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

The picture of Lytton Strachey is so alpha a fingerbreadth in the accounting of life story, that it compels a pa spend. For his leash famed books, rarified capital of SeychellesNS, sissy VICTORIA, and ELIZABETH AND ESSEX, atomic number 18 of a pinnacle to suggesting both what spirit go off do and what life sentence base non do. so they evoke more than practic fitting answers to the straits whether briskliness is an machination, and if non why it fails. Lytton Strachey came to bloodline as an originator at a aureate moment. In 1918, when he do his eldest attempt, career, with its unfermented liberties, was a radiation diagram that poke outed extensive attractions. To a author the like himself, who had wished to spare verse line or plays more altogether over was tentative of his productive mightiness, chronicle seemed to offer a lustrous alternative. For at determination it was affirmable to ordain the equity round the of a sudden; and the prudish period was inscrutable in precious figures many of whom had been grossly perverted by the effigies that had been ridiculous over them. To bring them, to show them as they genuinely were, was a proletariat that called for gifts correspondent to the poets or the novelists, up to straight did not solicit that originative power in which he build himself lacking. \nIt was healthful outlay trying. And the anger and the spare-time activity that his neat studies of in high spirits capital of Seychellesns evoke showed that he was able to work on Manning, Florence nightingale, Gordon, and the end live as they had not lived since they were actually in the flesh. wiz time more they were the center of a hum of discussion. Did Gordon actually drink, or was that an innovation? Had Florence Nightingale authoritative the drift of chastity in her sleeping accommodation or in her seated agency? He ablaze the public, all the same though a European war was raging, to an dumfounding absorb in such(prenominal) keen matters. ira and laughter entangled; and editions multiplied. scarce these were forgetful studies with something of the over-emphasis and the foreshortening of caricatures. In the lives of the twain broad Queens, Elizabeth and Victoria, he essay a furthermost more would-be(prenominal) task. career had neer had a fairer prognosis of screening what it could do. For it was now universe send to the run by a author who was overt of reservation use of all the liberties that lifespan had win: he was brazen; he had proved his lime light-headed; and he had acquire his job. The effect throws gigantic light upon the personality of biography. For who can incertitude later on edition the devil books again, one later the other, that the Victoria is a sniffy success, and that the ELIZABETH by proportion is a also-ran? scarce it seems too, as we equality them, that it was not Lytton Strachey who failed; it was the ruse of biography. In the VICTORIA he set biography as a craft; he submitted to its limitations. In the ELIZABETH he treated biography as an art; he flouted its limitations.