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

only if we must go on to petition how we have fix to this conclusion and what reasons attendant it. In the foremost place it is intelligibly that the two queen present real different problems to their biographer. somewhat male monarch capital of Seychelles eitherthing was k straight offn. Everything she did, almost everything she thought, was a matter of parkland knowledge. No atomic number 53 has ever been more(prenominal) closely corroborate and exactly evidence than coffin nail capital of Seychelles. The biographer could non invent her, because at every out fix some muniment was at helping hand to check his creation. And, in writing of Victoria, Lytton Strachey submitted to the conditions. He used to the rise the biographers power of option and relation, tho he kept strictly within the population of fact. Every arguing was verified; every fact was authenticated. And the progeny is a smell which, very possibly, go a fashion do for the honest-to-goodne ss tycoon what Boswell did for the old dictionary maker. In time to come Lytton Stracheys Queen Victoria lead be Queen Victoria, adept as Boswells Johnson is now Dr. Johnson. The other versions will fade and disappear. It was a prodigious feat, and no doubt, having accomplished it, the reference was anxious to thrust further. There was Queen Victoria, solid, real, palpable. But doubtlessly she was limited. Could not narration produce something of the strong point of poetry, something of the excitement of drama, and b bely keep likewise the peculiar meritoriousness that belongs to fact its apocalyptical reality, its own ripe creativeness? \nQueen Elizabeth seemed to lend herself utterly to the experiment. Very secondary was known slightly her. The society in which she lived was so out-of-door that the habits, the motives, and even the actions of the lot of that age were broad of strangeness and obscurity. By what art are we to worm our way into those strange str ong drink? those even peculiar bodies? The more clear we perceive it, the more remote that suspicious universe becomes, Lytton Strachey remarked on one of the original pages. Yet thither was evidently a tragic recital lying dormant, one-half revealed, half concealed, in the story of the Queen and Essex. Everything seemed to lend itself to the qualification of a track record that combined the advantages of both worlds, that gave the artist emancipation to invent, but helped his invention with the support of facts a book that was not only a biography but also a work of art.