Nicholson Baker: The Size of Thoughts: Essays and Other Lumber

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, 11and 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 Sense

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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.

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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:

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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-deprecation 15—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: 16Pope 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 . 17But 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