ウォルター・ペイターにおける「時」の意識

概要

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The stories of Walter Pater are divided in a broad way into the autobiographical and the historical. The autobiographical stories must have the common theme "time" as the process of growth and the historical ones have to be concerned with "time" as history itself. Curious to say, however, Pater seems to try to eliminate "time" from these stories. In "The Child in the House", Pater recollects the old house in which he "had passed his earliest years, but which he had never since seen," and yet the passage of "almost thirty years which lay between him and that place" is consciously eliminated. The scene of Marius the Epicurean is laid in Rome of the 2nd Century, and many historical persons enter the stage of various historical events. It is doubtful, however, whether the true aim of Pater is to depict a chronological story. In this novel, too, it seems to me, Pater tries to eliminate the chronological order ; indeed, his interest is rather in the fact that Marius's age and his own have much in common, and he makes, in fact, an excuse and says "let the reader pardon me if here and there I seem to be passing from Marius to his modern representatives-from Rome, to Paris or London." Another aspect of Pater's stories which deserves consideration is his attitude towards diseases. Almost all the heroes are disposed to suffer from diseases : they are in some cases afflicted with real consumptive diseases, and in others, with intellectual maladies. In both cases, diseases are the essential, part of Pater's view of life. And this is apparently symbolized in the fact that Pater starts his career with an essay on "Coleridge" and ends with one on "Pascal". In these essays Pater goes on further to emphasize the positive meanings of their diseases, which had no small effect on their literary works. As for the background of Marius the Epicurean, Pater explains it and says: "That was an age of valetudinarians, in many instances of imaginary ones." Pater traces the bodily and spiritual disease of Marius in this novel, contrasting him with Cornelius who symbolizes healthiness, having" a youthful voice, with a reassuring clearness of note, which completed his [Marius's] cure." Pater eliminates the chronological order in Marius the Epicurean as stated above, and Marius is depicted as a man who has not any growth in his life and who ends it without any hopes in the future. But as for "the marvellous hopefulness of Cornelius," it is gradually proved to be "Christianity" and it is explained as : "his seeming prerogative over the future, that determined, and kept alive, all other sentiment concerning him. A new hope had sprung up in the world of which he, Cornelius, was a depositary,...." We find then the following sentence in Plato and Platonism to be most significant : "Motion discredited, motion gone, all was gone that belonged to an outward and concrete experience, thus securing exclusive validity to the sort of knowledge,..., which corresponds to the 'Pure Being,' that after all is only definable as 'Pure Nothing,' that colourless, formless, impalpable existence to use the words of Plato....' We may recollect that Pater uses this definition of 'Pure Nothing' to describe the distemper of Coleridge. So by substituting the word "time" for "motion," we can read the above quotation as the explanation by Pater of the relation between his elimination of "time" and his favourite theme of "disease." Thus it necessarily follows that such a characteristic of Pater's stories shows clearly his anti-Christian tendency.
財団法人日本英文学会の論文
1967-11-10

ウォルター・ペイターにおける「時」の意識

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概要

財団法人日本英文学会 | 論文

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