The Henson Journals

[37]

Saturday, July 10th, 1926.

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Another very brilliant hot day, tending to be sultry. I spent the morning in writing letters, and making a start on the new volume of "Anglo–Catholick" Essays, which is much commended in the papers, & has received a very favourable notice from Inge. It is called "Essays Catholic and Critical by members of the Anglican Communion, edited by Edward Gordon Selwyn".

Mead–Falkner & his wife came to tea, & spent nearly two hours here. He is a curiously evasive creature. What his real convictions, if there be any, actually are not his most intimate friends can discover. His interests are antiquarian, musical, and literary. His employment through most part of his life have [sic] been commercial. He presented the piquant combination of a prosaically practical career – the manufacture and sale of armaments, and a genuine concern for purely intellectual and aesthetic matters. He told me that on one occasion he found himself in rivalry with the head of the great Creusot armament works for the purchase of a rare xivth century Missal, he being at the time managing director of the great armament firm Armstrong, Whitworth & Co. There is something pathetic about the efforts which men make to emancipate themselves from the yoke of their secular fate. He spoke of the Dean of Durham, for whom he professes a genuine regard. He marvelled at the curiously inadequate effect of Welldon's scholarly attainments. His academic record seemed to promise a refined and keenly sensitive interest in art and scholarship, but his adult career indicated an almost complete lack of such interest. He was just "an overgrown schoolboy". This circumstance was certainly very unfortunate at a juncture when both the Cathedral and the University of Durham were traversing a crisis.

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