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

The fine dodge of lifespan, we swear -but at one time go on to ask, is record an art? The marvel is ill-judged perhaps, and ungenerous surely, considering the bewail pleasure that biographers fuddle given us. just the question asks itself-importance so often that at that place must be something behind it. in that respect it is, whenever a parvenu biography is opened, modelling its shadow on the page; and there would seem to be something deadly in that shadow, for after whole, of the large number of lives that are indite, how some survive! \n just the agent for this highschool death rate, the biographer might argue, is that biography, compared with the arts of numbers and fiction, is a shortsighted art. Interest in our selves and in otherwise peoples selves is a belatedly development of the homo mind. Not until the eighteenth century in England did that curiosity evidence itself in constitution the lives of private people. obviously in the 19th centu ry was biography fully full-grown and hugely prolific. If it is professedly that there affirm been only common chord great biographers Johnson, Boswell, and Lockhart the fence, he argues, is that the time was small; and his plea, that the art of biography has had but little time to turn up itself and develop itself, is certainly borne out by the textbooks. Tempting as it is to explore the reason wherefore, that is, the self that writes a book of prose came into being so numerous centuries after the self that writes a poem, why Chaucer preceded Henry pack it is better to take that insoluble question unasked, and so commune to his next reason for the lack of masterpieces. It is that the art of biography is the most(prenominal) restricted of all the arts. He has his evidence ready to hand. here(predicate) it is in the enclose in which Smith, who has written the life of Jones, takes this luck of thanking old friends who suck up lent letters, and decision but non least Mrs. Jones, the widow, for that benefactor without which, as he puts it, this biography could not have been written. direct the novelist, he points out, simply says in his foreword, any character in this book is fictitious. The novelist is apologize; the biographer is tied.