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

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 original 5—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. 6One 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

’s

7

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,