The Henson Journals
Fri 18 February 1927
Volume 41, Page 366
[366]
Friday, February 18th, 1927.
There is a column of my Lecture on the front page of the Yorkshire Post, and a leading article snifflingly favourable. Both the Newcastle Papers give a column of report, & decorate it with a photograph, but abstain from commentary. The Manchester Guardian has neither report nor comment. I suppose as the lecture was a domestic affair of Armstrong College, the general press takes no account of it, save in so far as it is given access to the M.S. The Times has nearly a column of report. On the whole, I think, the poor thing reads connectedly. It will not please anybody! Sir Theodore Morison sends me a kindly expressed letter in which he says that my lecture "was exactly what I have thought the Earl Grey Lecture should be, a great handling of a great subject". And Turner sends me a pleasant note of "congratulation". Nevertheless, I cannot pretend to be satisfied with it.
I wasted the day (save for the formal business) in reading a romance sent me by the publisher "Jew Süss, a Historical Romance, by Lion Feuchtwanger", which is most highly praised by the Review, & certainly is a powerful composition. It is disfigured by passages of incredible & gratuitous grossness, but its broad impression is not salacious. The description of a Jew hunt is wonderful, and the grossness of German life shot through by Jesuit intriguing is vividly portrayed. The central figure is boldly drawn, & his moral evolution holds the reader's interest to the end.
Ernest kept his room, pleading a sore throat. He seems to have influenza. This compelled the usual bothersome revising of arrangements.
The "Spectator" prints an article headed "A Free Churchman on Prayer Book Revision", which is signed by Harold E. Brierley. It is in the main very favourable, and contrasts with the fanatical denunciation of our own Evangelicals. The truth is that the latter are in a false positions [sic] as members of the Church of England. One result of the Toleration Act was to draw away from the National Establishment its most virile Protestants, for whom it provided another & a less circumscribed sphere. The Protestants who remained in the Church of England were inferior in type, and have never been really at home there.