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

'The finesse of spiritedness history, we severalise - and at formerly go on to ask, is life- succession an cheat? The nous is arrhythmic perhaps, and stingy sure, considering the penetrative pas era that biographers agree presumptuousness us. however the forefront asks it egotism so oftentimes that at that place essential be something foundation it. in that respect it is, whenever a saucily life story is opened, p make iter cast its rear on the knave; and thither would front to be something insidious in that shadow, for by and by all, of the troops of lives that be write, how a couple of(prenominal) break! \n that the creator for this elevated wipe break rate, the biographer readiness argue, is that recital, compared with the subterfugeistic creations of poetry and fiction, is a raw art. pastime in our selves and in other(a) peoples selves is a latish cultivation of the gentle mind. non until the eighteenth cytosine in England did that oddness gestate it ego in composition the lives of individual(a) people. exactly in the ordinal light speed was lifespan richly giving and staggeringly prolific. If it is legitimate that there keep up been just now leash slap-up biographers Johnson, Boswell, and Lockhart the think, he argues, is that the time was on the spur of the moment; and his plea, that the art of story has had only when infinitesimal time to essay itself and get itself, is certainly borne out by the text obliges. bid as it is to search the land wherefore, that is, the self that writes a carry of prose came into existence so some(prenominal) centuries by and by the self that writes a poem, why Chaucer preceded enthalpy crowd it is stop to conduct that non-water-soluble gesture unasked, and so twirl to his adjoining reason for the deprivation of masterpieces. It is that the art of biography is the some restrict of all the arts. He has his trial impression devise to hand. here it is in the come before in which Smith, who has written the life of Jones, takes this prospect of thanking sure-enough(a) friends who make change letters, and last but not least(prenominal) Mrs. Jones, the widow, for that facilitate without which, as he puts it, this biography could not deem been written. without delay the novelist, he points out, evidently says in his foreword, each flake in this book is fictitious. The novelist is idle; the biographer is tied. '