George Eliotの田園小説 : 主として'life'と'pattern'の側面からみた場合

Abstract

Mr Arnold Kettle, in his "An Introduction to the English Novel", attempts to examine and analyse some of the famous English novels from the viewpoint of two phases, 'life' and 'pattern', in all novels. According to his opinion, there are in all novels which are successful works of art two elements 'life' and 'pattern'. These are not emphatically separate and yet to some extent separable. 'Life' is the characteristic in novels which gives vividness and vitality to works of art, and is concerned with 'the texture of life' produced by a human interest of an author. On the other hand, 'pattern' is what the novel contains in which the writer seems to have started with his 'moral discovery' prior to the conception of the book. And it can bestow wholeness and significance on the novel. In this kind of novel, which may be described as a 'moral fable', it is fair to say that the various elements of the novel, character and plot in particular, are continuously subordinated to and in a special sense derived from the pattern. In case one of the novels written by Geoege Eliot, Middlemarch, is examined by Mr Arnold Kettle upon this opinion, it is concluded that the novel has little of the moral fable about it for all the deep moral preoccupation and that Georoge Eliot's method in Middlemarch is to present most concretely a particular situation and then draw to our attention the moral issues involved. In this essay my attempt is to analyse and criticise some of George Eliot's earliler works, which are generally called 'Rural Novels', from the point of two aspects in novels that are described by Mr Arnold kettle as 'life' and 'pattern'. But actually the works I have chiefly treated here are her first book, Scenes of Clerical Life, and Silas Marner generally called the last one of her rural novels. Now, in Scenes of Clerical Life, George Eliot first of all devoted herself to the method of reminiscence, rejected fantastic, capricious materials and took in the matters that were in the sphere of her own experience. And moreover she found these materials not in ideal or exceptional characters but in very commonplace people. Though she treated those materials as realistically as possible, it was her first great concern that her fiction should enable readers to share a profounder realization of the feeling and the plight of common humanity. As far as Scenes of Glerical Life stays on the stage of an experimental book, it may be called a quite humble and moderate piece of work. Therefore, in case we consider this novel from the point of 'life' and 'pattern', it is fair to say that Scencs of Clerical Life, on the whole, may be regarded as the work which has rather more 'life' than 'pattern'. It is of the kind of novel that has more vitality than significance or than wisdom. In The Sad Fortunes of the Rev Amos Barton it is the novelist's sense of humour that supports this element, namely, vitality. The effect of vividness, however, is sometimes weakened in this book, by the consciously emphasized pathos manifested, for instance, in the scene of Milly's death bed of the first story, and by the sensational, melodramatic elements brought in Mr Gilfil's Love-story. Indeed, the third story, Janet's Repentance, may be said to contain a certain 'pattern', that is to say, a pattern that Janet is to be gradually awakened from degenerate life to dignified one. But in this case it is impossible to say that the environmental material which surrounds the heroine is pursued by the writer with so much width and depth as in The Mill on the Floss. Accordingly Janet's Repen-lance seems to be a work that is rather wanting in vividness and intensity. Next, in Silas Marner George Eliot starts with her pattern, her moral vision that is her moral truth convinced by herself. And it is, here, her convinced moral truth that even an isolated soul can realize the good will of others, or that people are all able to believe firmly the possibility of existence of final goodness. It i