The Henson Journals

[5]

Monday, November 13th, 1922.

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A fair day with a glorious sun–rise at the start and a glorious sunset at the finish with no rain in between. I frittered the morning away & played bowls with William in the afternoon. Then more letters, & I started reading Taylor's " Life of Robert Surtees Esq ." edited by James Raine for the Surtees Society. I did this in the vain hope of gathering material for the Scott dinner. What an interesting society of amiable and cultivated people it disclosed, and how remote it all is from our own time! Surtees was evidently a religious man, and, like Scott the most excellent of husbands, masters & neighbours: but his letters hardly indicate by so much as an allusion that he was amusing himself with his antiquarianisms in the mid course of a vast &wasting war, and in the midst of a population distracted & degraded by a profound economic revolution. The gentry were a class by themselves living in a world of their own. They were kind to "the lower orders" when these received a kind of initiation by their service to them, & they were attached to them, as to their dogs & horses, by a generous condescension: but the class frontier was jealously guarded, and it might not be passed. There was " a great gulf fixed " between those whose birth and breeding gave entrance within the fold, and those humbly born & roughly trained, who were without. Genius, like [5] that of "the Ettrick Shepherd" opened the door, but then genius in the lowly created "freaks", not "gentlemen"!

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