Time & Perspective Quote by Laurence Housman

A little humility, a little hustle, and a quietly barbed understanding of how culture actually gets made. Housman frames inspiration as luck - a "happy moment" - but the sentence is really about control: once he chooses St Francis, he’s chosen a figure so large, pliable, and symbolically overloaded that the subject can carry the work even if the craft wobbles. That’s the wager. The saint becomes a cultural engine.

Then comes the sly pivot: "Others might have written them better". It reads like modesty, but it’s also a prophylactic against critics and rivals. He concedes the hypothetical superiority of others while making it irrelevant, because the only advantage that matters in the marketplace of art is not being best; it’s being first, or at least being the one who actually did it. The line "as I have written them, the advantage will probably remain mine" is a crisp, modern admission that authorship is a kind of property claim. You can’t outdo the fact of existence.

Context sharpens the edge. Late-Victorian and Edwardian theater loved moral pageantry and historical-spiritual subjects, but it was also a crowded ecosystem with shifting taste and a growing appetite for "serious" drama. St Francis offers sanctity without dogma, tenderness without politics - a saint who can be staged as radical innocence, social critique, or aesthetic retreat. Housman is telling you he knows the canon is built as much by opportunism as by genius, and he’s comfortable living in that truth.