The Sot-Weed Factor (2 page)

The Remarkable Manner in Which Ebenezer

Was Educated, and the No Less Remarkable

Results of That Education

Ebenezer and Anna
had been raised together. There happening to be no other children on the estate in St. Giles, they grew up with no playmates except each other, and hence became unusually close. They played the same games together and were educated in the same subjects, since Andrew was wealthy enough to provide them with a tutor, but not with separate tutoring. Until the age of ten they even shared the same bedroom -- not that space was lacking either in Andrew's London house, on Plumtree Street, or in the later establishment at St. Giles, but because Andrew's old housekeeper, Mrs. Twigg, who was for some years their governess, had in the beginning been so taken with the fact of their twinship that she'd made a point of keeping them together, and then later, when their increased size and presumed awareness began to embarrass her, they had come so to enjoy each other's company that she was for a time unable to resist their combined protests at any mention of separate chambers. When the separation was finally effected, at Andrew's orders, it was merely to adjoining rooms, between which the door was normally left open to allow for conversation.

In the light of all this it is not surprising that even after puberty there was little difference, aside from the physical manifestations of their sex, between the two children. Both were lively, intelligent, and well-behaved. Anna was the less timid of the two, and even when Ebenezer naturally grew to be the taller and physically stronger, Anna was still the quicker and better coordinated, and therefore usually the winner in the games they played: shuttlecock, fives, or
paille maille;
squalls, Meg Merrilies, jackstraws, or shove ha'penny. Both were great readers, and loved the same books: among the classics, the
Odyssey
and the
Metamorphoses,
the
Book of Martyrs
and the
Lives of the Saints;
the romances of Valentine and Orson, Bevis of Hampton, and Guy of Warwick; the tales of Robin Good-Fellow, Patient Grisel, and the Foundlings in the Wood; and among the newer books, Janeway's
Token for Children,
Batchiler's
Virgins Pattern,
and Fisher's
Wise Virgin,
as well as
Cacoethes Leaden Legacy, The Young Mans Warning-Peece, The Booke of Mery Riddles,
and, shortly after their publication,
Pilgrim's Progress
and Keach's
War with the Devil.
Perhaps had Andrew been less preoccupied with his merchant-trading, or Mrs. Twigg with her religion, her gout, and her authority over the other servants, Anna would have been kept to her dolls and embroidery-hoops, and Ebenezer set to mastering the arts of hunting and fencing. But they were seldom subjected to direction at all, and hence drew small distinction between activities proper for little girls and those proper for little boys.

Their favorite recreation was play-acting. Indoors or out, hour after hour, they played at pirates, soldiers, clerics, Indians, royalty, giants, martyrs, lords and ladies, or any other creatures that took their fancy, inventing action and dialogue as they played. Sometimes they would maintain the same role for days, sometimes only for minutes. Ebenezer, especially, became ingenious at disguising his assumed identity in the presence of adults, while still revealing it clearly enough to Anna, to her great delight, by some apparently innocent gesture or remark. They might spend an autumn morning playing at Adam and Eve out in the orchard, for example, and when at dinner their father forbade them to return there, on account of the mud, Ebenezer would reply with a knowing nod, "Mud's not the worst of't: I saw a snake as well." And little Anna, when she had got her breath back, would declare, "It didn't frighten
me,
but Eben's forehead hath been sweating ever since," and pass her brother the bread. At night, both before and after their separation into two rooms, they would either continue to make-believe (necessarily confining themselves to dialogue, which they found it easy to carry on in the dark) or else play word-games; of these they had a great variety, ranging from the simple "How many words do you know beginning with
S?"
or "How many words rhyme with
faster?"
to the elaborate codes, reverse pronunciations, and homemade languages of their later childhood.

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
el
µ
l
. 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 summerhouse 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 goodbye 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?