lumber becomes a lump of silver for me, since I have chosen to search for it, and I will bundle it in this paragraph and send it up to a latter-day “Mr. Hoare” to sell.21 At the same time, I will do what I can to rescue Wesley’s poetry, which I want to like, because Wesley is, despite episodes of marital stubbornness and fatherly pig-headedness (he ruined one daughter’s life by forbidding her to marry the man she wanted), a considerably more appealing person than Pope. Indeed Reverend Wesley could have been a real–life model for the good-hearted, stoical Vicar of Wakefield. Like Reverend Wesley, Goldsmith’s hero (Dr. Primrose) lives in the country with his large family, where he undergoes a series of Job-like trials and is forever in debt; and like Wesley, the Vicar just barely saves his children from a fire:
That moment I heard the cry of the babes within, who were just awaked by the fire, and nothing could have stopped me. “Where, where, are my children?” cried I, rushing through the flames and bursting the door of the chamber in which they were confined. “Where are my little ones?”—“Here, dear pappa, here we are,” cried they together, while the flames were just catching the bed where they lay. I caught them both in my arms and snatched them through the fire as fast as possible, while just as I was got out, the roof sunk in. “Now,” cried I, holding up my children, “now let the flames burn on, and all my possessions perish. Here they are, I have saved my treasure. Here, my dearest, here are our treasures, and we shall yet be happy.” We kissed our little darlings a thousand times, they clasped us round the neck, and seemed to share our transports, while their mother laughed and wept by turns.
It’s at least possible that Goldsmith was recalling some account of the 1709 fire at Wesley’s Epworth Rectory (either Wesley’s actual letter to Sheffield or something written or preached by one of his famous Methodist sons) when he was writing this scene in his 1766 novel.
1 The lurching ugliness of “communication channels” must be intentional, a wave of the toilet-brush to the abstract nouns that can suddenly start marching energetically in place in the middle of an otherwise fine passage in Wordsworth’s Prelude.
2 Ruskin uses “scoria” in the preface to his Crown of Wild Olive, in one of his eulogistic antipollution paragraphs, which I must quote: “And, in a little pool, behind some houses further in the village, where another spring rises, the shattered stones of the well, and of the little fretted channel which was long ago built and traced for it by gentler hands, lie scattered, each from each, under a ragged bank of mortar, and scoria; and bricklayers’ refuse, on one side, which the clean water nevertheless chastises to purity; but it cannot conquer the dead earth beyond; and there, circled and coiled under festering scum, the stagnant edge of the pool effaces itself into a slope of black slime, the accumulation of indolent years.” (This too has a hint of the Gibbon-Poggio lament over the ruins of the Forum.) A sentence earlier, Ruskin mentions “street and house foulness; heaps of dust and slime, and broken shreds of old metal, and rags of putrid clothes.” Scoria, refuse, scum, slime, foulness, dust, old metal, and rags: nearly an entire thesaurus list, lumber excepted, in a single paragraph—and all of them made beautiful, Edenized by one perfect phrase: “which the clean water nevertheless chastises to purity.”
3 One of Collins’s poems, “Tomorrow,” was chosen by Palgrave for his Olden Trashery (as Christopher Ricks permutes the book’s title on p. 450 of the Penguin edition)—the last two lines of the poem are: “As this old worn-out stuff, which is threadbare Today,/May become Everlasting Tomorrow.” Palgrave explains that “Everlasting” is used “with side-allusion to a cloth so named, at the time when Collins wrote.”
4 “Scrut” is from scruta, an uncommon (though Horatian) Latin word meaning, “discarded goods, junk” (Oxford Latin Dictionary). A scrutarius is a junk-merchant. For scruta, Cooper’s seventeenth-century Thesaurus Linguae Romanae has “Olde garments, horse shoes, and such other baggage solde for necessitie.” Close scrutiny, then, on the etymological evidence, is a kind of ragpicking. And until recently, if you looked up lumber in the English side of Traupman’s New College Latin & English Dictionary you were given scruta as the translation—as you still are with Cassell’s, and with Langenscheidt’s tiny Universal Latin Dictionary, bound in a yellow plastic cover that resists spills—but in the brand-new edition of Traupman (1995), materia (“timber”) is the equivalent offered.
5 In a preface, Henley called his collection, Views and Reviews (1890), “less a book than a mosaic of scraps and shreds recovered from the shot rubbish of some fourteen years of journalism.” While he was editor of the National Observer, Henley published a series of colorful essays on legal history by Francis Watt that were collected in 1895 as The Law’s Lumber Room.
6 Christopher Smart attempted to turn these two lines (from the Essay on Criticism again) into Latin:
Vis veri ingenii, natura est cultior, id quod
Senserunt multi, sed jam scite exprimit unus.
A. E. Housman claimed that Smart didn’t write any good poetry until after he became insane, somewhere around 1756. His Latin version of Pope’s poem was published in 1752. One wonders whether a growing sense of the utter futility of trying to Latinize an egg as ideally ovoid as Pope’s couplet was what caused the sad “estrangement” of Smart’s mind, and led to his confinement in St. Luke’s Hospital, where he versified Horace and first wrote poetry that the exacting Housman could admire. Smart translated “loads of learned lumber” as nugarum docta farrago—“a learned trail-mix of trivia,” more or less. Smart carefully preserved a faintly praising note that Pope wrote him in 1743 and even had it painted in his portrait. See Arthur Sherbo, Christopher Smart, Scholar of the University (1967), p. 33.
7“Pope and His Editors,” in Mark Pattison, Essays, vol. II, 1889.
8 Aristotle shoots Descartes with an arrow in the right eye; Homer’s horse tramples D’Avenant; then Homer gets John Denham with a long spear, and Samuel Wesley is slain by a kick of Homer’s horse’s heel.
9 Samuel Butler, Prose Observations, ed. Hugh de Quehen (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), p. 131. Pope, it turns out, lunched on this very image in his Epilogue to the Satires, Dialogue II (1738):
Let Courtly Wits to Wits afford supply,
As Hog to Hog in Huts of Westphaly;
In one, thro’ Nature’s bounty or his Lord’s,
Has what the frugal, dirty soil affords,
From him the next receives it, thick or thin,
As pure a Mess almost as it came in.
How Pope came to read Butler’s distinctive passage, when it wasn’t published until after Pope’s death, is a matter of conjecture. One wants Swift to have had something to do with it, but Robert Thyer, the first editor of Butler’s posthumous manuscripts (Genuine Remains, 1759), suspects (vol. II, p. 497) the agency of Bishop Atterbury, who earlier had helped Charles Boyle in his attack on Bentley’s Phalaris. See also John Butt’s note to l. 172 of the Twickenham edition of the Epilogue to the Satires, Dialogue II, p. 323.
10 And I am aware that I am overquoting—I know that there is an ideal rhythm of quotation and text, a museum-goer’s pace that you must offer the
reader that isolates each labeled display-case of small print from the next—but I nonetheless haven’t been able to keep from close-packing the page: this piece of ham-scholarship is, I think, the one chance I will get to cite freely, without shame, without constraint: I’ll never let myself fall so utterly in lumber again.
11 Naturam intueamur, hanc sequamur: id facillimè accipiunt animi quod agnoscunt, Pope piously quotes, which is adapted from Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria, Book VIII, ch. 3, paragraph 71: “We must look to nature, and follow her … the mind easily admits what it recognizes as true.…” I’m following the translation by John Selby Watson.
12 Pope replaces Wesley’s “Good Sense” with the first two words of the Prologue to Dryden’s Mr. Limberham (from the passage that six lines later mentions “machining lumber”):
True wit has seen its best days long ago;
It ne’er looked up, since we were dipt in show.
13 The eagerest and most appealingly innocent version of this thought comes earlier still, in “At a Vacation Exercise,” by the nineteen-year-old John Milton. Since it doesn’t contain “drest” or “exprest,” you can’t reach it through mechanical retrievals; but it is in handy collections like The Penguin Book of Renaissance Verse, where I first encountered it. Milton addresses Philosophy:
I have some naked thoughts that rove about
And loudly knock to have their passage out;
And wearie of their place do only stay
Till thou hast deck’t them in thy best array.
(It was written in 1623 and published in Poems, 1673.) And James Russell Lowell, writing a hundred and fifty-odd years after Pope, successfully nudged the apparently immovable Popianism forward several feet, in prose:
in literature, it should be remembered, a thing always becomes his at last who says it best, and thus makes it his own. (“Dryden.”)
And
The thought or feeling a thousand times repeated becomes his at last who utters it best. (“Keats.”)
And better still, in poetry:
Though old the thought and oft expressed,
’Tis his at last who says it best.
(“For an Autograph.”)
Bartlett’s gives Lowell’s couplet, and refers us in a footnote not to Pope but to Emerson’s “Next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of it.” Emerson’s problem, though, was that when he quoted he didn’t always remember to use quotation marks.
14 Normanby is John Sheffield, Earl of Mulgrave, Duke of Buckingham and Normanby (1648–1721), a patron of Dryden, Wesley, and Pope, and author of An Essay Upon Poetry, 1682. He, too, uses the phrase “true wit” in a couplet, following Dryden (“True Wit is everlasting, like the Sun”), and regarding the Soul of Poetry, he happily asks:
what caverns of the Brain
Can such a vast and mighty thing contain?
15 Wesley’s brother-in-law and editorial partner, John Dunton, tells us that Wesley “usually writ too fast to write well. Two hundred couplets a day are too many by two-thirds, to be well furnished with all the beauties and graces of that art.” (John Nichols, Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century, ed. Colin Clair, p. 404. Nichols says that Wesley’s poetry is “far from being excellent.”) In the Epistle Wesley is resolutely humble, claiming that he is himself no poet, and is “Content to Rime,” like Tom Durfey. Durfey (1653–1723) was a tireless dramatist, poet, and songster whom Dryden and (later, predictably) Pope made fun of. Defoe called him “Pun-Master-General Durfey.” But Durfey had his good days, too, as Wesley did: he wrote “I’ll Sail Upon the Dog Star,” which Purcell set to music; Auden included it in his Oxford Book of Light Verse.
16 See the note to line 126 in the Twickenham Dunciad, Book 1, pp. 78–79, which cites Norman Ault as the source of this information.
17 The Life of Our Blessed Lord & Saviour Jesus Christ. An Heroic Poem Dedicated to Her Most Sacred Majesty, In Ten Books. Attempted by Samuel Wesley. It was accompanied by laudatory poems by unknowns like Taylor, Pittis, Luke Milbourne, Peter Motteux (the translator of Rabelais and Cervantes) and Nahum Tate, then poet laureate—
The vast Idea seem’d a subject fit
To exercise an able Poet’s Wit;
But to Express, to Finish and Adorn,
Remain’d for you, who for this Work was Born.
A poet named Cutts was stoutly Keatsian in his praise of Wesley’s attempt:
You, (with Columbus,) not alone descrie,
But conquer (Cortez-like), new Worlds in Poetry.
18 There is a nice footnote to William Harness’s memoir of Coleridge in the fourth volume (1875) of Stoddard’s Bric-a-Brac Series: “Wordsworth and Rogers called on him [Coleridge] one forenoon in Pall Mall. He talked unin-terruptedly for two hours, during which time Wordsworth listened with profound attention. On leaving, Rogers said to Wordsworth, ‘Well! I could not make head or tail of Coleridge’s oration: did you understand it?’ ‘Not a syllable,’ replied Wordsworth.” Stoddard’s book (an ad for which was mentioned above, in an earlier footnote) is embossed on the cover with the motto “Infinite riches in a little room,” as well as an image of a lumber-room filled with statues, halberds, missals, and urns. I bought it at the rare-book room of the Holmes Book Store in Oakland, California (since closed), for $12.50.
19 The commentary was eventually finished and published posthumously, with a dedication to Queen Caroline. John Wesley knelt before the Queen and presented his father’s book in October of 1735. “It is very prettily bound,” said the Queen politely. She set it aside without opening it.
20 The letter is quoted in Franklin Wilder’s Father of the Wesleys, pp. 79–82, a biography of Samuel Wesley “proudly dedicated” to Mr. Wilder’s late son, Robert Seab Wilder. (“Born January 2, 1948—Died September 10, 1966.”) I found the letter on the evening of November 23, 1994, in the library of the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California, where I’d never been before, accompanied by my own beautiful son, who had just had his first birthday, and who was in a deep sleep, with his head flopped sideways in the stroller, unaware of the silent aisles of book-lumber towering above him. It must have been painful for Mr. Wilder to type Wesley’s account of the miraculous survival of a son.
21 The Mr. Hoare in Wesley’s letter, the silver-broker, not the coincidental Hoare who wrote about “loads of learned lumber” in the special collections of the university library.
(vii)
Despite Pope’s evident reliance on Wesley’s unsung Epistle while he was working on the Essay on Criticism, Wesley’s “lumber-thoughts” are not responsible for the lumber in (and let me quote it whole again for convenient reference) Pope’s great couplet:
The Bookful Blockhead, ignorantly read
With Loads of Learned Lumber in his Head.
I now believe, however, that I know where Pope’s phrase came from. The EPFTD-florist has delivered it to me. While I may preserve some pedantic pride by citing the pre-Popian lumber-finds that I made solo, unaided by concordances, indexes, the OED, the Library of the Future, or Chadwyck-Healey (the only significant find, come to think of it, is the lumber-pair in Locke’s “Of the Conduct of the Understanding”),1 it is Chadwyck-Healey that triumphed in the end.2
For several months I misunderstood what it was trying to tell me. In November of 1994 I was confident that I had the chronology of the derivation of Pope’s couplet sketched out. There was a “learned Lombard” prominently mentioned (Book I, canto i) in D’Avenant’s huge poem Gondibert (1651), set in Lombardy.3 This use prepped the ear for “learned lumber” without inventing it. And then there was a fairly complicated Lombardy-lumber pun, probably the handiwork of the debt-harassed Sir John Denham (1615–1669), in one of the anonymous satires on Gondibert that were bundled with the second edition of D’Avenant’s poem (1653) and attributed to “severall of the Authors Friends”:
Of all Ill Poets by their Lumber known,
Who nere Fame’s favor wore, yet sought them long,
&n
bsp; Sir Daphne [D’Avenant] gives precedency to none,
And breeds most business for abstersive Song.
From untaught Childhood, to mistaking Man,
An ill-performing Agent to the Stage;
With Albovin in Lumber he began,
With Gondibert in Lumber ends his rage.
“Albovin” refers to D’Avenant’s first play, The Tragedy of Albovine. To be “in lumber” can mean to be in debt, but (as we have seen) it can also mean to be imprisoned, or simply (see Partridge’s Dictionary of Slang) to be in big trouble—senses that Denham wants here, since D’Avenant “began” with a bad case of syphilis about the time Albovine came out (the illness was, according to Drabble’s Companion, “a subject referred to in his own works and in the jests of others”), and he was held captive in the Tower from 1650 to 1652, while working on Gondibert.4
Then there was Dryden’s
Damn me, whate’er those book-learned blockheads say
from his translation, the “Third Satire of Persius,” line 152 (1693). It impelled Pope toward the “bookful blockhead” in the first half of his couplet. (“Bookful” itself is a rare word; Pope’s choice of it over Dryden’s “book-learned” is characteristic of his fine-tunefulness.) And finally there was this anonymous translation of some lines from the beginning of the Fourth Satire of Boileau, dated 1687: