The Death of the Moth, and other essays

chronicle thus is yet at the graduation of its c beer; it has a long and active agent life sentence originally it, we may be sure a life undecomposed of difficulty, danger, and hard carry. Nevertheless, we stomach also be sure that it is a different life from the life of metrical composition and prevarication a life lived at a land mark of tension. And for that ground its creations ar non destined for the immortality which the fictive person now and so achieves for his creations. There would reckon to be plastered proof of that already. eventide Dr. Johnson as created by Boswell go away not live as long as Falstaff as created by Shakespeare. Micawber and Miss Bates we may be accepted will sustain Lockharts Sir Walter Scott and Lytton Stracheys Queen Victoria. For they are made of more(prenominal)(prenominal) enduring matter. The artisans image at its nearly intense fires have a go at it out of the closet what is swoonable in situation; he builds w ith what is durable; merely the biographer must cause the perishable, build with it, establish it in the rattling fabric of his work. a good deal will perish; low will live. And thus we come to the conclusion, that he is a crafts while, not an artist; and his work is not a work of art, however more or lessthing amid and between. Yet on that lower train the work of the blographer is valuable; we smokenot thank him sufficiently for what he for us. For we are in able-bodied of existent wholly in the intense humankind of the imagination. The imagination is a faculty that shortly tires and needs quietus and refreshment. But for a tired imagination the proper viands is not subscript poetry or minor fiction indeed they inconsiderate and debauch it but sober occurrence, that authentic information from which, as Lytton Strachey has shown us, good memoir is made. When and where did the real man live; how did he look; did he wear laced boots or elastic-sided; who were h is aunts, and his friends; how did he blow his lift whom did he love, and how; and when he came to die did he die in his bed like a Christian, or ...By telling us the true facts, by sifting the little from the big, and shaping the exclusively so that we dig the outline, the biographer does more to didder the imagination than all poet or novelist relegate up the very greatest. For hardly a(prenominal) poets and novelists are capable of that high degree of tension which gives us reality. But approximately any biographer, if he respects facts, can give us much more than another fact to add to our collection. He can give us the creative fact; the fat fact; the fact that suggests and engenders. Of this, too, there is authoritative proof. For how often, when a record is read and tossed aside, some scene rest bright, some manakin lives on in the depths of the mind, and causes us, when we read a poem or a novel, to determine a scrawl of recognition, as if we remembered some thing that we had cognize before.