日本英文学会第 80 回大会

研究発表資料2008 年 5 月 25 日（日）於：広島大学東広島キャンパス

Wilkie Collins の Basil における ‘sensation’ の扱いをめぐって―

1850 年代における「センセーション小説」の萌芽―

関西外国語大学

専任講師

橋野 朋子

１． Basil における ‘sensation’ と ‘thought’ の対比
1-1

The impression left by it [the sight of Margaret] made me insensible for the time to all
boding reflections, careless of exercising the smallest self-restraint. I gave myself up
to the charm that was at work on me. Prudence, duty, memories and prejudices ofhome, were all absorbed and forgotten in love - love that I encouraged, that I dweltover in the first reckless luxury of a new sensation. (emphasis added. )[Wilkie Collins, Basil (1852. Oxford: Oxford U. P. , World’s Classics, 1990) 38]

1-2

human consciousness

thought
sensations[“Psychological Inquiries” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (Apr. 1855)]

mental phenomena
sensibility(the phenomena of feeling, sensationor passive susceptibility)

activity(the phenomena of volition, effort oractive impulse, prompted by feeling)higher / finer / humanemotionlower / ruder / animal

sensation

intellect(the phenomena of thought, cognition
or intelligence)[“Bain on The Senses and the Intellect”
Fraser’s Magazine (Feb. 1856)]

OED での ‘sensation’ の定義 : the operation or function of the senses /a physical ‘feeling’ considered apart from the resulting ‘perception’ of an object

1-3. . . how the sense of that touch was prolonged! I felt it thrilling through me –thrilling in every nerve, in every pulsation of my fast-throbbing heart.
(emphasis added. ) [Basil 29]

1-4. . . the senses are dependent upon the attention the mind may bestow. The soulcaninsulate itself, as it were; or, locking up all the doors of its adytum, can exclude theimpressions which solicit admission.
[“The Philosophy of the Senses” The British Quarterly Review (Apr. 1854) 433-434]

1-5

Stirring ideas; store of knowledge patiently heaped up; visions of better sights than
this world can show, falling freshly and sunnily over the pages of my first book; allthese were past and gone - withered up by the hot breath of the senses - doomed by apaltry fate, whose germ was the accident of an idle day! (emphasis added. )[Basil 41]
Deteriorating as my passion was in its effect on the exercise of my mental powers, andon my candour and sense of duty in my intercourse with home, it was a pure feelingtowards her. (emphasis added. ) [Basil 43]

1-6

1-7

Her lovely lustrous black eye seemed to flash into mine through the glass; her warm,
quick breathing played on my cheek – it was but for an instant, and in that instant I
kissed her for the first time. What sensations the kiss gave me then!
(emphasis added.) [Basil 99]

1-8

Directing my characters and my story. . . towards the light of Reality wherever I could
find it, I have not hesitated to violate some of the conventionalities of sentimental
fiction. [Basil xxxvi]

２． Basil が妻の「不貞」を聞き知る章に関して
2-1

I could neither move nor breathe. The blood surged and heaved upward to my brain;
my heart strained and writhed in anguish; the life within me raged and tore to getfree. Whole years of the direst mental and bodily agony were concentrated in that
one moment of helpless, motionless torment. I never lost the consciousness ofsuffering. . . and knew when the paroxysm passed, and nothing remained of it, but ashivering helplessness in every limb.
Erelong, the power of thinking began to return to me by degree.
(emphasis added.) [Basil 161]

2-2

ONE THOUGHT slowly arose. . . and cast down before it every obstacle of conscience,
every principle of education, every care for the future, every remembrance of the past,
every weakening influence of present misery, every repressing tie of family and home,every anxiety for good fame in this life, and every idea of the next that was to come.
Before the fell poison of that Thought, all other thoughts - good or evil - died. As it
spoke secretly within me, I felt my bodily strength coming back; a quick vigour leaped
hotly through my frame. [Basil 161]

2-3

One long pang of shame and despair shot through my heart as I looked at her, andtortured out of its trance the spirit within me. Thousands on thousands of thoughts
seemed to be whirling in the wildest confusion through and through my brain thought, whose track was a track of fire - thoughts that struck me with a hellish
torment of dumbness, at the very time when I would have purchased with my life thepower of a moment’s speech. (emphasis added.) [Basil 165]

2-4

I hid my face in my hands, and tried to assure myself that I was still in possession ofmy senses. I strove hard to separate my thoughts; to distinguish between myrecollections; to extricate from the confusion within me any one idea, no matter what and I could not do it. In that awful struggle for the mastery over my own mind, allthat had passed, all the horror of that horrible night, became as nothing to me. I
raised myself, and looked up again, and tried to steady my reason by the simplest
means. . . The darkness bewildered me. . . A blaze of lurid sunshine flashed before myeyes; a hell-blaze of brightness, with fiends by millions, raining down out of it on myhead; then a rayless darkness - the darkness of the blind - then God’s mercy at last the mercy of utter oblivion. (emphasis added.) [Basil 167]

2-5

My first sensation. . . was of a terrible heat. . . After this, came a quick, restless,unintermittent toiling of obscure thought. . .Soon these thoughts began to take a form
that I could recognise. (emphasis added.) [Basil 169]

３．

同時代小説の流れにおける Basil の特異性

3-1

I’m sick to death of novels with an earnest purpose. I’m sick to death of outbursts ofeloquence, and large-minded philanthropy, and graphic descriptions, and unsparing
anatomy of the human heart, and all that sort of thing. . . Good Gracious me! isn’t it
the original intention or purpose of fiction, to set out distinctly by telling a story?
And how many of these books, I should like to know, do that? Why, so far as telling astory is concerned, the greater part of them might as well be sermons as novels. . .
what I want is something that seizes hold of my interest. . . something that keeps me
reading, reading, in a breathless state to find out the end.
[Wilkie Collins, The Queen of Hearts (1859 Doylestown: Wildside Press) 43]

3-2

We must shuffle off the traditional descriptions, the sleepy dialogue, the bits ofscenery which have nothing to do with the action. . . We must go straight to the vitalinterest, and keep to it to the end.
[“The Art of Story-Telling” Fraser’s Magazine 53 (Jun. 1856) 732]

3-3

Whatever men are congregated together, there are human passions, hopes, desires.
The inner life is much the same everywhere. It is the external life, modified by social,moral, and physical circumstances, that presents the most material differences. Thestory in which the former is taken as the basis of the interest, and the latter as thevehicle, must make itself felt it be true to its design. English story-tellers haveseldom grasped both. [“The Art of Story-Telling” 730]

４． 出版当時の Basil に対する評価
4-1

There is a startling antagonism between the intensity of the passion, the violent
spasmodic action of the piece, and its smooth, common-place environments. The
scenery, the dramatic personae, the costumery, are all of the familiar, every-day type,belonging to an advanced stage of civilization; but there is something rude andbarbarous, almost Titanic, about the incidents; they belong to a different state ofsociety.
(emphasis added.) [“Esmond and Basil” Bentley’s Miscellany (Dec. 1852) 586]4-2(a) Fertile and comprehensive as is the domain of imaginative art, . . . it is not too muchto expect that [man’s] vices, in the lowest abyss of their degradation, should not be
selected as the subject of fiction. (emphasis added.)[“A Trio of Novels” Dublin University Magazine (Jan. 1853), in Norman Page [ed.] Wilkie
Collins: the Critical Heritage (London: Routledge, 1974) 51]
4-2(b) Mr. Collins, on the contrary, makes a woman given up to evil the heroine of his piece,and dwells on the details of animal appetite with a persistency which can serve nomoral purpose, and may minister to evil passions even while professing condemnationof them.
[“The Progress of Fiction as an Art” The Westminster Review (Oct. 1853) 373]
4-2(c) There are some subjects on which it is not possible to dwell without offence; and Mr.
Collins having first chosen one which could neither please nor elevate, has rather
increased the displeasure it exercise, by his resolution to spare us no revolting details.
[“The Progress of Fiction as an Art” 372-373]

５． まとめ ― 先駆的な「センセーション小説」としての Basil
5-1

Lingering over the delineation of character and of manners, our novelists began tolose sight of the story and to avoid action. . . . As modern stories are intended not to set
people to sleep, but to keep them awake, instead of the narrative breaking down into asoporific dulness, it was necessary that it should rise at the close into startlingincident. (emphasis added.)[E. S. Dallas, “Great Epectations” The Times (17 Oct. 1861)]

5-2. . . not because we are less intellectual, but because it is a necessity of our existence. . .
we should fly thought, and cultivate sensation. (emphasis added.)[E. S. Dallas, “Popular Literature - the Periodical Press” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine(Jan. 1859) 111]

5-3

The “sensation” which it is the design of Mr Wilkie Collins to raise in our monotonous
bosom, is - horror.
[Margaret Oliphant, “Modern Novelists - Great and Small” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine(May 1855) 566]
≪参考≫
The Woman in White における ‘sensation’ の扱いについて「The Woman in White における ‘sensation’ とは」(ヴィクトリア朝文化研究第５号 2007 年 11 月)