Laurence Housman's drawing

Laurence Housman

The view from under the table (3)

A talk given to the Housman Society in Street Library by David Parsons, 22 June 2005

The last book I want to look at in detail is an edition of Shelley's poem, The Sensitive Plant. I am not myself a lover of Shelley. I can enjoy "I awake from dreams of thee", but his long, long verse dramas and dialogues I have not the stomach for.

I therefore read this poem, The Sensitive Plant, with a sense of duty. I wanted to discover why Laurence agreed to illustrate it.

Seventy-seven 4-line stanzas tell of a garden full of wonderful flowers all getting on splendidly together,

and one sensitive plant, full of love, who seems to have felt rather out of it all, not being very beautiful:

For the Sensitive Plant has no bright flower
Radiance and odour are not its dower.
It loves, even like Love, its deep heart is full,
It desires what it has not, the Beautiful!

Aha! Little Laurence under the table! But there is more.

The gardener is a beautiful lady with long hair. Now Laurence had from his extreme youth been an admirer of long hair. He thought that long hair was only in storybooks until he saw his step-mother at her dressing table with her hair down. He exclaimed: "You are beautiful!" and loved her ever after.

And wherever her aery footstep trod,
Her trailing hair from the grassy sod
Erased its light vestige, with shadowy sweep,
Like a sunny storm o'er the dark green deep.

This beautiful creature died in the autumn; the garden went to rack and ruin. Shelley doesn't know whether the Sensitive Plant was aware of all this or not:

Whether the Sensitive Plant, or that
Which within its boughs like a Spirit sat,
Ere its outward form had known decay,
Now felt this change, I cannot say.

I freely confess that I don't understand Shelley's conclusion:

That garden sweet, that lady fair,
With all sweet shapes and odours there,
In truth have never passed away:
'Tis we, 'tis ours, are changed; not they.

For love and beauty and delight
There is not death nor change; their might
Exceeds our organs, which endure
No light, being themselves obscure.

I turned for interpretation to the Cambridge History of English and American Literature.

"In The Sensitive Plant, the loveliness of an Italian flower garden in spring, and its autumn decay, inspired a Shelleyan myth, .... His flowers, commonly impressionist hints of colour and perfume, are now finely articulated and characterised; they are Shelleyan flowers, but, like those of Shakespeare, they are, recognisably, nature's too. In "the sensitive plant" itself, Shelley found a new symbol for his own "love of love," "companionless," ... and

... the mood of lament at the passing of beauty and the seeming frustration of love merges in a note of assurance, here not ecstatic but serene, that beauty and love are, in reality the eternal things."

Housman has not been content with plants.

He shows his love of gardens, certainly, but the Sensitive Plant, or its Spirit, has become a thin young man,

and fauns inhabit the garden,

and Pan presides over its decay. Laurence has made visible the allegory implicit in the verse. Whether this enhances the reader's experience I am not sure, but the alternative would have been to draw flowers only.

I think that the spirit of the Sensitive Plant is quite a haunting image. Laurence himself called the Shelley illustrations "the best drawings I ever did."

Laurence Housman was by now an established artist and writer. But the great decade of illustration is coming to an end.

There were title pages for the poems of Francis Thompson,

and for his own fairy tales, Blue Moon.

But Laurence finds the work too much for his eyesight, and turns to writing, editing and criticism. Laurence wrote, "My failure, during the first five or six years of my art training, to get set in the right direction, and the disappointment which it caused me, drove me the more persistently into writing as an alternative." In this, as in his graphic work, he had great success, and gained some eminent admirers and friends.

[James] Joyce saw his first publication in book form in Venture: an Annual of Art and Literature, edited by Laurence Housman and W. Somerset Maugham, when they published his "Two Songs" in 1904.

Lawrence of Arabia had six of Housman's books in his library when he died.

Oscar Wilde was among his acquaintances - he wrote an account of Wilde's conversation when they met in France.

He drew his friend H.G. Wells

James Agate (drama critic for the London Sunday Times (1923 to 1947)): Watching this rubbish I thought regretfully of that play of Mr. Laurence Housman in which a departed Victorian lady wires from earth to an elder sister who has preceded her - the address is that of a distinctly anthropomorphic Heaven - "Railway accident. Arriving 4.30." "I expected you earlier," says the elder lady, looking at the clock and pecking her sister's cheek. "The train was late," replies the younger woman simply. Oh, for just one little breath of Mr. Housman's irony, or even of his common sense, to blow away these screen absurdities!

Laurence moved in circles that included the leading literary, artistic and theatrical figures of the day. G.K. Chesterton, who wrote this letter, also wrote:

"It is impossible to ignore altogether any comment coming from so eminent a literary artist as Mr. Laurence Housman." No doubt Chesterton went on to criticise that comment.

A Farm in Fairyland - frontispiece detail

L. H. knew (and drew) the composer Cyril Scott, who was quoted as an authority in a textbook on Modern Harmony that I possess.

George Bernard Shaw corresponded with him.

Ernest Shepard, illustrator of Winnie the Pooh and The Wind in the Willows, exchanged Christmas cards.

He debated theology with Father Tyrell, whom he here portrays rather unkindly.

His drama, Bethlehem, was produced by one of the formative influences of the 20th century stage, Gordon Craig. Craig was one of the big names, along with Stanislavski and Brecht, about whom I had to learn for A level Theatre Studies a few years ago.

Playing Mary in his nativity drama was Mrs Gerald Bishop, evidently no Raphael Madonna.

A newspaper commissioned LH to draw a cartoon of Max Beerbohm. Laurence made several trials before the finished article emerged.

Despite what they did to each other on paper, they seem to have remained friends.

You can see Max's caricature of Housman here.

Laurence Housman's writing is for tomorrow. Today I end with a few more pictures, showing the variety of his styles.

There's a simple humorous drawing of a pig, made for a little book.

There's the god running through the wood, all movement and impression.

There's the careful allegorical picture refused by his publisher, and eventually printed in the notorious Yellow Book along with Beardsley. According to Laurence it has a highly moral meaning.

"The full figure in my drawing represents a human soul bound among thorns and roses to the doorway of Life. At his touch the roses of pleasure crumble and fall; pleasure has become suffering. This I have ventured to suggest under the form of the crucifixion, as I wished to put in contrast the crucified sinner and the crucified Sinless One.

To the left is a figure that represents man's lower nature, once the tempter, and now the scoffer at the soul's sufferings. He holds the wine cup and the thyrsus. In the latter my idea has been to give a parallel to the sponge set upon a reed in which the vinegar was offered to Christ.

To the right sits Nature or Flora, a neutral figure, capable of good or evil, holding Pan's pipes among a lap full of flowers. But behind her stands St Eustace's stag, representing Nature's spiritual side and the revelation, through Nature, of Christ."

Another allegorical picture, designed as the frontispiece to Thompson's poems. A different style again, darker and more mysterious.

This illustrates, I think, the Sleeping Beauty. What a perfect excuse for portraying long hair - after it has been growing for 100 years! See the mystery in the picture: what lurks in those recesses? What lies around the bend of the stairs? What was the young men doing before he was frozen in sleep?

Before I show you my final picture, I would like to provide a contrast.

An illustrator called Julia Noonan made this picture for a 1974 edition of Housman's story, The Ratcatcher's Daughter, one of the stories from the Blue Moon collection. It is a perfectly acceptable picture, suitable for children for whom the story was, perhaps, intended. I say perhaps, because Housman used some language that is really more fitting for adult readers - not obscene, of course, but hard. Now let's see how Laurence himself illustrated The Ratcatcher's Daughter.

Here is the drawing, on brown paper. It is kept by the Tate Gallery. It shows The Rat-Catcher's Daughter, made to marry the ugly gnome who cares only for gold. Here is the Pre-Raphaelite girl, long-haired and beautiful, delicately drawn; and here also is the dark, threatening and hunched gnome. The light that illumines her face as it looks out at something unknown serves only to throw the gnome's face into deep shadow, and the background into gloom.

We end, as we began, with a figure on the ground in the shadows, with the good and the admirable above him, bathed in light. Is there anything of Laurence's self-doubt still there in this, one of his latest pictures? I wonder.

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