There is no fierceness left in the teaching now.Just after I went up to Trinity, Gates, our Head, wrote a review article in defence of our curriculum.In this, among other indiscretions, he asserted that it was impossible to write good English without an illuminating knowledge of the classic tongues, and he split an infinitive and failed to button up a sentence in saying so.His main argument conceded every objection a reasonable person could make to the City Merchants' curriculum.He admitted that translation had now placed all the wisdom of the past at a common man's disposal, that scarcely a field of endeavour remained in which modern work had not long since passed beyond the ancient achievement.He disclaimed any utility.But there was, he said, a peculiar magic in these grammatical exercises no other subjects of instruction possessed.
Nothing else provided the same strengthening and orderly discipline for the mind.
He said that, knowing the Senior Classics he did, himself a Senior Classic!
Yet in a dim confused way I think be was making out a case.In schools as we knew them, and with the sort of assistant available, the sort of assistant who has been trained entirely on the old lines, he could see no other teaching so effectual in developing attention, restraint, sustained constructive effort and various yet systematic adjustment.And that was as far as his imagination could go.
It is infinitely easier to begin organised human affairs than end them; the curriculum and the social organisation of the English public school are the crowning instances of that.They go on because they have begun.Schools are not only immortal institutions but reproductive ones.Our founder, Jabez Arvon, knew nothing, I am sure, of Gates' pedagogic values and would, I feel certain, have dealt with them disrespectfully.But public schools and university 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....
