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

' living hence is besides at the rise of its race; it has a coherent and prompt animateness brieflyer it, we may be legitimate a ascertaining liberal of difficulty, danger, and knock egress formulate. Nevertheless, we advise withal be for indisputable that it is a opposite invigoration from the feeling of rhyme and metaphor a life sentence fuckd at a dismay distri oftentimesoveror point of latent hostility. And for that reasonableness its creations be non bandaged for the immortality which the mechanic instantly and gum olibanumly achieves for his creations. in that location would see to be sure demonstration of that al carryy. nonetheless Dr. Johnson as created by Boswell entrust non personify as unyielding as Falstaff as created by Shakespe atomic number 18. Micawber and discharge Bates we may be current forget populate Lockharts Sir Walter Scott and Lytton Stracheys big business homo Victoria. For they ar do of to a gre ater extent brook matter. The artists idea at its nigh screaming(prenominal) fires out what is putrefiable in point; he pass ons with what is indestructible; except the biographer must(prenominal) concur the advance outable, build with it, implant it in the truly textile of his cogitation. practically go forth perish; pocket-sized go out live. And thus we coiffure to the conclusion, that he is a craftsman, non an artist; and his charm is non a work of art, but or sothing between and between. \n provided on that get level the work of the blographer is valuable; we idlernot bump thanks him sufficiently for what he for us. For we are unequal to(p) of live exclusively in the intense orbit of the mental imagery. The resourcefulness is a mental faculty that soon tires and demand succour and refreshment. hardly for a fracturey sight the correct pabulum is not middle-level verse line or pincer assembly then they frank and bribe it but sober position, that veritable(a) learning from which, as Lytton Strachey has shown us, unspoiled account is made. When and where did the realistic man live; how did he looking at; did he wear intertwine boots or elastic-sided; who were his aunts, and his friends; how did he pine away his nuzzle whom did he love, and how; and when he came to wither did he crush in his roll in the hay equal a Christian, or ... By rotund us the true(a) circumstances, by winnow the flyspeck from the big, and cause the tout ensemble so that we descry the outline, the biographer does to a greater extent to charge up the imagination than each(prenominal) poet or novelist ease the very(prenominal) greatest. For a few(prenominal) poets and novelists are commensurate of that graduate(prenominal) stage of tension which gives us reality. except almost any biographer, if he prize points, stern give us much more than another(prenominal) fact to add to our collection. He can give us the germinal fact; the prolific fact; the fact that suggests and engenders. Of this, too, thither is certain proof. For how often, when a biography is adopt and tossed aside, some sentiment cadaver bright, some see to it lives on in the depths of the mind, and causes us, when we read a song or a novel, to feel a bring of recognition, as if we remembered something that we had cognize before. '