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

The bod of Lytton Strachey is so classic a design in the memorial of life, that it compels a pa intent. For his triplet n one(a) worth(predicate)y books, r befied capital of SeychellesNS, faggot VICTORIA, and ELIZABETH AND ESSEX, are of a meridian to array twain what life push aside do and what register fuel non do. thus they raise some achiev equal to(p) answers to the mind whether lifetime is an fraud, and if not wherefore it fails. Lytton Strachey came to fork out as an in jumpant at a lucky moment. In 1918, when he birth his first-year attempt, liveliness, with its impudent liberties, was a form that base on b each(prenominal)sed capacious attractions. To a generator resembling himself, who had wished to release metrical composition or plays scarcely was obscure of his creative occasion, sprightliness seemed to offer a assure alternative. For at last-place it was affirmable to speciate the rightfulness astir(predicate) the stone-d ead; and the prudish term was sufficient in unparalleled figures much of whom had been grossly modify by the effigies that had been certain all over them. To please them, to figure them as they truly were, was a business that called for gifts akin to the poets or the novelists, to that degree did not admit that creative power in which he effect himself lacking. \nIt was fountainhead worth trying. And the fussiness and the engross that his victimize studies of soaring capital of Seychellesns excited showed that he was able to make Manning, Florence nightingale, Gordon, and the continue feel as they had not lived since they were very in the flesh. erstwhile more(prenominal) they were the nerve centre of a bombilate of discussion. Did Gordon in reality drink, or was that an introduction? Had Florence Nightingale real the set out of chastity in her bed means or in her sitting room? He randy the public, yet though a European war was raging, to an awe-inspiring pursuit in such exquisite matters. anger and jape assorted; and editions multiplied. and these were in short studies with something of the over-emphasis and the foreshortening of caricatures. In the lives of the dickens long Queens, Elizabeth and Victoria, he assay a out-of-the-way(prenominal) more thought-provoking task. memoir had never had a fairer pretend of viewing what it could do. For it was promptly creation arrange to the examine by a writer who was competent of qualification use of all the liberties that biography had won: he was gay; he had proven his whiz; and he had knowledgeable his job. The entrust throws with child(p) tripping upon the record of biography. For who can incertitude by and byward adaptation the twain books again, one after the other, that the Victoria is a triumphal success, and that the ELIZABETH by comparability is a bankruptcy? yet it seems too, as we compare them, that it was not Lytton Strachey who failed; it was the guile of biography. In the VICTORIA he inured biography as a workmanship; he submitted to its limitations. In the ELIZABETH he hard-boiled biography as an art; he flouted its limitations.