Mr. Forster, it seems, has a strong impulse to belong to both camps at once. He has many of the instincts and aptitudes of the pure artist (to adopt the old classification) -- an exquisite prose style, an acute sense of comedy, a power of creating characters in a few strokes which live in an atmosphere of their own; but he is at the same time highly conscious of a message. Behind the rainbow of wit and sensibility there is a vision which he is determined that we shall see. But his vision is of a peculiar kind and his message of an elusive nature." This seems to be a hint as to Woolf's own approach. Certainly a work like "The Death of the Moth" exhibits an "exquisite prose style" and even has its own moment of forlorn comedy, perhaps, in its closing line: but behind all of Woolf's observation...
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