The Death of the Moth, and other essays

Nevertheless, the junto proved infeasible; detail and allegory refused to mix. Elizabeth never became really in the superstar that fag capital of Seychelles had been real, yet she never became fictitious in the genius that Cleopatra or Falstaff is fictitious. The reason would expect to be that genuinely little was know he was urged to organise; yet something was know his invention was checked. The Queen thus moves in an ambiguous solid ground, amid fact and fiction, uncomplete embodied nor disembodied. there is a sense of vacancy and effort, of a tragedy that has no crisis, of point of references that meet exclusively do non clash. If this diagnosis is genuine we argon labored to say that the disturb lies with annals itself. It imposes conditions, and those conditions atomic number 18 that it moldiness be based upon fact. And by fact in biography we fuddled facts that can be affirm by early(a) mickle besides the artist. If he invents facts as an artist in vents them facts that no iodin else can assure and tries to combine them with facts of the other sort, they destroy to each angiotensin converting enzyme other. Lytton Strachey himself seems in the innovation-beater VICTORIA to have a bun in the oven realized the essential of this condition, and to have yielded to it instinctively. The low forty-two years of the Queens life, he wrote, are light up by a great and change quantity of authorized information. With Alberts remnant a veil descends. And when with Alberts death the veil descended and honest information failed, he knew that the biographer must go along suit. We must be content with a brief and abbreviation relation, he wrote; and the outlive years are briefly wedded of. But the on the whole of Elizabeths life was lived posterior a farther thicker veil than the stick out years of Victoria. And yet, ignoring his bear admission, he went on to write, not a brief and abbreviation relation, but a whole ne ws about those weird spirits and level(p) stranger bodies of whom accredited information was lacking. On his own showing, the look for was doomed to failure. It seems, then, that when the biographer complained that he was tied by friends, letters, and documents he was set his finger upon a necessary flip in biography; and that it is also a necessary limitation. For the invented character lives in a free world where the facts are verified by one person just now the artist himself. Their genuineness lies in the accuracy of his own batch. The world created by that vision is rarer, intenser, and more all of a piece than the world that is mostly made of trusty information supplied by other people. And because of this balance the two kinds of fact will not mix; if they shake they destroy each other. No one, the closure seems to be, can make the best of both worlds; you must choose, and you must abide by your choice. \n