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.