The Henson Journals

[540]

Saturday, June 24th, 1916.

691st days

A damp melancholy day, bad for body and mind. I made no progress with any work, attended Evensong, and afterwards showed Lady Osler & her son over the Cathedral. He seems an intelligent youth, and confessed ingenuously that, in spite of his khaki uniform, he would rather be a crossing sweeper than a soldier. I received but one letter in the course of the day, and that was from Aleck Pleasance, who is now stationed in Ireland.

Henry Keepe's 'Monumenta Westmonasteriensia: or an Historical Account of the Original, Increase, and Present State of St Peter's or the Abbey Church of Westminster' (London, 1683) contains the following comment on Spencer: 'a most excellent poet, who indeed had a sweet and luxuriant fancy and expressed his thoughts with admirable success, as his Fairy Queen, and other works of his sufficiently declare; and a pity it was such true poetry should not have been imployed in as true a subject'. The romantic age of Elizabeth had passed into the harder, colder age of the later Stuarts when such a criticism could suggest itself to a scholarly student. I suspect that "Paradise Lost" owed most of its popularity to its subject, familiar & scared. In that case the quality of the verse merited popularity but it was too often otherwise. We may compare the immense vogue of such plays as "The Sign of the Cross", or such "literature" as 'In His Steps'. Here are compositions of little or no merit, which yet receive an eager welcome from masses of people, who are indeed destitute of any power of literary judgment, but who are vastly interested in moral & religious subjects. Their rudimentary dramatic or literary instinct is afforced by an immense fervour, and they combine in their appreciation the sentiments of the play–goer and those of the devotee!

---