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