Towards the end of his life Sōseki Natsume reflects on his earliest days in his essays and ‘Michikusa’. His recollections remind us of a landscape seen through the wrong end of a telescope, which, though withdrawn to a great distance, is curiously bright and clear. From these recollections of his we know that as a child Sōseki was given in adoption twice, first to a street junk seller, secondly to a minor office clerk. There is something pathetic about his early life. As the late L. Auer said, there must be something buried in the soul by poverty (poverty used to be a very ‘pathetic’ status of life), something mystical, something beautiful, something that developed feeling, force, sympathy and tenderness. We find that this remark which was originally applied to musical genius is very true of Sōseki.

　During his lonely and pathetic childhood and boyhood Sōseki cultivated a special sense of ‘human existence’ (called ‘karma relation’ in Buddhist terminology) and a habit of being absorbed in the type of old Chinese and Japanese landscape pictures (usually with poems attached to them) called ‘Nan'ga’. It seems that he really understood ‘karma’ and the world of Nan’ga. According to August Graf von Platen :

　Wer die Schönheit angeschaut mit Augen,　

　Ist dem Tode schon anheimgegeben,

　Wird zu keinem Dienst der Erde taugen.

　Sōseki, as a child, had seen the beauty of the world of Nan’ga, and he became a man who was useless in worldly affairs. At first sight Sōseki may seem to have been a successful man, but how spiritually unfit he was for this world can be traced in his Chinese poems which he kept on composing from his boyhood to the end of his life excepting only a very meaningful ten-year interruption.

　Sōseki began his life with an ardent wish to stay in the world of Nan'ga, the beauty of which he had seen as a child, that is, a world beyond evolution and struggle for survival, where one can safely be incompetent and useless. But the age in which Sōseki happened to grow up, the Era of Meiji, was that of the most radical and rapid transition from Old Japan to New Japan. Herbert Spencer’s philosophy of evolution was generally accepted by Japanese intellectuals and was taught him by his eldest brother. Since English seemed to symbolize the foreign force which had been breaking down the equilibrium of Old Japan, Sōseki, as a schoolboy, hated English lessons just as morbidly as Lafcadio Hearn condemned Christian missions to Japan and for exactly the same reason. Sōseki’s erudition in the field of Chinese classics was already so remarkable that it astounds first-class scholars of the same speciality today.

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　Dr. Arthur Waley was born in London in 1889 and died on June 27th, 1966 at his house in Highgate, after injury by a motor-car accident. He was not only representative of British Japanology and Chinology, but the most widely- known Orientalist in the world. Without Waley’s workings, the classics, especially classical poetry, of Japan and China would not have been recognized as such an important part of the heritage in the Occidental world.

　‘Greatness in men is a rare but unmistakable quality,’ Professor D. Hawkes says, in his Obituary on Dr. A. Waley, from Oxford: ‘In our small profession it is unlikely we shall see a man of such magnitude as he again.’

　In our country, although he is so famous in the professional sphere, few people know what kind of life he led, why he entered the field of Japanology, and how grand his works are. I would like to write on these points as an introduction to his achievements and in the field of Japanese Classical Literature, such as the translation of The Tale of Genji and other masterpieces. The main points I commented on in the present paper are :

　(1) The Department of Oriental Antiquities, and Prints and Drawings in the British Museum, where he worked and studied Chinese and Japanese languages.

　(2) Bloomsbury where he lived, after living in Cambridge, as a member of the Bloomsbury Group.

　(3) Uta and Nō play he translated and published as his first achievement.

　(4) The translation of The Tale of Genji, his monumental work, published in 1926.

　(5) Virginia Woolf’s encouraging criticism about the first volume of The Tale of Genji.

　(6) His farewell to the Japanese Literature during and after World Wax II. In writing this paper I am indebted to A Preliminary List of the Published Writings of Dr. Arthur Waley, compiled by Mr. F. A Johns of Rutgers University, on the occasion of his seventieth birthday in Asia Major in 1959.

　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.

　Heine schreibt mit Stolz in seinem späten Werk „Geständnisse“ (1854), er habe in Paris von einem gewissen Dr. Bürger, der dreißig Jahre in Nagasaki verbracht haben wollte, gehört, daß dieser einen jungen Japaner Deutsch gelehrt und später Heines Gedichte in japanischer Übersetzung habe drucken lassen. Diese Gedichte in Übersetzung werden neuerdings „Phantastisches Gedichtbuch Heines“ genannt, und die Frage ihrer Authentität als erste deutsche Gedichte in japanischer Übersetzung kommt in der akademischen Welt nun gar zu oft zur Diskussion.

　Dieser Dr. Bürger war Apotheker; er folgte der Aufforderung von Siebold und kam 1825 als dessen Assistent nach Japan. Es scheint gewiß, daß er bis 1834 in diesem Land blieb. Es ist wohl bekannt, daß er sich mit Eifer an der Arbeit an Siebolds großem werk „Nippon“ beteiligte. Aber von der großen Leistung Siebolds überschattet bleibt seine Gestalt noch im Dunkel. Noch unklarer ist, wer eigentlich der junge Japaner war, der bei ihm Deutsch lernte, und welche Gedichte Heines in japanischer Übersetzung gedruckt wurden.

　In der vorliegenden Arbeit versuche ich, auf Grund der Zeugnisse von Kazan Watanabe,dem bekannten damaligen Maler, und der ausführlichen Forschung von Jūjiro Koga, einem Heimatsgeschichtsforscher in Nagasaki, als Ansatzpunkt zu dem genannten Problem etwas-wenn vorerst auch noch trübes-Licht auf Bürgers Leben in Japan zu werfen.

　Ich weise im übrigen darauf hin, daß sich in H. Weiffenbachs „Leitfaden zum Unterricht in der deutschen Sprache und Literatur“, 2Bde., 2. verbesserte Aufl., Breda 1853, ein Gedicht und ein Prosatext Heines aufgenommen sind, und daß dieses Werk spätestens 1861 nach Japan eingeführt worden ist. Diese beiden Bände sind die ältesten erhaltenen Literatur denkmäler in Japan, die Werke Heines enthalten.

　La Revue “Chitoku-kai，” fondée, en janvier 1894， à la suite d’une proclamation impériale concernant l’éducation, était au début un périodique non littéraire. Mais, après la guerre russso-japonaise, elle commença à publier des articles sur les littératures étrangères, comme d’autres revues d’alors.

　Les principaux articles sont: “Sur Edmond de Goncourt,” par Gyokumei Ota, “Joseph de Maistre,” par Sangetsu Yamawaki， “Emile Zola” par Syososhi, etc.

　Dans l’article， “Etudes sur la littérature française et Notre Revue 《Chitoku-kai》”, on écrivit que nous devions étudier plus profondément la littérature française pour développer davantage la littérature japonaise.

　En février 1898, le titre de la Revue a été changé; elle s’intitula alors 《Shinobu-Gusa ou Revue des idées françaises》.

　La Revue “Shinobu-Gusa” devint un périodique spécial, qui eut pour but de présenter, au Japon, la littérature française avec la collaboration de deux savants français : Michel Revon et Emile Heck. On y publia beaucoup de traductions et d’articles.