RICHARDSONの小説理論 : その背景と意義

抄録

Not so learned and educated as Fielding, Samuel Richardson seemed to dislike giving a systematic opinion or theory on his novels. Even so, he had much to say about his own writings in his correspondence with his friends as well as in his prefaces and postscripts to his novels. These scattered opinons, if collected together, are remarkably characteristic of his ideas on the art. The present paper is an attempt to investigate what Richardson conceived on his novels in reference to their backgrounds and significance. The most important document on his theory of fiction is the postscript to Clarissa, in which Richardson, first of all, defended himself against those who insist that he should have written a happy ending to the story. Behind this defense, however, lies "the Christian Doctrine," by which the author consistently shows the importance of death as a universal lot of human beings. Richardson's correspondence with Edward Young shows how he warned Young in his composition of Conjectures against the excess of the theory on genius or originality for the Christian dispensation. We can also see this old and traditional Puritanism when Richardson showed his strong antipathy to the school of Shaftesbury, and again when he became sceptical about the optimism of David Hartley. Underlying these opinions, we can perceive Richardson's persistent Puritanism. His opposition to the contemporary novels and romances was based mainly upon the puritan sense of reality. For him, "novels" were generally too "low" and "pernicious" without any serious purpose, while "romances" were usually unrealistic and "marvellous" without any specific concern with everyday reality. His objection to epic had also the same basis; he was against the improbability as well as the immorality of epic poetry. Thus, the literary genre upon which Richardson would establish his theory of fiction naturally became the drama. It was partly because of the epistolary method of his novels that Richardson came to depend upon the theory of the drama. He insisted on the dramatic representation and the dramatic unity in his novels, which he once called "my Drama." The lively technique of "writing to the moment", of which he was justly proud, and which made his descriptions "minute and circumstantial," was one of the natural sequences of the dramatic representation. Needless to say, it is a new psychological method of the later eighteenth century. The combination, however, of this new psychological method of "writing to the moment" with the old traditional idea of Puritanism, is in itself a very curious and incompatible one, a combination of the old idea and the new expression. Thus, something very unexpected and curious happened when Richardson's intention for minute and circumstantial descriptions became more intensive and successful. For, the more circumstantial his descriptions were, the more improbable his novels became as epistolary correspondence, till they lost dramatic unity and became digressive. Richardson's puritan opposition to romances also became very ambiguous and complex when he not only applied the theory of the drama to that of his novels, but also practised in his novels various dramatic devices of his contemporary plays. For there were lots of devices peculiar to romances which through the drama came into Richardson's novels. As a result, we find some mutually incompatible elements jumbled together even in his theory of fiction. The so-called "Richardson's divided mind", which recent critics pointed out in his novels, may be explained psychologically from his frame of mind or sociologically from the class conflicts. But if we consider the above-mentioned incompatible elements in his theory, we would conclude that there may be some connection between say his descriptions

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