le 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