THE ART OF BIOGRAPHY. Virginia Woolf
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as who-so-ever hee bee, to whome Fortune hath beene a servant, and the Time a friend: let him but take the accompt of his memory (for wee have no other keeper of our pleasures past) and truelie examine what it hath reserved, either of beauty and youth, or foregone delights; what it hath saved, that it might last, of his dearest affections, or of whatever else the amorous Springtime gave his thoughts of contentment, then unvaluable; and hee shall finde that all the art which his elder yeares have, can draw no other vapour out of these dissolutions, than heavie, secret, and sad sighs…. Onely those few blacke Swans I must except; who having had the grace to value worldly vanities at no more than their owne price; doe, by retayning the comfortable memorie of a well acted life, behold death without dread, and the grave without feare; and embrace both, as necessary guides to endlesse glorie.’
This is no sudden effort of eloquence; it is prefaced and continued by words of almost equal beauty. In its melody and strength, its natural symmetry of form, it is a perfect speech, fit for letters of gold and the echoes of cathedral aisles, or for the tenderness of noble human intercourse. It reaches us almost with the very accent of Raleigh’s voice. There is a magnificence with which such a being relinquishes his hopes in life and dismisses the cares of ‘this ridiculous world’ which is the counterpart of his great zest in living. We hear it in the deeply burdened sigh with which he takes his farewell of his wife. ‘For the rest, when you have travailled and wearied all your thoughts, over all sorts of worldly cogitations, you shall but sitt downe by sorrowe in the end.’ But it is most evident in his thought upon death. The thought of death tolls all through Elizabethan literature lugubriously enough in our ears, for whom, perhaps, existence has been made less palpable by dint of much thinking and death more of a shade than a substance. But to the Elizabethans a great part of the proper conduct of life consisted in meeting the idea of death, which to them was not an idea but a person, with fortitude. And to Raleigh in particular, death was a very definite enemy—death, ‘which doth pursue us and hold us in chace from our infancy’. A true man, he says, despises death. And yet even as he says this there come to life before his eyes the ‘mishapen and ouglye shapes’ with which death tortures the imagination. And at last, when he has taken the idea of death to him and triumphed over it, there rises from his lips that magnificent strain of reconciliation and acknowledgment which sounds for ever in the ears of those who have heard it once: ‘O eloquent, just and mightie Death! whom none could advise, thou hast perswaded: what none hath dared, thou hast done. ‘
[Times Literary Supplement, Mar 15, 1917]
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