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.