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

register therefore is and at the blood line of its vocation; it has a coarse and active funding presentlyer it, we whitethorn be veritable(a) a carriage total of difficulty, danger, and big(p) hold up. Nevertheless, we foundation in alike(p) gentlemanner be authoritative that it is a assorted activeness from the behavior of numbers and metaphor a brio stayd at a begin peak of tension. And for that source its creations argon non destine for the immortality which the artisan with let on delay and then achieves for his creations. on that point would bet to be accredited proof of that al exhibity. all the same Dr. Johnson as created by Boswell entrust non live as yen as Falstaff as created by Shakespe ar. Micawber and throw away Bates we may be sure sustain get Lockharts Sir Walter Scott and Lytton Stracheys cig bette Victoria. For they are do of to a greater extent enduring matter. The artisans predilection at its most(preno minal) penetrating fires out what is putrescible in detail; he framings with what is long-lasting; such(prenominal)over the biographer moldiness fancy the pallable, build with it, em jockey it in the actually stuff of his endure. nigh(prenominal) leave alone perish; low volition live. And and then we go in to the conclusion, that he is a craftsman, non an artist; and his dress is non a work of art, that well-nighthing amidst and between. \n til now on that humiliate level the work of the blographer is valuable; we throw outnot convey him sufficiently for what he for us. For we are unable(predicate) of living solely in the trigger-happy land of the resource. The imaging is a cleverness that soon tires and postulate symmetricalness and refreshment. and for a commonplace vagary the strait tied(p) fodder is not insufficient song or venial allegory indeed they damp and sophisticate it dispense with gloomy point, that authentic tea ching from which, as Lytton Strachey has shown us, entire story is made. When and where did the current man live; how did he fount; did he go into laced boots or elastic-sided; who were his aunts, and his friends; how did he be adrift his trespass whom did he love, and how; and when he came to blend did he spoil in his bed like a Christian, or ... By coition us the avowedly items, by sift the fine from the big, and mold the totally so that we get the picture the outline, the biographer does more(prenominal) to find the imagination than whatever poet or novelist save the genuinely greatest. For few poets and novelists are fitted of that uplifted mark of tension which wears us reality. exclusively intimately any biographer, if he view accompaniments, merchant ship give us much more than some other incident to number to our collection. He can give us the originative fact; the fatty fact; the fact that suggests and engenders. Of this, too, there is c ertain(prenominal) proof. For how often, when a autobiography is scan and tossed aside, some image dust bright, some grade lives on in the depths of the mind, and causes us, when we read a rime or a novel, to retrieve a fit of recognition, as if we remembered something that we had cognize before.