The Size of Thoughts: Essays and Other Lumber

(i)

Now feels like a good time to pick a word or a phrase, something short, and go after it, using the available equipment of intellectual retrieval, to see where we get. A metaphor might work best — one that has suggested itself over a few centuries with just the right frequency: not so often that its recovered uses prove to be overwhelming or trivial, nor so seldom that it hasn’t had a chance to refine and extend its meaning in all kinds of indigenous foliage. It should be representatively out of the way; it should have seen better days. Once or twice in the past it briefly enjoyed the status of a minor cliché, but now, for one reason or another, it is ignored or forgotten. Despite what seems to be a commonplace exterior, the term ought to be capable of some fairly deep and marimbal timbres when knowledgeably struck. A distinct visual image should accompany it, and yet ideally its basic sense should be easily misunderstood, since the merging of such elementary misconstruals will help contribute to its accumulated drift. It should lead us beyond itself, and back to itself. And it should sometimes be beautiful.

The mind has been called a lumber-room, and its contents or its printed products described as lumber, since about 1680. Mind-lumber had its golden age in the eighteenth century, became hackneyed by the late nineteenth century, and went away by 1970 or so. I know this because I’ve spent almost a year, on and off, riffling in the places that scholars and would-be scholars go when they want to riffle: in dictionaries, indexes, bibliographies, biographies, concordances, catalogs, anthologies, encyclopedias, dissertation abstracts, library stacks, full-text CD-ROMs, electronic bulletin boards, and online electronic books; also in books of quotations, collections of aphorisms, old thesauruses, used-book stores, and rare-book rooms; and (never to be slighted, even if, in my own case, a habitual secretiveness limits their usefulness) in other living minds, too — since “Learned men” (so William D’Avenant wrote in 1650, when the art of indexing was already well advanced) “have been to me the best and briefest Indexes of Books”; or, as John Donne sermonized in 1626, “The world is a great Volume, and man the Index of that Booke.”

Boswell, for example, said, in the last pages of his biography, that Johnson’s superiority over other learned men “consisted chiefly in what may be called the art of thinking,”

the art of using his mind; a certain continual power of seizing the useful substance of all that he knew, and exhibiting it in a clear and forcible manner; so that knowledge, which we often see to be no better than lumber in men of dull understanding, was, in him, true, evident, and actual wisdom.

Logan Pearsall Smith, in an essay on the sermons of John Donne, asserts that the seventeenth-century divines, “with all the lumber they inherited from the past, inherited much also that gives an enduring splendour to their works.” Michael Sadleir, in his The Northanger Novels: A Footnote to Jane Austen (1927), writes: “There are probably no items in the lumber-rooms of forgotten literature more difficult to trace than the minor novels of the late eighteenth century.” One of those minor novels was Charles Johnstone’s Chrysal (1760–65), in which a bookseller named Mr. Vellum stores surplus copies of books by a dead self-published author for seven years in the “lumber garret” so that he can pass them off as new creations. Laurence Sterne mentions “the lumber-rooms of learning” in Book IV of Tristram Shandy (1761).

Goethe revered Sterne, and he might have read Chrysal (which was translated into German in 1775); and Goethe’s learned yearner, Faust, calls the spirit of the past, as it is reflected in the minds who study it, a Kehrichtfaβ and a Rumpelkammer, in a line that has been variously Englished as a “mouldy dustbin, or a lumber attic” (Philip Wayne), “a junk heap,/A lumber room” (Randall Jarrell), “Mere scraps of odds and ends, old crazy lumber, / In dust-bins only fit to rot and slumber” (Theodore Martin, revised by W. H. Bruford), “A very lumber-room, a rubbish-hole” (Anna Swanwick), “A heap of rubbish, and a lumber room” (John Stuart Blackie), “A rubbish-bin, a lumber-garret” (George Madison Priest), “A trash bin and a lumber-garret” (Stuart Atkins), “An offal-barrel and a lumber-garret” (Bayard Taylor), “a trash barrel and a junk room” (Bayard Quincy Morgan), “A lumber-room and a rubbish heap” (Louis MacNeice and E. L. Stahl), and “A mass of things confusedly heaped together;/A lumber-room of dusty documents” (John Anster). Lord Francis Leveson Gower’s early translation (John Murray, 1823) may be, for this particular passage, the best:

Read but a paragraph, and you shall find

The litter and the lumber of the mind.

¹

Master Humphrey has lumber dreams in the first chapter of Dickens’s Old Curiosity Shop:

But all that night, waking or in my sleep, the same thoughts recurred and the same images retained possession of my brain. I had ever before me the old dark murky rooms — the gaunt suits of mail with their ghostly silent air — the faces all awry, grinning from wood and stone — the dust and rust, the worm that lives in wood — and alone in the midst of all this lumber and decay, and ugly age, the beautiful child in her gentle slumber, smiling through her light and sunny dreams.

Hazlitt does not refer to the lumber of scholarship where you would expect him to, in his Montaignesque “On the Ignorance of the Learned,” but he does so, affectionately, in “On Pedantry,” an essay that also contains his helpful circular definition of learning as “the knowledge of that which is not generally known.” Of a character named Keith in South Wind, Norman Douglas writes, “He had an encyclopaedic turn of mind; his head, as somebody once remarked, was a lumber-room of useless information.”

Norman Douglas’s “somebody” was probably Lord Chesterfield, who in 1748 advised his son that “Many great readers load their memories without exercising their judgments, and make lumber-rooms of their heads, instead of furnishing them usefully.” Sir Thomas Browne, though he was one of the greatest of readers, and of indexers, claimed to have avoided this pitfall: “I make not therefore my head a grave, but a treasure, of knowledge,” he writes, in Religio Medici (1642), finding no use here for the word “lumber,”² but getting some mileage instead out of the Greek root of thesaurus—“treasure-house”—a word associated with dictionaries long before Roget,³ and employed in passing in an eighteenth-century Latin oration written by Johann Mencke (and edited by a collateral descendant, H. L. Mencken) called The Charlatanry of the Learned:

The bookshops are full of Thesauruses of Latin Antiquities which, when examined, turned out to be far less treasuries than fuel for the fire.

Mencken himself, in his autobiographical “Larval Stage of a Bookworm,” said that

At eight or nine, I suppose, intelligence is no more than a small spot of light on the floor of a large and murky room.

This is Mencken’s elegantly spare version of John Locke’s dark room, from An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), which is illuminated by shafts of external and internal sensation:

These alone, as far as I can discover, are the windows by which light is let into this

dark room

For, methinks, the understanding is not much unlike a closet wholly shut from light, with only some little opening left, to let in external visible resemblances, or ideas of things without.… [Locke’s italics.]

And Locke’s unlit closet may be an irreligious revision of the room of despair, “a very dark room, where there sat a man in an iron cage,” in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (1678).⁴ Practicing architects had tired, by the 1890s, of dark seventeenth-century rooms of the soul, and had developed as a result an antipathy to the closet. Russell Sturgis, in an article on “The Equipment of the Modern City House,” appearing in Harper’s Magazine in April 1899, mentions one architect who wanted to rid domestic life of closets altogether, arguing that they were

extremely wasteful of space, and in every way to be shunned; that they were places where old lumber was stored and forgotten, dust-catchers, nests for vermin, fire-traps.

But one has to store things somewhere; and Sherlock Holmes in 1887 compared the brain in its untutored state to a “little empty attic,” which should be properly stocked:

A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it.

(A Study in Scarlet.

)

Holmes warns Watson that “it is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent.” Montaigne, however, disagrees: when considering the question whether (in Florio’s translation, “Of Pedantisme”) “a mans owne wit, force, droope, and as it were diminish it selfe, to make roome for others,” he at first appears to hold that it does, and then he decides that, no, on the contrary, “our mind stretcheth the more by how much more it is replenished.”

These preliminary examples and semirelevant corollaries, having stretched the elastic walls of the preceding paragraphs nearly to the point of tissue damage, must now draw back to reveal, in a kind of establishing quotational shot, the one really famous piece of lumber we have. It was published in 1711, the work of the twenty-three-year-old Alexander Pope. (Youth is often a time of lumber: “An ever increasing volume of dimensional lumber is juvenile wood,” as Timothy D. Larson pointed out in 1992, in his “The Mechano-Sorptive Response of Juvenile Wood to Hygrothermal Gradients,” indexed in the Dissertation Abstracts CD-ROM.⁵) Pope’s An Essay on Criticism describes a bad critic:

The Bookful Blockhead, ignorantly read

With Loads of Learned Lumber in his Head.

This is a very good couplet: ignorantly fills its alloted verse-hole with a lumpy tumultuousness, like a rudely twisted paper clip, and the three capital Ls on the next line halt in their places one after another as remuneratively as a triplet of twirling Lemons in a slot machine just before the quarters start spraying out. Pope’s jingle has stayed with us: it is included under the heading “Reading: Its Dangers” in The Home Book of Quotations; it appears in Bartlett’s and The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. Even in extrapoetical contexts it continues to find advocates: as recently as 1989 (so the Wilson Library Literature CD-ROM index points out), Peter A. Hoare contributed a chapter to The Modern Academic Library: Essays in Memory of Philip Larkin that was called “Loads of Learned Lumber: Special Collections in the Smaller University Library.” Hoare writes that specialized collections, regardless of whether they are directly related to any “immediate academic programme,” nonetheless “contribute, not always in an easily definable way, to the quality of the whole institution”; and he mentions Larkin’s useful distinction between the “magical value” and the “meaningful value” of literary manuscripts.

Where in his library, though, one wants to ask, did Pope find his lumber? Pope was an artful borrower, a mechano-sorptive wonder, as generations of often testy commentators have shown; many of his finest metrical sub-units have an isolable source. (E.g., Pope’s “Windsor Forest” mentions a “sullen Mole, that hides his diving Flood,” which rodent is, says commentator Wakefield, a borrowing, or burrowing, from Milton’s “Vacation Exercise,” where there is a “sullen Mole that runneth underneath.”) Is learned lumber from Milton, too, then?

No, it isn’t. Milton didn’t use lumber in any poem, and you will find it (with the aid of Sterne and Kollmeier’s Concordance to the English Prose of John Milton, 1985) only once in all his prose works: “When Ministers came to have Lands, Houses, Farmes, Coaches, Horses, and the like Lumber,” he says in Eikonklastes (1649), “then Religion brought forth riches in the Church, and the Daughter devour’d the Mother.” Is Pope’s lumber from Shakespeare, then, or Spenser, or Marlowe, or Urquhart’s translation of Rabelais? Can it really be that he coined the phrase himself? The critical editions of Pope — even the great Twickenham series that came out piecemeal while Nabokov was working on Pale Fire (1962) and his Pushkin commentary — suggest no specific sources in this case; E. Audra and Aubrey Williams, the Twickenham editors of An Essay on Criticism, confine themselves to a footnote citing the Oxford English Dictionary: “Lumber] ‘useless or cumbrous material’ (OED).” Is it from Horace or Quintilian, in the original or in translation? (Lady Mary Wortley Montagu: “I admired Mr. Pope’s Essay on Criticism at first, very much, because I had not then read any of the antient critics, and did not know that it was all stolen.”) Is it from Jonathan Swift?

Swift does indeed have a passage in his early “Ode to Sir William Temple” that goes

Let us (for shame) no more be fed

With antique Reliques of the Dead,

The Gleanings of Philosophy,

Philosophy! the Lumber of the Schools

The Roguery of Alchymy,

And we the bubbled Fools

Spend all our present Stock in hopes of golden Rules.

This was written around 1692—the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations quotes just its fourth line — but the ode remained unprinted until 1745, when it was included in one of Dodsley’s Miscellanies; it isn’t likely that Pope read it until after he had published An Essay on Criticism (1711, 1711—I must try to remember that date) and had befriended Swift. Swift’s first published poem, his “Ode to the Athenian Society” (1692), is a potential influence; it praises the efforts on the part of the Athenian Society⁶ to strip Philosophy, that “beauteous Queen,” of her old lumber:

Her Face patch’d o’er with Modern Pedantry,

With a long sweeping Train

Of Comments and Disputes, ridiculous and vain,

All of old Cut with a new Dye,

How soon have You restor’d her Charms!

And rid her of her Lumber and Her Books,

Drest her again Genteel and Neat,

And rather Tite than Great,

How fond we are to court Her to our Arms!

How much of Heav’n is in her naked looks.

Despite the naked looks, this setting of lumber (which I found using the Concordance to the Poems of Jonathan Swift, edited by Michael Shinagel, 1972) is also comparatively humdrum — not capable on its own of inspiring Pope’s magnificently punched-up lumber-couplet. And Swift’s early prose is no help, either. In Tale of a Tub (1704) there is the interesting brain-recipe for distilling calfbound books in an alchemical solution of balneo Mariae, poppy, and Lethe and then “snuffing it strongly up your nose” while setting to work on your critical treatise, whereupon (in another variation on the notion of the brain as a treasure-house and thesaurus)

you immediately perceive in your head an infinite number of

abstracts, summaries, compendiums, extracts, collections, medulas, excerpta quaedams, florilegias

and the like, all disposed into great order, and reducible upon paper.

Amid these rudenesses about modern erudition, however, not one lumbered disparagement, perplexingly, appears. We can be sure of the absence, since there is nothing listed between ludicrously and lungs in Kelling and Preston’s computer-generated KWIC Concordance to Jonathan Swift’s A Tale of a Tub, The Battle of the Books, and A Discourse Concerning the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit (1984). (KWIC stands for Key Word In Context.) It could be that Swift felt less inclined to use the word “lumber” after he showed Dryden his Athenian “Ode” and Dryden said to him (as Johnson tells it), “Cousin Swift, you will never be a poet.” Dryden, after all, had himself been a lumberer of some prominence in his day: “We bring you none of our old lumber hither,” the Poet Laureate promised the King and Queen, on behalf of a newly consolidated dramatic company, in 1682; and in his prologue to Mr. Limberham (1680) he complains that

True wit has seen its best days long ago;

It ne’er looked up, since we were dipt in show;

When sense in doggrel rhymes and clouds was lost,

And dulness flourished at the actor’s cost.

Nor stopt it here; when tragedy was done,

Satire and humour the same fate have run,

And comedy is sunk to trick and pun.

Now our machining lumber will not sell,

And you no longer care for heaven or hell;

What stuff will please you next, the Lord can tell.

(“Machining lumber” means clunky theatrical supernaturalism and personification, deus ex machinery.) To Swift the word would have felt like a piece of Dryden’s proprietary vocabulary, and, wounded by Dryden’s brutal assessment of his literary future, he purged it from his speech for over twenty years.⁷ Or maybe not.

Either way, Swift and Dryden don’t look to be convincing sources for Pope’s durable phrase. Is it from Samuel Butler’s Hudibras, which Swift had by heart, or did Pope get it from Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis, or from a sermon by Donne or Jeremy Taylor, or from John Locke? (“Locke’s reasoning may indeed be said to pervade every part of the Essay on Criticism,” writes Courthope, another nineteenth-century Pope commentator.) And, more elementarily — before we get too carried away in our snuffing for sources — what exactly does the word “lumber” mean in Pope’s poetry, and in poetry generally? Do we really understand what Pope has in mind, metaphorically, when he refers to “Loads of Learned Lumber”? What might these loads look like? Edwin Abbott’s Concordance to the Works of Alexander Pope (1875) helpfully gives, in addition to the “learned” line, three later settings for “lumber,” all from The Dunciad, two of which employ the word nominatively, in the relevant anti-pedantic sense:

Lumber

.

Dropt the dull

l

of the Latin store

D

iv. 319

With loads of learned

l

in his head

E. C

613

Thy giddy Dulness still shall

l.

on D

iii. 294

A

l.-house

of books in ev’ry head D

iii. 193

Edwin A. Abbott writes, in his introduction to the concordance his father compiled, “I venture to commend the following pages to all those who wish to be able to know at any moment how Pope used any English word in his Original Poems.” And who would not want to know at any moment how Pope, of all poets — one of the most skilled word-pickers and word-packers in literary history — used any English word? Who does not feel an inarticulate burble of gratitude toward the senior Mr. Abbott (1808–1882; headmaster of the Philological School, Marylebone) for the enormous manual labor he expended in copying and sorting Pope’s lines, creating a book that, though few will read it cover to cover, selflessly paves the sophomore’s strait path to pedantry? Concordances are true triumphs of what Michael Gruber, a pseudonymous thriller writer and marine biologist, recently called “siftware”⁸—they are quote verifiers and search engines that in an ardent inquirer’s hands sometimes turn up poetical secrets that the closest of close readings would not likely uncover.⁹

But grateful though we must always be to Edwin Abbott, the truth is that in the case of lumber, at least, his grand Victorian concordance fails us — fails us because it indexes only from the revised, final version of The Dunciad (1743). It does not include a more revealing use of lumber that appears in the first, and at times superior, Dunciad of 1728.

The searcher will find this particular couplet, though, in the beautiful, blue Concordance to the Poems of Alexander Pope, in two volumes, by Emmett Bedford and Robert Dilligan, produced in 1974 with the help of a Univac 1108 and an IBM 370 computer, using optically scanned microfilm images of the Twickenham edition.¹⁰ Alternatively, you can find the couplet that Abbott omitted as I first found it, by peering into the greatest lumber-room, or lumber-ROM, ever constructed: the all-powerful, manually keyed English Poetry Full-Text Database, released in June of 1994 on four silver disks the size of Skilsaw blades by the prodigious Eel of Science himself, Sir Charles Chadwyck-Healey.

Chadwyck-Healey’s forces are responsible for a variety of CD-ROM power-tools: they have brought us the National Security Archive Index of previously classified documents; the catalog of the British Library to 1975; full texts of The Economist, The Times, The Guardian, Il Sole 24 Ore, and works of African-American literature; indexes of periodicals, films, music, and French theses; the full text of the nine-volume Grand Robert de la Langue Française; United Nations records indexed or in full text, auction records, Hansard’s record of the House of Commons, a world climate disk, and British census data; all 221 volumes of Migne’s Patrologia Latina; on and on. But nothing can remotely compare, in range and depth and tantric power, with their English Poetry Database, which promises, and moreover delivers, something like 4,500 volumes of liquidly, intimately friskable poetry by 1,350 poets who wrote between A.D. 600 and 1900.

Not that it is all English poetry: “all” is a meaningless word to use in connection with so sprawling a domain. “Nowhere in our publicity do we say that we are including every poem ever written or published in the English language,” writes Alison Moss, Chadwyck-Healey’s editorial director, in a news-letter; and the project consciously sidestepped certain squishy areas: American poetry, drama, verse annuals and miscellanies (with some important exceptions), and poems by writers not listed or cross-referenced as poets in the New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature. The project’s heavy reliance on this last-mentioned work has led to some puzzling exclusions. While the English Poetry Database includes a truly astounding and thrilling number of minor poems by minor poets, it is unreliable in its coverage of minor poems, and in some cases major poems, by major prose writers.

“I shall not insult you by insinuating that you do not remember Scott’s Lay of the Last Minstrel,” wrote Vladimir Nabokov in the top margin of page 37 of his teaching copy of Madame Bovary¹¹; but Walter Scott’s poem is not to be found in the English Poetry Database.¹² The poem by the nineteenth-century Erewhon-man, Samuel Butler, about a plaster cast of a Greek discus-thrower kept prudishly in storage,

Stowed away in a Montreal lumber room

The Discobolus standeth and turneth his face to the wall

is not in the Database, even though it was good enough for Auden’s Oxford Book of Light Verse and for a number of editions of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations. (Inexplicably, Bartlett’s doesn’t index it under “lumber” or “room” in the current edition, as it has in the past, but it is still stowed away in there.) George Meredith is listed as a mid-nineteenth-century novelist in the New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature and not cross-referenced as a poet, so none of his poetry is on Chadwyck-Healey’s disks, though Meredith is part of nearly every anthology of Victorian poetry. Benjamin Disraeli’s blank-verse epic, called The Revolutionary Epic, conceived, according to The Oxford Companion to English Literature, as a “companion to the Iliad, the Divina Commedia, and Paradise Lost,” was skipped over by the databasers, evidently simply because Disraeli is classed as a novelist; while five poems by his less famous father, author of Curiosities of Literature, made the grade, including these lines from the end of “A Defence of Poetry” addressed to James Pye, the poet laureate:

Thou, who behold’st my Muse’s rash design,

Teach me thy art of Poetry divine;

Or, since thy cares, alas! on me were vain,

Teach me that harder talent — to refrain.

They make a nice table-grace for minor poets of all ages.

There are other mystifying prose-poetry juxtapositions, too. The poems that Goldsmith inserted into The Vicar of Wake-field are in the English Poetry Database (“When lovely woman stoops to folly”), as is the “chair-lumbered closet” that Goldsmith mentions in his poem “The Haunch of Venison,” but not the poems Charles Dickens put in The Pickwick Papers (“Creeping on, where time has been,/A rare old plant is the Ivy green”¹³), or any of Dickens’s other poems or prologues:

Awake the Present! Shall no scene display

The tragic passion of the passing day?

Leigh Hunt’s poetry is here, but not one poem by Thackeray.¹⁴ There are eighty religious poems by a certain Francis William Newman, including the interestingly abysmal antipollution tract “Cleanliness” (1858), which staggers to its Whitman-esque peak with

The workers of wealthy mines poison glorious mountain torrents,

Drugging them with lead or copper to save themselves petty trouble;

And the peasant groans in secret or regards it as a “landed right,”

And after some lapse of time the law counts the right valid.

The work of this Newman is included because the New Cambridge Bibliography lists him as a minor poet of the period 1835–1870. Not a hemistich, however, by the man’s older brother, John Henry, Cardinal Newman, finds its way in, since the New Cambridge Bibliography categorizes Cardinal Newman as a mid-nineteenth-century prose writer. Yet Cardinal Newman’s poems are both better and better known (“Lead, kindly light”); two were chosen by Francis Turner Palgrave for his Golden Treasury, Second Series.¹⁵ Emily Brontë’s poetry was reached by Chadwyck-Healey’s rural electrification program, but Charlotte’s and Anne’s was not, despite the fact that all three women published a book together in 1846: Poems, by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. “It stole into life,” wrote Mrs. Gaskell of the book: “some weeks passed over without the mighty murmuring public discovering that three more voices were uttering their speech.” It got a decent review in the Atheneum, and while many will concede that Emily’s poetry shows the most talent, Charlotte’s is not embarrassing:

The room is quiet, thoughts alone

People its mute tranquillity;

The yoke put off, the long task done,—

I am, as it is bliss to be,

Still and untroubled.

(“The Teacher’s Monologue”)

Warm is the parlour atmosphere,

Serene the lamp’s soft light;

The vivid embers, red and clear,

Proclaim a frosty night.

Books, varied, on the table lie,

Three children o’er them bend,

And all, with curious, eager eye,

The turning leaf attend.

(“Gilbert”)

And if you search the English Poetry Database for the words join and choir and invisible together you will retrieve sixty-four nineteenth-century efforts by such fixtures of the poetasters’ pantheon as Atherstone, Bickersteth, Caswall, Coutts-Nevill, Mant, Smedley, and Mary Tighe (and Byron and Keats and Coleridge, too) — but you won’t pull up George Eliot’s

O may I join the choir invisible

Of those immortal dead who live again

In minds made better by their presence

or any other poetry she wrote. (I found two instances of “rubbish-heap” in Eliot’s 488-page Collected Poems, edited by Lucien Jenkins, but discovered no lumber.)

Finally, if you want to read about “hope’s delusive mine” in Samuel Johnson’s verses on the death of Dr. Levet, your hopes will be dashed; in fact if you browse for any “S. Johnson” in the database’s name index you will browse in vain. (You will find “L. Johnson,” “R. Johnson,” and “W. Johnson,” though.) Still, the actual texts of Johnson’s two best poems, “London” and “The Vanity of Human Wishes,” are hidden within, retrievable not by poet’s name but by title or search-word, since they were republished in Dodsley’s Collection of 1763, one of the compendia that Chadwyck-Healey’s editors (rightly) shipped off to the Philippines for keypunching.¹⁶ Dodsley’s Collection fortunately also happens to contain one version of Richard Bentley’s only poem (he isn’t listed in the name index, either), a poem itemizing the tribulations of the scholar:

He lives inglorious, or in want,

To college and old books confin’d;

Instead of learn’d he’s call’d pedant,

Dunces advanc’d, he’s left behind.

Samuel Johnson could recite Bentley’s poem from memory, as H. W. Garrod reminds us in Scholarship: Its Meaning and Value, before he (Garrod, that is) goes on to praise A. E. Housman (a Bentley worshipper himself) as a “great scholar and, as I shall always think, a great poet,” which is a remarkably generous assessment, since Housman had, in a preface to his edition of Manilius,¹⁷ viciously dismissed Garrod’s earlier Manilian emendations as “singularly cheap and shallow” and judged Garrod’s apparatus criticus “often defective and sometimes visibly so.”

Housman would probably say similarly rude things about the holes, minor and major, in the English Poetry Database (no Jonathan Swift at all, anywhere?¹⁸) since Housman spent most of his life absorbed in “those minute and pedantic studies in which I am fitted to excel and which give me pleasure,” and was intolerant of grand schemes and mechanized shortcuts. Moreover, his own 1896 volume, A Shropshire Lad, is missing from the disks, possibly for copyright reasons, a fact that would have nettled him, although he would have pretended not to care.

But we, on the other hand, shouldn’t say rude things. This database may be, as John Sutherland pointed out in the London Review of Books (vol. 16, no. 11, 9 June 1994), the most significant development in literary scholarship since xerography. And even Sutherland’s high praise is insufficient. The EPFTD, as some refer to it, is a mind-manuring marvel, and we are lucky that a lot is left out (provided that no university libraries, tempted by its aura of comprehensiveness, “withdraw”—which is to say, get rid of — the unelectrified source books themselves); we don’t want every corner of poetry lit with the same even, bright light, for such a uniformity would interfere with what Housman himself called the “hide-and-seek” of learning. The god of scholars, Housman pointed out in his “Introductory Lecture,” “planted in us the desire to find out what is concealed, and stored the universe with hidden things that we might delight ourselves in discovering them.” And the fact is that Chadwyck-Healey’s demiurgic project comes so much closer than anything else in paper or plastic to the unattainable om of total inclusion (containing, by my estimate, several thousand times more poetry than Great Poetry Classics, itself a fine shovelware CD-ROM published by World Library, Inc.) that hunter-gatherers of all predilections can pretend, some of the time, when it calms their research anxieties to do so, that no obscurity of consequence will be left unfingered. After all, the disks hold (on top of hymns before 1800, and nursery rhymes) many verse translations from other languages into English, if they were published before 1800—a very useful subcategory for the lumber-struck.

¹ Gower’s translation offers a bonus lumber earlier that is almost as inspiring:

Hemm’d round with learning’s musty scrolls,

Her ponderous volumes, dusty rolls,

Which to the ceiling’s vault arise,

Above the reach of studious eyes,

Where revelling worms peruse the store

Of wisdom’s antiquated lore,—

With glasses, tools of alchemy,

Cases and bottles, whole and crack’d,

Hereditary lumber, pack’d.

This is the world, the world, for me!

² Not every passage quoted herein will actually contain the word; that would be obsessive.

³ Cf. Thomas Cooper’s Thesaurus Linguae Romanae & Britannicae, 1565.

⁴ Both Locke’s and Bunyan’s dark rooms may owe something to a sermon by John Donne delivered on Christmas Day, 1624: “God does not furnish a roome, and leave it darke; he sets up lights in it; his first care was, that his benefits should be seene; he made light first, and then creatures, to be seene by that light.…”

⁵ Juvenile wood is wood near the pith of the tree; it has a “larger longitudinal hygrocoefficient of expansion than mature wood,” writes Larson, who is concerned that the expansion-habits of juvenile wood will lead to “an increase in the frequency and severity in spatial deformation of wood subjected to hygrothermal gradients.”

⁶ Samuel Johnson, in his “Life of Swift,” described the Athenian Society as “a knot of obscure men.” They were Samuel Wesley (whom we will meet again later), Daniel Defoe, and the publisher John Dunton, among others; they published Swift’s flattering “Ode” in their Athenian Gazette, vol. 5, supplement, 1692. Dunton wrote that Swift’s “Ode” was “an ingenious poem” (See John Nichols, Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century, ed. Colin Clair, p. 122), but Pat Rogers (Jonathan Swift: The Complete Poems, p. 604) reports that Joseph Horrell’s harsh verdict — that this is Swift’s “worst poem by odds”—is “shared by many critics.”

⁷ There is no lumber in Gulliver’s Travels (1726). The word resurfaces in Swift’s “The Progress of Poetry,” written c. 1719 but not published until the Miscellanies in Prose and Verse (1728), which was edited by Pope: “To raise the lumber from the earth.” Pat Rogers subjoins a note to this line: “lumber one of Pope’s favourite terms of opprobrium.”

⁸ See the WELL’s “Info” Conference (“A Conference About Communication Systems, Communities, and Tools for the Information Age”), Topic 641 (“Internet Encyclopedia”), Response 15 (Oct. 26, 1993): “Your hyperencyclopedia software (or ‘siftware’) would direct you toward a basic article on spiders, analogous to the FAQ files placed in many newsgroups.” The WELL is an electronic conferencing system: (415) 332–8410; http://www.well.com.

⁹ Inspired by Kent Hieatt’s numerical analysis of Edmund Spenser’s “Epithalamion” (Short Time’s Endless Monument, 1960), a sophomore in college, in 1975, wrote a paper on the numerical structure of Book I of The Faery Queen, in which he pointed out that the word seven appears for the first time in the poem on line seven, stanza 17, Canto vii of Spenser’s poem (“For seven great heads out of his body grew”), and appears in precisely the same context (a mention of the seven-headed beast that carries the Whore of Babylon) as surrounds the word seven in Revelations chapter 17, verse 7. Without Osgood’s concordance to Spenser (1915) and several concordances to the Bible open before him, the student would never have noticed this further tiny instance of Spenserian numerology. And it was so incredibly easy, too, once I (for it was I) had decided what to look up: “Index-learning,” Pope himself pointed out, reworking some earlier snideries of Charles Boyle and Dean Swift,

turns no student pale,

Yet holds the Eel of science by the Tail.

¹⁰ Soberingly, the editors of the concordance write that “this optical scanning proved to be the phase of the project that caused the most problems and it seemed for a time that we had traded a tedious but straightforward task [i.e., manual text-entry] for an exasperatingly complicated one.… But these difficulties were related to the fact that the technique of direct optical scanning, the claims of computer and data processing houses to the contrary, is still in the developmental stage. Our experience with this method makes us feel that for most purposes literary scholars had best regard it as in the realm of the possible as contrasted with the practical.”

¹¹ Reproduced in Lectures on Literature, p. 137.

¹² There is an ode to Walter Scott in there, by one Horatio Smith, that mentions the “minstrel’s lay” and “lordly Marmion,” and there is even the text of an entire anthology that Scott edited, Minstrelsy of the Scottish Borders. There are 227 poems by William Bell Scott, a painter in the circle of Rossetti. But Sir Walter’s own poetry, which, as Francis Jeffrey wrote in a review of the Lay in 1805, “has manifested a degree of genius which cannot be overlooked,” was overlooked.

¹³ It was set to music several times and in song form sold tens of thousands of copies.

¹⁴ “During almost his whole literary career he had been a sparing but an exquisite writer of a peculiar kind of verse, half serious half comic, which is scarcely inferior in excellence to his best prose,” says George Saintsbury, in A History of Nineteenth-Century Literature. I couldn’t find any lumber in Thackeray’s poems, but I did find a good poem about a garret, called “The Garret.” Here are two middle stanzas:

Yes; ’tis a garret — let him know’t who will—

There was my bed — full hard it was and small;

My table there — and I decipher still

Half a lame couplet charcoaled on the wall.

Ye joys, that Time hath swept with him away,

Come to mine eyes, ye dreams of love and fun;

For you I pawned my watch how many a day,

In the brave days when I was twenty-one.

And see my little Jessy, first of all;

She comes with pouting lips and sparkling eyes:

Behold, how roguishly she pins her shawl

Across the narrow casement, curtain-wise;

Now by the bed her petticoat glides down,

And when did woman look the worse in none?

I have heard since who paid for many a gown,

In the brave days when I was twenty-one.

See Thackeray’s Ballads and Tales, Scribners, 1904, pp. 103–4.

¹⁵ It is a comfort to know, though, that two hundred and ninety of Palgrave’s own poems are on these disks. Reading the poetry of people famous for their anthologies is a melancholy but instructive task.

¹⁶ Optical scanning isn’t feasible for old typefaces and foxed paper, and even when the material is in a modern edition and hence legible to scanning software, the raw output still demands, just as it did for the disillusioned Pope concordancers in the seventies, a considerable amount of labor-intensive “markup”—to distinguish things like titles, epigraphs, footnotes, and side-notes from text, for instance, and stanza breaks from page breaks — not to mention the inevitable manual fiddling afterward to fix small errors, like dashes that were read as hyphens.

¹⁷ Manilius being the Roman astrological poet who gave Johnson the tag he applied to Cowley and the rest of the Metaphysicals, discordia concors (not to be confused with Horace’s concordia discors, or Gratian’s Concordia discordantium canonum): you can find the Manilian reference in a footnote to the life of Cowley in G. Birkbeck Hill’s 1905 edition of Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, a lovely example of old-fashioned scholarship, or you can search the Saturnian rings of the Latin CD-ROM published by the Packard Humanities Institute and Silver Mountain Software, which takes about five minutes.

¹⁸ No Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome? Only one of Daniel Defoe’s poems? Nothing by Lewis Theobald?

(ii)

Having borrowed a copy of the English Poetry Database from Douglas Roesemann, manager of Chadwyck-Healey’s U.S. base in Alexandria, Virginia, with the rash pledge that I would review it for The New York Review of Books, I stuck the tip of my index finger in the center hole of Disk 2 on a summer afternoon in 1994. This is one of the safer ways to handle a CD-ROM, especially one with a suggested retail value of over ten thousand dollars. (The whole multidisk kit goes for $47,500 in the U.S., according to the last price list I saw.) I was thus able to flourish, to flaunt, around the first joint of a single finger, like one of those living collars certain reptiles unfurl to frighten away predators, “all” of English poetry from 1660 to 1800.

On the point of popping open my computer’s spring-loaded tray and laying the Pierian pancake in its circular bed — about to enclose its infinite riches in a little CD-ROM drive¹ —Inoticed that my finger was a little unsteady, and so too was the iridescently flared CD-reflection of my overbooked room. I was aware of the possibility that my private quote-stash, my typewritten cullings, my heaps of coffee-splashed and ant-jaywalked photocopies on the floor, some of which I had grown quite fond of, would appear embarrassingly skimpy and unmethodical when ranked against the neat, single-sourced lumber-list I knew I would get in minutes using the English Poetry Database. Would the speed and thoroughness of one-stop searching overwhelm my project with easy erudition (airudition, perhaps) and inhibit my will to finish? Dilettante and scholar-pretender though I was content to remain, I didn’t like the idea that readers of The New York Review of Books would assume, merely because I was an admitted Chadwyck-Healeyan, that I had read even less than I had read in the paginal sprints and leg-stretches I had performed to lumber up for my chosen task. I was reminded of A. E. Housman’s contemptuous footnote about a German classicist:

Wolf, like all pretenders to encyclopedic knowledge, had a dash of the impostor about him, and we have no assurance that he had read the book which he thus presumes to judge.

Of Housman, D. R. Shackleton-Baily wrote in 1959:

I have always suspected that the animus which he sometimes seemed to show against the great German dictionary, the

Thesaurus Linguae Latinae

, had partly to do with a feeling that such compilations help lazy scholars to conceal their lack of reading.

²

In literary history as elsewhere, a find is valuable to the degree that it is hard to come by, and the frightening thing about a huge full-text poetry stockpile like Chadwyck-Healey’s is that any word or phrase in it, regardless of the bespidered and dust-fledged remoteness of the book from which it was taken, is as easily unearthed as any other. Barring variant spellings, or typos in the original poem or in the transcription, which may help it elude literal searching, no thought, no image anywhere in it is out of the way. Richard Bentley (whom the hard-to-please Housman praised for the “firm strength and piercing edge and arrowy swiftness of his intellect, his matchless facility and adroitness and resource”), when compelled to defend his Dissertation on the Epistles of Phalaris from an attack by Charles Boyle and friends, wrote:

I am charg’d with several faults; as first, for citing Passages

out of the way

An Accusation I should wish to be True, rather than False. For I take it to be a Commendation, to entertain the Reader with something, that’s

out of the common way

; and I’ll never desire to trouble the World with

common Authorities

, as this Gentleman would have me do.

But on the level playing field of the CD-ROM, Amhurst, Bickersteth, and Smedley are “common Authorities” equal in weight to Butler, Dryden, and Pope: the scholar gets no earned learnedness credits for quoting them. And yet there they are up on the screen even so — blandly, blindingly obscure, insisting on assimilation.

Unsure of my ability to digest the sudden hairball of new fascinations that Disk 2 was sure to deposit at my feet,³ I postponed the worrying search, and turned instead to my stereo system. Removing the Suzanne Vega CD that was slumbering in my Magnavox portable CD-player (featuring Dynamic Bass Boost circuitry), I replaced it with Chadwyck-Healey’s silver poemage. I listened.

It may not be universally known that you can play CD-ROM software disks on ordinary audio CD-players. The digital sequence is misread as an analog signal. Eighteenth-century English poetry, as interpreted by my Yamaha stereo receiver and peripherals, generated an edgy square-wave buzz, around a low E-natural, a discordia concors lower than a table saw (except when it is cutting a piece of wood with a split end), more like one of those neck hair trimmers that the stylist pulls out of a drawer in the final phase of a haircut, but with excellent spatial separation and some gratuitous conch-shell oceania on top. Disk 3 (1800–1900, poets A — K) sounded much the same. Every so often the power-substation effects would let up a little and there would be some shortlived but lyrical swooshing, as of several cooling hoses playing over the mind at once, although this was not nearly as pronounced as in the excellent Library of the Future CD-ROM, Version 3 (which offers the complete texts of “over 1,750 historical, classical, and cultural titles” for $149.95): this has some very well-defined swooshing intervals that put me in mind of the circular-sander finishes that David Smith used for his big minimalist sculptures, finishes that as you stare into them become three-dimensional, and yet, like some works of science fiction, yield little in real brain-nourishment.

The CD-ROM that works best under this sort of auditory misprision, though, is Compton’s Encyclopedia. As a beginner’s encyclopedia, played on a computer, it has its uses (offering black-and-white pictures of lumber mills, for instance), but as a found John Cage for headphones, as a multimedia dramatization of James Russell Lowell’s phrase about “the omniscience of superficial study,”⁴ it’s perfect. The first track is given over to the usual vagrant digital buzzing and swooshing. But in track two, the left and right channels split, and each carries a separate inventory of audio clips. In your right ear you hear an intelligent woman reading alphabetized words like abdominal cavity, adrenal, algae, brackish, bronchial tree, catastrophic, cephalothorax, conflicting, and contour feathers, while in your left, a Ted Baxtery voice booms out political clichés. (“Give me liberty or give me death!” “The British are coming!” “Don’t shoot until you see the whites of their eyes!”) The woman quietly continues with: massive collapse, minute food particles, and mucous membrane, while Roosevelt angrily declares war on “the Japanese empire.” You’ll hear potential energy, prolonged, protective coloration, pyroclastic rocks, receptors, rectangular grid, residues, rhythmic pulsing, savage, and serrated bristles, over Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech. Stoloniferous, structural defects, taxonomic order, and tentacles accompany Kennedy’s “Ask not” speech. Underground burrows, vulcanism, and voluntary muscle are superimposed over a moment from Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker. Water-dwelling species comes in over the bark of a dog, a mosquito whines over the Equal Rights Amendment. A third didactic man intones fingerlike projection over some hooting monkeys, and he enunciates encroaching and engorgement over the casual grunts of a pig. The experience is hypnotizing, draining, and not to be missed: it is like living through four years in a suburban high school in forty-five minutes.⁵

But even the antiphonal disROMtion of Compton’s audio files couldn’t distract me forever from the duties and temptations of high-speed eighteenth-century retrieval, and two days after my initial failure of nerve I found I was prepared to open my clone-tower’s drive once again and awaken Chadwyck-Healey’s Disk 2 from its dogmatic lumber. I performed a “Standard Search” across the entire disk, and immediately discovered something of value (to me): an additional lumber-couplet from Pope’s first version of The Dunciad, a version I had never read. In Dunciad I, Pope trains his metered hate on Lewis Theobald, the unfortunate critic and minor poet who doomed himself by venturing some acute criticisms of Pope’s edition of Shakespeare. Theobald sits surrounded by books in his study: “He roll’d his eyes that witness’d huge dismay,” Pope writes (and this happens to be a mock-epic echo of a line from Paradise Lost, as Pope tells us in a footnote — Theobald, like Milton’s Satan eyeing Hell, glances in misery over the gilded prison of his library)—

He roll’d his eyes that witness’d huge dismay,

Where yet unpawn’d, much learned lumber lay.

Notice the “Where yet unpawn’d” clause: probably Pope revised this couplet out of Dunciad II because he had second thoughts about pawning off his earlier and better use of learned lumber, in An Essay on Criticism, on this new placement. But to me the passage was of interest mainly because it proved, as none of the other concordanced lumber-quotations directly did, that Pope was (like Samuel Butler before him) consciously aware of the pawnbrokerly undermeaning of lumber.

For in English prose and poetry, lumber doesn’t mean what most Americans think it means (“felled timber”); rather it means, roughly, old household goods, slow-selling wares, stuff, or junk—junk of the sort you might find at a junkshop, or even, figuratively, at Yeats’s foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart. The bookful blockhead’s head is not filled with fresh, sap-scented New England plywood, ready for postdoctoral carpentry, but rather with broken, sprung, pawed-over, and possibly pawned Old World trinkets and bric-a-brac. “Lumber, old stuffe” is the concise definition given by Robert Cawdrey, author of the first English dictionary, A Table Alphabeticall … of hard usuall English wordes (1604).

Only recently did we lose this meaning in the United States. When William Faulkner, in a class at the University of Virginia in 1957, described the writer “reaching into the lumber room” to find the plots and images he needs, he was referring to what he moments earlier had called his “junk box.”⁶ But by 1987, that old drossy sense of “lumber” was sufficiently dormant in American usage that Donald Duclos could write an interesting paper (published in The Eugene O’Neill Newsletter and listed in the MLA CD-ROM Index) entitled “A Plank in Faulkner’s ‘Lumber Room’: The Emperor Jones and Light in August.” The paper calls attention to some telling verbal similarities between Faulkner’s book and O’Neill’s play. “I suggest,” Duclos writes, “that that play became a significant plank in [Faulkner’s] lumber room of building materials.”

We shouldn’t be surprised that Duclos mistook Faulkner’s meaning. There has always been confusion over lumber-room in America — and in Mississippi, Faulkner’s state, the existence of a nineteenth-century Natchez firm called the R. F. Learned Lumber Company left matters especially ambivalent.⁷ Faulkner himself, being American, used lumber often enough in the familiar building-supply sense — for instance, a character pauses “among the mute soaring of the moon-blond lumber-stacks” in “Pantaloon in Black,” a pleasant surprise I found via volume 1 of Jack L. Capps’s 1977 concordance to Go Down, Moses, one of the series of concordances overseen by The Faulkner Concordance Advisory Board at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. H. L. Mencken, in The American Language, writes that “Lumber, in England, means articles left lying about and taking up needed room, and in this sense it survives in America in a few compounds, e.g., lumber room”; but even if the compound hadn’t survived in America when Mencken was writing, Faulkner could have found it easily in the junk box he reached into most often and most helpfully, Ulysses. Near the beginning of Joyce’s novel, Stephen Dedalus stands in front of his students thinking about storytelling and memory. (“For them too history was a tale like any other too often heard, their land a pawnshop”; Pyrrhus and Julius Caesar, being stories, “are not to be thought away”—“they are lodged in the room of the infinite possibilities they have ousted.”) Stephen then dismisses his students from class:

Quickly they were gone and from the lumberroom came the rattle of sticks and clamour of their boots and tongues.

On the next page, “Hockeysticks rattled in the lumberroom.” And then, on page 714, we find a “lumbershed with padlock for various inventoried implements.” You can collect these passages⁸ by reading Ulysses, of course, or, if you’ve already read it and can’t face reading it again, or if you don’t want to read it at all, you can arrive at them as I did, with the help of Miles L. Hanley’s Word Index to James Joyce’s Ulysses (1937), a manually typewritten volume that was the result of gluing Joyce’s words onto 220,000 cards⁹ and alphabetizing them into six wooden racks of post-office pigeonholes. (Theresa Fein, notes Hanley in his acknowledgments, is the person who did most of the actual work of typing, alphabetizing, proofreading, and verification — I hope Joyce wrote her a thank-you.)¹⁰ The Word Index’s page references don’t exactly match the pagination of the familiar Random House edition, but they are close enough that you can eventually spot what you’re looking for, and when you do, you feel (because you had to hunt a little harder than usual) that you’ve done some real scholarly work.

So when Pope in The Dunciad neatly describes a row of owlish scholars—

A Lumberhouse of Books in ev’ry head,

For ever reading, never to be read

— the lumber-house he has in mind is not a moon-blond, plank-ranked lumberyard at all, as I used to think, but a “Lombard-house,” or a pawnshop. He wants us to understand that scholars are borrowing from the past, cashing in on and taking credit for things they don’t own. He hasn’t forgotten that he was himself born on or just off Lombard Street, so named because thirteenth-century Lombard pawnbrokers (cf., Longobardi, “long-beards”¹¹) collected there to do business, replacing persecuted Jews. (Pepys called it “Lumber Street” in 1668; Wycherley spelled it “Lumbard Street” in 1675.)¹² It is a street “still familiar to the public eye,” writes De Quincey in one of his essays on Pope, and important

first, as the residence of those Lombards, or Milanese, who affiliated our infant commerce with the matron splendours of the Adriatic and the Mediterranean; next, as the central resort of those jewellers, or “goldsmiths,” as they were styled, who performed all the functions of modern bankers from the period of the Parliamentary War to the rise of the Bank of England, — that is, for six years after the birth of Pope.…

Lumber seems originally to have meant possessions pawned to a Lombard, or money received in exchange for articles pledged to a Lombard; a lumber-room or lumber-house or lumber-office was a pawnbroker’s establishment, or, more broadly, a storeroom in a bank where a debtor’s possessions were held as collateral. During Pope’s childhood, there were several proposals for the founding of charitable, semi-public lumber-houses, on the model of church- or state-funded monts-de-Piété in Paris, Amsterdam, and Rome — one prospectus, circa 1708, entitled The New Lombard Houses, proposed to lend money “in a manner most cheap and easie to the Industrious Poor” at the rate of about 5 percent — nonetheless, pawnbroking remained a private enterprise in England. Elisha Coles’s long-running English Dictionary listed the various spellings in 1676:

Lombard, Lombar, Lum-, D

a bank for ufury or pawns, alfo as

Lombardeer

, an Ufurer or Broaker, fo called from the

Lombards, Longobards

, Inhabiting the hither part of

Italy

, and much addicted to Ufury.

(D. stands for “Dutch.”) The successor to Elisha Coles was Nathan Bailey; his Universal Etymological English Dictionary (1721) became, according to Gertrude Noyes, “the most popular and representative dictionary of the eighteenth century.”¹³ Its fourth edition appeared in 1728, the year of Pope’s first use of “Lumberhouse”; it has:

LOMBAR-

Houfe

[

of

lumpe

or

lompe

,

Du

a Rag] a Houfe in which feveral Sorts of Goods are taken in as Pawns: Alfo where they are expofed to Sale.

LOMBARD-

Street

[fo called, becaufe the Refidence of the

Lombards

, who were great Ufurers, &c.] a Street near the

Royal Exchange, London

.

This sense of lumber-house is obsolete now, although Brewer’s Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Phrase and Fable (1991) includes a related entry for LOMBARD: “An acronym for Loads of Money but a Real Dickhead.” Skeat’s Etymological Dictionary half seriously includes Minsheu’s onomatopoeic derivation from 1627: “Lumber, old baggage of houshold stuffe, so called of the noise it maketh when it is remoued, lumber, lumber, &c.” (Skeat comments: “If any reader prefer this fancy, he may do so.”) The Pocket Dictionary, or Complete English Expositor (“A Work entirely new, and defign’d for the Youth of both Sexes, the Ladies and Persons in Business”), published in 1753, defined Lumber as “Old, heavy, ufelefs furniture”; and Samuel Johnson, two years later, influentially but too narrowly defined it as Any thing ufelefs or cumberfome: any thing of more bulk than value, adducing a wonderful sentence from one “Grew,” who is, I assume, Nehemiah Grew (1641–1712), a plant-microscopist and Royal Societitian:

If God intended not the precife ufe of every fingle atom, that atom had been no better than a piece of

lumber

.

Johnson also gives Pope’s “lumber-house of books in ev’ry head” as an illustrative quotation — without, however, any hint of banking or brokering in his definition: the usurious sense of lumber had always been slightly slangy, and Johnson held “modern cant” in low regard. (He was “at all times jealous of infractions upon the genuine English language, and prompt to repress colloquial barbarisms,” said Boswell of him.)¹⁴ Latham’s dictionary, in 1866, sticks very close to Johnson’s definition: “Cumbersome matters of more bulk than value; old stuff.” Noah Webster’s An American Dictionary of the English Language (1828) also echoes Johnson:

LUM’BER, n. [allied to Sax. leoma, utensils, or to lump, clump, a mass, or Dan. lumpe, a rag; lumperie, trifles; Sw. lumpor, rags, old cloths; D. lomp; G. lumpen; Fr. lambeau. In French, lambourde is a joist.]

1. Any thing useless and cumbersome, or things bulky and thrown aside as of no use.

The very bed was violated—

And thrown among the common

lumber

.

Otway.

But Webster adds the woody meaning that was by then widespread in the U.S. and Canada:

2. In America, timber sawed or split for use; as beams, joists, boards, planks, staves, hoops and the like.

Webster was prone to fanciful etymology, and we should be careful not to be swept away by it; still, his hint that the American and (French-)Canadian logger’s meaning of lumber could be related to or influenced by the French word “lambourde” (joist) is more helpful than the entry in The Oxford Dictionary of English Eytmology (1966), which doesn’t attempt to explain the transatlantic shift of meaning at all; and it has more pith than the conjecture offered by Joseph T. Shipley, in his personable Dictionary of Word Origins (1945), which seems a little too neat:

In American pioneer days, when the land was cleared for farming, there were many felled trees lying around; these, being discarded material, were

lumber

— which later was put to good use.

¹⁵

American writers from time to time use the word in the English way (Poe, in his “The Rationale of Verse,” wrote that metrical quantity “is a point in whose investigation the lumber of mere learning may be dispensed with, if ever in any”); but the reverse is seldom true: Adam Smith is the only writer from Great Britain I can come up with who used our sort of lumber several times.¹⁶ In The Wealth of Nations (1776), he writes:

In a country quite covered with wood, where timber consequently is of little or no value, the expense of clearing the ground is the principal obstacle to improvement. By allowing the colonies a very extensive market for their lumber, the law endeavours to faciliate improvement by raising the price of a commodity which would otherwise be of little value, and thereby enabling them to make some profit of what would otherwise be a mere expense.

Incidentally, the Poe and the Adam Smith I found by searching the Library of the Future CD-ROM, Version 3, which gives forty-five competent lumberians (not Alexander Pope, though), from Harriet Beecher Stowe (“The garret of the house that Legree occupied, like most other garrets, was a great, desolate space, dusty, hung with cobwebs, and littered with cast-off lumber”), and Oscar Wilde (“The middle-aged are mortgaged to Life,” says Lord Illingworth, in A Woman of No Importance; “The old are in Life’s lumber-room”), to Johann Wyss’s Swiss Family Robinson in translation (“The stairs served afterwards for a kind of lumber-room”).

Webster’s Second (1934), the dictionary Nabokov loved, includes the obsolete pawning sense of lumber as its first definition for the word; its one quotation comes from the prologue to The Scarlet Letter—

The heap of Customhouse

lumber. Hawthorne

— which refers to the yellowing documents and the torn piece of scarlet cloth in the second story of the Custom-House that betray Salem’s guilty secret.¹⁷Webster’s Third (1961) scraps the Hawthornian lumber and replaces it with a bit of forward-looking table-thumpery halfway between timber-cutting and encumbrance-clearing—“”—substituting

Dewey because (as Herbert Morton shows in his valuable history of Webster’s Third) its unsentimental editor, Philip Gove, wanted quotations that pulled their weight of definitional meaning, not ones which merely demonstrated that a famous name had employed the word. “The hard truth is that literary flavor in a dictionary quotation represents a luxury of a bygone age,” Gove wrote, heartbreakingly¹⁸—and it is true that Hawthorne’s Custom-House context doesn’t get you very far if you don’t already understand what he’s talking about.

Funk & Wagnalls New Standard Dictionary (1963), however, manages to quote Hawthorne¹⁹and convey meaning:

2. Discarded household goods; disused articles put aside.

Happy the man who in a rainy day can betake himself to a huge garret, stored, like that of the Manse, with lumber that each generation has left behind it from a period before the revolution.

HAWTHORNE MOSSES, The Old Manse p. 26. [H. M. & CO. 1891.]

(Notice that Funk & Wagnalls gives specific page references, like the OED. Webster’s doesn’t.) Isaac Funk and his heirs also call our attention to a couplet from Cowper’s “Table Talk” (1782) about poetry in the time of Cromwell:

3. Hence, worthless stuff; rubbish.

Verse, in the finest mould of fancy cast,

Was

lumber

in an age so void of taste.

COWPER Table Talk 1. 627.

The rest of Cowper’s passage (one of three by him, according to the English Poetry Database, that have lumber in them) is good:

But when the second Charles assumed the sway,

And arts revived beneath a softer day,

Then like a bow long forced into a curve,

The mind released from too constrain’d a nerve,

Flew to its first position with a spring

That made the vaulted roofs of pleasure ring.

(But Cowper is not at all pleased, as he goes on to say, with the “dissolute and hateful school” of indecent poets that surrounded Charles II, by whom he means men like John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, appointed a Gentleman of the Bedchamber in 1665, and author of the most beautiful piece of lumber-poetry extant, which I plan to quote in a moment.)

The last meaning in the Funk & Wagnalls entry, flagged by a dagger to indicate that it is obsolete, is “6†. A pawnshop,” and there follows a generous quotation from Trench’s On the Study of Words about lombard-rooms. Webster’s Third, by contrast, entirely eliminates the debtor-creditor meaning, except to allude to it in a capsule etymology: “perh. alter. of ¹lombard; fr. the use of pawnshops as storehouses of disused property.”

Yet Webster’s Third is much better about the modern sense of lumber-room than either Webster’s Second or Funk & Wagnalls: besides furnishing a primary meaning (“a room in which unused furniture and other discarded articles are kept: STOREROOM”), it gives a separate figurative submeaning that includes the following ungrudgingly long but apt citation: “lumber room of their minds with odds and ends of a grudge here, a jealousy there — J.L.Liebman>.”

Who was J. L. Liebman? Joshua Loth Liebman was a Boston rabbi and “one of the leading radio preachers in America,” according to the author’s note at the back of his Peace of Mind (1946)—“his sermons over NBC, ABC and CBS coast-to-coast networks have been heard by millions.” He is dead and forgotten now, as so many are. Dead, wee become the Lumber of the World, wrote the Earl of Rochester, around 1674, immortally translating a chorus from Seneca’s Trojan Women:

After Death, nothing is, and nothing Death,

The utmost Limit of a gaspe of Breath;

Let the Ambitious Zealot, lay aside

His hopes of Heav’n, (whose faith is but his Pride)

Let Slavish Soules lay by their feare;

Nor be concern’d which way, nor where,

After this Life they shall be hurl’d;

Dead, wee become the Lumber of the World,

And to that Masse of matter shall be swept,

Where things destroy’d, with things unborne, are kept.

²⁰

Rabbi Liebman’s style — psychotherapeutical uplift pitched in an exalted Emersonian key — isn’t easy to skim, but I was interested in his relatively late American use of “lumber room” in its traditional sense, and I didn’t think I could put it to etymological use having only seen it laid out on the sheeted gurney of a dictionary page. That would be lazy; not up to A. E. Housman’s exacting standard. Housman singles out for praise the scholar who is willing to spend

much of his life in acquiring knowledge which for its own sake is not worth having and in reading books which do not in themselves deserve to be read.

Housman could of course be wrong in his conception of scholarship: Edmund Wilson, who was hit hard by Freud, thought that “there was an element of perversity, of self-mortification, in Housman’s career all along.”²¹ But Housman’s self-denying intensity appealed to me in my outward-bound lumber-quest. And Liebman certainly qualified as a test of scholarly dedication: his book did not, in itself, deserve to be read, at least as literature. (As self-help, however, it is better written, certainly more allusive, than, say, Deepak Chopra’s Ageless Body, Timeless Mind, which is something.) I spent about two hours paging impatiently through Peace of Mind. I thought — for you begin to develop an instinct for where a sought word can hide when you have looked for it long enough — that my prize would be middened in the section called “Inferiority Complex May Hide Self-Hate.” It wasn’t. I looked for it in the vicinity of “Let us learn, then, not to take the depression of the day or the month as the permanent state of our life.” I expected to run into it as I came to: “When we are tired, every pinprick becomes the stab of a knife and every molehill becomes a mountain.” But I didn’t find it anywhere, and as I scanned steadily, feeling the marshmallow-sized minutes tumble by, occasionally tricked by two nearby words (number and plod, say), which my overeager stare united as the absent object of research — just as in adolescence my eyes would fuse an innocent word on one line (full) with another just below it (knuckle) into a short-lived neutrino of an obscenity that I would invariably hurry back to reread — I became troubled by the knowledge that this was not Rabbi Liebman’s only book: in other words, that I might have to scan Hope for Man or Psychiatry and Religion just as closely; and the suspicion that I was wasting my irreplaceable afternoon of research time got in the way of my attempt to concentrate on what I was looking at, so that several pages would rise in the east and set in the west without my being sure I had properly reviewed them. I flunked this test of scholarship: I couldn’t make myself thoroughly skim Peace of Mind.

I flunked, also, in the case of T. D. Weldon’s Introduction to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, which I checked out because Webster’s Third included, as part of its entry for lumber,

— T. D. Weldon>

Here I really tried: I took off my glasses so that I could be on closer terms with the page, and I braked the pace of my scanning by running a fingertip down each margin (the type was small, so it took me about three seconds), but again I kept blanking on the phrase that I was looking for; I had to whisper it to myself to keep my retinas primed for it. As the sense of my fallibility grew, I began to have fantasies of paying Text Busters, a local optical scanning service, the dollar or two per page it would take to put the whole book on a disk so I could search it electronically, even though that would take all the fun out of any finds I would make; and I remembered a New York Times article about Xerox’s invention of an automatic page-turning system for scanners and copiers that employed an electrostatically charged sliding glass plate. Was it true that only the books that didn’t deserve to be read deserved to be scanned, or only the books that did?

T. D. Weldon’s book was not a masterpiece — it was a careful work of explication, not merely a tissue of “useless words,” but not piercingly beautiful, either. George Herbert’s line, about how speech

Doth vanish like a flaring thing,

And in the eare, not conscience ring

chased its tail in my conscience as I skimmed doggedly along, until I realized that for an indeterminate number of pages I had been unwittingly looking for “flaring thing” rather than “worthless linguistic ~.” I didn’t have the fortitude to go back. Nonetheless, although no lumber forthcame that afternoon, I did find this variation on Locke’s dark room passage:

This completes the catalogue of the kinds of furniture which are constantly being conveyed by the senses into the empty room of the mind’s consciousness. (p. 31)

And I found this:

It is unlikely that any philosopher has ever produced a more unutterably tedious work on metaphysics than Baumgarten’s

Metaphysica

; or combined so successfully the pedantry of a dying scholasticism with the illusory clearness of a pseudo-geometrical demonstration. (pp. 40–41)

How exciting to be given a fresh touchstone of unutterable tedium! Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten it would be, then: I immediately looked him up. His earliest work, a set of poetic precepts and theorizings that appeared in Latin in 1735, was annotated and translated by Karl Aschenbrenner and William Holther in 1954 as Reflections on Poetry. At first there looks to be a sort of lumber-room in it, when Baumgarten discusses the definitions of poem, poetry, and poet: “For rehashing these scholastic terms by nominal definitions, the overstuffed cupboards of the Scaligers, the Vosses, and many others are there to be pilfered.” But “overstuffed cupboards” is only an anachronistic translation of “refertissima scrinia.” A scrinium is a scroll-box,²² or, in Baumgarten’s modern extension of the word, a bookcase. The phrase just means “crowded shelves,” then. Baumgarten does offer, however, a sensible note of warning some pages later:

§ 76. It is advisable to omit certain elements from a poem, § 75. If one were to try to present every interconnection of a historical theme, he might wonder if he should not include a substantial part of the world, not to say all the history of the ages: it is poetic to omit certain details and more remote connections.

And yet if I followed Baumgarten’s advice here, in this non-poem, I would have to leave him out altogether, and that I could never do.

¹ Marlowe’s “Infinite Riches in a Little Room” is, by the way, the motto used in a nineteenth-century advertisement for Scribner & Armstrong’s “Bric-a-Brac Series” of literary reminiscences, edited by Richard Henry Stoddard. The ad appears in the back of the American edition of Leslie Stephen’s Hours in a Library, which contains two essays on Pope. Infinite Riches: Gems from a Lifetime of Reading (1979) is the title of a 588-page “garnering” by Leo Rosten, which excludes quotations from poetry, novels, Shakespeare, and the Bible. Under “Books” Rosten offers a précis of a relevant Hebrew legend: “Whenever the shelves in the Library of Heaven were entirely full, and a new, worthy book appeared, all the books in the celestial collection pressed themselves closer together, and made room.” The English Poetry Database is the most efficient compression of the celestial collection yet.

² Quoted in Norman Page’s A. E. Housman: A Critical Biography (1983), p. 175.

³ Bentley said of Warburton, one of Pope’s early annotators, that he had a voracious appetite for knowledge, but a poor digestion; fifty years earlier Hobbes wrote that “it is an argument of indigestion, when Greek and Latin sentences unchewed come up again, as they used to do, unchanged.” In an Easter sermon in 1619, John Donne said, “The memory, sayes St. Bernard, is the stomach of the soul, it receives and digests, and turns into good blood, all the benefits formerly exhibited to us in the particular.” And Ovid refers to Chaos, embryon Nature, as a “rudis indigestaque moles”—“a rude and indigested mass” in Dryden’s interestingly literal translation, 1693.

⁴ “His [Dryden’s] mind was growing to the last, his judgment widening and deepening, his artistic sense refining itself more and more. He confessed his errors, and was not ashamed to retrace his steps in search of that better knowledge which the omniscience of superficial study had disparaged.” (Among My Books, 1870, “Dryden.”)

⁵ Compton’s is also a more intelligently conceived encyclopedia in some ways than the flashier Encarta ’95—if you search for the word “concordance” on Compton’s, you retrieve a passage about Bible concordances; if you perform the same search on Encarta, you get every article that includes the shortened text-string concord: the town in Massachusetts, Henry David Thoreau (who was born there), the supersonic Concorde, and so on.

⁶ Faulkner in the University, Frederick L. Gwynn and Joseph L. Blotner, eds., University of Virginia Press (1959), pp. 116–7.

⁷ Charles W. Crawford wrote a history of the R. F. Learned Lumber Co. as his dissertation for the University of Mississippi in 1968. Though he never went to college, Rufus Frederick Learned, whose father was a lawyer and whose mother ran a boarding school for girls, could easily have known of Pope’s couplet; Pope was a pedagogical staple.

⁸ Cumulatively reminiscent, perhaps only to me, of the lines

While yet I groped

Within the darkened lumber-room

Of memory

in one of John Davidson’s Fleet Street Eclogues, “Michaelmas” (1893). It’s in the English Poetry Database, Disk 3. Joyce read John Davidson.

⁹ A mere 20,000 cards shy of the rude and indigested mass of cards that Guy Montgomery produced from all of Dryden’s poetry and plays and left alphabetized but unpublished on his death in 1951. Mary Jackman and Helen S. Agoa used Professor Montgomery’s fearsome legacy to create an early computer-generated punch-card concordance (1957): it may look a little crude, but it’s very useful. It led me to the “machining lumber” in the Prologue to Mr. Limberham (quoted above), which, since it was part of a play, wasn’t included in the English Poetry Database.

¹⁰ Was Finnegans Wake an attempt to write an unconcordanceable book? If so, the attempt failed: see Clive Hart, A Concordance to Finnegans Wake (1963). Hart, of the University of Lund, persuaded his wife to type Finnegan out on three-by-two-and-a-half cards and together they sorted it into a “Primary Index,” an index of “Syllabifications,” and an index of “Overtones.” (The word Propellopalombarouter, for example (p. 314), is separately indexed under Propellopalombarouter, and its syllabifications pellopalom-barouter, lopalombarouter, palombarouter, lombarouter, barouter, router, and outer.) With Hart’s help, I found one lumber closet and a slurred version of Lombard Street: “… she rapidly took to necking, partying and selling her spare favours in the haymow or in lumber closets or in the greenawn ad huck (there are certain intimacies in all ladies’ lavastories we just lease to imagination) or in the sweet churchyard close itself …” (p. 68). “I wouldn’t miss her for irthing on nerthe. Not for the lucre of lomba strait” (p. 207).

¹¹ Du Cange’s Glossary, “Langobardi,” cites “Guntherus lib. 2. ex Ottone Frising. lib. 2. cap. 18. de Gestis Friderici,” which proves to be a bearded-lady anecdote by Bishop Otto of Freising (c. 1110–1158): “For to increase their army [by the drafting of women] they twisted the women’s hair about the chin in such a way as to imitate a manly and bearded face, and for that reason they were called Lombards (Longobardi), from their long beards.” (Otto of Freising, Deeds of Frederick Barbarossa, tr. by Charles Christopher Mierow, p. 127.) Eric Partridge, however, in his Origins (1958), under “Lombard,” cites a private letter to him in which Ernest Weekley speculates that Longobardus refers to long axes (barta in Old High German), and not long beards. Whatever it was that was long, beards or axes, their owners came to be called Lombards. Perhaps it was both: one thinks of Tolkien’s blade-wielding, ore-loving dwarves, with their beards tucked under their belts. (Tolkien himself does not seem to be interested in the dwarvish etymology of Lombardy, but he does use lumber. Pamela Blanpied, author of a book about dragons, has kindly called my attention to Gandalf’s description of Butterbur, the innkeeper, in Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring, ch. 10: “A worthy man, but his memory is like a lumber-room: thing wanted always buried.”)

¹² Pepys’s Diary, September 16, 1668; William Wycherley, The Country Wife, IV, iii., modernized as “Lombard Street” in some editions. The u-spelling was common: University Microfilms offers Aqua Genitalis, a sermon by Simon Patrick on baptism, which was preached “at Alhallows Lumbard-street,” October 4, 1658, and published in 1670, and a collection of Farewell Sermons by various hands (1663), including “Mr. Lyes summary rehearsal at the conclusion of the last morning exercise at All-hallows Lumber-street.” A True Narrative of the Proceedings at the Sessions-House in the Old-Bayley describes a “yound [young] lad” who was tried and convicted for stealing one hundred and forty pounds “out of a goldsmiths shop in Lumbard Street” in 1678.

¹³ De Witt T. Starnes and Gertrude E. Noyes, The English Dictionary from Cawdrey to Johnson, 1946, p. 107.

¹⁴ “… such as pledging myself, for undertaking; line, for department, or branch, as, the civil line, the banking line.” (The Life of Samuel Johnson, Dent, II, 143, A.D. 1777.)

¹⁵ Edward Henry Brooke Boulton, president of the Institute of Wood Science in Sussex, offers an interesting, although unsubstantiated, alternative theory in the article on “Lumbering” that he contributed to the new revised Chambers’s Encyclopaedia (1973): “A ‘Lombard’ was … a man who kept a pawnbroker’s shop, and the word ‘lumbering’ arose in the early days of the North American settlers when timber was used as a medium of exchange.” And the Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia (1911) notes, under “limber,” that limar (plural of lim) means “boughs” or “branches” in Icelandic. One is tempted to propose that Viking explorers left the Indians of North America with some lim-lumbery Icelandic wood-word, which then persisted for six centuries or so in one or more Indian languages, until the Indians passed it on to the tree-felling colonists. The difficulty with this theory is that I have been able to find only one such word in my hasty check of Native American dictionaries. Li·me- is a noun-stem meaning “woods,” “brush,” or “branch” in the tongue of the Northern Sierra Miwok people, who ate acorn meal, grizzly bears, and yellowjacket larvae in the mountains not far from Sacramento, California. Sacramento is a very long way from Leif Ericsson’s Vinland, wherever it was exactly. See Catherine A. Callaghan, Northern Sierra Miwok Dictionary, 1987, p. 132.

¹⁶ The English seem for the most part to have been unaware of the competing sense. Dickens, describing a raft of logs on the St. Lawrence River near Montreal, felt obliged to introduce the novel word to his readers: “All the timber, or ‘lumber,’ as it is called in America, which is brought down the St. Lawrence, is floated down in this manner.” (American Notes, 1842, Vol. II, p. 198.) Similarly the OED cites Trollope’s observation in North America (1862) that “Timber in Canada is called Lumber.”

¹⁷ There are affinities (perhaps Updike reviewers have already pointed them out?) between the old men in their chairs on the porch of the Poor-house, in the beginning of Updike’s first novel The Poorhouse Fair, and those “venerable figures,” the Custom-House officers, in the entry of Hawthorne’s Custom-House, “sitting in old-fashioned chairs, which were tipped on their hind legs back against the wall.” Conner, Updike’s young administrator, has an office in the cupola, up four flights, and his job is similar in flavor to Hawthorne’s narrator’s job (Custom-House Surveyor). Updike was, it appears, deliberately linking his book to The Scarlet Letter, as he did again later in Roger’s Version.

¹⁸ The Story of Webster’s Third: Philip Gove’s Controversial Dictionary and Its Critics, Herbert C. Morton, 1994, p. 99.

¹⁹ Who, like Poe, wanted to use lumber in the English sense as evidence of his unprovinciality.

²⁰ Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations gives just the lumber-line from this extraordinary passage, with spelling modernized, on the same page as it proffers a small falsehood by La Bruyère: “We come too late to say anything which has not been said already”—a sentiment imported, as Bartlett’s notes, from Terence. (Robert Burton, who quoted Terence’s thought in his Anatomy of Melancholy, was, unlike La Bruyère, careful to cite his source: “I make them pay tribute, to set out this my Macaronicon, the method only is mine own, I must usurp that of Wecker e Ter. nihil dictum quod non dictum prius, methodus sola artificem ostendit, we can say nothing but what hath been said, the composition and method is ours only, & shows a Scholar.”) When Charles Blount, a friend of Rochester’s, read the Senecan translation, he was understandably moved: “Indeed,” he wrote Rochester, who was by this time raving with neurosyphilis, “the hand that wrote it may become lumber, but sure the spirit that dictated it can never be so.” See Jeremy Treglown’s The Letters of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, p. 234.

²¹ E. M. Forster disagreed: “Passion and Scholarship may enhance each other’s effects. A. E. Housman.” (E. M. Forster, Commonplace Book, ed. Philip Gardner, p. 32.)

²² “When a number of rolls had to be carried from one place to another, they were put into a box (scrinium or capsa). This receptacle was cylindrical in shape, not unlike a modern hat-box. It was carried by a flexible handle, attached to a ring on each side; and the lid was held down by what looks very like a modern lock. The eighteen rolls, found in a bundle at Herculaneum, had doubtless been kept in a similar receptacle.” John Willis Clark, The Care of Books. 1901, p. 30.

(iii)

The point was — getting back to T. D. Weldon — that Weldon had possessed the self-discipline (assuming of course that he was not “something of an impostor,” as Housman had called Wolf) to read a great deal of Baumgarten’s Metaphysica—enough to judge it unworthy of wider notice, which discrimination is one of the public services that scholars perpetually perform. I’m very glad I spent several hours with Weldon’s book (he contributed two pieces of mental furniture to my “empty room” or “overstuffed hatbox”—whichever it is), even though my time with it humblingly demonstrated my own inability to carry out the elementary postgraduate duty of checking it for a quotation. At times a feeling of inferiority does hide, as Rabbi Liebman suggests, something like self-hate, and it is true that many failed scholars, turning on the books that formerly absorbed them, rail at pedantry; Montaigne, De Quincey, and Hazlitt were guilty of this, as was Pope in The Dunciad: Maynard Mack, in his great study of Pope’s library, describes the quibbling annotations the poet made as he read, and describes him “as a young man too close for comfort to the literary pedant.”¹ And Pope’s late collaborator, Bolingbroke, was “contemptuous in his language about men of learning,” writes Leslie Stephen, in his life of Pope: “He depreciated what he could not rival.”

But sometimes, contra Liebman, a feeling of scholarly inferiority may hide nothing so dramatic and colorful as self-hate, and may simply betray a wish for heroes and heroines. Some of us, falling short of what De Quincey called “massy erudition,” retreat for a period to cultivate light learning about learnedness. We satisfy our craving for the emotions of intense study at second hand, by consuming gee-whiz stories about the omnilegent and omnilingual. “A learned man is the most venerable of all,” Virginia Woolf wrote, in Jacob’s Room—

a man like Huxtable of Trinity, who writes all his letters in Greek, they say, and could have kept his end up with Bentley.

And in her essay on Bentley, she wrote: “Of all men, great scholars are the most mysterious, the most august”:

Since it is unlikely that we shall ever be admitted to their intimacy, or see much more of them than a black gown crossing a court at dusk, the best we can do is to read their lives — for example, the

Life of Dr. Bentley

by Bishop Monk.

What Woolf really meant here, though she was too proud, or perhaps too subtle, to say it, was: Since we will never have the evergreen knowledge of ancient texts they had, since their inner-espaliers are off limits to us, we must content ourselves with the vicarious flutter that comes from reading their heroic, or (in the case of Bentley) shameful, life-exploits.

So naturally Woolf was interested in the notion of a mental lumber-room. She entitled her essay on Hakluyt’s Voyages “The Elizabethan Lumber Room”; she closes it with a sentence of appreciation for the prose of Sir Thomas Browne, whom she regarded as Hakluyt’s noble broker:

Now we are in the presence of sublime imagination; now rambling through one of the finest lumber rooms in the world — a chamber stuffed from floor to ceiling with ivory, old iron, broken pots, urns, unicorns’ horns, and magic glasses full of emerald lights and blue mystery.

Browne may be responsible for one of the finest lumber-rooms in the world, but I have yet to find one lumber in Browne’s own prose — not even in Urne Buriall, where I was certain it was waiting for me; nor any lumber for that matter in Donne’s sermons or meditations, which were important wells of metaphor for Browne. And, though I badly wanted to come across some learned lumber in Orlando, I only spotted (besides the irrelevant “lurching and lumbering traffic”) lumber-substitutes: “plate, cruets, chafing dishes and other movables,” “a perfect rag-bag of odds and ends within us,” “old iron,” a starling “on the brink of the dust bin,” a mind like a traveler’s suitcase containing “something contraband for which she would have had to pay the full fine,”² the mind “a meeting-place for dissemblables,” and a modern bookshop in which “the works of every writer she had known or heard of and many more stretched from end to end of the long shelves” or were “piled and tumbled” on tables and chairs. I wasn’t too disappointed, though: Orlando as a whole is Woolf’s lumber-Room of One’s Own: in it she imagines an anthropomorphized anthology of the literary tradition that leads up to her. With touching, almost American naivete, her preface to the novel politely thanks Defoe, Browne, Emily Brontë, De Quincey, and Walter Pater for their help,³ as well as nearer-and-dearers like Roger Fry and Julian Bell. It doesn’t mention the Rev. George Croly (1780–1860) — author of a two-hundred-some page Byronesquerie called The Modern Orlando, published in 1846, which one wants to imagine the young Virginia Stephen reading in her father’s library, and even copying bits of into one of her early commonplace books — a poem I found on Disk 3 of the English Poetry Database.⁴ In it you will find the story of Isidore, a count who runs out of money and who applies for relief to a pawnbroker of sorts in the Roman ghetto. He and his companion enter the “Hebrew’s ancient Store,” a chamber rather like Woolf’s Elizabethan lumber-room:

The room was piled with all strange kinds of lumber;

………………………

Huge folios, by the world long sent to slumber;

Arms on the walls, and pictures on the ground;

Cracked china; lutes, long guiltless of a sound;

Furred mantles, missals, tarnished antique plate;

………………………

A sepulchre of

things

— dim reliques of the great.

But, speaking of dim relics of the great, the greatest of Orlando’s “favourite heroes” never used the word “lumber.” He came close. In Henry IV, Part II, Shakespeare has Mistress Quickly say that Falstaff is “indited to dinner to the Lubber’s Head in Lumbert Street, to Master Smooth’s the silkman.” Who Master Smooth is, and what is the precise social tone of the “Lubber’s Head,” or “Leopard’s Head,” no glossator will divulge, but financial transactions are not far off, since moments later Mistress Quickly laments that she has loaned so much money to Falstaff that she may be forced to pawn her plate and even her gown.

Shylock’s pound of flesh in The Merchant of Venice is probably not an equivoque on lumber, though. Never mind that one of the word’s submeanings, aside from “money loaned,” is, in the words of Webster’s Second, “sometimes, specif., superfluous flesh”—the phrase “pound of flesh” predates Shakespeare in English, and Shakespeare, a punculsive, probably wouldn’t have passed up the chance of making some sort of outright Lombard-lumber-lump-of-lard association if he had seen it.⁵ The first example in the OED of this sense is from 1806–7, in Beresford’s Miseries of Human Life (“With all my fleshy lumber about me”); Thomas Traherne contributes an apposite seventeenth-century line found in the English Poetry Database:

A Body like a Mountain is but Cumber.

An Endless Body is but idle Lumber.

⁶

William Trevor’s Reading Turgenev (1991) has another example: “It seemed to her that her own flesh and bones were so much lumber, real but without real interest.” (My wife is the source of this quotation.) Partridge’s Dictionary of Slang has “live lumber,” meaning “soldiers or passengers on board ship … ca. 1780–1910.” But later fleshy meanings seem most often to refer to horses and dogs, not people, as in this instance from the OED:

1891 H. S. C

ONSTABLE

Horses, Sport & War

15 Good thoroughbred horses have also lost what goes by the name of ‘lumber’—such as lumps of flesh and fat … on the top of the neck.

And this from The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia:

A fine slashing dog, of good size, possessing plenty of bone without

lumber

, and excellent legs and feet.

Dogs of Great Britain and America, p. 104.

Despite Shakespeare’s disappointingly low keyword turnout, we shouldn’t forget that his folios were themselves esteemed as pawnable lumber. In T. H. White’s Mistress Masham’s Repose, the underfed and word-hungry Professor, having misplaced his copy of Du Cange’s Glossary, wonders for a salivary moment whether he should trade in one of his first-folio Shakespeares so he can buy a fishhook and snag some perch in one of the lakes of Malplaquet. Happily, Cook brings a packet of bloaters and the Professor can keep his Shakespeare. At the end of the novel, he receives The Medieval Latin Word-List, a gift that the Lilliputians have financed by “pawning their sprugs” (their gold coins), and he can finally look up the word that has been troubling his thoughts, the ambiguous Tripharium. (Though learned, T. H. White’s book lacks lumber.)⁷ Isaac D’Israeli, in his essay on the recovery of manuscripts in Curiosities of Literature, tells how a lawyer in the papal court gave Petrarch two books by Cicero on Glory. Petrarch in turn

lent them to a poor aged man of letters, formerly his preceptor. Urged by extreme want, the old man pawned them, and returning home died suddenly without having revealed where he had left them. They have never been recovered.

“Usurers,” D’Israeli recounts, considered manuscripts

as precious objects for pawn. A student of Pavia, who was reduced, raised a new fortune by leaving in pawn a manuscript of a body of law; and a grammarian, who was ruined by a fire, rebuilt his house with two small volumes of Cicero.

Medieval monastic libraries frequently demanded the deposit of a pledge before they loaned out books, and booksellers, or stationers, in university towns “had transcripts made, bought, sold and hired out books and received them in pawn.”⁸So Pope’s unmannerly crack about Theobald’s plagiarizable library, “Where yet unpawn’d, much learned lumber lay,” had an important literal meaning, too: Pope made a small fortune from his Homeric translations (jobbing out pieces of The Odyssey to junior poets and selling it all under his name), but Lewis Theobald was poor, clerkish, “supper-less” (so Pope cruelly calls him in The Dunciad), and in a pinch he would have relied on the possibility of pledging some of his sizable book collection as his bond. As late as 1731 Theobald was in serious financial distress: he wrote Warburton (who would later edit Pope) that “at present, when I should set down with a Mind & Head at ease & dis-embarrass’d, the Severity of a rich Creditor (& therefore the more unmercifull) has strip’d me so bare, that I never was acquainted with such Wants, since I knew the Use of Money.”⁹

Poor in purse Theobald may have been; but he was not invariably a poor poet. The Cave of Poverty (1715) is a Gothic surprise — it describes the wicked Queen of Poverty in her cave, gloating over the misery she has wrought:

Ten Thousand Doors, like Flaws in mouldring Earth,

Led to the Center of the Gloomy Den;

And each to streaky Gleams of Light gave Birth,

That shot a-thwart the Dusk, and seem’d a-kin:

Pale as the Fire that on Night’s Visage glows,

Serving alone her Horrors to disclose.

There are many stricken poets down in the cave—“Clusters of Bards” that lie in penury in “small silent Dormitories,” trying to subsist:

With wild Profusion these consume their Store,

And rack Invention, lab’ring to be poor.

¹⁰

And Theobald’s Shakespeare Restored is an impressively rich work of textual criticism, too; the first of its kind on an English poet (as Theobald himself can’t resist pointing out on the second-to-last page): its tone has some of Bentley’s joshing roughness and show-offy annotative exuberance. As with many tractatuses, the supplemental material is more interesting than the main text — the sixty-one dense pages of Theobald’s Appendix are full of insights and connections, some of them damaging to Pope. For instance, Pope had endorsed a change from “Aristotle thought” to “graver sages think” in a passage from Troilus and Cressida. In scandalized response, Theobald heaps up Diogenes Laertius, Cicero, Iamblichus, Strabo, Aullus Gellius, King Lear, Coriolanus, Beaumont and Fletcher’s Humorous Lieutenant, Dryden and Lee’s Oedipus, Sophocles, Anaxandrides, Alexis, Diphilus, Athenaeus, and others on the quarto page — invoking all these authors merely to prove that Shakespeare’s anachronistic mention of Aristotle, in a play set in Troy, was “the Effect of Poetick Licence in him, rather than Ignorance” and that Pope’s meddling was unwarranted, literal-minded, and indeed pedantic, which it was. Embarrassed, embittered by the exposure of his scholarly shortcomings, Pope adapted the premise of Theobald’s Cave of Poverty, swapping the Queen of Dulness for the Queen of Poverty and making Theobald himself the Queen’s supplicant, and in this way came up with the first version of The Dunciad, which, over time, irreparably and wrongfully damaged Theobald’s reputation. Theobald was without question a pedant¹¹—but his is the good kind of pedantry, the kind in which playful fierceness and a motley flutter of cognate or merely ornamental references (“a Rhapsody of Rags,” Burton or Donne would call it) colorfully and contentiously and self-parodically coexist. The Cave of Poverty is not dull, it’s almost Dickensian, and Shakespeare Restored isn’t dull, either, as Pope knew: the entertaining war between Bentley and Boyle over the authenticity of the letters of Phalaris had shown would-be pamphleteers that few things will get the readerly pulse racing like the spectacle of well-read scholars going after each other in the vernacular. (The Poggio v. Filelfo¹² and Milton v. Salmasius bouts were fought in Latin.) There was a market for learned strife in racy English. The same morning I read Theobald fume (rightly) at Pope’s gratuitous “graver sages,” I read this “Note upon the note” to an Englished version of Dr. Bentley’s Horace, published by Lintot in 1712:

In this

Ode

the Dr. makes a horrid Pother about the spelling of some proper Names; much Ink is spilt, many Pages consum’d, several old Parchments and Copies dusted, Commentators and Criticks quoted and confuted, various Lections settled, Indexes and Lexicons turn’d over, and a great deal of

Latin

and

Greek

squander’d away; and all to prove whether we must read,

Thyas

, or

Thias

, or

Thuas

, or

Thyias;

as also, whether we must say,

Rhacus

, or

Raecus

, or

Recus

, or

Runcus

, or

Rhucus

, or

Rhaetus

, or

Raetus

…

But horrid Pothers over tiny cruces are exactly what we need from commentators: for they (the Pothers, I mean — and what an impossibly Anglican teacake of a word that is!) are hard evidence that someone has really grunted and sweated over this single lump of poetry. Some spelunker has stopped here, of all places, and sat down, and made this clammy side-grotto the temporary center of learning, toward which all else written impends; he has roamed as many of the “Ranks of subterranean Rooms” in the Cave of Poverty and poetry as he could, single-mindedly looking for antecedents; he has memorized, dated, compared and contrasted, triple-parsed, even dreamed about what he is elucidating — dreamed about it as Heinrich Heine’s professor, in “The Harz Journey,” dreams about

walking in a beautiful garden where the flower-beds produced nothing but slips of white paper with quotations written on them, gleaming delightfully in the sunshine; and now and then he would pull up a handful and laboriously transplant them to a new bed, while the nightingales rejoiced his old heart with their sweetest notes.

So must have dreamed, I imagine, the far-darting commentator to Virginia Woolf’s essays (vols. I–IV), Andrew McNeillie, who does not let go of one of Woolf’s unattributed quotations until he has successfully located the unique floral attribution for its buttonhole; and on those rare occasions when he can’t come up with a previous carnation, he sounds genuinely chagrined. Thus in her essay on Sir Walter Raleigh, Virginia Woolf mentions in passing the “vast and devouring space” of the centuries, and puts the phrase in quotation marks, without troubling to tell us where she got it. McNeillie searches everywhere, but for once he is stumped:

The origin of this phrase, which VW also quotes in ‘Papers on Pepys’ below, has resisted all attempts at discovery.

Naturally I had to do a quick ROM-search for “vast and devouring space” in the English Poetry Database; I came up with half of it on Disk 3. In a verse drama called Festus (1877) by Spasmodic poet Philip James Bailey, a space-devouring work of 688 pages and over 31,000 lines that barely missed being excerpted in Palgrave’s Golden Treasury¹³ —a creation so vast, in fact, that the very word “vast” appears in it 130 separate times (e.g., “Alp-blebs of fire, vast, vagrant”) — you will find the phrase-fragment “devouring space” on line 15,772. Obviously this isn’t Woolf’s source — but since Bailey’s Festus is a Faustian reworking, I felt some anticipatory giddiness at the possibility that the reference which had resisted McNeillie’s researches might yield to my own, and that it would be waiting for me in Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus; but when I hurried to the library to wash my hands in the milk of the excellent Marlowe concordance (Robert J. Fehrenbach, Lea Ann Boone, and Mario A. Di Cesare, 1982),¹⁴ I determined that “vast and devouring space” wasn’t to be found there (as lumber wasn’t) — and how very presumptuous of me, anyway, to think that I could have divined the elusive source when McNeillie, who has devoted years of his life to this sort of maddening pursuit, could not. But someone someday, probably very soon (Chadwyck-Healey’s English Verse Drama Database is out now),¹⁵ will track it down. (The Library of the Future CD-ROM offers this from halfway through Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov: “The horses galloped on, ‘devouring space,’ and as he drew near his goal, again the thought of her, of her alone, took more and more complete possession of his soul.…”) McNeillie is not alone; I am not alone: it is worth remembering that each lonely plodding footnoter is also an honorary citizen of the intergenerational federation of commentators. Virginia Woolf writes (in her essay called “Hours in a Library”) that “a learned man is a sedentary, concentrated solitary enthusiast, who searches through books to discover some particular grain of truth upon which he has set his heart”; but he can draw comfort from the knowledge that other sedentary enthusiasts preceded him, and others will follow him — he can, if he wishes to wax eschatological, think of these as friends and colleagues of a sort, as Housman seems to have regarded Scaliger and Bentley, and “the next Bentley or Scaliger.” Peter Lombard in his Book of Sentences built a useful central warehouse of theological quotation and analysis that developed, in the centuries after his death, a whole walled city and surrounding shantytown of secondary disputation and explication, as each hard-reading schoolman brought his trifles and trumpery to the great memorial Peter Lombard-room, to see what they were worth.¹⁶ “A commentary must arise from the fortuitous discoveries of many men in devious walks of literature,” wrote Samuel Johnson: I haven’t read this quotation in its original context; I have plucked it from a paragraph by Pope’s fussy Charles Kinbote of a commentator, the Reverend Whitwell Elwin, who includes it in his introduction to Pope’s Works, on the same page that he announces his plan to cart off most of the “pedantic lumber” of previous commentators to appendixes.

And — to glance back at Lewis Theobald for a minute — one of the bits of pedantic lumber that Shakespeare Restored offers us is this note on Hamlet’s “bare bodkin” speech, which might have attracted Vladimir Nabokov’s attention as he was imagining Pale Fire, since it supplies a missing connection (in the person of Theobald himself, Shakespeare’s pedantic, moony worshipper, and Pope’s antagonist) between Shakespeare, Pope, and the Kinbote-anagram, botkin:

I can scarce suppose that he [Shakespeare] intended to descend to a Thought, that a Man might dispatch himself with a

Bodkin

, or little Implement with which Women separate, and twist over their Hair. I rather believe, the Poet designed the Word here to signify, according to the old Usage of it, a

Dagger

.

But Pale Fire’s Charles Kinbote — the Zemblan émigré who explicates an uneven neo-Augustan poem in rhymed couplets by John Shade — isn’t only a stand-in for Pope’s minor bodkin-toting foe, Lewis Theobald: he is all of Pope’s eulogistic or crabby commentators superimposed. Here is how the Reverend Elwin describes an early editor, Warburton:

He employed his sagacity less to discover than to distort the ideas of his author, and seems to have thought that the more he deviated from the obvious sense the greater would be his fame for inventive power.… The exuberant self-sufficiency of Warburton deluded him into the belief that [Pope’s] text derived its principal lustre from the commentary. He selected for the frontispiece to his edition a monument on which were hung medallions of himself and the poet, and Blakey, the draughtsman, told Burke that ‘it was by Warburton’s particular desire that he made him the principal figure, and Pope only secondary, and that the light, contrary to the rules of art, goes upwards from Warburton to Pope.’ (xx-xxi)

The lighting is very Pale Fiery indeed. But then another Pope editor, Mark Pattison, says this of Reverend Elwin:

Mr. Elwin has adopted an opinion that Pope was engaged in a conspiracy with Bolingbroke for the writing down of the Christian religion, and the substitution of Bolingbroke’s irreligious meta-physics in its place.… To what Mr. Elwin has said of Warburton’s commentary, we can make no objection. But he has sadly laid himself open to a

tu quoque

retort, by reproducing against Pope the same strained interpretation, the same imputation of meaning never meant, and the same inconclusive prosing on moral problems, which he objects to in Warburton.

Elwin reminds Pattison, in fact, of Richard Bentley’s editing of Paradise Lost:

Bentley first created a fictitious editor, who had corrected the poem for the blind author. Having set up this imaginary personage, he could attribute to his forgery every word or line which he wished to correct. Mr. Elwin sets up the hypothesis of an antichristian conspiracy, and deduces from it the meaning of particular passages.

¹⁷

This is not so very far from Kinbote’s paranoid pother over John Shade’s wife’s suppression of the Zemblan dimension of Shade’s poem in its final version:

[W]e may conclude that the final text of

Pale Fire

has been deliberately and drastically drained of every trace of the material I contributed; but we also find that despite the control exercised upon my poet by a domestic censor and God knows whom else, he has given the royal fugitive a refuge in the vaults of the variants he has preserved.… (

Pale Fire

, Vintage ed., p. 81)

And A. E. Housman — whose poems are referred to by Charles Kinbote as the “highest achievement in English poetry in the past hundred years”—is a fussing presence behind Nabokov’s novel, too. There is one passage in particular from Housman’s Selected Prose that could have opened an injector valve in Nabokov’s Russian-gauge locomotive, if he saw it. It is from a snide review of a book of Lucilian fragments edited by Friedrich Marx:

Mr Marx should write a novel. Nay, he may almost be said to have written one; for his notes on book iii (Lucilius’ journey to Sicily) are not so much a commentary on the surviving fragments as an original narrative of travel and adventure.

¹⁸

The twenty-year-old Nabokov, in the words of his biographer Brian Boyd, encountered, while at Cambridge, Housman’s “glum features and drooping-thatch mustache … at Trinity’s high table almost every night”;¹⁹ and Boyd quotes helpfully from Speak, Memory, where Nabokov admits

the direct influence upon my Russian structures of various contemporaneous (“Georgian”) English verse patterns that were running about my room and all over me like tame mice.

Mice are in their element in poetry’s l.-room, by the way. Robert Louis Stevenson has a line in his Child’s Garden of Verses about “mice among the lumber” (although he may well be talking about outdoor lumber — hay or stubble or brush, or even possibly wood — here);²⁰ and there are ten other nineteenth-century poems in the English Poetry Database that contain lumber and mice or mouse in them, including a read-aloud piece of sentimentalism by Mary Montgomerie Lamb (1843–1905), also known as Violet Fane. (She would not want to be confused with Mary Ann Lamb, Charles Lamb’s matricidal sister.) It is called “The Old Rocking-Horse (In the Lumber-Room)”:

The mice, in their frolicsome revels,

Sport over him night and day,

And the burrowing moth

In his saddle-cloth

Has never been flick’d away.…

What a medley of eloquent lumber

Do his proud eyes lighten upon,

From those drums and flutes

To the high snow boots

And the mouldering stuff’d wild swan …

Yeats got the stuff’d wild swan of rhymed poetry to fly again at Coole a few decades later.²¹

It wasn’t Housman’s tame Georgian verse-mice, however, that swayed Nabokov in later years. Housman the critic (captious, haughty, ferulean) left his permanent mark on Nabokov’s nonfictional style, just as Francis Jeffrey’s harsh intelligence marked Housman. Here, for example, is Housman sounding sneeringly Nabokovian on the subject of translation:

“Scholars [Housman quotes] will pardon an attempt, however bald, to render into English these exquisite love-poems.” Why?

Those who have no Latin may pardon such an attempt, if they like bad verses better than silence; but I do not know why bald renderings of exquisite love-poems should be pardoned by those who want no renderings at all.… Misrepresentation of Propertius is indeed the capital defect of this performance; good or bad, in movement, in diction, in spirit, it is unlike the original.

²²

Nabokov and Housman both used huge critical projects (Pushkin, Manilius) as ways of rationing self-expression — as counterweights to the trebuchet-flights of their lyricism.²³

Naturally I looked semi-diligently in Housman’s writing for the 1. word, since any appearance of it would help me in my passing attempt to yoke him and Nabokov by violence to the same limber-load. But Housman, more power to him, prefers a quiet, beautiful word like marl, which collapses all the travertines of St. Peter’s into its earthen fold, and yet escapes any charge of pedantry because no word so short was ever crabbed:

In gross marl, in blowing dust,

In the drowned ooze of the sea,

Where you would not, lie you must,

Lie you must, and not with me.

(XXXIII, Last Poems)

In prose he uses lumber-nyms like dross-heap: “Thinly scattered on that huge dross-heap, the Caroline Parnassus, there were tiny gems of purer ray.” Where another writer might more gently speak of the lumber-room of Dryden’s diction, Housman brutally calls it a “dungeon.” The only real lumber I turned up in my hours with Housman was contained in a sentence by Francis Jeffrey, which Housman quotes disapprovingly in his review of The Cambridge History of English Literature:

The tuneful quartos of Southey are already little better than lumber — and the rich melodies of Keats and Shelley, — and the fantastical emphasis of Wordsworth, — and the plebeian pathos of Crabbe, are melting fast from the field of our vision.

“Little better than lumber” is a telling metaphorical choice for Jeffrey to have made, from the present vantage, since if you search “Southey, R. OR Wordsworth, W. OR Crabbe, G. OR Keats, J. OR Shelley, P.B.” for lumber in the English Poetry Database you will discover that none of them were lumberjacks, except for George Crabbe, once. (In a poem called “The Birth of Flattery,” Flattery, the offspring of Poverty and Cunning, is able to revive the bloom of graceless forms, and “bid the lumber live.”)²⁴

Housman’s and the Romantic poets’ neglect didn’t deter Nabokov, who, surprisingly enough, gives our chosen keyword a prominent setting in Pale Fire. The deposed Zemblan king, Charles, is imprisoned in a “dismal lumber room” (p. 121) in the royal palace. This “old hole of a room” contains a closet, and in the closet is a Zemblan translation of Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens, as well as some “old sport clothes and gymnasium shoes,” which will, for the ~-obsessed, recall Samuel Butler’s lines (in “Religion”) about the Sanctum of the Jews containing nothing but “lumber and old shoos,” and will perhaps also bring to mind Dickens’s mention of the old shoes and fish baskets in Ebenezer Scrooge’s lumber room.²⁵ A sliding door in the Zemblan lumber-room closet leads to a long secret passageway through which the King escapes; stumbling over “an accumulation of loose boards” (p. 133), he enters a second “dimly lit, dimly cluttered” lumber room, or lumbarkamer (this time Kinbote is good enough to supply us with the actual Zemblan-language equivalent),²⁶ a retreat that was once, as it happens, a dressing room in the Royal Theater, where Iris Acht, paramour of the King’s grandfather, puffed and patched herself in preparation for her role in The Merman. All this is complicated and full of quadrupal playful para-meanings with short half-lives that I don’t really follow, but it seems safe to say that the loose boards that block the door are Nabokov’s nod to the preferred American meaning of lumber, which causes us pedestrians to stumble and misstep in our comprehension of Anglicisms like lumber-room; and both ~-rooms, linked by so “angular and cryptic” a passageway, could without too much symbolic tussling be taken to represent the two received linguistic traditions, the two dictionaries filled with ready-made verbal scenery, that the commentator king, and by inference Nabokov himself, must unite through painful acts of verbal and physical translation. Nabokov escapes one Russian lumbarkamer of second-hand literary heirlooms only to have to contend with the dust and sheets of an Anglo-American substitute.

¹ Mack loses restraint altogether when he writes: “I will make no secret of my belief that in his younger days Pope shows signs of the interest in word-catching that he scorned in others.” (“ ‘Books and the Man’: Pope’s Library,” in Collected in Himself, 1982, p. 318.)

² Compare Nabokov: “A book is like a trunk tightly packed with things. At the customs an official’s hand plunges perfunctorily into it, but he who seeks treasures examines every thread.” (Lectures on Literature, “Charles Dickens,” p. 89.)

³ As Harold Bloom points out in his thoughtful The Western Canon, 1994.

⁴ There are fifty-five instances of lumber on Disk 3 (1800–1900, A-K) and forty-five on Disk 4 (1800–1900, L — Z): a total of one hundred lumber-uses for the nineteenth century. Compare this with the 129 lumbers on Disk 2, for the period 1660–1800, A — Z: much more poetry in the nineteenth century, less lumber. Yet lumber and lumber-room often feel overused in nineteenth-century contexts, and don’t in the eighteenth century. Word-frequency studies, then, can’t tell you whether something is more or less of a cliché.

⁵ Thomas Hood includes a defense of puns in the prefatory matter to the second edition of his Whims and Oddities (first ed. 1826): “I am informed that certain monthly, weekly, and very every day critics have taken great offence at my puns, — and I can conceive how some Gentlemen with one idea must be perplexed by a double meaning. To my own notion a pun is an accommodating word, like a farmer’s horse, — with a pillion of an extra sense to ride behind;—it will carry single, however, if required.”

⁶ From Traherne’s “In Making Bodies Lov could not Express.”

⁷ Which makes no sense, since Mistress Masham’s Repose takes place in Malplaquet, where lumber-users congregated. The Professor (who is, in Fritz Eichenberg’s illustrations, longobarded) recalls that “Dr. Swift was at Malplaquet, as we know, in 1712. He came here straight from Twit-nam, with the poet Pope.” In White’s Malplaquet there are “larders, laundries, cupboards, closets, still rooms, coal cellars, outward rooms frequented in his early days by Dr. Johnson, servants’ halls, sculleries, harness rooms, pantries, dairies, cloakrooms, storerooms, and so forth,” but no lumber-room. Did I miss it? The word lumbago jumped out at me several pages from the end (p. 249), but then I realized my error. (Lumbago makes you lumber because it hurts your back to walk normally.) When my mother read White’s book to me, I assumed that “bloaters” were large pale German hot-dogs, but the Concise Oxford Dictionary says, incredibly, that they are smoked herrings. Listening to her read, I aspired to be the Professor — to live in a small booky shack in an overgrown garden. And in fact my office at this moment bears some resemblance to the Professor’s Rumpelkammer: “As he was one of those unfortunate people who leave the book open at the quotation in some accessible place, all the window ledges, oven-shelves, mantelpieces, fenders, and other flat surfaces were stocked with verified quotations, which had long been forgotten.”

⁸ Old English Libraries, Ernest A. Savage, 1912, p. 200. Savage quotes (pp. 202–3) from Henry Anstey’s description (in his introduction to the Munimenta Academica) of the “ponderous iron chests, eight or ten feet in length and about half that width” that were kept by the university stationer at Oxford in the late fifteenth century, holding “as many as a hundred or more large volumes, besides other valuables deposited as pledges by those who have borrowed from the chest.”

⁹ Lewis Theobald, Richard Foster Jones, 1919, p. 280.

¹⁰ Jones points out (p. 14) that Johann Jacob Bodmer (1698–1783), translator of Paradise Lost into German prose and author of an influential pre-Romantic treatise on the wonderful in poetry, was a fervent enthusiast of The Cave of Poverty. Theobald and Bodmer (a professor of history at Zurich) corresponded. Thus Pope’s piddling arch-pedant, of all people, is a distinct English impulse behind German Romanticism, and German Romanticism in turn feeds back into English Romanticism. This pre-Romantic influence-laundering through a Swiss account makes more under-standable a tiny but odd resemblance between the “Ten thousand doors” that lead to Theobald’s gloomy cave and the “twice ten thousand caverns” reached by the tidal swell in Keats’s sea-sonnet.

¹¹ “It is hardly surprising that the phrase ‘learned lumber’ recurred to Pope’s mind when describing Theobald’s library in Dunciad, Book 1.” (Maynard Mack, Alexander Pope: A Life, p. 429.) Peter Seary’s superb Lewis Theobald and the Editing of Shakespeare (Oxford, 1990) devotes an appendix to Theobald’s (vanished) library, which was auctioned over four evenings in 1744. Seary also shows that Theobald became increasingly sensitive to the Dunciad’s charge of pedantry, and therefore, in his edition of Shakespeare, suppressed his inclination to give tiny textual questions their discursive due: “Theobald’s commentary established a new standard for editors of English texts and created new levels of expectation in the reading public, but a regrettable consequence of his fear of being considered a pedant is that often he fails to do himself justice in his accounts of his discoveries,” writes Seary (p. 178). And Seary compellingly argues that Samuel Johnson, not Pope or even the despicable Warburton, was responsible for the conclusive defamation of Theobald as a scholar by the end of the eighteenth century: Johnson took over Theobald’s methods and insights for his own edition of Shakespeare and for his Dictionary (“Theobald instituted the practice of citing parallels as a means of explicating obscure English words, and Johnson in the Dictionary followed his practice on an unprecedented scale,” p. 207), while making unfair jabs at Theobald and failing to give him proper credit. Still, it is Pope’s Dunciad that defames Theobald now — the fact that Johnson underappreciates him in his prefaces does no active harm to his reputation.

¹² Filelfo’s orations and epithalamials were, writes John Addington Symonds, “conceived in the lumbering and pedantic style that passed for eloquence at that period.” This is a lumber that mixes the sense of heavy footfalls and old vocabulary. (Renaissance in Italy, Modern Library, p. 456.)

¹³ See “Some poems specifically considered but rejected” in the notes to Christopher Ricks’s Penguin edition of The Golden Treasury, p. 511: “on whole too slight” was the final judgment in the manuscript of the anthology. In Edmund Gosse’s Critical Kit-Kats, p. 145, there is this about the poem: “Mr. Bailey’s Festus was really a power for evil, strong enough to be a momentary snare to the feet of Tennyson in writing Maud, and even of Browning.”

¹⁴ One of the dark-red Cornell Concordances that lure the eye here and there in the stacks — some of the others in the series sort the words of Ben Jonson, Herbert, Yeats, Blake, Skelton, Pascal’s Pensées, Mandelstam, Racine, Beowulf, E. E. Cummings, and Swift. I can be sure I haven’t missed any lumber in Samuel Johnson’s poetry thanks to the Cornell Concordance to the Poems of Samuel Johnson. (A Latin epigram called “The Logical Warehouse: Occasioned by an Auctioneer’s having the Groundfloor of the Oratory in Lincoln’s-Inn-Fields” was the closest I got to lumber-room: it is printed as a poem of doubtful authorship in the Oxford edition of Johnson’s poems.) One can easily become sentimental about these great series of concordances, since the more full-text material is available electronically, the less esteemed and understood they will be. They have magical as well as meaningful value, to use Larkin’s dichotomy. “This person is worth studying,” they affirm; “every word that this person wrote deserves its own private lanai of a line.”

¹⁵ I am avoiding it.

¹⁶ Maybe part of the reason scholastic learning was dismissed as “the lumber of the schools” was that Peter Lumber’s Sentences occasioned so many heavy folio volumes.

¹⁷ Pattison’s Essays, vol. II (1889), “Pope and His Editors.”

¹⁸ A. E. Housman, Selected Prose, ed. John Carter, p. 107. Carter’s selection was published in 1962, however, the same year as Pale Fire, so that in order for this passage to have had some slight influential bearing on Nabokov’s novel, we would have to assume that Nabokov read it in its original form in an issue of Oxford’s Classical Quarterly from 1907, which is a sizable assumption.

¹⁹ Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years, p. 171.

²⁰ Garden darkened, daisy shut,

Child in bed, they slumber—

Glow-worm in the highway rut,

Mice among the lumber. (R. L. Stevenson, “Night and Day”)

²¹ There is a mouse among the lumber of Stultifera Navis: or, The Modern Ship of Fools, by William Henry Ireland (1777–1835), once famous as a forger of Shakespeariana. Section XXXI, entitled “Of Foolish Antiquaries,” has:

Old stones, bones, coffins, without number,

Pots, pipkins, pans, such kitchen lumber;

Old chain, mail, armour, weapons rusty,

Coins, medals, parchments, writings musty:

Yet, after all antiques, not one compare I can

To that most rare of all, an antiquarian.

(“Mouse” comes earlier in the poem, in a footnote.) The English Duden (1960), a pictorial dictionary, gives an illustration for “lumber” in its two-page spread on “The Store Room” which shows an old umbrella, some cardboard boxes, a set of weightlifter’s disks, and (no. 74) “the mouse.”

²² “Tremenheere’s ‘Cynthia’ of Propertius,” in Selected Prose, pp. 91–93.

²³ The lombard, or lombarda, was a kind of military “engine,” says the OED, used in sixteenth-century Spain. The first quotation the OED supplies for this separate meaning of lombard is from 1838. But Samuel Wesley uses artillery lumber in a metaphor in 1700, from his Epistle to a Friend concerning Poetry:

A thousand trivial Lumber-Thoughts will come,

A thousand Fagot-Lines will crowd for room;

Reform your Troops [i.e., rewrite, cut], and no Exemption grant,

You’ll gain in Strength, what you in Numbers want.

It’s tempting to think of the military lombard as a species of small trebuchet, turning dead lumbering weight into parabolic flight. (In the Scientific American, July 1995, Paul E. Chevedden, Les Eigenbrod, Vernard Foley, and Werner Soedel describe a modern reconstruction of a medieval trebuchet that successfully tossed a junk car, sans engine, eighty meters, using a thirty-ton counterweight. For a few seconds that car was not junk, it was science — it soared above all landfills.) But it may be that the lombarda wasn’t in fact a portable trebuchet, but some sort of gun or cannon (cf. the OED’s ambiguous quotation of Zurita’s Annales, 1610: “Començo se a combatir la ciudad con diuersos trabucos [trebuchets?] y lombardas”) — or that Samuel Wesley (who was for a short time a chaplain on a man-of-war, according to the Dictionary of National Biography, and may have had some idea of what he is talking about, as I do not) is referring with his lumber-thoughts not to the lombarda at all, whatever it was, but the limber. The limber was a “two-wheeled carriage forming a detachable part of the equipment of all guns on travelling carriages,” according to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th ed., “Limber.” The limber-box held ammunition. The notion of an army pulling its horse-drawn limber-carriages overland could have further helped the word “lumber” to load up on its heavy, hulking connotations. (Limber is still a word in use in the military sense, by the way. You can buy a Civil War cannon and sixteen-inch limber for $130 from the Art & Artifact catalog, Fall Preview, 1995, p. 35: “The wheeled artillery limber with an opening trunk [that is, the limber-box] attaches to the back of the cannon.”) Possibly lumber-thoughts was a simple typo for limber-thoughts (rather than a variant spelling of lombard-thoughts) in the one and only printing of Samuel Wesley’s poem.

²⁴ The quartos of Francis Jeffrey are little better than lumber now, but not the quartos of Southey: Southey brought us the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears (in The Doctor), as well as one of the great poems about scholarship. Palgrave in his Golden Treasury titled it “The Scholar.” Here are the first and last stanzas:

My days among the Dead are past;

Around me I behold,

Where’er these casual eyes are cast,

The mighty minds of old:

My never-failing friends are they,

With whom I converse day by day.

My hopes are with the Dead; anon

My place with them will be,

And I with them shall travel on

Through all Futurity;

Yet leaving here a name, I trust,

That will not perish in the dust.

²⁵ “Lumber-room as usual. Old fire-guard, old shoes, two fish-baskets, washing-stand on three legs, and a poker.” (A Christmas Carol, “Marley’s Ghost.”) The detectable strain of anti-Semitism, or at least of raised Semitic consciousness, in some lumber-contexts can’t be ignored. Jews are the heroic keepers of the past; that fact has amused or irritated some poets and novelists. Nabokov himself, however, wasn’t anti-Semitic.

²⁶ The word (or a word, at least) for lumber-room in Russian is kladovaia. Vladimir Krymov wrote Iz Kladovoi Pisatelia (1951), which some online library catalogs translate as From a Writer’s Lumber Room. In keeping with general European usage, a lombard in Russian is a pawnshop.

(iv)

And why was Nabokov so interested in the word? It may have caused him some memory-triggering linguistic trouble when he was teaching Madame Bovary in translation at Wellesley and Cornell. In the course he taught, partially published as Lectures on Literature, Nabokov worked over Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (which contains some “lumber of crates and bottles” and some “crazy lumber,” although he didn’t mention this fact to his students), and Bleak House; the scene at Krook’s Rag and Bottle Warehouse, displaying “Kitchen-Stuff,” “Old Iron,” “Waste Paper,” “shabby old volumes,” and “Bones” (no lumber) Nabokov described in detail. Then he came to Madame Bovary, and dwelt on the “wonderful” jam-making scene (Part III, ch. 2) in which (and this is Nabokov, not Flaubert, speaking)

little Justin, who having been told to fetch an additional pan for the jam, took one from the lumber room in the dangerous neighborhood of a blue jar with arsenic.

This is the same lumber-room arsenic that Emma later eats, having coaxed the key from Justin. Twice in his lecture notes Nabokov mentions Flaubert’s “lumber room”—it is the alchemical garret in which Homais, the self-important druggist, stores his apothecary materials and performs chemical putterings, pretending to be more of a man of science than he is:

He often spent long hours alone there [writes Flaubert, as translated by Lowell Bair], labeling, decanting and repackaging, and he regarded it not as an ordinary storeroom, but as a veritable sanctuary from which issued all sorts of pills, boluses, decoctions, lotions and potions which he had made with his own hands and which would spread his fame throughout the countryside.

In the original French, the name that Flaubert has Homais give his upstairs sanctuary is not one of the cluster of basic alternatives for “warehouse” or “place of storage”—words like depôt or magasin or debarras or grenier. Rather it is the exotic-sounding (exotic at least to English-speakers) capharnaüm. Capernaum was the town in Galilee where such a press of spectators gathered to hear Jesus (Mark 2) that a palsied man had to be lowered in his bed through the roof to be healed, and it was the site of various other miracles and pronouncements, including the sermon Jesus preached (John 6) after the feeding of the five thousand with the magic loaves and fish-baskets. Hence “un vrai capharnaüm” came to mean (according to the stacked volumes of Littré and Le Grand Robert and Trésor de la Langue Française), a room in which lots of things are tumbled together pell-mell — a “lieu de désordre et de débauche.” Harrap’s dictionary and the Oxford French Dictionary offer bear-garden and glory hole as English equivalents, but these have an unsavory ring. “Lumber room” is the term that J. Lewis May supplies in his translation, the text that was imported into the Library of the Future CD-ROM. Translations by Mildred Marmur (Signet), Joan Charles (edited by Somerset Maugham), Alan Russell (Penguin Classics), Francis Steegmuller (Quality Paperback Book Club), and Paul de Man (Norton) give Capharnaum without umlaut or explanation;¹ clearly, however, the English reader needs some interpretive help. Lowell Bair’s translation for Bantam floats depository as an alternative, turning Homais’s beakered retreat into a sperm bank, which may not be so far wrong, since it is the place where, in Flaubert’s nudging phrase, he “se délectait dans l’exercice de ses prédilections.” Gerard (not Manley) Hopkins, on the other hand, in his Oxford Classics edition, gives the burly and Father-Knows-Bestial Den.

Nabokov also addressed the problem of the best English equivalent. Although he uses lumber room in the published text of his lectures on Madame Bovary, it seems that he also at times tried storeroom. On a handwritten list of mistranslated words that he evidently read aloud to his students, in order that they might correct their copies of the Aveling translation — a facsimile of which, headed “Last Batch of Mistranslated Words,” one may inspect in the Lectures on Literature paperback, p. 161—Capharnaum appears next to “storeroom (or house of confusion).” An additional hard-to-read note says “derived from the name of a [?devastated] city in Palestine.” Maybe this list dates from a period following the first composition of the lectures: having encountered some American-undergraduate bewilderment when he used lumber room, Nabokov possibly fell back on a plainer word. But Den, depository, and storeroom are not good enough: they strip the faded splendor, the reverberantly umlauted plume of Carthaginianism, from capharnaüm, which in the mouth of a small-town pseudo-savant and freethinker like Homais is exasperating and ludicrous, and yet still preserves (as does lumber room, with its fitful gleams of old gold and Lombard wealth) a residue of its own original radical glory. “I can’t accept the idea of a God who goes walking in his garden with his cane in his hand, lodges his friends in the bellies of whales, dies with a groan and comes back to life three days later,” Homais tells Emma; his capharnaüm holds “acids and caustic alkalis” (which he sells on credit to Charles), rather than a prophet and a throng of converts. But it is nonetheless a place of novelistic transubstantiation, of course, in which Emma, driven to eat fistfuls of arsenic powder in Homais’s chemical attic, an act without any of the classical panache of asps or hemlock, nonetheless manages to resurrect herself as an immortal tragic heroine, right on the powder-white page.

There is another beakerful of meaning in this seductive word, too. Gallic lexicographers suggest that capharnaüm may be influenced by a ruralism from the region of Berry, in central France. The Berry patois has cafournion or cafourneau or caforgnau (possibly a splice from caverne, “cavern,” and fourneau, “stove”), meaning a little shack or side-room or shed or cabin. So the Eastern strangeness of one ancient biblical etymology merges with the hobnailed and humble country dialect of another. George Sand, soon to become Flaubert’s esteemed correspondent, had called attention to the berrichon word in her pastoral novel La Petite Fadette (1848): her narrator takes a long sentence to explain that a schoolmaster would censure her for saying carphanion rather than carphanaüm [sic], but that she would have to teach him what it referred to: “the lumber-room … the part of the barn next to the stables where we keep the yokes, chains, and tools of all kinds used with working beasts and for working the soil.” (This English is taken from Eva Figes’s 1967 translation, Little Fadette.) Capharnaüm, then, is an ideal word for Flaubert’s purposes, which are to domesticate exoticism, to interleave realism with high romance, to confuse coarseness and exaltation. Homais’s grandly named refuge may also, I note, be a fictionalization of what Flaubert called his “citadel” (citadelle). This was, George Sand writes in her diary for August 29, 1866, “a strange little old house built of wood that he uses as a wine store.”² No doubt he exercised his predilections there, too.

Which carries us to Proust, who defended Flaubert’s steely style late in his life from an attack in the Nouvelle Revue Française, but who listed George Sand as his favorite writer when he was fourteen. Readers of Swann’s Way will remember Marcel’s affection for Sand’s “romans champětres,” and for the old forms of speech that his grandmother used, which were like old armchairs, on which

we can still see traces of a metaphor whose fine point has been worn away by the rough usage [

usure

] of our modern tongue. As it happened, the pastoral novels of George Sand which she was giving me for my birthday were regular lumber-rooms full of expressions that have fallen out of use and become quaint and picturesque, and are now only to be found in country dialects.

One has to believe that capharnaüm was one of the worn-away words from Sand’s pastoral dens that Proust had in mind here — and yet in the original, where we would hope to visit un véritable capharnaüm we confront, instead, a mere mobilier ancien, not a packed attic but something old packed away in an attic, as if Proust were deliberately obscuring his tracks by the Galilean lake, or as if he had interrupted his writing to think over “capharnaüm” and then had chosen to redirect his phrasing slightly, unwilling to dose his clause with Emma’s arsenic, or unable to tolerate so thoroughly vulgarized a metaphor in his own prose, although he could love it and celebrate it in his grandmother’s speech and in his mother’s evening readings from Sand. Or Proust could here have fallen in step with some allied passage in an English book — possibly something from one of Ruskin’s cathedral-threnodies (the mention of the fine points of ornament effaced by the rough usury of the modern tongue has a Lombardic stonemason’s provenance that recalls Ruskin), flamboyancies that Proust’s mother had diligently translated for him into “several red, green and yellow school exercise books” (see chapter 9 of Ronald Hayman’s biography), as he, fired up with Ruskin-love despite his own TOEFL-unready English, wrote a series of essays about the church sites that Ruskin had so copiously empurpled. But I must resist the urge to page through the thirty volumes of Ruskin that Proust said he owned, or even through the French studies of Ruskin by Robert de la Sizeranne and J. A. Milsand whose translated passages Proust drew on for his essays before his English improved. I’m sure the lumber rests somewhere there; I’m sure that I would have to spend only four or five days holed up in the ornate 39-volume library edition by Cook and Wedderburn (1903) and — as in the story Ruskin tells in Sesame and Lilies (a work Proust translated) of some schoolboys throwing stones at their books, which they had piled on gravestones — the dead ~ would live again:

So, also, we play with the words of the dead that would teach us, and strike them far from us with our bitter, reckless will; little thinking that those leaves which the wind scatters had been piled, not only upon a gravestone, but upon the seal of an enchanted vault — nay, the gate of a great city of sleeping kings, who would awake for us, and walk with us, if we knew but how to call them by their names.

New lamps for old — that’s what the novelist gives us: he beats the rugs, and with a bit of torn T-shirt he works the Old English petroleum distillate into the starved fleurette of the doubtful fauteil, and suddenly those huddled movables we always vaguely knew we owned and yet never gave their due seem worth hauling out into sunlit living rooms: the city of sleeping things and kings starts up, staggers in, and begins raving like Vault Whitman, who in 1855, ten years before Ruskin had imagined saying “Open Sesame” to the enchanted and encrypted city of the dead, in his thereafter suppressed Introduction to the first edition of Leaves of Grass (an edition that Malcolm Cowley calls, in his Penguin introduction, “the buried masterpiece of American writing”), wrote:

The greatest poet forms the consistence of what is to be from what has been and is. He drags the dead out of their coffins and stands them again on their feet … he says to the past, Rise and walk before me that I may realize you.

Whitman, though, only uses lumber to mean timber.

Or, less hysterically, Proust could be remembering Middlemarch. During his tussles with the writing of Jean Santeuil he said in a letter: “There are moments when I wonder whether I do not resemble the husband of Dorothea Brook in Middlemarch, and whether I am not collecting ruins.”³ Of Middle-march’s pasty and cold-fingered Mr. Casaubon — the collector of dead mythologies, whose promised Key to them all turns out to open nothing more than a cabinet of dry and worthless salvages from a lifetime of severe study — the impassioned Will Ladislaw says to Dorothea:

“Do you not see that it is no use now to be crawling a little way after men of the last century — men like Bryant — and correcting their mistakes? — living in a lumber-room and furbishing up broken-legged theories about Chus and Mizraim?”

(I skimmed 165 pages of the Riverside edition before I found this; the fact that it was embedded in dialogue made it harder to spot.) Some pages earlier George Eliot lays out another lumber-room or curiosity-shop image. “The idea of this dried-up pedant,” thinks Ladislaw as he falls in love with Dorothea,

this elaborator of small explanations about as important as the surplus stock of false antiquities kept in a vendor’s back chamber, having first got this adorable young creature to marry him, and then passing his honeymoon away from her, groping after his mouldy futilities (Will was given to hyperbole) — this sudden picture stirred him with a sort of comic disgust … (Riverside edition, p. 152.)

Eliot probably was thinking of Faust’s line to Wagner about the spirit of the age being a Rumpelkammer when she had Will talk scornfully of living in a lumber-room. She translated Goethe and “read probably every word” by him, according to Gordon Haight, one of her biographers; and she helped G. H. Lewes with his once well-known biography, The Life and Works of Goethe (1855).

Mark Pattison, editor of Pope and biographer of Isaac Casaubon, was George Eliot’s primary model for the character of Mr. Casaubon,⁴ though Pattison is a more likable and (on paper, at least) a more complicated figure than the Middlemarch dry goods merchant. “To be mesmerized by a vast subject is a dilettante feature and a recipe for disaster,” writes C. O. Brink, in his English Classical Scholarship. “It devitalizes activity and tends to cause such creative powers as there are to wither. I wonder,” he adds, “if not something like it happened to Pattison.”⁵ And yet the last chapter of Pattison’s best book, his biography Isaac Casaubon, is a frightening but inspiring portrait of a compulsive reader, a Greek-citation-hoarder, an urn-burier, who was (like all scholars, but especially those who spend a lifetime preparing themselves to write something that is too big for one brain to encompass) “greater than his books.”⁶ Books Isaac Casaubon did write, as Mark Pattison himself did, but they were never the Big Book, and instead he took Alp-blebs of notes. Unfortunately, the notes are useless without the mind they served:

What he jots down is not a remark of his own on what he reads, nor is it even the words he has read; it is a mark, a key, a catchword, by which the point of what he has read may be recovered in memory.

“To this vast mass of material,” writes Pattison of the real Casaubon, “his own memory was the only key.” A sympathetic scrutineer, looking over Isaac Casaubon’s shoulder with Pattison’s help at his literary remains, sees only what Dorothea Brooke finally worked up the courage to examine in her fictional Mr. Casaubon’s cabinet — he sees (again in Pattison’s surprisingly lyrical and heartfelt words)

disjointed fragments, lying there massive and helpless, like the boulders of some abraded stratification.

⁷

But the observer must nonetheless acknowledge, Pattison urges, that in the posthumous rubble of Isaac Casaubon (as in that of Mark Pattison, who abandoned his huge history of Renaissance scholarship) he is witnessing “the remains of a stupendous learning,” which is something valuable and admirable, after all. Eliot called her Middlemarch notebook “Quarry,” and this Ozymandian final chapter by Pattison, uninsistently autobiographical, was certainly one of the marmoreal desolations from which she prised chunks and cooked them for lime.⁸

Nor should we be surprised that Mark Pattison resorts to the word “lumber” himself, as he prepares to defend Isaac Casaubon’s old-fashioned scholarship from the attacks of anti-pedants like Thomas De Quincey:

De Quincey has endorsed the complaint that “the great scholars were poor as thinkers.” De Quincey wrote at a time when “original thinking” was much in repute, and was indeed himself one of the genial race to whom all is revealed in a moment, in visions of the night.… A freshness and a vigour characterise the english and german literature of the fifty years 1780–1830, which are due to this effect [?effort] to discard the lumber of “unenlightened” ages.

⁹

Looking up from this passage, which indirectly puts De Quincey and Pattison at antipodes, one can almost envision George Eliot conjuring up the figure of De Quincey as she worked out the character of Will Ladislaw — De Quincey being, like Ladislaw, a Lake-poet enthusiast, though not actually a poet, a follower of German esthetic philosophy, though not quite a philosopher himself, and above all, an extremely chatty and intelligent journalist. Why De Quincey himself resisted the temptation to use the word lumber in recounting his opium dreams or in writing about Pope I do not know.¹⁰

But to return to Proust momentarily, before we take leave for the time being of the confusingly crowded French tabernacle and return to the safe haven of Augustan English prose (since my French is sorrier than Proust’s English, and Proust, says Hayman, “would have found it hard to order a chop in an English restaurant”¹¹) — the thing worth pointing out is that in Swann’s Way, in the paragraph that follows Marcel’s comparison of George Sand’s figures of speech to an old and exiled armchair, when he speaks of the “beauty and sweetness” of his mother’s reading voice, and of how she

supplied all the natural tenderness, all the lavish sweetness which they demanded to sentences which seemed to have been composed for her voice and which were all, so to speak, within the compass of her sensibility

— the thing worth noting is that Proust may be not only remembering George Sand’s novels at bedtime, which in their quaint way supplied him with a stock of “narrative devices” that are “common to a great many novels,” but also privately cherishing his mother’s more recent literal renderings in French of Ruskin and (perhaps) other English masters of the longer-handled ladle. And it is just possible that Proust owes something of his feeling for his grandmother’s linguistic furniture to Henry James’s Spoils of Poynton, a novel about (to be crude) the sale of old furniture. Proust’s grandmothery passage about the metaphors effaced by the usure of the modern tongue recalls James’s lovely “She hated the effacement to which English usage reduced the widowed mother.…” from chapter 5. I don’t know enough about Proust to say with any certainty that he had read James’s Spoils, but it is his kind of book,¹² and Proust did after all write (in 1910), as quoted by Ronald Hayman:

It is curious that in all the contrasted kinds of writing from George Eliot to Hardy, from Stevenson to Emerson, there is no literature which exerts on me a power comparable to that of English and American literature.

On Proust’s own authority, then, let’s politely take leave of him and George Sand and of Flaubert, especially Flaubert: for if it is this fraught an undertaking to arrive at a full-bellied understanding of a plain English pork-chop of a word like lumber-room, as I am finding it to be, then it will be next to impossible to make sense of Flaubert’s untranslatable chutes and laideurs. Let’s return, instead, to the green and pleasant Samuel Johnson.

¹ Eleanor Marx Aveling, who was responsible for the version of Bovary that Nabokov assigned, did use an umlaut. She, we learn from Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot, was the first English translator of the work, and, sunk in a cafard-naum of her own, she later killed herself with prussic acid.

² See the Steegmuller-Bray translation of the Flaubert-Sand correspondence (1993), p. 18, and Anne Chevereau’s edition of Sand’s Agendas, vol. III (1992), p. 384.

³ Proust: A Biography, Ronald Hayman, p. 139. Either Proust or Hayman leaves off the terminal “e” in “Brooke.”

⁴ For some of the details of the link, see John Sparrow’s Mark Pattison and the Idea of University. Gordon Haight strongly disagrees that Mr. Casaubon was inspired by Mark Pattison, and devotes Appendix II of his biography to the “canard.” But he isn’t convincing.

⁵ English Classical Scholarship, 1985, p. 132. To be mesmerized by a tiny subject can be a dilettante feature and a recipe for disaster, too. Brink goes on to quote from a letter of A. E. Housman to Lord Asquith asserting that Pattison was “a spectator of all time and all existence, and the contemplation of that repulsive scene is fatal to accurate learning.”

⁶ Mark Pattison, Isaac Casaubon, 2nd ed., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1892, Section X, p. 434.

⁷ Isaac Casaubon, p. 430. There are rhythms in this exciting sentence-fragment that remind one of Gibbon’s translation of Poggio’s description of fifteenth-century Rome: “The forum of the Roman people, where they assembled to enact their laws and elect their magistrates, is now enclosed for the cultivation of pot-herbs, or thrown open for the reception of swine and buffaloes. The public and private edifices, that were founded for eternity, lie prostrate, naked, and broken, like the limbs of a mighty giant; and the ruin is the more visible, from the stupendous relics that have survived the injuries of time and fortune.” (Decline and Fall, vol. VIII, ch. 71.) The incoherent notes that survive a great classical scholar who has failed to complete his great work have, then, some of the sublimity and grandeur of Poggio’s broken Forum. Still, I did not succeed in finding any lumber in Gibbon’s descriptions of fallen Rome or sacked Constantinople.

⁸ Latter-day Romans made cement by burning marble ruins for lime. A footnote by Dean Milman in the 1855 Milman, Guizot, and Smith edition of Gibbon, published by John Murray, says (vol. VIII, p. 277): “Ancient Rome was considered a quarry from which the church, the castle of the baron, or even the hovel of the peasant, might be repaired.” Gordon Haight reports that George Eliot read Decline and Fall in 1855 and again in 1864; Middlemarch was written c. 1870.

⁹ Isaac Casaubon, pp. 448–9.

¹⁰ In his treatment of Pope’s Essay on Man, however, De Quincey pre-sciently describes Mr. Casaubon’s Key to All Mythologies. The Essay on Man is a work, writes De Quincey, “which, when finished, was not even begun; whose arches wanted their key-stones; whose parts had no coherency; and whose pillars, in the very moment of being thrown open to public view, were already crumbling into ruins.” (Essays on the Poets, “Alexander Pope,” Ticknor & Fields, 1856, p. 193.)

¹¹ My French isn’t nearly as bad as my Latin, which would have made Virginia Woolf cough discreetly behind her hand.

¹² As is Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters (1864–66), a Poynton precursor in which some beloved old furniture of a dead mother is stored away by a tasteless stepmother: “Most girls would be glad to get rid of furniture only fit for the lumber-room,” says Mrs. Kirkpatrick, on p. 189 of the Oxford Classics edition. I’m grateful to my wife for pointing out this reference. While I was reading Wives and Daughters (just to p. 189, where I stopped, off to lumber-pastures new), I came across some passages about a certain Lord and Lady Cumnor and heard in their names the minuet-music of country gentry, and was reminded of Alexander Pope’s game of ombre in the second version of The Rape of the Lock. It occurred to me that if one didn’t know anything about the etymology of lumber, one might guess that it was from l’ombre, “shade” or “shadow”—and one would imagine that lumbery things were stored away in the shadows of l’umbra-rooms, overseen by Pope’s melancholy gnome, Umbriel, whose name is just lumber with the l displaced. The Concise Oxford French Dictionary has mettre un homme à l’ombre meaning (colloquially) to put a man in prison, and this is also one of lumber’s slang senses in English: to be in lumber can signify imprisonment (as can to be in limber and to be in limbo), per Partridge’s Dictionary of Slang.

(v)

In his seventy-eighth Rambler essay, for Saturday, December 15, 1750, Johnson wrote:

The most important events, when they become familiar, are no longer considered with wonder or solicitude, and that which at first filled up our whole attention, and left no place for any other thought, is soon thrust aside into some remote repository of the mind, and lies among other lumber of the memory, over-looked and neglected.

When I first read this sentence, in 1982, I had no notion of the long-bearded and — barded history of lumber. The phrase “lumber of the memory” appealed to me because it brought to mind dim palletized piles of pressure-treated two-by-fours, their end-grain sprayed bright nonwooden colors to distinguish grades and brands, laid out in a huge, fragrant mind-hangar — a place like the Home Depot, or Grossman’s, or Chase Pitkin, where new sawdust, and not the dust of ages, covers the floor, and where unfinished ten-foot pieces of molding (quarter-rounds, coves, and coronado caps) are stored upright in allées of sequential pens; lengths that when you bring them up to the register, intending to Make Something New with them, spring in sympathy with your steps, like the rhythmic slow-motion warp of the sprinting vaulter’s resilient prop: a forward-looking, American lumber of imminence, then, of unrolled plans and dormer punch-throughs and vest-pocket solariums, not a backward-looking European lumber of decrepitude and decay.¹ Remote repositories of the mind were just the sort of places you would need to store a heavy, dentable, sandable percept like lumber: the roundedness of the word implies the shearing scream of the tablesaw in some distant neighbor’s yard on summer afternoons, which is always followed by a reassuringly melodic mallet-plink as the shorn end falls into the pile of angled scrap.

But if someone had quietly let me know back then that Johnson’s chosen word had nothing directly to do with wood, that it was often used euphemistically to mean “rubbish,” in metric placements where a single syllable like “trash” wouldn’t work, I, though ashamed of the seriousness of my misunderstanding, would still have treasured the sentence. I connected it with Johnson’s way of walking, his oddly love-inspiring “infirmity of the convulsive kind” (as Pope called it, when recommending some of Johnson’s early verses to a friend) — an affliction “that attacks him sometimes, so as to make Him a sad Spectacle.” Boswell, attempting a diagnosis, quotes a description of St. Vitus’s dance from a medical book: “It manifests itself by halting or unsteadiness of one of the legs, which the patient draws after him like an ideot.” Thus Johnson lumbered into the drawing rooms of dancing masters like Chesterfield; and his gait easily merged with my reverence for the extensive mental millyards of knowledge that he was able to pack into his Dictionary, a book that as soon as it was published stood for the raw materials of prose, so definitive an inventory that even Pater, a century later, advised would-be Cyreniasts to be wary of any word that Johnson hadn’t seen fit to define.

And I was also certain, when I first read it, that Johnson’s sentence was the secret fuse-force that lay behind Coleridge’s better-known description of the power of philosophy and of poetic genius: the sort of genius that “rescues the most admitted truths from the impotence caused by the very circumstance of their universal admission”:

Truths of all others the most awful and mysterious, yet being at the same time of universal interest, are too often considered as

so

true, that they lose all the life and efficiency of truth, and lie bed-ridden in the dormitory of the soul, side by side, with the most despised and exploded errors.

Johnson’s lumbered “repository of the mind” reforms itself as Coleridge’s slumbering “dormitory of the soul.” Even Coleridge’s use of “exploded errors” has a Johnsonian sound: Johnson elsewhere (The Adventurer, no. 126) censures the recluse who “thinks himself in possession of truth, when he is only fondling an error long since exploded.” Coleridge wrote his version for the fifth issue of The Friend, a short-lived periodical (it ran from 1809 to 1810) that seems to have been modeled in part on Johnson’s Ramblers, Idlers, and Adventurers; but he liked his passage so much that he worked it into his Biographia Literaria (1817).² Right he was to fondle it a second time, too: he had renovated and Sardanopalized Johnson’s truth, which had itself become so true that it lay bedridden in a multivolume collection of passé eighteenth-century moral essays by a critic who, in the eyes of the Lakers (as Jeffrey called Wordsworth et al.), stood for the falsely orotund diction of the Popists. Those hinted shapes that you can almost detect in the turbid shadows of Coleridge’s sentence — the sprawling forms of despised and exploded opium-eaters sleeping off their murky glassfuls in a communal paralysis of indolence, bad dreams, and missed deadlines — force the inherited assertion to assume once again all the life and efficacy of truth.

Both quotations, I hope I am the first to note, can be traced back to a particular passage in Saint Augustine, whom Johnson read carefully and occasionally quoted from in essays and ghost-written sermons. In Chapter X of the Confessions, Augustine thinks about how cogo (to gather) and cogito are allied words, and how in remembering something, we must gather, or re-collect, truths that sparsa prius et neglecta latitabant—that before lay hidden away, scattered and ignored; or, in Coleridge and Johnson’s variations, lay “despised and exploded” or “overlooked and neglected.” “If,” writes Augustine, in Pine-Coffin’s Penguin translation,

If, for a short space of time, I cease to give them my attention, they sink back and recede again into the more remote cells of my memory, so that I have to think them out again, like a fresh set of facts, if I am to know them. I have to shepherd them out again from their old lairs.…

(Augustine also refers here to the mind’s contents as thesauri, “treasures,” and compares his memory to a “huge temple” and a “spacious palace” and, with a little more neurological justification, to a place with ineffabiles sinus—ineffable sinuses, or secret recesses, folds, fastnesses, or deep pockets in the financial sense.) The first version of Johnson’s Rambler essay, which has “the remoter repositories of the mind”³ rather than the (better) singular “some remote repository,” further points up the Augustinian source, which is plural.

There is another figure behind Johnson’s and Coleridge’s rooms full of neglected memory-lumber, as well. In Locke’s “Of the Conduct of the Understanding,” a work posthumously published in 1706 and probably intended as a coda to the much better-known but less interesting and human (and lumberless) Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke writes that “General Observations drawn from Particulars, are the Jewels of Knowledge, comprehending great Store in a little Room; but they are therefore to be made with the greater Care and Caution,” since, Locke warns, we are always in peril of overdoing our jewel-storage, making

the Head a Magazine of Materials, which can hardly be call’d Knowledge, or at least ’tis but like a Collection of Lumber not reduc’d to Use or Order; and he that makes every thing an Observation, has the same useless Plenty and much more falsehood mixed with it.

Some pages later, Locke (who was in the habit of using metaphors to point out the dangers of metaphor) says that he who has not a mind to represent to himself an author’s sense “divested of the false lights and deceitful ornaments of speech,” will make

his understanding only the warehouse of other men’s lumber; I mean false and unconcluding reasonings, rather than a repository of truth for his own use, which will prove substantial, and stand him in stead, when he has occasion for it.

⁴

This is a form of the great scholarly worry — a worry which hydroptically book-thirsty poets like Donne, Johnson, Gray, Southey, and Coleridge all felt at times — the fear that too much learning will eventually turn even an original mind into a large, putty-colored regional storage facility of mislabeled and leaking chemical drums. Locke wasn’t much of a poetry reader,⁵ so it isn’t likely that he got his lumber from Butler or Dryden. But he might have had Charles Cotton’s translation of Montaigne in mind. I know I do now, as I retype Locke. One of the first places I looked for lumber was in Florio’s 1603 translation of Montaigne’s Essays, figuring that Florio would have given it to Shakespeare, and Shakespeare would have passed it on to everyone else (via The Tempest, say), since that was one of vocabulary’s known spice-routes — but vexingly I didn’t find it in Book 1, Chapter XXIV, “Of Pedantisme,” where it should have been, and the Harvard Concordance to Shakespeare was able to cough up only the one unremunerative Lumbert Street address from Henry IV, Part II. So I set Florio’s Montaigne aside, in one of my floor-piles, as a false lead — regretfully, since E. J. Trechmann, one of Montaigne’s later translators, likens the nineteenth-century rediscovery of Florio’s version to “the finding of a valuable piece of old furniture.”⁶ But then I discovered, working my way through some of the screens from the Library of the Future CD-ROM, that Charles Cotton (1630–1687) found a way to put lumber into his 1685 translation of the Essays. (It was Cotton’s version, not Florio’s, that Pope and Emerson read.) “Some one may say of me,” Cotton has Montaigne say (in the late essay called “Of Physiognomy”), “that I have here only made a nosegay of culled flowers, and have brought nothing of my own but the thread that ties them.”⁷ Montaigne has a thousand quote-crammed volumes ranged about him in his circular library as he writes, and he can borrow, if he wants to, “from a dozen such scrap-gatherers, people about whom I do not much trouble myself, wherewith to trick up this treatise of Physiognomy.” But he will try to resist, since

These lumber pies of common-places, wherewith so many furnish their studies, are of little use but to common subjects, and serve but to show us, and not to direct us.…

Lumber pies? What are these succulent-sounding baked goods that Cotton serves us, in his version of Montaigne’s unusual phrase “pastissages de lieux communs”? Florio’s translation kneejerks here with “rapsodies of common places,” a cliché; modern versions by J. M. Cohen and Donald Frame offer the relatively vague “concoctions of commonplaces.” Yet a pastissage is, according to Godefroy’s Dictionnaire de l’Ancienne Langue Française, a “making, or baking of pies, or pastmeats,” or figuratively, a mélange. Possibly Donald Frame would object that Cotton erred on the side of overspecificity. But Cotton seems to be aware of the range of metaphorical meaning that pastissage can have, since he translates the only other use of the word in the Essays, in “Of the Resemblance of Children to Their Fathers,” less colorfully: “we call the piling up [pastissage] of the first laws that fall into our hands, justice.”⁸ Trechmann translates pastissage as “pasties” and M. A. Screech, most recently, substitutes “meat pies.” But to my nose, Cotton’s translation retains more of the steamy savoriness of the original, a lumber pie being, depending on the dictionary you consult, a “highly seasoned meat-pie, made either of veal or lamb” (lumbard-pie in Halliwell’s Dictionary of Archaic and Provincial Words, Obsolete Phrases, Proverbs, and Ancient Customs, from the Fourteenth Century, 10th ed., 1881), or “A pie in which balls of minced meat or fish are baked with butter and eggs” (Webster’s Second; definition omitted in Webster’s Third), or even possibly an uncle or nephew of the numble, umble, or humble pie, a pie made from the lombles (cf. loins and lumbar-organs) or “certain inward parts” of the deer, according to Dr. Ernest Klein’s Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the English Language (Elsevier, 1966–67), whose dedication pages made me cry furtively and without warning at the copying machine of the Berkeley Public Library. Volume I of Klein’s dictionary is

DEDICATED TO THE SACRED MEMORY OF THE BEST PARENTS

MY DEAR

MOTHER

WHO AFTER A LIFE OF SELF-SACRIFICE DIED IN SZATMAR IN 1940

AND MY DEAR

FATHER

,

THE WORLD-RENOWNED RABBI AND SCHOLAR

RABBI IGNAZ (ISAAC) KLEIN OF SZATMAR

,

WHO DIED A MARTYR OF HIS FAITH IN AUSCHWITZ IN 1944;

AND TO THE SACRED MEMORY OF MY

WIFE

AND OF MY ONLY

CHILD JOSEPH (HAYYIM ISRAEL)

WHO ALSO FELL VICTIMS TO NAZISM IN AUSCHWITZ IN 1944

And Volume II is

DEDICATED TO THE BLESSED MEMORY OF

ARTHUR MINDEN, Q.C

.

THE DEAREST FRIEND I EVER HAD,

THE NOBLEST MAN THAT EVER LIVED,

WHO DIED IN TORONTO IN 1966

MAY HIS SOUL BE BOUND IN THE BOND OF LIFE

Dr. Klein: a quiet and disciplined scholar who, after these awful deaths, was left with an extended etymological word-family to keep him company. I would like to thank him, if he is still with us, and even if he is not, for his help with the numbles and umbles and other inward parts that I hereby bake in this lumber pie — a pie that is, regardless of which fishes or meats may have participated in its recipe at various times, above all a mixed dish: Montaigne intended us to think of his “pastissage de lieux communs” as a shepherd’s pie, a calzone, a frittata, a scrapple, a haggis, a pizza ai quattro formaggi, of commonplaces. Frame’s “Concoction” sounds water-based and medicinal and unchewable — it is a non-nutritive pestle-product that Homais the apothecary would formulate in his capharnaüm. The English Poetry Database offers further elucidation: a lumber pie is a “compound paste” in a poem called “A Farewel to Wine, by a Quondam Friend to the Bottle” (1693 is the date of the edition used by the database), by one Richard Ames. Several screens in, Ames samples one vintage and rejects it:

I’ve tasted it—’tis spiritless and flat,

And has as many different tastes,

As can be found in Compound pastes,

In Lumber Pye, or soporifrous Methridate.

The lumber pie also appears to be made, at least at some periods, without benefit of milk or butter or beef, and possibly with ox-heel — or so I nervously conclude (feeling in matters of culinary and bovine history more than a little out of my depth) from a 1717 poem by Edward (“Ned”) Ward entitled “British Wonders: Or, A Poetical Description of the Several Prodigies and Most Remarkable Accidents That have happen’d in Britain since the Death of Queen Anne,” another finding from the Poetry Database. Ward sings of the “hornplague” that “like a fatal Rot or Murrain,/Turn’d all our Bulls and Cows to Carrion,” leaving a queasy populace unwilling to touch beef or anything made with dairy products, such as “custard,” for instance — an “open pie” (according to the OED) often containing meat in an egg and cream sauce:

Custard, that noble cooling Food,

So toothsome, wholsome, and so good,

That Dainty so approv’d of old,

Whose yellow surface shines like Gold …

That crusty Fort, whose Walls of Wheat,

Contain such tender lusheous Meat,

And us’d so often to be storm’d

By hungry Gownmen sharply arm’d,

Was now, alas, despis’d as nought,

And slighted wheresoe’er ’twas brought;

Whilst Lumber-Pies came more in play,

And bore, at Feasts, the Bell away.

So in wet Seasons, when our Mutton

Is e’ery where cry’d down as rotten

,

Cow-heel becomes a Dish of State

,

And climbs the Tables of the Great

.

The OED also informs us that “cow-heel” can mean “ox-heel.” So a lumber pie was at one time a non-dairy ox-product. Or not: I may be misapplying the last four lines, which possibly do not refer specifically to the pie that precedes them.⁹

Another and (to be honest) incompatible explanation for the appearance in the Essais of the rare phrase “pastissage de lieux communs” is that Montaigne was quietly adapting, as was his way, and not quite understanding, a pie-figure from a text that was originally in English, or English mediated by Latin. Pie is — as I happened to discover while looking for lumber in Froude’s Short Studies on Great Subjects, Second Series, vol. II¹⁰—a printer’s term. In “On Progress,” Froude writes:

When a block of type from which a book has been printed is broken up into its constituent letters the letters so disintegrated are called “pie.” The pie, a mere chaos, is afterwards sorted and distributed, preparatory to being built up into fresh combinations. A distinguished American friend describes Democracy as “making pie.”

(I take it the distinguished American friend was Emerson? Or Oliver Wendell Holmes?) The OED doesn’t include Froude’s passage, but the quotations there establish that, at least from the mid-seventeenth century, pie could mean “A mass of type mingled indiscriminately or in confusion, such as results from the breaking down of a forme of type.” Quoting from a writer, too, is the breaking of his work down to constituent pieces, with an eye to an alternative typeset reassembly. And a few inches above the OED entry for the typographical pie is the information that, in the fifteenth century and after, Pyes were the English church’s name for certain elaborate ordinals, or books of commemorational scheduling; and the secular pye book became, perhaps relatedly but probably later, “an alphabetical index to rolls and records.” So even in Montaigne’s own time, pies or pyes were, unfiguratively, books, and maybe were, as well, the hashed dark-matter of type — the Drydo-Ovidian “rude and indigested mass”—from which books were formed. Perhaps Montaigne encountered this more specialized use of pie somewhere and mistakenly concretized it as a pasty, causing the scrupulously flour-powdered Cotton to liven it up further as a lumber pie.

Under either conjectural prehistory of pastissage, we can speculate that Locke read Montaigne/Cotton’s “lumber pies of commonplaces” and wrote of men who make their understandings into “warehouses of other men’s lumber,” and of false knowledge as “a Collection of Lumber not reduc’d to Use or Order,” and then Samuel Johnson read Locke and wrote about those overlooked and neglected thoughts, lying among “other lumber of the memory.” At least, that’s one possible amateur genealogy. Then Ralph Waldo Emerson, reading Coleridge, Locke, Saint Augustine, and Johnson attentively,¹¹ sensed he was in the presence of something very special in the way of recyclable truisms here; and, some twelve years following the appearance of Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria, in “The American Scholar” (1837), after giving an enthusiastic plug for the Romantic movement, and on his way to a denunciation of the “cold and pedantic” style of Pope, Johnson, and Gibbon, he worked his own preacherly numbers on the mind-lumber theme. “That, which had been negligently trodden under foot by those who were harnessing and provisioning themselves for long journeys into far countries, is suddenly found to be richer than all foreign parts,” he declaimed to the slack-jawed Phi Beta Kappans; and then:

let me see every trifle bristling with the polarity that ranges it instantly on an eternal law; and the shop, the plough, and the ledger referred to the like cause by which light undulates and poets sing;—and the world lies no longer a dull miscellaney and lumber-room, but has form and order; there is no trifle, there is no puzzle, but one design unites and animates the farthest pinnacle and the lowest trench.

Emerson was expressing, in fact, the nineteenth century’s constantly repeated desire — the wish to find unexpected for-eignness and beauty in the lumber at one’s feet. Wordsworth had set things in motion in 1800 by announcing (in the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads) that he was imparting to incidents and situations from common life “a certain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual aspect.” But everyone tried out the idea. Hazlitt gave it an entomological turn:

Let the naturalist, if he will, catch the glow-worm, carry it home with him in a box, and find it next morning nothing but a little grey worm; let the poet or the lover of poetry visit it at evening, when beneath the scented hawthorn and the crescent moon it has built itself a palace of emerald light. (

Lectures on the English Poets

, 1818.)

Shelley, in 1821, in his Defence of Poetry (published in 1840), gave it a haremy flavor: “Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar”; and later he says that it “strips the veil of familiarity from the world, and lays bare the naked and sleeping beauty.”

Edward Bulwer-Lytton used it to pit prose and poetry against each other:

Verse cannot contain the refining and subtle thoughts which a great prose writer embodies: the rhyme eternally cripples it; it properly deals with the common problems of human nature which are now hackneyed, and not with the nice and philosophising corollaries which may be drawn from them: thus: though it would seem at first a paradox, commonplace is more the element of poetry than of prose.

¹²

Leigh Hunt, essayist and teacher of Keats, in his The Seer; Or, Common-Places Refreshed (1840), wants to break open

the surfaces of habit and indifference, of objects that are supposed to contain nothing but so much brute matter, or common-place utility, and show what treasures they conceal. (“Pleasure.”)

And in a very Leigh Huntian essay called “A Christmas Tree” in the Christmas 1850 number of Household Words, Dickens himself, entranced by the sight of the tree, invokes (as I clumsily did some pages ago, before I ran across this page of Dickens) the Arabian Nights:

Oh, now all common things become uncommon and enchanted to me. All lamps are wonderful; all rings are talismans. Common flower-pots are full of treasure, with a little earth scattered on the top; trees are for Ali Baba to hide in; beef-steaks are to throw down into the Valley of Diamonds, that the precious stones may stick to them, and be carried by the eagles to their nests, whence the traders, with loud cries, will scare them.

¹³

In 1856, Coventry Patmore said it again in the Edinburgh Review: “The poet is doing his noblest work in resuscitating moral truths from the inert condition of truisms and conferring upon them a perennial bloom and power.…” John Stuart Mill gave the theme a try himself in his On Liberty (1859):

There is only too great a tendency in the best beliefs and practices to degenerate into the mechanical; and unless there were a succession of persons whose ever-recurring originality prevents the grounds of those beliefs and practices from becoming merely traditional, such dead matter would not resist the smallest shock from anything really alive, and there would be no reason why civilization should not die out, as in the Byzantine Empire. (

On Liberty

, Chapter III.)

Matthew Arnold, who once absurdly criticized Wordsworth for being under-read,¹⁴ weighs in, repetitive and humorless and uninspired as usual,¹⁵ in 1863: “The grand power of poetry,” he booms,

is its interpretative power; by which I mean, not a power of drawing out in black and white an explanation of the mystery of the universe, but the power of so dealing with things as to awaken in us a wonderfully full, new, and intimate sense of them, and of our relations with them.

Bulwer-Lytton gave the notion of the renovated commonplace a second try, this time in rhyme, in 1869:

Thou also, old picture of Paradise, well

In the cobwebb’ed lumber-chamber of Hell

Hast thou rested, rotted, and rusted:

Beelzebub’s masterpiece, painted

Long since, though the canvas be old,

And the hues of it tarnisht and fainted,

Yet retoucht with our purple and gold,

Thou shalt brighten, and glitter, and glow, for him,

With the colours of Eden ere they wax’d dim.

Come forth, and be furbisht and dusted!

(“Orval.”)

“Cobwebb’d lumber-chamber of Hell” is nicely torchlit; but better still is W. E. Henley’s sad wave at the past, “that wharf of aery lumber,” in his tribute, “My Meerschaum Pipe” (1875), which lifts the veil, or hanky, of custom from the sleeping beauty of that once commonplace appliance. This lyric (found in the English Poetry Database) is fortunately short enough to quote in full, and it is a good example, too, of the congeners slumber, cumber, and lumber, which poets and prose writers have found useful in close proximity:

My Meerschaum Pipe is exquisitely dipped!

Shining, and silver-zoned, and amber-tipped,

In close chromatic passages that number

The tones of brown from cinnamon to umber,

Roll the rich harmonies of shank and crypt.

Couchant, and of its purple cushions clipped,

Its dusky loveliness I wake from slumber.

Was ever maid than thou more softly lipped,

My Meerschaum Pipe?

How many pangs herethro’ have lightly tripped

Into the past, that wharf of aery lumber?

How many plans, bright-armed and all equipt,

Out of this glowing brain have skyward skipped?

Memories that hallow, O regrets that cumber

My Meerschaum Pipe!

W. E. Henley, we may learn from Drabble’s Oxford Companion to English Literature, lost a foot early on to tubercular arthritis, and for this reason as well as his general piratical mien inspired the character of Long John Silver in Treasure Island (1883), which has in it just one lumber, a treasure handily unburied from the sandbanks of chapter 5 with the help of the Library of the Future CD-ROM:

This appeal seemed to produce some effect, for two of the fellows began to look here and there among the lumber [the bushes of broom?], but half-heartedly, I thought, and with half an eye to their own danger all the time, while the rest stood irresolute on the road.

Interesting that Henley, a forgotten poet of the meerschaum pipe, is thesaurized by Stevenson as Silver, the unforgettable pirate of the maritime poop. “You have your hands on thousands, you fools,” Blind Pew tells the men poking around the bushy lumber for the map. “You’d be as rich as kings if you could find it, and you know it’s here, and you stand there malingering.” And earlier: “Oh, shiver my soul,” he laments, “if I had eyes!”

But only the poets and storytellers have eyes. Even Macaulay isn’t quite up to par, according to Saintsbury’s History of Nineteenth Century Literature (1896–1910): “A poet of the very highest class Macaulay was not; his way of thought was too positive, too clear, too destitute either of mystery or of dream, to command or to impart the true poetical mirage, to ‘make the common as if it were not common.’ ”¹⁶ James Russell Lowell similarly qualifies his praise for Dryden:

But if he [Dryden] have not the potent alchemy that transmutes the lead of our commonplace associations into gold, as Shakespeare knows how to do so easily, yet his sense is always up to the sterling standard.

Christina Rossetti entitled an entire book Commonplace, and Other Short Stories (1870). One of the stories is an account of a lost masterpiece by Titian — a landscape with a female nude and some grapes — that is overpainted with a crude image of a flaming dragon by one of Titian’s envious and less talented friends. The story ends:

Reader, should you chance to discern over wayside inn or metropolitan hotel a dragon pendent, or should you find such an effigy amid the lumber of a broker’s shop, whether it be red, green, or piebald, demand it importunately, pay for it liberally, and in the privacy of home scrub it. It

may

be that from behind the dragon will emerge a fair one, fairer than Andromeda, and that to you will appertain the honour of yet further exalting Titian’s greatness in the eyes of a world.

The superficial exoticism of the dragon hides the long-limbed lumber-luster of the naked and fruitful commonplace.

“Make It New,” Pound’s manifestoid call, and “Make It Strange,” the Formalists’ onion-dome of a translation, is thus shorthand for a hundred years of poetical and critical orthodoxy. By 1914, Saki had stocked a six-page short story with the esthetic theory. In “The Lumber-Room” (collected in Beasts and Super-Beasts), young Nicholas announces that there is a frog in his breakfast. His elders scold him for thinking such a thing. As it happens, however, there is a frog in Nicholas’s breakfast — his meal being a predecessor of Marianne Moore’s horticultural definition of poetry, an imaginary breakfast with a real frog in it. (Nicholas has put the animal there himself.) As punishment, he is kept from visiting the beach with his vile cousins; and, watched over instead by his antipathetic aunt, he is forbidden to visit the gooseberry garden. So Nicholas decides to visit the lumber-room instead:

The key turned stiffly in the lock, but it turned. The door opened, and Nicholas was in an unknown land, compared with which the gooseberry garden was a stale delight, a mere material pleasure.

In keeping with the general features of dark rooms of the Human Understanding, it is “large and dimly lit, one high window opening on to the forbidden garden being its only source of illumination.” Like Saint Augustine’s memory, it is a “storehouse of unimagined treasures.” There is a piece of framed tapestry with a wolvish hunting scene, a roll of Indian hangings, some twisted candlesticks in the shape of snakes, a duck-shaped teapot, brass figures of peacocks and bulls, and, of course, a book: a “large square book” containing pictures of birds. (“And such birds!” A catalog of bird-wonders follows.) Just as Nicholas is “assigning a life-history” to the mandarin duck, his bad aunt calls accusingly from the gooseberry garden, and our hero is quietly pleased:

It was probably the first time for twenty years that any one had smiled in that lumber-room.

Naturally the other children turn out to have a crummy time at the beach, while Nicholas, deprived of two layers of purported treats (beach and garden), meditates happily on possible plot-twists for the dusty hunting tapestry, having suddenly come into a fabulous inheritance in the nineteenth-century lumber-room of fiction. We are left with the expectation that Nicholas will grow up to write quick, cruel, funny stories about nasty grownups and sharp-toothed beasts, as his creator had.

Mervyn Peake changes the sex of his fifteen-year-old visitor to the fictional lumber-room in his Titus Groan of 1946, but Fuschia’s hiding place is very similar to Nicholas’s:

The fact that this room was filled with lumber did not mean that she ignored it and used it only as a place of transit. Oh no, for it was here that many long afternoons had been spent as she crawled deep into the recesses and found for herself many a strange cavern among the incongruous relics of the past. (p. 60.)

Mervyn Peake, since he must as a writer go beyond Saki, posits for Fuschia two even more secret areas beyond the lumber-room — the acting room, and the secret attic. Fuschia describes the tripartite house of fiction to herself:

I know where I go. I go here. This is where I go. Up the stairs and into my lumber room. Through my lumber room and into my acting room. All across my acting room and up the ladder and on to my verandah. Through the door and into my secret attic. And here it is I am. I am here now. I have been here lots of times but that is in the past. That is over, but now I’m here it’s in the present. This is the present. I’m looking on the roofs of the present and I’m leaning on the present window-sill and later on when I’m older I will lean on this window-sill again. Over and over again. (p. 62.)

So useful and welcome does the curiosity-shop model of literary activity become that by 1961, Muriel Spark could confidently assume, when she had a character in her book The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie write a treatise called “The Transfiguration of the Commonplace,” that we would know pretty much what she was getting at. The commonplace was the entire arbitrarily window-framed world, the world of moral clichés, the world of cardboard-character types, the world of material junk, so familiar it was rejected and put in storage, and the transfigurer was the connoisseur-pawnbroker-auctioneer who saw where he or she might tie a dangly handwritten price on a little white string, assigning value and ownership where there had before been only oppressiveness and shopworn confusion.

Arthur Danto, a philosopher at Columbia, “admired and coveted” Muriel Spark’s title, and, having evidently secured her permission (as he tells us in his Introduction), he used it as the title of his own book, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art (1981), a “takeover” (Danto’s word) that, whatever the merits of his book, may not sit quite right with some observers, since Spark was obliged to give her gracious consent regardless of whatever private misgivings she might have felt in seeing a professional esthetician detach her quiet invention from the warmth and privacy of its living chapter and plaster it all over a study (mainly) of the smirking, loveless twentieth-century “transfigurations” of Duchamp and Warhol and their camp-followers — handlebar mustaches on the Mona Lisa, fake Brillo boxes, etc. Danto devotes a paragraph to Hamlet, passingly mentions Proust’s long sentences and Hemingway’s short ones, and alludes to “Johnsonian symmetries” and “Shakespearean fustian” (p. 197), but he says nothing about Wordsworth or Coleridge or Tennyson; his coverage of the textbook pop-art Modernists is not at all the sort of Transfiguration that Muriel Spark’s Tennyson-reciting Sister Helena of the Transfiguration, or Miss Brodie herself, would have wanted anything to do with in their prime.

Muriel Spark’s approximate contemporary Elizabeth Bishop is a modern poet-commonplacer for whom Sister Helena would more likely have had some affinity. The Concordance to Elizabeth Bishop, one of a whole series of Garland Concordances put together under the supervision of Todd K. Bender, directed me to the lumber in Bishop’s late book of poetry, Geography III. Bishop, adopting the voice of Robinson Crusoe, has a passage about how Crusoe’s few island possessions, which once “reeked of meaning” when they were all he had, are now no more than “uninteresting lumber.”¹⁷ This by an American in 1976. It is the most recent use of the older English sense of the word by an American writer that I have found — with the exception of the title of an essay in Government Publications Review, vol. 13, 1986, called “A Mystery Tour Through the Lumber Room: United States Census Publications, 1820–1930, A Descriptive Essay,” by Michele Fagan,¹⁸ and also excepting a poem (assuming he is American) by a person named Hugh Croft that was part of a wedding ceremony between Keith and Kirsten Evans-Orville whose “online recreation” was posted in a series of messages in September 1993 on the WELL. I found the poem by typing a Unix command, “!extract — f lumber misc,” to extract lines from any messages holding “lumber” (or “golden slumbers” or “convention of plumbers”) from the WELL’s Miscellaneous Conference. The relevant stanza is:

I love you because you

Are helping me to make

Of the lumber of my life

Not a tavern

But a temple,

Out of the works

Of my every day

Not a reproach

But a song.

¹⁹

Who Hugh Croft is I don’t know. He isn’t in the anthologies of wedding poetry or the library catalogs that I checked, and he isn’t in Books in Print, and he isn’t as good as Elizabeth Bishop. Even so, he is someone worth thanking — he has helped keep the old sense of the l.-word current in the U.S. through 1993.

I was looking forward to quoting Elizabeth Bishop’s lumber in this warehouse-in-progress — I was inching my way toward it — when Sven Birkerts’s funereal Gutenberg Elegies, about the decline and fall of the culture of print, arrived on December 14, 1994, sent by book-loving, book-reading Barbara Epstein of The New York Review of Books, and sent extravagantly by Federal Express even though Ms. Epstein knew then, because I had warned her, that my lumberfest had grown fifteen times too long for her noble tabloid. Sven Birk-erts quotes Bishop’s “Crusoe in England,” including the lines

I’m bored, too, drinking my real tea,

surrounded by uninteresting lumber

but he neglects to write with wonderment about Bishop’s atypical use of this word, my word. Did Birkerts stop to think about it when he was retyping the passage? Bishop, despite the fact that she is as American a poet as you could ask for, uses the word in the English way, defiantly, as if our Crown Zellerbachs and Georgia-Pacifies and International Papers had not successfully pruned out the old-growth meaning, even though Daniel Defoe’s own novel doesn’t use it at all.²⁰ (Defoe contents himself with “provisions,” “divers pieces,” “goods,” “luggage,” and “warehouse”—no lumber or lumber-room.) ²¹ Of course it isn’t an error on Birkerts’s part to use this innocent, very good poem by Bishop to do something big and floppy like run down “our cultural condition and its prospects,” as Birkerts does (poems can and should be used for all sorts of apoetical purposes — it keeps us thinking about them), and Birkerts does follow his Bishop quotation up with a thought-provoking half-sentence: “The more complex and sophisticated our systems of lateral access, the more we sacrifice in the way of depth.” The half-sentence isn’t true, though, in my experience: I have made “lateral access” my catechism for the past nine lumberlost months, and I have as a result read more, read deeper, read with more curiosity, joy, fanaticism, found more writers I look forward to reading more of, loved the Printed Page in the abstract more, saw more thrilling future in its past, than I have since early college. Lateral access uncovers new places to go deep. I have been reading my great-grandfather Nicholson’s five-volume 1767 Tonson edition of Dryden,²² and my grandfather Nicholson’s copy of Meredith’s poems, books I once doubted I would ever get to — and I owe these reactionary pleasures in great part to the ostensibly heartless, plastic English Poetry Database, whose thousand sideways shocks air-hockey us into an unusually vivid realization of the number of poems there are out there, waiting for us — good, funny poems sometimes, and not (as we might hope, because then we would feel better about not having looked them up) wasted efforts. A passing fret that literacy is under siege is good for reading; it lends grandeur to a commonplace pastime. I am not merely reading Elizabeth Bishop, one can say, I am doing my part to preserve culture from the Straw Men. And is there, I wonder, any point in Birkerts’s lamenting how few there are who now read books with the trough-snortingly ludic absorption with which many allegedly used to read books, if the few who still do — readers like Birkerts himself — forget to bring to them the verbal attentiveness, the readiness to hear what Pater called the “finer edge of words still in use” that will demonstrate by example why one given piece of lithography merits attention over all its laterally accessible alternatives? Bishop’s poem is itself no more than “uninteresting lumber” unless you can hear the strangeness of her use of lumber. Or do I censure Sven Birkerts for being unfruitfully dour about electronic encroachments only because he managed to quote the lumber-passage from “Crusoe in England” in his book before I did in this essay? Am I so petty?²³ Or is it really just because Birkerts’s meditation on reading doesn’t find space to mention somewhere my own meditation on reading, called U and I, published in 1991? Am I indignant at Birkerts’s sourness about our unbookish culture because U and I failed to cheer so thoughtful a man up about the future of the book? What unbecoming garbage!

¹ “Up, my comrades! up and doing!” yodels John Greenleaf Whittier in “The Lumbermen”—an unintentionally funny poem, now that Monty Python’s “I’m a Lumberjack and I’m OK” has transvestized forestry, and a poem that isn’t in the English Poetry Database, because no American poems are—

Up, my comrades! up and doing!

Manhood’s rugged play

Still renewing, bravely hewing

Through the world our way!

² Chapter 4, “On Fancy and Imagination,” in Collected Works, vol. 7, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate, p. 82.

³ See W. J. Bate’s and Albrecht B. Strauss’s edition of the Rambler essays, vol. II, p. 46.

⁴ In this second quotation I’m following a 1901 Maynard, Merrill, & Co. student edition of “Of the Conduct of the Understanding,” with spelling and capitalization modernized, p. 121, bought for a dollar at an estate sale. Locke’s “Of the Conduct,” may I say in passing, in its discussion of the ways to train and subjugate the caprices of ideational succession, in order that no “foreign and unsought Ideas will offer themselves,” and so that we will be able to keep these anarchic ideas “from taking off our Minds from its present pursuit, and hinder them from running away with our Thoughts quite from the Subject in hand,” seems to have influenced several of Samuel Johnson’s best Rambler essays, viz.: “Lest a power so restless should be either unprofitably, or hurtfully employed, and the superfluities of intellect run to waste, it is no vain speculation to consider how we may govern our thoughts, restrain them from irregular motions, or confine them from boundless dissipation.” (Rambler no. 8.) Coleridge, an expert on muddle-headedness, attacks Locke in a letter to the Wedgewoods for his “complete Whirl-dance of Confusion” over mental terminology: “Sometimes again [in Locke’s Essay] the Ideas are coincident as objects of the mind in thinking, sometimes they stand for the mind itself, and sometimes we are the thinkers & the mind is only the Thought-Box. In short, the Mind in Mr Locke’s Essay has three senses — the Ware-house, the Wares, and the Ware-houseman.…” (Quoted in A Locke Miscellany, edited by Jean S. Yolton, 1990, pp. 274–5.) Laurence Sterne was of the contrary opinion that Locke’s “glory [was] to free the world from the lumber of a thousand vulgar errors.” (Tristram Shandy, vol. III, ch. 20.) See Patricia Graves’s meticulous Computer-Generated Concordance to Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Emory University, 1974, p. 807).

⁵ Judging by his library and the slighting things he says in the Essay about the poetic imagination. Locke did, though, own Rabelais, Shakespeare, and Congreve’s The Mourning Bride. (See Richard Ashcraft, “John Locke’s Library: Portrait of an Intellectual,” in A Locke Miscellany.)

⁶ The Essays of Montaigne, Oxford University Press, vol. 1, “Translator’s Preface.”

⁷ And it is contemptible and wrong of Montaigne to have melted whole stolen crayons from Seneca into his paragraphs without announcing it, or for that matter for Georges Perec to work entire Frenched-over sentences from Joyce’s Ulysses into his Life: A User’s Manual without so much as a peep to his readers about it, or for Sterne to plagiarize paragraphs of Locke, or for Emerson to plagiarize a paragraph of Samuel Johnson’s Preface to Shakespeare—it isn’t cute, it isn’t postmodern, it’s cheating, and always has been — and once we learn that a prose writer is capable of such silent filchery, we dismiss him, rightly, as a liar and a con-man, and no matter how good he is, we no longer completely trust anything he gives us.

⁸ A sentence that (as I determined only after much incredulous scrolling and searching) you will not find anywhere on the Library of the Future’s Third Series CD-ROM (you will in Roy E. Leake’s Concordance des Essais de Montaigne, 1981) — since the Library of the Future’s version of the Essays leaves out more than four fifths of the original Cottonian translation. (Rather scandalously, given that World Library, Inc., repeats the claim that “All books are complete & unabridged” five times in its product catalog.) The CD-ROM includes, for example, only two of the first twenty-five essays, leaving out “Of Pedantry,” “Of Liars,” and “Of Fear,” nowhere warning us, onscreen or off, that any material is cut. If this Library of the Future really is a foretaste of the Library of the Future, I hope we won’t, overawed by its exquisite searchability (and I am deeply indebted to it at present myself — although I would like to go on record as saying that I had already found the use of lumber in Boswell’s Life of Johnson by reading an old Everyman Library edition on the T in Boston in 1987), compromise the university Library of the Present, which typically holds Hazlitt’s full annotated nineteenth-century edition of Cotton’s translation, as well as a convenient one-volume 1952 Great Books edition that prints every word. (The electronic text that Library of the Future uses looks to be a scanned version of Doubleday’s handsome, footnote-free distillation of 1947, edited by Salvador Dali — an edition that in its physical paper form is accompanied by some interestingly autopsy-esque Dali illustrations not included on the disk — and I wonder, in passing, if Doubleday’s permissions department is aware that their selection was scanned, and if Dali’s act of essay-selection constitutes sweat-of-the-brow intellectual value that exists on top of a work in the public domain.)

⁹ I like to think that Samuel Johnson ate lumber pies, too — one of the best passages in Macaulay’s article about Johnson in the Encyclopaedia Britannica goes: “Even to the end of his life, and even at the tables of the great, the sight of food affected him as it affects wild beasts and birds of prey. His taste in cookery, formed in subterranean ordinaries and à la mode beef shops, was far from delicate. Whenever he was so fortunate as to have near him a hare that had been kept too long, or a meat pie made with rancid butter, he gorged himself with such violence that his veins swelled and the moisture broke out on his forehead.” But even Johnson might have had some difficulty with this gut-buster from the True Gentlewoman’s Delight (1676), quoted in Robert Nares’s Glossary, as supplemented by Halliwell and Wright (1867): “A lumber pie. — Take three or four sweet-breads of veal, parboil and mince them very small, then take the curd of a quart of milk, turned with three eggs, half a pound of almond-past, and a penny-loaf grated, mingle these together, then take a spoonful of sweet herbs minced very small, also six ounces of oringado, and mince it, then season all this with a quarter of sugar, and three nutmegs, then take five dates, and a quarter of a pint of cream, four yolks of eggs, three spoonfuls of rose-water, three or four marrow-bones, mingle all these together, except the marrow, then make it up in long boles, about the bigness of an egg, and in every bole put a good piece of marrow, put these into the pie; then put a quarter of a pound of butter, and half a sliced lemon, them make a caudle of white wine, sugar and verjuice, put it in when you take your pie out of the oven, you may use a grain of musk and ambergriece.”

¹⁰ No lumber in Froude that I found, but I came across an interestingly indigestible equivalent: “To cram a lad’s mind with infinite names of things which he never handled, places he never saw or will see, statements of facts which he cannot possibly understand, and must remain merely words to him — this, in my opinion, is like loading his stomach with marbles.” (“Education: An Address Delivered to the Students at St Andrew’s, March 19, 1869,” in Short Studies on Great Subjects, Second Series, p. 455.)

¹¹ Emerson mentions Saint Augustine as one of the writers one must read in his “Books.” There is a helpful essay on Emerson’s fascination with Johnson by Stephen Swords called “Emerson and the Ghost of Doctor Johnson,” in The Age of Johnson, vol. 6, ed. Paul J. Korshin (New York: AMS Press, 1994). Swords does not mention one notable remaking of Johnson by Emerson. Johnson, in his “Life of Congreve,” says of a passage in Congreve’s The Mourning Bride: “He who reads those lines enjoys for a moment the powers of a poet: he feels what he remembers to have felt before, but he feels it with great increase of sensibility; he recognises a familiar image, but meets it again amplified and expanded, embellished with beauty, and enlarged with majesty.” Emerson condensed this into his famous line (which I am temporarily unable to locate) about recognizing, in works of genius, our own rejected thoughts: “They return with an alienated majesty.” The Mourning Bride (first produced in 1697) is the only one of Congreve’s plays (according to David Mann’s Concordance to the Plays of William Congreve) that contains lumber. Zara says (II, ii),

what are Riches, Empire, Power,

But larger Means to gratifie the Will?

The Steps on which we tread, to rise and reach

Our Wish; and that obtain’d down with the Scaffolding

Of Sceptres, Crowns, and Thrones; they’ve serv’d their End,

And are like Lumber, to be left and scorn’d.

¹² The Pilgrims of the Rhine, 1834, quoted approvingly by the sixteen-year-old Ruskin in 1836 in his “Essay on Literature,” in Three Letters and an Essay on Literature by John Ruskin, 1836–1841: Found in His Tutor’s Desk (George Allen, 1893), p. 36.

¹³ The essay is in the Penguin Classics edition, Selected Short Fiction, ed. Deborah A. Thomas, p. 131. In Dickens’s “Seven Dials,” included in the Penguin collection, there are “shops for the purchase of rags, bones, old iron, and kitchen-stuff” but no lumber-rooms. This may be as good a place as any to point out, if nobody has, that one of Leigh Hunt’s essays from The Indicator, published in 1833, contains a sentence that was possibly the piece of old iron that Dickens hammered and alloyed into the entirety of The Old Curiosity Shop. In “Of the Sight of Shops,” Hunt writes:

The curiosity-shop is sometimes very amusing, with its mandarins, stuffed birds, odd old carved faces, and a variety of things as indescribable as bits of dreams.

Here is Dickens’s version in the first chapter of The Old Curiosity Shop:

There were suits of mail standing like ghosts in armour here and there, fantastic carvings brought from monkish cloisters, rusty weapons of various kinds, distorted figures in china and wood and iron and ivory: tapestry and strange furniture that might have been designed in dreams.

¹⁴ “But surely the one thing wanting to make Wordsworth an even greater poet than he is, — his thought richer, and his influence of wider application, — was that he should have read more books, among them, no doubt, those of that Goethe whom he disparaged without reading him.” (“The Function of Criticism at the Present Time.”)

¹⁵ In his critical prose, that is. “Rugby Chapel” and the corded bales at the end of “The Scholar-Gypsy” are awfully good.

¹⁶ Saintsbury seems to be half-remembering the aforequoted passages of Shelley here, or perhaps paraphrasing Horace, who had said some helpful things in his Art of Poetry about how difficult it is to treat in one’s own way what is common (line 128), and about the desirability of a poetry made of familiar things (line 240), and about the “beauty that may crown the commonplace” (line 243) — passages more helpful when pulled out of context, as they frequently were. (For instance, the “unutterably tedious” Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten writes in his Reflections on Poetry that a “confused recognition, if it occurs, represents in the most poetic way a mingling of the familiar and the unfamiliar,” and then he says, “Hence Horace, ‘I should look for my poetic fictions in familiar things.’ ”) In one of the early translations into English of Horace’s Ars Poetica, by Oldham (1683), a word leaps up:

For there’s no second Rate in Poetry

A dull insipid Writer none can bear,

In every place he is the publick jeer,

And Lumber of the Shops and Stationer.

¹⁷ Some lines from G. K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy help explain Bishop’s choice of Crusoe. In the chapter called “The Ethics of Elfland” he says that Robinson Crusoe “celebrates the poetry of limits,” and then writes: “Crusoe is a man on a small rock with a few comforts just snatched from the sea: the best thing in the book is simply the list of things saved from the wreck. The greatest of poems is an inventory. Every kitchen tool becomes ideal because Crusoe might have dropped it in the sea.” I must thank my mother for reminding me of this passage. “ ‘Saved from the wreck,’ as Chesterton said, ‘saved from the wreck,’ ”she said, helping her grandchildren build a lean- to out of sticks on a beach.

¹⁸ Michele Fagan said by phone that the “Mystery” in her title was an editorial addition — she had intended it simply to be “A Tour Through the Lumber Room.” The Beatles reference does confuse things a little. Her essay is a survey of the oddments that can be found in old census reports; I found it by searching the Wilson Library Literature CD-ROM.

¹⁹ The WELL, Miscellaneous Conference, Topic 871, no. 8, September 22, 1993. The topic has since been retired and frozen and is no longer extractable unless you add an “-r” (for “retired”) to the command string; i.e., “!extract — f ‘lumber of my life’ — r misc.” If it is like most topics, it will eventually be deleted entirely, and my citation of it will be the only record of its existence. Electronic media have an underdeveloped sense of the value of their own history; all but a small fraction of what was actually posted on the WELL since 1985 has vanished.

²⁰ What got Bishop interested in lumber? Had she been reading Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who is her kind of writer in several ways, funny and observant and lesbian and mail-loving, and who has a passage in a letter of October 10, 1716 (partially quoted in the OED’s history of lumber) about the cabinets of curiosities in the Emperor’s repository in Vienna? It sounds a lot like Bishop: “Two of the rooms were wholly filled with relics of all kinds, set in jewels, amongst which I was desired to observe a crucifix, that they assured me had spoken very wisely to the Emperor Leopold. I won’t trouble you with the catalogue of the rest of the lumber; but I must not forget to mention a small piece of loadstone that held up an anchor of steel too heavy for me to lift.” Horace Walpole, another letter-writer who would have appealed to Bishop, cattily dismisses Versailles (a symbol of civilization one could set in opposition to Crusoe’s island) as a “lumber of littleness,” which is an adaptation of a couplet in one of Pope’s Moral Essays, about a uselessly grand house:

Lo, what huge heaps of littleness around!

The whole, a labour’d Quarry above ground.

(I found the Walpole reference in an endnote to Essays and Criticisms, Thomas Gray, ed. Clark Sutherland Northup, 1911. Gray, on May 22, 1739, says of Versailles, “What a huge heap of littleness!”) Or had Bishop been reading Anthony Powell’s Books Do Furnish a Room, which came out in 1971, about the time she may have been writing her poem: “In the dozen years or so since I had last been at Thrubworth more lumber than ever had collected in these back parts of the house, much of it no doubt brought there after requisitioning. There was an overwhelming accumulation: furniture: pictures: rolled-up carpets: packing cases.” Or had Bishop simply grown dissatisfied with “junk” and “stuff” in earlier drafts of her poem and looked in a thesaurus? It’s always a possibility.

²¹ Moll Flanders, though, says of a stolen trunk, or “Portmanteua,” as Moll spells it, which she has safely gotten past the Custom-House officers: “I did not think the Lumber of it worth my concern.” (Oxford ed., p. 266.) Owens and Furbank’s A KWIC Concordance to Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1985) took me there. Woolf’s and Nabokov’s customs-inspection similes are traceable to this scene in Defoe’s proto-novel.

²² Or I was reading it, anyway, until vol. III was stolen from the front seat of my car. The thief either was planning on pawning it, or possibly wanted to add to his book collection.

²³ I don’t resent the witty Anthony Lane, who, in The New Yorker of February 20–27,1995, beat me to an American review of the English Poetry Database. Lane pursues the word lard for a moment, and mentions “the old Housman principle that good verse should make the hair stand up on the back of your neck” (did Housman really shave the back of his neck?), and he makes an excellent point: “Yet I found myself stirred, not engulfed, by the flow of mediocrity. ‘English Poetry’ offers a way out of the crucial, and frankly tedious, impasse that has stiffened within the academy in recent years — the standoff, in broad terms, between the élitist and the democratic.”

(vi)

Ah, and A. R. Ammons’s Garbage (1993), a book-length poem of paired run-on lines, is the latest attempt at the ultramundane. It announces its age-old transfigurative hope right up front, on its dedication page, which reads:

to the bacteria, tumblebugs, scavengers

,

wordsmiths — the transfigurers, restorers

Some of the poem, heavily metaled with lumps of arrhythmic Green-Party pulpitry, sounds surprisingly like Cardinal Newman’s little brother, quoted many pages ago. For example:

… the ditchwork of the deepest degradation

reflects waters brighter than common ground:

poetry to no purpose! all this garbage! all

these words: we may replace our mountains with

trash: leachments may be our creeks flowing

from the distilling bottoms of corruption …

But some of the dross-dressing is, on its bewildering syntactical spree, good, and aptly self-critical:

my

poetry is strawbags full of fleas the dogs won’t

sleep on or rats rummage: I am the abstract inexact’s

chickenfeed: I am borderlines splintered down

into hedgerows: I am the fernbrake ditches

winter brown, the shaggy down springs’ flows

accrue: but think what it would be like to get every word in

And at one point the grandly spatted old Wordsworthian commonplace of renewal gets suddenly reshod, made new by a kicker at the end about poetry’s post-transfigurational residue: the poem, Ammons writes,

reaches down into the dead pit

and cool oil of stale recognition and words and

brings up hauls of stringy gook which it arrays

with light and strings with shiny syllables and

gets the mind back into vital relationship with

communication channels:

¹

but, of course, there

is some untransformed material, namely the poem itself

Ammon’s National-Book-Awarded Garbage is in fact the latest of many books of poetry and collections of essays or stories that, in low-mimetic contrast to Renaissance fardle-words like jewels or flowers or garland, point proudly to the unpromising material that will be remade in the trash-compaction of the book they entitle.

How might we find some of the others? One way is to begin with the second (1853) edition of the Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases, Classified and Arranged so as to Facilitate the Expression of Ideas and Assist in Literary Composition (by Peter Mark Roget, M.D., F.R.S., F.R.A.S., F.G.S, “Author of the ‘Bridgewater Treatise on Animal and Vegetable Physiology,’ etc.”), which gives several lumber groups. Under INUTILITY it has

Litter, rubbish, lumber, trash, orts, weeds.

And under UNIMPORTANCE it has

Refuse, lumber, litter, orts, tares, weeds, sweepings, scourings, offscourings; rubble,

débris

, slough, dross,

scoriae

,

²

dregs, scum, flue, dust,

see

Dirt.

If you search a library catalog with this handful of alternatives in mind, and add a few more as they occur to you, you can amass a relevant poets’ and writers’ Garbage checklist without too much trouble. There is an Orts by Ted Hughes (1977) and an Orts by George MacDonald (1882); an Orts and Scantlings by H. C. Dillow (1984), and Scantlings: Poems, 1964–1969, by Gael Turnbull. (An ort is a morsel of leftover food.) There is Tares, by a poet named R. S. Thomas (1961), and Tares: A Book of Verses by Rosamond Marriott Watson (1898). Or you can try the charming-sounding Chaff and Wheat: A Few Gentle Flailings (1915), by Francis Patrick Donelly, or Sweepings (1926), by Lester Cohen, or Slough Cup Hope Tantrum, by Alan Davies (1975). Stephen Vincent Benet brought us The Litter of the Rose Leaves (1930), following up on Frank William Boreham’s Rubble and Roseleaves, and Things of That Kind (1923). The poets of the Sludge Collective came out, in 1973, with Sludge: Daughter of Ooze, Son of Stain. Ohio University Press published Conrad Hilberry’s Rust: Poems in 1974; Turkey Press produced Michael Hogan’s Rust: Poems in 1977. Out of the Dunghill: A Series of Fifty Odes by Gordon Jackson came out in 1981. Allen Ginsberg published 150 copies of Scrap Leaves: Hasty Scribbles circa 1968; Marietta Minnigerode Andrews gave us Scraps of Paper in 1929; Edwin C. Hickman is the author of Scraps of Poetry and Prose, from 1854, preceded by Scraps and Poems, by Mrs. R. A. Searles, published by Swormstedt and Power of Cincinnati in 1851, and by Scripscrapologia, or Collins’ Doggerel Dish of All Sorts, a collection by John Collins from 1804.³ There is a book of prose pieces by Rod Mengham called Beds & Scrapings, and Scrut,⁴ poems by George Roberts, published by Holy Cow! Press in 1983. Someone named Tuschen published Junk Mail: Poems in 1970; Richard Le Galliene published The Junk-Man and Other Poems in 1920; Jack Kerouac’s “Junk” came out as a postcard poem in 1976. In Old Junk (1918, revised 1933), a little-known though moving collection of World War I essays intersprinkled with thoughts on toadstools and bedside reading, H. M. Tomlinson describes entering a French town after the German withdrawal and has a G. K. Chestertonian moment:

The gardens beyond are to be seen through the thin and gaping walls of the streets, and there, overturned and defaced by shell-bursts and the crude subsoil thrown out from dug-outs, a few ragged shrubs survive. A rustic bower is lumbered with empty bottles, meat tins, a bird-cage, and ugly litter and fragments.… It is perplexing to find how little remains of the common things of the household; a broken doll, a child’s boot, a trampled bonnet. Once in such a town I found a corn-chandler’s ledger.…

I don’t know that I ever read a book with more interest than that corn-chandler’s ledger; though at one time, when it was merely a commonplace record of the common life which circulated there, testifying to its industry and the response of earth, it would have been no matter to me.

Tomlinson even gives a wartime inflection to lumber in his preface: “My friend added his own gas-mask and apparatus to the grim lumber on the hat-rack. The floor was wet, and was cumbered with heavy boots, guns, and dirty haversacks.”

Back to cheerfuller Garbage-heaps, though. Charles Ira Bushnell published Crumbs for Antiquarians, a book of revolutionary war studies, in 1864–66; and the Reverend Elnathan Corrigton Gavitt came up with the fine title Crumbs from My Saddle Bags for a book of pioneer reminiscences published in 1884. About then T. De Witt Talmage tried the simpler Crumbs Swept Up. Dylan Thomas published “The Crumbs of One Man’s Year” in The Listener in 1947. Nathaniel Parker Willis offered The Rag-Bag, a Collection of Ephemera (1855); Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes produced an anthology called The Rattle Bag in 1982. There is Waste Basket, Husks of Wheat, Dump Truck, Debris, Sewage, Bin Ends, Stubble Burning, Stubble Poems, Dirty Washing, The Waste Land, Out of the Bog, Bog Poems, and Disgust, which are books of poetry by Charles Bukowski, Diane Wakoski, Keith Abbott, Madge Morris, Valerie Hannah Weisberg, Victoria Rothschild, Roland Gant, Willie, Sylvia Kantaris, T. S. Eliot, Harold Strong Gulliver, Seamus Heaney, and Algernon Charles Swinburne, respectively. Layton Irving is the author of Droppings from Heaven (1979); Thomas MacKellar in 1844 wrote a book of occasional poetry called Droppings from the Heart; and the poet Duncan McNaughton titled one of his books Shit on My Shoes (1979). There is even a Poop, and Other Poems (1972) by Gerald Locklin. Douglas Houston produced With the Offal Eaters: Poems in 1986, and Ordinary Madness Press published Doug Hornig’s Feeding at the Offal Trough: Poems in 1983.

Ammons, performing a subject search in an online catalog for “Garbage Disposal,” was (so he tells us in Garbage, p. 49) pleased to retrieve nothing, since it gave him a “clear space and pure / freedom to dump whatever.” Ammons’s online catalog (presumably it is Cornell’s) has more clear spaces than mine: on the day I devoted to this offal search (December 1, 1994), I found several books by typing FIND SUBJECT GARBAGE DISPOSAL: one was a Combustible Refuse Collection Survey performed in Cleveland, circa 1940, by the WPA. But I found no books of poetry or collected prose entitled Sullage, or Dregs, or Rinsings, or Squeezings, or Medical Waste, or Filth-Inhabiting Flies, or Draff, or Vetch—and I hereby reserve the right (nonexclusive, of course) to use any or all of these, alone or in combination, for future books. Most surprisingly, there is no book of poetry or gathering of fugitive review-essays called simply Lumber. Lumber and Other Essays: one can imagine some minor turn-of-the-centurion like Augustine Birrell or Edmund Gosse or W. E. Henley⁵ settling on it as a title, but as it happens, none of them quite saw their way to it. There is, however, an ahead-of-its-time book by one Selina Gaye called The World’s Lumber Room (1885) that A. R. Ammons would probably like. Its epigraph is a slightly emended quotation from Goldsmith’s Vicar of Wakefield:

I regarded myself as one of those vile things that Nature designed should be thrown by into her

lumber room

, there to perish in obscurity.

Selina Gaye (also the author of The Maiden of the Iceberg: A Tale in Verse, published in 1867 and not included in the English Poetry Database, though it is available on microfilm) has left out an adjective: Goldsmith’s sentence actually reads (I flipped through the Vicar three times before I found it), “… there to perish in unpitied obscurity.” The World’s Lumber Room is an interdisciplinary study of “dust” and its sources and users — it occupies itself with decomposition, the recycling of Victorian household refuse, the social hierarchy of Parisian ragpickers (or chiffonniers), kitchen middeners, ants, flies, coral reefs, volcanoes, beetles, the medicinal jelly made from ivory dust, brewers’ refuse (“draff”) pressed into cakes and fed to horses, and old rugs:

A carpet which covered the floor of one of the rooms in the mint of San Francisco for five years was, when taken up, cut in small pieces, and burnt in pans, with the result that its ashes yielded gold and silver to the value of 2,500 dollars.

The following passage in particular, from Gaye’s preface, is oddly inspiring:

The World’s Lumber Room, comprising the three great departments of Earth, Air, and Water, is in fact co-extensive with the World itself, and, so far from being the sort of place which the worthy Vicar’s son seems to have pictured to himself, is rather a workshop or laboratory, where nothing is left to “perish,” in his sense of the word, but the old becomes new, and the vile and refuse, instead of being “thrown by” in their vileness, are taken in hand and turned to good account.

Perhaps I am not so very misguided, then, in deliberately making a lumber-room of my head with the present study, so long as that room is, as Gaye contends, coextensive with the world itself. No decomposing quotation is so vile that it can’t be taken in hand and turned to good account. Still, if I’m going to quote from the long and illustrious line of lumber-into-treasure commonplaceholders, if I’m going to cite Horace and Wordsworth and Emerson and W. E. Henley and Saki and A. R. Ammons, there is no excuse for my having left out of this series the most adept and amazing commonplace-transfigurer there ever was, or will be. “He unfortunately worked up the rubbish as well as the gems,” Leslie Stephen writes, in an essay called “Pope as a Moralist,” but in another passage Stephen grants, as we all must, that Alexander Pope has “a probably unequalled power of coining aphorisms out of common-place.” Of Pope’s Essay on Criticism the harsh Reverend Elwin says that all the classical doctrines of criticism in it “might have been picked up from his French manuals in a single morning,” and he concurs with De Quincey’s dismissal of it as “mere versification, like a metrical multiplication table, of common-places the most mouldy with which criticism has baited its rat-traps.” And yet what an extraordinary multiplication table it is, and what lucky sewer rats we readers are! Tiny known quantities of sense, operated upon in accordance with known metrical law, yield in Pope’s arithmetic hands infinitely long and unrepeating decimals of truth:

True Wit is Nature to Advantage drest

What oft was Thought, but ne’er so well Exprest.

Not much has been more oft thought over the centuries than the notion that the writer writes what oft was thought but ne’er so well exprest; nobody, though, has exprest it with such politely imploded conviction as Pope exhibits here.⁶ At twenty-five, Pope possessed (this is Leslie Stephen again) “the rare art of composing proverbs in verse, which have become part of the intellectual furniture of all decently educated men.” Even De Quincey, in spite of the ornate scorn he reserves for the Essay, seems to have come into a few Queen Anne tea-tables from Pope’s estate. In the Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, he denounces certain works of political economy as being “the very dregs and rinsings of the human intellect.” Compare Pope:

Still run on Poets in a raging Vein,

Ev’n to the Dregs and Squeezings of the Brain.

Not that Pope’s “dregs and squeezings” isn’t itself a second pressing: a footnote in the Twickenham edition calls our attention to a line in Oldham’s Satyrs upon the Jesuits that goes, “With all the dregs, and squeesings of his rage.” Mark Pattison writes that Pope was

very industrious, and had read a vast number of books, yet he was very ignorant, — ignorant, that is, of everything but the one thing which he laboured with all his might to acquire, the art of happy expression. He read books to find ready-made images, and to feel for the best collocations of words. His memory was a magazine of epithets and synonymes, and pretty turns of language. Whenever he found anything to his purpose, he booked it for use, and some time or other, often more than once, it made its appearance in his verse.

⁷

We pardon Pope, most of the time, because he rehabilitates nearly every second-hand phrase that comes through his shop. He unscrews a line he likes, sorts and cleans its pieces, stores them, finds matches, does some seemingly casual beveling, drills a narrow caesural ventilation-hole, squirts the Krazy Glue of genius into several chinks, gives the prototypical whole a sudden uniting twist, and hands the world a tiny two-cylinder perpetual-motion machine — a heroic couplet. Even when we know his sources phrase by phrase, we must still remain in awe (following a week in a darkened room devoted to adjusting to the horrifying extent and specificity of the thefts) of his divine clockmaker’s gift. Dryden (in his “Preface to the Fables”) explains that “the genius of our countrymen in general [is] rather to improve an invention, than to invent themselves; as is evident not only in our poetry, but in many of our manufactures.” And Samuel Wesley (a poet too minor to receive an entry of his own in Drabble’s Oxford Companion, though Swift gives him the honor of being the fourth fatality in The Battle of the Books),⁸ in a passage from his Epistle to a Friend Concerning Poetry (1700) defends Dryden’s own frequent raids on the already articulated:

If from the modern or the antient Store

He borrows ought, he always pays ’em more:

So much improv’d, each Thought, so fine appears,

Waller or Ovid scarce durst own ’em theirs.

The Learned Goth has scowr’d all Europe’s Plains,

France, Spain, and fruitful Italy he drains,

From every Realm and every Language gains:

His Gains a Conquest are, and not a Theft;

He wishes still new Worlds of Wit were left…

This is a sort of versification of Dryden’s own praise of Boileau, in the essay “On the Origin and Progress of Satire”:

What he [Boileau] borrows from the ancients he repays with usury of his own, in coin as good and almost as universally valuable.

Samuel Butler, a few decades earlier, came up with one of the tripier casings for this old trope:

Our moderne Authors write Playes as they feed hogs in Westphalia, where but one eate’s peas, or akornes, and all the rest feed upon his and one anothers excrement.

⁹

I happened on Wesley’s Epistle to a Friend Concerning Poetry in the English Poetry Database simply because it mentions the “lumber-thoughts” of a poetical first draft. (Some you should keep, and some “the sponge should strike.”) But I liked the poem and paused over it, for it looked to be something Pope had read carefully:

Draw the Main Strokes at first, ’twill shew your Skill,

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,¹¹ and 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

¹²

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.

¹³

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:

¹⁴

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-deprecation¹⁵—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:¹⁶ Pope 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.¹⁷ But 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

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,¹⁸ that 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.¹⁹ Samuel 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. — 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,

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:

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 original⁵—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.⁶ One 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,

if he troubles to study [

The Dispensary

], is often haunted by a vague suspicion that he has met a line or couplet elsewhere, in a very different, much more spacious context; and it soon occurs to him that, although Pope may not have borrowed from Garth … his old friend’s poem may have lingered in the background of his mind, and that, while he was imagining and writing, he was also unconsciously remembering.

On the evidence, “may not have borrowed” is much too charitable, as is “unconsciously remembering”: throughout his life, Pope’s mimicry and mosaicry has every sign of being entirely conscious — brilliant and beautiful, but at the same time contemptible.

Why, though, an untutored twentieth-century reader might ask, wouldn’t Garth put up some sort of minor fuss about Pope’s many petty thefts? Because he was good-natured? Bolingbroke said Garth was “the best-natured ingenious wild man I ever knew,” and Pope in “The Epistle to Arbuthnot” calls him “well-natur’d Garth,” and he is quoted in Spence’s Anecdotes as saying that Garth was “one of the best natured men in the world.” In an age of wig-wearers, Garth wore one of unusual magnitude and copiousness (his portrait was painted in it) — and it could be that Pope, whose praise always came at the end of a long series of calculations, thought so highly of Garth’s character because Garth didn’t get angry and shriek, as Belinda did in The Rape of the Lock (a poem about plagiarism), upon seeing his flowing curls so expertly forfexed. Reverend Wesley’s phrase about overdressed style-wigs “Like Hairy Meteors glimm’ring through a Cloud” may supply a hint as to what Pope is doing: he’s snipping Garth’s locks in The Rape of the Lock, but because he is writing a better poem than The Dispensary, Pope’s appropriations will immortalize and meteorize the wiggy victim (Garth), who would otherwise be forgotten:

But trust the Muse — she saw it upward rise,

Tho’ mark’d by none but quick Poetic Eyes:…

A sudden Star, it shot thro’ liquid Air,

And drew behind a radiant

Trail of Hair

.

(Rape of the Lock, Canto V)

I may have come up with this theory (Pope as hairdresser) because not far from where I live is a hair-styling salon called simply Alexander Pope. I haven’t had a haircut there yet.

Maybe all this talk of Pope’s theft is unfair to him. Yet even Maynard Mack, who is sympathetic to his lifelong poet, brings himself to say that “there remains a reserve in him that in some circumstances can edge over into evasiveness, deceit, or chicanery.”¹⁰ Professor Mack tentatively attributes the chicanery to Pope’s being a Catholic in a Catholic-hating age, an only child, and a hunchback, which doesn’t seem fair to all the good-hearted siblingless Catholic hunchbacks who have ever lived. Pope was bad because it helped him to write to be bad — he snuck things from other writers without thanking them, and then, having wronged them that way, he took offense at them publicly, too. One after another, he unjustly attacked the figures in or at the periphery of his circle, from John Dennis to Lewis Theobald to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, not because he cared to right wrongs and expose incom-petencies, but because the glove-flinging, spittle-spraying indignation that accompanied an autochthonous squabble was his best muse. He hated being hated, but he found he liked being angry, and he loved versifying his revenge.

In the early case of “learned lumber,” though, there is another way the derivation might have worked. Say a seventeen-year-old, vastly talented but still byline-shy Pope, encouraged by his reception at Will’s, offered to comment on some of the less successful passages in Garth’s gift to him, The Dispensary. Say that Pope, in the course of going over the poem, came up with some fine alternative lines and outright interpolations and showed them to Garth, who, very impressed (and confusing self-interest with generosity toward lyric youth), stuck them in his poem. Under this supposition, the reason why Pope said that each edition of The Dispensary was an improvement over the last was that Pope had himself supplied some of the improvements. Here is the whole “learned lumber” passage from the Essay on Criticism, italics included this time for variety. Notice that it goes on to mention Samuel Garth by name:

The Bookful Blockhead, ignorantly read,

With

Loads of Learned Lumber

in his Head,

With his own Tongue still edifies his Ears,

And always

List’ning to Himself

appears.

All Books he reads, and all he reads assails,

From

Dryden’s Fables

down to

Durfey’s Tales

.

With

him

, most Authors steal their Works, or buy;

Garth

did not write his own

Dispensary

.

Near the end of his life, Pope added a self-congratulating footnote to this last line:

A common slander at that time in prejudice of that deserving author. Our poet [i.e., Pope] did him this justice, when that slander most prevail’d; and it is now (perhaps the sooner for this very verse) dead and forgotten.

Perhaps the “justice” Pope is doing Garth with that line is rather a trickier kind of betrayal. Pope is pretending to be holding a false charge up to ridicule — the charge that Garth stole or bought his creation — while actually saying what he in fact literally says: that Garth did not write his own Dispensary. He is spreading gossip without spreading it — hiding his true confession behind a pretend-sneer at a blockhead critic. One can speculate that Pope got paid, either in amazed respect or in actual cash, for his contributions to Garth’s poem, just as, later on, Pope paid (underpaid) the poets who quietly helped him translate The Odyssey. I haven’t seen the marked-up Yale copy, 1703A, in which those 414 added and 82 revised lines are included “in a hand not Garth’s”—but even if the modifications aren’t in Pope’s handwriting, and they probably aren’t, it is entirely possible that Pope was responsible for some of the added couplets, including the Tennysonian moment that G. Birkbeck Hill and Peter Quennell choose to quote:

To Die, is landing on some silent Shoar,

Where Billows never break, nor Tempests roar.

¹¹

The sparkling line in The Dispensary about the healing Pine that will “Lament your Fate in tears of Turpentine” is a post-1703 addition, too. Both of these passages sound to me like Pope at his precocious best — and if Pope was capable of introducing these improvements into Garth’s cantos, he could also have thought up “To these dark Realms much learned Lumber creeps / There copious M[ilbourne] safe in Silence sleeps” and given it to Garth as well.¹²

What we can earnestly strive to believe, then (although it may well not be true), is that Pope, who is after all the greater poet, slipped Garth the “learned lumber” under the tabula rasa around 1705, and then found he liked it so much that he wished he hadn’t, and used it in his own poem in 1711, reclaiming it from Ozell’s Lutrin. Garth didn’t protest these and other later borrowings, because Pope was a friend and Garth was good-natured, and because if he did, he would then have had to admit that some number of lines in the revised and amplified poem were not from his own pen. I don’t know whether to subscribe to this sequence of events or not. Either the young Pope stole his learned lumber outright from Garth (and Ozell), which would diminish him forever in my eyes, since I thought of him, when I began my lumberjahr, as being at the center of the metaphor of study that I had chosen to study, or the young Pope first loaned it to Garth and then repossessed it, which adds to the picture of his tiresome sneakiness, but leaves his original talents unim-peached. At the moment, I can’t help reading the following additions in the 1706 Dispensary as being the stealthy work of a teenage Pope, a warm up for his Rape of the Lock, rather than the work of a secure and successful forty-five-year-old Garth:

But still the offspring of your Brain shall prove

The Grocer’s care, and brave the Rage of Jove.

When Bonfires blaze, your vagrant Works shall rise

In Rockets, till they reach the wondring Skyes.

The lines sound so young, so ambitious (though ironic), and in their “you” address, so like the last four lines of the Rape—

When those fair Suns shall sett, as sett they must,

And all those Tresses shall be laid in Dust;

This Lock

, the Muse shall consecrate to Fame,

And mid’st the Stars inscribe

Belinda’s

Name!

Pope learned what he had in him to say by helping Garth say things he didn’t know he wanted to say, but was happy to be thought to have said. Surely Garth had help: the fact that there are four lumbers in The Dispensary’s final version is, I now see, an argument not for Garth’s uncontrollable enthusiasm for lumber as a word, but rather for the existence of multiple contributors to his poem (one of whom was Pope): helped by one or more hands, Garth lost track of what he had and was no longer able to suppress unwanted repetitions.¹³

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.