colleges sprang into existence correlated, the scholars went on to
the universities and came back to teach the schools, to teach as
they themselves had been taught, before they had ever made any real
use of the teaching; the crowd of boys herded together, a crowd
perpetually renewed and unbrokenly the same, adjusted itself by
means of spontaneously developed institutions. In a century, by its
very success, this revolutionary innovation of Renascence public
schools had become an immense tradition woven closely into the
fabric of the national life. Intelligent and powerful people ceased
to talk Latin or read Greek, they had got what was wanted, but that
only left the schoolmaster the freer to elaborate his point. Since
most men of any importance or influence in the country had been
through the mill, it was naturally a little difficult to persuade
them that it was not quite the best and most ennobling mill the wit
of man could devise. And, moreover, they did not want their
children made strange to them. There was all the machinery and all
the men needed to teach the old subjects, and none to teach whatever
new the critic might propose. Such science instruction as my father
gave seemed indeed the uninviting alternative to the classical
grind. It was certainly an altogether inferior instrument at that
time.
So it was I occupied my mind with the exact study of dead languages
for seven long years. It was the strangest of detachments. We
would sit under the desk of such a master as Topham like creatures
who had fallen into an enchanted pit, and he would do his
considerable best to work us up to enthusiasm for, let us say, a
Greek play. If we flagged he would lash himself to revive us. He
would walk about the class-room mouthing great lines in a rich roar,
and asking us with a flushed face and shining eyes if it was not
"GLORIOUS." The very sight of Greek letters brings back to me the
dingy, faded, ink-splashed quality of our class-room, the banging of
books, Topham's disordered hair, the sheen of his alpaca gown, his
deep unmusical intonations and the wide striding of his creaking
boots. Glorious! And being plastic human beings we would consent
that it was glorious, and some of us even achieved an answering
reverberation and a sympathetic flush. I at times responded freely.
We all accepted from him unquestioningly that these melodies, these
strange sounds, exceeded any possibility of beauty that lay in the
Gothic intricacy, the splash and glitter, the jar and recovery, the
stabbing lights, the heights and broad distances of our English
tongue. That indeed was the chief sin of him. It was not that he
was for Greek and Latin, but that he was fiercely against every
beauty that was neither classic nor deferred to classical canons.
And what exactly did we make of it, we seniors who understood it
best? We visualised dimly through that dust and the grammatical
difficulties, the spectacle of the chorus chanting grotesquely,
helping out protagonist and antagonist, masked and buskined, with
the telling of incomprehensible parricides, of inexplicable incest,
of gods faded beyond symbolism, of that Relentless Law we did not
believe in for a moment, that no modern western European can believe
in. We thought of the characters in the unconvincing wigs and
costumes of our school performance. No Gilbert Murray had come as
yet to touch these things to life again. It was like the ghost of
an antiquarian's toy theatre, a ghost that crumbled and condensed
into a gritty dust of construing as one looked at it.
Marks, shindies, prayers and punishments, all flavoured with the
leathery stuffiness of time-worn Big Hall…
And then out one would come through our grey old gate into the
evening light and the spectacle of London hurrying like a cataract,
London in black and brown and blue and gleaming silver, roaring like
the very loom of Time. We came out into the new world no teacher
has yet had the power and courage to grasp and expound. Life and
death sang all about one, joys and fears on such a scale, in such an
intricacy as never Greek nor Roman knew. The interminable
procession of horse omnibuses went lumbering past, bearing countless
people we knew not whence, we knew not whither. Hansoms clattered,
foot passengers jostled one, a thousand appeals of shop and boarding
caught the eye. The multi-coloured lights of window and street
mingled with the warm glow of the declining day under the softly
flushing London skies; the ever-changing placards, the shouting
news-vendors, told of a kaleidoscopic drama all about the globe.
One did not realise what had happened to us, but the voice of Topham
was suddenly drowned and lost, he and his minute, remote
gesticulations…
That submerged and isolated curriculum did not even join on to
living interests where it might have done so. We were left
absolutely to the hints of the newspapers, to casual political
speeches, to the cartoons of the comic papers or a chance reading of
some Socialist pamphlet for any general ideas whatever about the
huge swirling world process in which we found ourselves. I always
look back with particular exasperation to the cessation of our
modern history at the year 1815. There it pulled up abruptly, as
though it had come upon something indelicate…
But, after all, what would Topham or Flack have made of the huge
adjustments of the nineteenth century? Flack was the chief
cricketer on the staff; he belonged to that great cult which