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

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, 18that 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. 19Samuel 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.

My discovery, in Samuel Wesley’s letter, of a casual l. — phrase 20was, 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. 21At 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.