The results, as far as I was concerned, were what might have been
expected. My school made only the thinnest pretence of teaching anything
but Latin and Greek. When I went there as a very small boy I knew a good
deal of Latin grammar which I had been taught in a few weeks privately
by my uncle. When I had been several years at school this same uncle
examined me and discovered that the net result of my schooling was that
I had forgotten what he had taught me, and had learnt nothing else. To
this day, though I can still decline a Latin noun and repeat some of the
old paradigms in the old meaningless way, because their rhythm sticks
to me, I have never yet seen a Latin inscription on a tomb that I could
translate throughout. Of Greek I can decipher perhaps the greater
part of the Greek alphabet. In short, I am, as to classical education,
another Shakespear. I can read French as easily as English; and under
pressure of necessity I can turn to account some scraps of German and
a little operatic Italian; but these I was never taught at school.
Instead, I was taught lying, dishonorable submission to tyranny, dirty
stories, a blasphemous habit of treating love and maternity as
obscene jokes, hopelessness, evasion, derision, cowardice, and all the
blackguard's shifts by which the coward intimidates other cowards. And
if I had been a boarder at an English public school instead of a day boy
at an Irish one, I might have had to add to these, deeper shames still.