The Sot-Weed Factor Read online

  In 1676, when they were ten, Andrew employed for them a new tutor named Henry Burlingame III—a wiry, brown-eyed, swarthy youth in his early twenties, energetic, intense, and not unhandsome. This Burlingame had for reasons unexplained not completed his baccalaureate; yet for the range and depth of his abilities he was little short of an Aristotle. Andrew had found him in London unemployed and undernourished, and, always a good businessman, was thus for a miserly fee able to provide his children with a tutor who could sing the tenor in a Gesualdo madrigal as easily as he dissected a field-mouse or conjugated єìµí. The twins took an immediate liking to him, and he in turn, after only a few weeks, grew so attached to them that he was overjoyed when Andrew permitted him, at no increase in salary, to convert the little summer-pavilion on the grounds of the St. Giles estate into a combination laboratory and living-quarters, and devote his entire attention to his charges.

  He found both to be rapid learners, especially apt in natural philosophy, literature, composition, and music; less so in languages, mathematics, and history. He even taught them how to dance, though Ebenezer by age twelve was already too ungainly to do it well. First he would teach Ebenezer to play the melody on the harpsichord; then he would drill Anna in the steps, to Ebenezer’s accompaniment, until she mastered them; next he would take Ebenezer’s place at the instrument so that Anna could teach her brother the steps; and finally, when the dance was learned, Ebenezer would help Anna master the tune on the harpsichord. Aside from its obvious efficiency, this system was in keeping with the second of Master Burlingame’s three principles of pedagogy; to wit, that one learns a thing best by teaching it. The first was that of the three usual motives for learning things—necessity, ambition, and curiosity—simple curiosity was the worthiest of development, it being the “purest” (in that the value of what it drives us to learn is terminal rather than instrumental), the most conducive to exhaustive and continuing rather than cursory or limited study, and the likeliest to render pleasant the labor of learning. The third principle, closely related to the others, was that this sport of teaching and learning should never become associated with certain hours or particular places, lest student and teacher alike (and in Burlingame’s system they were much alike) fall into the vulgar habit of turning off their alertness, except at those times and in those places, and thus make by implication a pernicious distinction between learning and other sorts of natural behavior.

  The twins’ education, then, went on from morning till night. Burlingame joined readily in their play-acting, and had he dared ask leave would have slept with them as well, to guide their word-games. If his system lacked the discipline of Locke’s, who would have all students soak their feet in cold water, it was a good deal more fun: Ebenezer and Anna loved their teacher, and the three were great companions. To teach them history he directed their play-acting to historical events; to sustain their interest in geography he produced volumes of exotic pictures and tales of adventure; to sharpen their logical equipment he ran them through Zeno’s paradoxes as one would ask riddles, and rehearsed them in Descartes’ skepticism as gaily as though the search for truth and value in the universe were a game of Who’s Got the Button. He taught them to wonder at a leaf of thyme, a line of Palestrina, the configuration of Cassiopeia, the scales of a pilchard, the sound of indefatigable, the elegance of a sorites.

  The result of this education was that the twins grew quite enamored of the world—especially Ebenezer, for Anna, from about her thirteenth birthday, began to grow more demure and less demonstrative. But Ebenezer could be moved to shivers by the swoop of a barn-swallow, to cries of laughter at the lace of a cobweb or the roar of an organ’s pedal-notes, and to sudden tears by the wit of Volpone, the tension of a violin-box, or the truth of the Pythagorean Theorem. By age eighteen he had reached his full height and ungainliness; he was a nervous, clumsy youth who, though by this time he far excelled his sister in imaginativeness, was much her inferior in physical beauty, for though as twins they shared nearly identical features, Nature saw fit, by subtle alterations, to turn Anna into a lovely young woman and Ebenezer into a goggling scarecrow, just as a clever author may, by delicate adjustments, parody a beautiful style.

  It is a pity that Burlingame could not accompany Ebenezer when, at eighteen, the boy made ready to matriculate at Cambridge, for though a good teacher will teach well regardless of the theory he suffers from, and though Burlingame’s might seem to have been an unusually attractive one, yet there is no perfect educational method, and it must be admitted that at least partly because of his tutoring Ebenezer took quite the same sort of pleasure in history as in Greek mythology and epic poetry, and made little or no distinction between, say, the geography of the atlases and that of fairy-stories. In short, because learning had been for him such a pleasant game, he could not regard the facts of zoology or the Norman Conquest, for example, with genuine seriousness, nor could he discipline himself to long labor at tedious tasks. Even his great imagination and enthusiasm for the world were not unalloyed virtues when combined with his gay irresolution, for though they led him to a great sense of the arbitrariness of the particular real world, they did not endow him with a corresponding realization of its finality. He very well knew, for instance, that “France is shaped like a teapot,” but he could scarcely accept the fact that there was actually in existence at that instant such a place as France, where people were speaking French and eating snails whether he thought about them or not, and that despite the virtual infinitude of imaginable shapes, this France would have to go on resembling a teapot forever. And again, though the whole business of Greece and Rome was unquestionably delightful, he found the notion preposterous, almost unthinkable, that this was the only way it happened: that made him nervous and irritable, when he thought of it at all.

  Perhaps with continued guidance from his tutor he could in time have overcome these failings, but one morning in July of 1684 Andrew simply announced at breakfast, “No need to go to the summer-house today, Ebenezer. Thy lessons are done.”

  Both children looked up in surprise.

  “Do you mean, sir, that Henry will be leaving us?” Ebenezer asked.

  “I do indeed,” Andrew replied. “In fact, if I be not greatly in error he hath already departed.”

  “But how is that? With never a fare-thee-well? He spoke not a word of leaving us!”

  “Gently, now,” said Andrew. “Will ye weep for a mere schoolmaster? ’Twas this week or the next, was’t not? Thou’rt done with him.”

  “Did you know aught of’t?” Ebenezer demanded of Anna. She shook her head and fled from the room. “You ordered him off, Father?” he asked incredulously. “Why such suddenness?”

  “ ’Dslife!” cried Andrew. “At your age I’d sooner have drunk him good riddance than raised such a bother! The fellow’s work was done and I sacked him, and there’s an end on’t! If he saw fit to leave at once ’tis his affair. I must say ’twas a more manly thing than all this hue and cry!”

  Ebenezer went at once to the summer-pavilion. Almost everything was there exactly as it had been before: a half-dissected frog lay pinned out upon its beech-board on the work-table; books and papers were spread open on the writing-desk; even the teapot stood half-full on the grate. But Burlingame was indeed gone. While Ebenezer was looking about in disbelief Anna joined him, wiping her eyes.

  “Dear Henry!” Ebenezer lamented, his own eyes brimming. “ ’Tis like a bolt from Heaven! Whatever shall we do without him?”

  Anna made no reply, but ran to her brother and embraced him.

  For this reason or another, then, when not long afterwards Ebenezer bade good-bye to his father and Anna and established himself in Magdalene College, at Cambridge, he proved a poor student. He would go to fetch Newton’s lectures De Motu Corporum from the library, and would spend four hours reading Esquemeling’s History of the Buccaneers instead, or some Latin bestiary. He took part in few pranks or sports, made few friends, and went virtually unnoticed by his professors. />
  It was during his second year of study that, though he did not realize it at the time, he was sore bit by the muse’s gadfly. Certainly he did not at the time think of himself as a poet, but it got so that after hearing his teachers argue subtly and at length against, say, philosophical materialism, he would leave the lecture-hall with no more in his notebook than:

  Old Plato saw both Mind and Matter;

  Thomas Hobbes, naught but the latter.

  Now poor Tom’s Soul doth fry in Hell:

  Shrugs GOD, “ ’Tis immaterial.”

  or:

  Source of Virtue, Truth, and All is

  Each Man’s Lumen Naturalis.

  As might be expected, the more this affliction got hold of him, the more his studies suffered. The sum of history became in his head no more than the stuff of metaphors. Of the philosophers of his era—Bacon, Hobbes, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibnitz, Locke—he learned little; of its scientists—Kepler, Galileo, Newton—less; of its theologians—Lord Herbert, Cudworth, More, Smith, Glanvill—nothing. But Paradise Lost he knew inside out; Hudibras upside down. At the end of the third year, to his great distress, he failed a number of examinations and had to face the prospect of leaving the University. Yet what to do? He could not bear the thought of returning to St. Giles and telling his formidable father; he would have to absent himself quietly, disappear from sight, and seek his fortune in the world at large. But in what manner?

  Here, in his difficulty with this question, the profoundest effects of Burlingame’s amiable pedagogy become discernible: Ebenezer’s imagination was excited by every person he met either in or out of books who could do with skill and understanding anything whatever; he was moved to ready admiration by expert falconers, scholars, masons, chimneysweeps, prostitutes, admirals, cutpurses, sailmakers, barmaids, apothecaries, and cannoneers alike.

  Ah, God, he wrote in a letter to Anna about this time, it were an easy Matter to choose a Calling, had one all Time to live in! I should be fifty Years a Barrister, fifty a Physician, fifty a Clergyman, fifty a Soldier! Aye, and fifty a Thief, and fifty a Judge! All Roads are fine Roads, beloved Sister, none more than another, so that with one Life to spend I am a Man bare-bumm’d at Taylors with Cash for but one pair of Breeches, or a Scholar at Bookstalls with Money for a single Book: to choose ten were no Trouble; to choose one, impossible! All Trades, all Crafts, all Professions are wondrous, but none is finer than the rest together. I cannot choose, sweet Anna: twixt Stools my Breech falleth to the Ground!

  He was, that is to say, temperamentally disinclined to no career, and, what is worse (as were this not predicament enough), he seemed consistently no special sort of person: the variety of temperaments and characters that he observed at Cambridge and in literature was as enchanting to him as the variety of life-works, and as hard to choose from among. He admired equally the sanguine, the phlegmatic, the choleric, the melancholic, the splenetic, and the balanced man, the fool and the sage, the enthusiast and the stick-in-the-mud, the talkative and the taciturn, and, most dilemmal of all, the consistent and the inconsistent. Similarly, it seemed to him as fine a thing to be fat as to be lean, to be short as tall, homely as handsome. To complete his quandary—what is probably an effect of the foregoing—Ebenezer could be persuaded, at least notionally, by any philosophy of the world, even by any strongly held opinion, which was either poetically conceived or attractively stated, since he appeared to be emotionally predisposed in favor of none. It was as pretty a notion to him that the world was made of water, as Thales declared, as that it was air, à la Anaximines, or fire, à la Heraclitus, or all three and dirt to boot, as swore Empedocles; that all was matter, as Hobbes maintained, or that all was mind, as some of Locke’s followers were avowing, seemed equally likely to our poet, and as for ethics, could he have been all three and not just one he’d have enjoyed dying once a saint, once a frightful sinner, and once lukewarm between the two.

  The man (in short), thanks both to Burlingame and to his natural proclivities, was dizzy with the beauty of the possible; dazzled, he threw up his hands at choice, and like ungainly flotsam rode half-content the tide of chance. Though the term was done he stayed on at Cambridge. For a week he simply languished in his rooms, reading distractedly and smoking pipe after pipe of tobacco, to which he’d become addicted. At length reading became impossible; smoking too great a bother: he prowled restlessly about the room. His head always felt about to ache, but never began to.

  Finally one day he did not deign even to dress himself or eat, but sat immobile in the window seat in his nightshirt and stared at the activity in the street below, unable to choose a motion at all even when, some hours later, his untutored bladder suggested one.

  3

  Ebenezer Is Rescued, and Hears a Diverting Tale Involving Isaac Newton and Other Notables

  LUCKILY FOR HIM (else he might have mossed over where he sat), Ebenezer was roused from his remarkable trance shortly after dinner-time by a sudden great commotion at his door.

  “Eben! Eben! Prithee admit me quickly!”

  “Who is it?” called Ebenezer, and jumped up in alarm: he had no friends at the College who might be calling on him.

  “Open and see,” the visitor laughed. “Only hurry, I beg of thee!”

  “Do but wait a minute. I must dress.”

  “What? Not dressed? ’Swounds, what an idle fellow! No matter, boy; let me in at once!”

  Ebenezer recognized the voice, which he’d not heard for three years. “Henry!” he cried, and threw open the door.

  “ ’Tis no other,” laughed Burlingame, giving him a squeeze. “Marry, what a lout thou’rt grown to! A good six feet! And abed at this hour!” He felt the young man’s forehead. “Yet you’ve no fever. What ails thee, lad? Ah well, no matter. One moment—” He ran to the window and peered cautiously below. “Ah, there’s the rascal! Hither, Eben!”

  Ebenezer hurried to the window. “Whatever is’t?”

  “Yonder, yonder!” Burlingame pointed up the street. “Coming by the little dram-shop! Know you that gentleman with the hickory-stick?”

  Ebenezer saw a long-faced man of middle age, gowned as a don, making his way down the street.

  “Nay, ’tis no Magdalene Fellow. The face is strange.”

  “Shame on thee, then, and mark it well. ’Tis Isaac himself, from Trinity.”

  “Newton!” Ebenezer looked with sharper interest. “I’ve not seen him before, but word hath it the Royal Society is bringing out a book of his within the month that will explain the workings of the entire universe! I’faith, I thank you for your haste! But did I hear you call him rascal?”

  Burlingame laughed again. “You mistake the reason for my haste, Eben. I pray God my face hath altered these fifteen years, for I’m certain Brother Isaac caught sight of me ere I reached your entryway.”

  “Is’t possible you know him?” asked Ebenezer, much impressed.

  “Know him? I was once near raped by him. Stay!” He drew back from the window. “Keep an eye on him, and tell me how I might escape should he turn in at your door.”

  “No difficulty: the door of this chamber lets onto an open stairway in the rear. What in Heav’n’s afoot, Henry?”

  “Don’t be alarmed,” Burlingame said. “ ’Tis a pretty story, and I’ll tell it all presently. Is he coming?”

  “One moment—he’s just across from us. There. Nay, wait now—he is saluting another don. Old Bagley, the Latinist. There, now, he’s moving on.”

  Burlingame came to the window, and the two of them watched the great man continue up the street.

  “Not another moment, Henry,” Ebenezer declared. “Tell me at once what mystery is behind this hide-and-seek, and behind thy cruel haste to leave us three years past, or watch me perish of curiosity!”

  “Aye and I shall,” Burlingame replied, “directly you dress yourself, lead us to food and drink, and give full account of yourself. ’Tis not I alone who have excuses to find.”

  “How! Then you know of my fa
ilure?”

  “Aye, and came to see what’s what, and perchance to birch some sense into you.”

  “But how can that be? I told none but Anna.”

  “Stay, you’ll hear all, I swear’t. But not a word till I’ve a spread of sack and mutton. Let not excitement twist thy values, lad—come on with you!”

  “Ah, bless you, thou’rt an Iliad Greek, Henry,” Ebenezer said, and commenced dressing.

  They went to an inn nearby, where over small beer after dinner Ebenezer explained, as best he could, his failure at the College and subsequent indecisions. “The heart of’t seems to be,” he concluded, “that in no matter of import can I make up my mind. Marry, Henry, how I’ve needed thy counsel! What agonies you might have saved me!”

  “Nay,” Burlingame protested. “You well know I love you, Eben, and feel your afflictions as my own. But advice, I swear’t, is the wrong medicine for your malady, for two reasons: first, the logic of the problem is such that at some remove or other you’d have still to choose, inasmuch as should I counsel you to come with me to London, you yet must choose whether to follow my counsel; and should I farther counsel you to follow my first counsel, you must yet choose to follow my second—the regress is infinite and goes nowhere. Second, e’en could you choose to follow my counsel, ’tis no cure at all, but a mere crutch to lean upon. The object is to put you on your feet, not to take you off them. ’Tis a serious affair, Eben; it troubles me. What are your own sentiments about your failure?”

  “I must own I have none,” Ebenezer said, “though I can fancy many.”

  “And this indecision: how do you feel about yourself?”

  “Marry, I know not! I suppose I’m merely curious.”

  Burlingame frowned and called for a pipe of tobacco from a winedrawer working near at hand. “You were indeed the picture of apathy when I found you. Doth it not gall or grieve you to lose the baccalaureate, when you’d approached so near it?”