6TH AUGUST 1925
Wrote Dayspring in present tense because all is now.
Not concerned, as were former writers of fiction, to present a picture of objective life, but to get at the subjective underground of it. It is a process of exploration, rather than of presentation. We explore continents, why not individuals, and why not into the unknown quarters of mind. The geography of the soul more important than the geography of the earth.
Must be fluid, because all is passing. We do not want to create complete, superb works. We realize that all work is but a step to something other. We expect greater men to come after.
But language itself, too, must be fluid, for we are trying to create a new language to apprehend the inner life, which previously has been metaphorical, and may have to be metaphorical still, but new metaphors familiar to a scientifically minded public.
The word “the” is not important. We do not want to point at things, we are trying to get inside the thing-in-itself. The word “was” is not important in a sentence. Nothing was. Everything is. But apart from that verbs are not important unless they add something to the picture or the interpretation. Everything is active, so why add verbs to say so. Use only those verbs which describe the action taking place.
I haven’t carried the new style either in arrangement or in the coinage of words as far as I hope to carry it, not because I am afraid to do so—although perhaps it is better to let the public walk before it runs—but because I am myself learning to walk. I am trying to break away from the old style, and it won’t come right by mere arbitrary conventions established, it must come naturally and spontaneously from the practice of working in a different way at a different aim.
So far my aims are not always in the forefront of my mind. I relapse into old ways of thinking and feeling, and hence use the old idiom. But when I am accustomed to feeling in the new way—unsolidified—the new idiom will develop.
See Virginia Woolf on American Fiction, in Saturday Review.
It will begin formless, because our knowledge of the interior world is formless, but it will develop into sharper lines and surer phraseology as we progress in apprehension of the spirit.
“His opinion,” says Blake, “who does not see spiritual agency is not worth any man’s reading.”
Again, in The Descriptive Catalogue, Blake says—“The great and golden rule of art, as well as of life, is this: That the more distinct, sharp, and wiry the bounding line, the more perfect the work of art; and the less keen and sharp, the greater is the evidence of weak imitation, plagiarism, and bungling. Great inventors, in all ages, knew this: Protegenes and Apelles knew each other by this line. Raphael and Michael Angelo, and Albert Durer, are known by this and this alone. The want of this determinate and bounding form evidences the idea of want in the artist’s mind, and the pretence of the plagiary in all its branches … Leave out this line and you leave out life itself; all is chaos again, and the line of the Almighty must be drawn out upon it before man or beast can exist.”
We are going back to the father (prodigal son) and we must relearn the immaterial language we once spoke. It is not less hard or definite or inevitable than the language we speak now. It is more of these things; but to find it we must begin formlessly and let it come in of itself. We must not employ ancient imagery and symbols. We must try to get away from symbols of the old order and create new ones of the new order. We must exhaust all symbols and arrive at the heart of the thing itself.