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: