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