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: