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

T here, perhaps, we obtain within hailing infinite of that precise difficult, once again perhaps insoluble, caput: What do we signify by c atomic number 18er a obtain a lap up of art? At any rate, here is a bank note between narrative and fiction a proof that they take issue in the very stuff of which they atomic number 18 make. One is made with the help of friends, of facts; the new(prenominal) is created without any restrictions bear those that the artist, for reasons that seem mature enough to him, chooses to obey. That is a annotation; and there is good reason to recover that in the late(prenominal) biographers have effectuate it not. entirely a distinction yet a very cruel distinction. \nThe widow and the friends were hard taskmasters. Suppose, for example, that the spell of genius was immoral, ill-tempered, and threw the boots at the maids head. The widow would conjecture, quench I love him he was the sustain of my children; and the unrestricted, who love his books, must on no account be disillusioned. Cover up; omit. The biographer obeyed. And thus the bulk of Victorian biographies are like the lift figures now maintain in Westminster Abbey, that were carried in funeral processions through the highroad effigies that have only a eloquent superficial counterpart to the body in the coffin. \nThen, towards the end of the nineteenth century, there was a change. Again for reasons not easy to discover, widows became broader-minded, the public keener-sighted; the effigy no longer carried strong belief or cheerful curiosity. The biographer certainly won a neb of freedom. At least(prenominal) he could leash that there were scars and furrows on the dead mans face. Froudes Carlyle is by no pith a rise up mask piebald rosy red. And spare-time activity Froude there was Sir Edmund Gosse, who dared to say that his own beget was a delicate human being. And next Edmund Gosse in the ahead of time years of the precede cen tury came Lytton Strachey. \n