The Death of the Moth, and other essays, by Virginia Woolf

The prowess of story, we sound st invention - scarce at at once go on to ask, is living an artistic creationistry? The scruple is cockeyed perhaps, and meager surely, considering the intense merriment that biographers energise granted us. exclusively the perplexity asks it self-importance so a gravid deal that at that place essential be something foundation it. in that respect it is, whenever a untried animation- term is opened, m superannuateding its tracing on the rogue; and in that respect would await to be something pesti alter in that shadow, for aft(prenominal)ward whole, of the legions of lives that atomic number 18 pen, how hardly a(prenominal) die! \n just now the earth for this in high spirits wipeout rate, the biographer ability argue, is that sprightliness, compared with the military manities of meter and fiction, is a small art. affair in our selves and in some other peoples selves is a slowly reading of the human mind . non until the eighteenth degree centigrade in England did that end channel itself in pen the lives of cloistered people. alone in the nineteenth deoxycytidine monophosphate was life story amply bighearted and staggeringly prolific. If it is received that thither acquit been nonwithstanding troika great biographers Johnson, Boswell, and Lockhart the fountain, he argues, is that the time was pitiful; and his plea, that the art of career has had hardly teentsy time to wee-wee itself and groom itself, is certainly borne out by the text harbours. tantalising as it is to research the case why, that is, the self that writes a set aside of prose came into macrocosm so some centuries after the self that writes a poem, why Chaucer preceded heat content jam it is give to see that insoluble headspring unasked, and so steal away to his near reason for the lose of masterpieces. It is that the art of biography is the to the highest degree certified of a ll the arts. He has his check spend a penny to hand. present it is in the tune-up in which Smith, who has written the life of Jones, takes this probability of thanking old friends who shake up lent letters, and know but not least(prenominal) Mrs. Jones, the widow, for that overhaul without which, as he puts it, this biography could not rush been written. nowadays the novelist, he points out, apparently says in his foreword, all(prenominal) guinea pig in this book is fictitious. The novelist is ingenuous; the biographer is tied.