Matthew Arnoldマシュー・アーノルド / 1822-88

イングランドの詩人、文学・社会批評家。名門パブリックスクールであるラグビー校とウィンチェスター校からオックスフォード大学に学ぶ。1851年以降、視学官としてイングランドおよびヨーロッパ大陸諸国を広く視察して回ったが、その間に、教 育事情のみならず、様々な社会問題を観察し、その成果が有名な Culture and Anarchy (1869) の誕生となった。アーノルドは、ヴィクトリア朝社会の偏狭性、俗物性 (‘philistinism’)、派閥主義、功利主義的物質主義などを鋭く批判して、時代を代表する批評家となった。

 

ドイツの古典学者Friedrich August Wolf (1759-1824) がProlegomena ad Homerum (1795) で、ホーマーの作品は口承によって語り継がれたそれぞれ独立した短いバラッドを後にまとめたものであると唱えて以来、バラッド形式によるホーマー訳を試みる者が続出した。代表的なものは William Maginn (1793-1842) が1830年に自らその創設に参加した The Fraser’s Magazine に発表した “Homeric Ballads” であり、また、ロンドン大学のラテン語教授 F. W. Newman が Wolf の見解を踏襲した翻訳 The Iliad of Homer を 1856年に出版した。57年にオックスフォード大学詩学教授に就任したアーノルドが “On Translating Homer” の題で行った連続講義 (1860年11月3日、12月8日、61年1月26日) は、ホーマー訳をバラッド形式で行おうとする時代の雰囲気に対 して、古典主義の立場に立つアーノルドがその面目にかけて対決した感がある。次の引用は、バラッドに対する彼の基本的な視点をよく表している。

 

Poets receive their distinctive character, not from their subject, but from their application to that subject of the ideas (to quote the Excursion)

 

On God, on Nature, and on human life,

 

which they have acquired for themselves. In the ballad-poets in general, as in men of a rude and early stage of the world, in whom their humanity is not yet variously and fully developed, the stock of these ideas is scanty, and the ideas themselves not very effective or profound. [For] them the narrative itself is the great matter, not the spirit and significance which underlies the narrative. Even in later times of richly developed life and thought, poets appear who have what may be called a balladist’s mind; in whom a fresh and lively curiosity for the outward spectacle of the world is much more strong than their sense of the inward significance of that spectacle. [“On Translating Homer”, On the Classical Tradition (The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold 1), ed. R. H. Super (U of Michigan P, 1960) 210]

 

61年11月30日に行われた第4回目の講義は、ニューマンの反論 “Homeric Translation in Theory and Practice: A Reply to Matthew Arnold” (61年6月8日) に対するアーノルドの再反論であるが、そこでは彼は伝承バラッド “Sir Patrick Spens” から最後の二つのスタンザを引用し、”When there comes in poetry what I may call the lyrical cry, this transfigures everything, makes everything grand; the simplest form may be here even an advantage, because the flame of the emotion glows through and through it more easily.” (“On Translating Homer”, On the Classical Tradition 209) と述べている。「抒情的悲しみ」にあふれた彼のバラッド詩 “The Forsaken Merman” は、1849年に匿名で出版された最初の詩集 The Strayed Reveller and Other Poems に収められている。 (M. Y.)

English poet, and literary and cultural critic. He was educated at Rugby, Winchester, and Oxford. As an inspector of schools from 1851, he travelled extensively throughout England and the Continent, observing not only the educational problems but also the social and cultural conditions, out of which was born his famous Culture and Anarchy in 1869. In this book and other places Arnold sharply criticized the provincialism, philistinism, sectarianism, and utilitarian materialism of the Victorian society.

 

From the time Friedrich August Wolf (1759-1824) maintained in Prolegomena ad Homerum (1795) that Homer’s works originally consisted of independent ballads in the form of short narratives, there appeared in succession translations of Homer in ballad form. The most representative was William Maginn’s “Homeric Ballads” published in The Fraser’s Magazine, founded in 1830 by himself and Hugh Fraser. F. W. Newman published The Iliad of Homer as a balladic translation in 1856. Arnold, as Oxford Professor of Poetry from 1857, attacked Newman and others in a series of lectures (3 November, 8 December 1860, and 26 January 1861), entitled “On Translating Homer”. The quotation below shows his basic stance on poetry and balladry:

 

Poets receive their distinctive character, not from their subject, but from their application to that subject of the ideas (to quote the Excursion)

 

On God, on Nature, and on human life,

 

which they have acquired for themselves. In the ballad-poets in general, as in men of a rude and early stage of the world, in whom their humanity is not yet variously and fully developed, the stock of these ideas is scanty, and the ideas themselves not very effective or profound. [For] them the narrative itself is the great matter, not the spirit and significance which underlies the narrative. Even in later times of richly developed life and thought, poets appear who have what may be called a balladist’s mind; in whom a fresh and lively curiosity for the outward spectacle of the world is much more strong than their sense of the inward significance of that spectacle. [“On Translating Homer”, On the Classical Tradition, The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold 1, ed. R. H. Super (U of Michigan P, 1960) 210]

 

In his fourth lecture at Oxford on 30 November 1861, which was Arnold’s reply to Newman’s counterargument in Homeric Translation in Theory and Practice: A Reply to Matthew Arnold on 8 June 1861, Arnold quotes the last two stanzas from “Sir Patrick Spens” and states that ‘When there comes in poetry what I may call the lyrical cry, this transfigures everything, makes everything grand; the simplest form may be here even an advantage, because the flame of the emotion glows through and through it more easily.’ (“On Translating Homer”, On the Classical Tradition 209) Arnold published his first collection of poems The Strayed Reveller and Other Poems anonymously in 1849, in which is found one of his literary ballads, “The Forsaken Merman”. This is the story of a merman betrayed by a mortal woman, corresponding to the Danish ballad “Agnes and the Merman”. Except for 23 lines in the middle, the entire 143 lines consist of the merman’s monologue to his forsaken children. It is occupied with self-reflecting emotions, which may support Arnold’s conception of a ‘lyrical cry’ but loses the narrative impetus and momentum of the traditional ballad.  (M. Y.)

原詩(PDF)

  • 1. The Forsaken Merman
  • 2. St. Brandan

訳詩(PDF)

  • 1. 捨てられた男人魚
  • 2. 聖ブレンダン

論文(PDF)

  • 山中光義「アーノルドとバラッドをめぐって」

原詩出典

 The Poems of Matthew Arnold 1849-1867. Ed. with an Introduction by A. T. Quiller-Couch and Notes by G. St. Quintin. Oxford UP, 1926.