The Project Gutenberg EBook of Angels & Ministers, by Laurence Housman

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Title: Angels & Ministers

Author: Laurence Housman

Release Date: February 10, 2004 [EBook #11020]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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ANGELS AND MINISTERS

AND OTHER VICTORIAN PLAYS

by

LAURENCE HOUSMAN

_Angels and Ministers_ AND _Possession_ WERE FIRST

Introduction

The Victorian era has ceased to be a thing of yesterday; it has become
history; and the fixed look of age, no longer contemporary in character,
which now grades the period, grades also the once living material which
went to its making.

With this period of history those who were once participants in its life
can deal more intimately and with more verisimilitude than can those whose
literary outlook comes later. We can write of it as no sequent generation
will find possible; for we are bone of its bone and flesh of its flesh;
and when we go, something goes with us which will require for its
reconstruction, not the natural piety of a returned native, such as I
claim to be, but the cold, calculating art of literary excursionists whose
domicile is elsewhere.

Some while ago, before Mr. Strachey had made the name of Victoria to
resound as triumphantly as it does now, a friend asked why I should
trouble to resuscitate these Victorian remains. My answer is because I
myself am Victorian, and because the Victorianism to which I belong is now
passing so rapidly into history, henceforth to present to the world a
colder aspect than that which endears it to my own mind.

The bloom upon the grape only fully appears when it is ripe for death.
Then, at a touch, it passes, delicate and evanescent as the frailest
blossoms of spring. Just at this moment the Victorian age has that bloom
upon it--autumnal, not spring-like--which, in the nature of things, cannot
last. That bloom I have tried to illumine before time wipes it away.

Under this rose-shaded lamp of history, domestically designed, I would
have these old cha