The Henson Journals

[611]

Thursday, January 20th, 1916.

535th day

Mr Oakley, an architect from Clifton, came to see the Kitchen. I showed him and a friend over the house.

Wilson sent for my acceptance a complete set of the Vanity Fair Album. The cartoons of public men of the last generation is of much interest, and no inconsiderable value. I am glad to possess them.

I worked at the Robertson Lecture all day, but with very unsatisfactory result. It is difficult to make much of a career which was obscure until its last six years, which was cut short at 37, and which was linked with no great personalities or great events of a stirring time. A proprietary chapel at Brighton is an uninviting kind of Nazareth for a modern prophet to come from! Even as a character–study Robertson is unsatisfactory, for he was plainly morbid. Incipient brain disease suggests itself throughout, & makes it difficult to give a just value to his vehement language. It is the more difficult to explain his sudden, wide–spread, & practically undisputed popularity after death because he has no personal connexion with any really considerable issue which divided men. The annals of Chartism would hardly include a reference to a few more or less sympathetic words spoken by an obscure man, in an obscure (relatively) pulpit. The fierce controversies which rent the Anglican Church, & absorbed its mind, when Europe was traversing the revolutionary crisis of 1848, did not receive from him any direction perceptible at the time: & probably nobody outside Brighton knew that he had sought to mitigate the 'No–Popery' zeal of 1851.

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