坪内逍遥とディケンズ

―写実と滑稽に関連して―

抄録

　Shoyo Tsubouchi retrospects in the reminiscence of his unfinished novel Kokoya Kashiko (Here and There) that he was so enthusiastic with Dickens as to be tempted to write a novel after the fashion of Nicholas Nickleby, one of Dickens’ early works. His Kaioku Mandan (Reminiscent Talk) also makes an evidence that Dickens was among those novelists Shoyo greatly indebted to in the making of Shosetsu Shinzui (The Essence of the Novel), the first book of the theory of realism in Japan. Naturally Shoyo made much use of Dickens in this epoch-making literary achievement. Dickens was an example to him in the usage of slang or vulgar tongue. And he was also a great humorist.

　Shoyo rejects the conventional Japanese comedies on the strength of Pickwick Papers, which, he maintains, does not resort to obscenity as Hiza- kurige, for instance, frequently does. And in the device of humor in his novel Tosei Shosei Katagi (The Students of Our Time), there recur the reflections of Dickens.

　Shoyo resorts again to Dickens in the defense against the criticism that attacked his vulgarity. Here Shoyo refers to Oliver Twist in which Dickens depicted the stern reality of the underworld of thieves. It is wrong of the critic to see any vulgarity in reality.

　But Shoyo’s realism was not such a kind that allows a literary anarchy. Those are, he says, not true novels, what cannot be read aloud by parents to their children. Here is a prudence similar to that of Victorian age. And Shoyo would rather trust in the reader’s imagination than offend by indecency, just as Dickens who endeavored in Oliver Twist “to lead to the unavoidable inference” of the existence of the most debased underworld, than “to prove it elaborately by words and deeds” of the lowest character.