The Henson Journals

[459]

Tuesday, September 23rd, 1913.

A most dreary morning, dark & damp with a rising wind. We breakfasted early, and got away by the early train from Aboyne. Our hospitable host added a capercailzie to our luggage. We travelled by the East coast express very comfortably as far as Newcastle, and there caught a train to Durham. Sir Fred: Bridge was our compagnon de voyage. We arrived in the Deanery about 6.15 p.m. As we entered the college we saw the choirboys evidently excited: they soon told us the reason. A fire had broken out in the School house, & had but just been extinguished.

On the journey – at Aberdeen – I happened to see "The Picture of Dorian Gray" set out in the list of shilling reprints on the book–stall. The book has been so continually pressed on one's notice, & recently has been produced on the London stage with so much publicity, that I determined to seize the opportunity of a railway journey in order to read it. I found it extraordinarily brilliant, and horribly fascinating. It is certainly bad in the worst sense, not because its moral is bad – indeed it points the old & inevitable moral that 'the way of transgressors is hard' – but because of its concentration on radically corrupt and [460]corrupting thoughts & pictures of life. The atmosphere is that of the rotten coterie in which the infamous author poured out his eccentric & richly dowered spirit. Perhaps one's knowledge of the squalid tragedy – illuminating as squalid – in which the star of Wilde's genius finally disappeared, operates disadvantageously on the reader's mind, & creates a disposition to find an autobiography where one ought only to perceive a literary work: but the book throbs with personal feeling, & only a very bad man could have written it.

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