The Henson Journals

[138]

Saturday, December 23rd, 1916.

873rd day

The weather has been very comfortless & depressing – no sun, but mist, fine falling snow, & thaws. I attended Mattins & Evensong. Also I wrote to Nimbus, Carissima, & Marion. George came in, & assisted me in tying up letters. He stayed to lunch. Gow and I talked much together: and, after dinner, I read from Fuller's Church History, the very amusing account of Antonius de Dominis, Archbishop of Spalato. We had much talk on palmistry & such like arts for reading the future. Automatic writing appears to be the popular method, and according to Mrs Gow, this is being extensively practised with the worst possible consequences. Linetta, like a true Italian ultimately a pagan, professed a larger measure of belief in these foolish tricks than I should have thought possible in any person of her intellectual quality: but, of course, when you are dealing with this subject, all estimates & expectations are worthless. Certainly the climate of a prolonged war, especially on a great scale & with its course marked by large disasters is enormously favourable to all these squalid superstitions, which lie buried in the unsuspected substructures of our conscious life, always waiting their resurrection when some great shock paralyses the self–controlling factors of human nature. To morality in the conventional sense War is frankly disastrous. Gow tells me that Sir E. Henry avers that since the outbreak of War there has been a notable increase of sodomy in London. From other sources it is reported that venereal disease is being greatly extended throughout the community. The mere breaking up of social "use & wont" implies the destruction of the conditions of personal morality for multitudes, in some measure for all.

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