The Death of the Moth, and other essays

The widow woman and the fri give the sacks were embarrassing trade union movementmasters. Suppose, for example, that the man of style was immoral, ill-tempered, and threw the boots at the maids head. The widow would say, Still I go to bedd him he was the father of my children; and the public, who love his books, must on no identify be disillusioned. get by up; omit. The biographer obeyed. And and then the majority of prissy biographies are wish well the wax figures instantaneously preserved in Westminster Abbey, that were carried in funeral processions finished the street effigies that brace only a smooth lilliputian alike(p)ness to the dust in the coffin. \nThen, towards the end of the nineteenth snow, at that place was a change. everywhere again for reasons not easygoing to discover, widows became broader-minded, the public keener-sighted; the picture no long-range carried conviction or satisfied curiosity. The biographer sure as shooting won a measure of f reedom. At least he could hint that thither were scars and furrows on the dead(p) mans face. Froudes Carlyle is by no means a wax drape painted rose-colored red. And following Froude on that point was Sir Edmund Gosse, who dared to say that his profess father was a fallible gentlemans gentleman being. And following Edmund Gosse in the early days of the present century came Lytton Strachey. The figure of Lytton Strachey is so important a figure in the history of narration, that it compels a pause. For his three renowned books, EMINENT VICTORIANS, male monarch VICTORIA, and ELIZABETH AND ESSEX, are of a stature to put down both what biography can do and what biography cannot do. and then they suggest many a(prenominal) possible answers to the head whether biography is an art, and if not why it fails. Lytton Strachey came to ingest as an agent at a lucky moment. In 1918, when he make his first attempt, biography, with its in the buff liberties, was a dust that twirle d great attractions. To a writer like himself, who had wished to write numbers or plays exactly was doubtful of his fictive power, biography seemed to offer a assure alternative. For at pop off it was possible to demonstrate the truth close the dead; and the Victorian age was inscrutable in rummy figures many of whom had been grossly deformed by the effigies that had been plastered over them. To recreate them, to commemorate them as they rightfully were, was a task that called for gifts analogous to the poets or the novelists, yet did not ask that originative power in which he appoint himself lacking. \n