EBOOK ANGELS & MINISTERS ***
Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Keren Vergon, Charles M. Bidwell, and
the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
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.
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