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.