Jude the Obscure

Chapter 1

"Save his own soul he hath no star."--SWINBURNE.

"Notitiam primosque gradus vicinia fecit;

Tempore crevit amor."--OVID.

I

The next noteworthy move in Jude's life was that in which he appeared

gliding steadily onward through a dusky landscape of some three

years' later leafage than had graced his courtship of Arabella,

and the disruption of his coarse conjugal life with her. He was

walking towards Christminster City, at a point a mile or two to the

south-west of it.

He had at last found himself clear of Marygreen and Alfredston: he

was out of his apprenticeship, and with his tools at his back seemed

to be in the way of making a new start--the start to which, barring

the interruption involved in his intimacy and married experience with

Arabella, he had been looking forward for about ten years.

Jude would now have been described as a young man with a forcible,

meditative, and earnest rather than handsome cast of countenance.

He was of dark complexion, with dark harmonizing eyes, and he wore

a closely trimmed black beard of more advanced growth than is usual

at his age; this, with his great mass of black curly hair, was some

trouble to him in combing and washing out the stone-dust that settled

on it in the pursuit of his trade. His capabilities in the latter,

having been acquired in the country, were of an all-round sort,

including monumental stone-cutting, gothic free-stone work for the

restoration of churches, and carving of a general kind. In London

he would probably have become specialized and have made himself a

"moulding mason," a "foliage sculptor"--perhaps a "statuary."

He had that afternoon driven in a cart from Alfredston to the village

nearest the city in this direction, and was now walking the remaining

four miles rather from choice than from necessity, having always

fancied himself arriving thus.

The ultimate impulse to come had had a curious origin--one more

nearly related to the emotional side of him than to the intellectual,

as is often the case with young men. One day while in lodgings at

Alfredston he had gone to Marygreen to see his old aunt, and had

observed between the brass candlesticks on her mantlepiece the

photograph of a pretty girlish face, in a broad hat with radiating

folds under the brim like the rays of a halo. He had asked who she

was. His grand-aunt had gruffly replied that she was his cousin

Sue Bridehead, of the inimical branch of the family; and on further

questioning the old woman had replied that the girl lived in

Christminster, though she did not know where, or what she was doing.

His aunt would not give him the photograph. But it haunted him; and

ultimately formed a quickening ingredient in his latent intent of

following his friend the school master thither.

He now paused at the top of a crooked and gentle declivity,

and obtained his first near view of the city. Grey-stoned and

dun-roofed, it stood within hail of the Wessex border, and almost

with the tip of one small toe within it, at the northernmost point of

the crinkled line along which the leisurely Thames strokes the fields

of that ancient kingdom. The buildings now lay quiet in the sunset,

a vane here and there on their many spires and domes giving sparkle

to a picture of sober secondary and tertiary hues.

Reaching the bottom he moved along the level way between pollard

willows growing indistinct in the twilight, and soon confronted the

outmost lamps of the town--some of those lamps which had sent into

the sky the gleam and glory that caught his strained gaze in his days

of dreaming, so many years ago. They winked their yellow eyes at him

dubiously, and as if, though they had been awaiting him all these

years in disappointment at his tarrying, they did not much want him

now.

He was a species of d**k Whittington whose spirit was touched to

finer issues than a mere material gain. He went along the outlying

streets with the cautious tread of an explorer. He saw nothing of

the real city in the suburbs on this side. His first want being a

lodging he scrutinized carefully such localities as seemed to offer

on inexpensive terms the modest type of accommodation he demanded;

and after inquiry took a room in a suburb nicknamed "Beersheba,"

though he did not know this at the time. Here he installed himself,

and having had some tea sallied forth.

It was a windy, whispering, moonless night. To guide himself he

opened under a lamp a map he had brought. The breeze ruffled and

fluttered it, but he could see enough to decide on the direction he

should take to reach the heart of the place.

After many turnings he came up to the first ancient medi val pile

that he had encountered. It was a college, as he could see by the

gateway. He entered it, walked round, and penetrated to dark corners

which no lamplight reached. Close to this college was another; and

a little further on another; and then he began to be encircled as it

were with the breath and sentiment of the venerable city. When he

passed objects out of harmony with its general expression he allowed

his eyes to slip over them as if he did not see them.

A bell began clanging, and he listened till a hundred-and-one strokes

had sounded. He must have made a mistake, he thought: it was meant

for a hundred.

When the gates were shut, and he could no longer get into the

quadrangles, he rambled under the walls and doorways, feeling with

his fingers the contours of their mouldings and carving. The minutes

passed, fewer and fewer people were visible, and still he serpentined

among the shadows, for had he not imagined these scenes through

ten bygone years, and what mattered a night's rest for once? High

against the black sky the flash of a lamp would show crocketed

pinnacles and indented battlements. Down obscure alleys, apparently

never trodden now by the foot of man, and whose very existence seemed

to be forgotten, there would jut into the path porticoes, oriels,

doorways of enriched and florid middle-age design, their extinct air

being accentuated by the rottenness of the stones. It seemed

impossible that modern thought could house itself in such decrepit

and superseded chambers.

Knowing not a human being here, Jude began to be impressed with

the isolation of his own personality, as with a self-spectre, the

sensation being that of one who walked but could not make himself

seen or heard. He drew his breath pensively, and, seeming thus

almost his own ghost, gave his thoughts to the other ghostly

presences with which the nooks were haunted.

During the interval of preparation for this venture, since his wife

and furniture's uncompromising disappearance into space, he had read

and learnt almost all that could be read and learnt by one in his

position, of the worthies who had spent their youth within these

reverend walls, and whose souls had haunted them in their maturer

age. Some of them, by the accidents of his reading, loomed out in

his fancy disproportionately large by comparison with the rest. The

brushings of the wind against the angles, buttresses, and door-jambs

were as the passing of these only other inhabitants, the tappings

of each ivy leaf on its neighbour were as the mutterings of their

mournful souls, the shadows as their thin shapes in nervous movement,

making him comrades in his solitude. In the gloom it was as if he

ran against them without feeling their bodily frames.

The streets were now deserted, but on account of these things he

could not go in. There were poets abroad, of early date and of late,

from the friend and eulogist of Shakespeare down to him who has

recently passed into silence, and that musical one of the tribe who

is still among us. Speculative philosophers drew along, not always

with wrinkled foreheads and hoary hair as in framed portraits, but

pink-faced, slim, and active as in youth; modern divines sheeted in

their surplices, among whom the most real to Jude Fawley were the

founders of the religious school called Tractarian; the well-known

three, the enthusiast, the poet, and the formularist, the echoes

of whose teachings had influenced him even in his obscure home.

A start of aversion appeared in his fancy to move them at sight of

those other sons of the place, the form in the full-bottomed wig,

statesman, rake, reasoner, and sceptic; the smoothly shaven historian

so ironically civil to Christianity; with others of the same

incredulous temper, who knew each quad as well as the faithful, and

took equal freedom in haunting its cloisters.

He regarded the statesmen in their various types, men of firmer

movement and less dreamy air; the scholar, the speaker, the plodder;

the man whose mind grew with his growth in years, and the man whose

mind contracted with the same.

The scientists and philologists followed on in his mind-sight in

an odd impossible combination, men of meditative faces, strained

foreheads, and weak-eyed as bats with constant research;

then official characters--such men as governor-generals and

lord-lieutenants, in whom he took little interest; chief-justices and

lord chancellors, silent thin-lipped figures of whom he knew barely

the names. A keener regard attached to the prelates, by reason of

his own former hopes. Of them he had an ample band--some men of

heart, others rather men of head; he who apologized for the Church

in Latin; the saintly author of the Evening Hymn; and near them the

great itinerant preacher, hymn-writer, and zealot, shadowed like Jude

by his matrimonial difficulties.

Jude found himself speaking out loud, holding conversations with

them as it were, like an actor in a melodrama who apostrophizes the

audience on the other side of the footlights; till he suddenly ceased

with a start at his absurdity. Perhaps those incoherent words of the

wanderer were heard within the walls by some student or thinker over

his lamp; and he may have raised his head, and wondered what voice it

was, and what it betokened. Jude now perceived that, so far as solid

flesh went, he had the whole aged city to himself with the exception

of a belated townsman here and there, and that he seemed to be

catching a cold.

A voice reached him out of the shade; a real and local voice:

"You've been a-settin' a long time on that plinth-stone, young man.

What med you be up to?"

It came from a policeman who had been observing Jude without the

latter observing him.

Jude went home and to bed, after reading up a little about these men

and their several messages to the world from a book or two that he

had brought with him concerning the sons of the university. As he

drew towards sleep various memorable words of theirs that he had

just been conning seemed spoken by them in muttering utterances;

some audible, some unintelligible to him. One of the spectres (who

afterwards mourned Christminster as "the home of lost causes," though

Jude did not remember this) was now apostrophizing her thus:

"Beautiful city! so venerable, so lovely, so unravaged by the fierce

intellectual life of our century, so serene! ... Her ineffable charm

keeps ever calling us to the true goal of all of us, to the ideal, to

perfection."

Another voice was that of the Corn Law convert, whose phantom he had

just seen in the quadrangle with a great bell. Jude thought his soul

might have been shaping the historic words of his master-speech:

"Sir, I may be wrong, but my impression is that my duty towards a

country threatened with famine requires that that which has been the

ordinary remedy under all similar circumstances should be resorted to

now, namely, that there should be free access to the food of man from

whatever quarter it may come... Deprive me of office to-morrow, you

can never deprive me of the consciousness that I have exercised the

powers committed to me from no corrupt or interested motives, from no

desire to gratify ambition, for no personal gain."

Then the sly author of the immortal Chapter on Christianity: "How

shall we excuse the supine inattention of the Pagan and philosophic

world, to those evidences [miracles] which were presented by

Omnipotence? ... The sages of Greece and Rome turned aside from the

awful spectacle, and appeared unconscious of any alterations in the

moral or physical government of the world."

Then the shade of the poet, the last of the optimists:

How the world is made for each of us!

* * * * *

And each of the Many helps to recruit

The life of the race by a general plan.

Then one of the three enthusiasts he had seen just now, the author of

the _Apologia_:

"My argument was ... that absolute certitude as to the truths of

natural theology was the result of an assemblage of concurring and

converging probabilities ... that probabilities which did not reach

to logical certainty might create a mental certitude."

The second of them, no polemic, murmured quieter things:

Why should we faint, and fear to live alone,

Since all alone, so Heaven has will'd, we die?

He likewise heard some phrases spoken by the phantom with the short

face, the genial Spectator:

"When I look upon the tombs of the great, every motion of envy dies

in me; when I read the epitaphs of the beautiful, every inordinate

desire goes out; when I meet with the grief of parents upon a

tombstone, my heart melts with compassion; when I see the tombs of

the parents themselves, I consider the vanity of grieving for those

whom we must quickly follow."

And lastly a gentle-voiced prelate spoke, during whose meek, familiar

rhyme, endeared to him from earliest childhood, Jude fell asleep:

Teach me to live, that I may dread

The grave as little as my bed.

Teach me to die ...

He did not wake till morning. The ghostly past seemed to have gone,

and everything spoke of to-day. He started up in bed, thinking he

had overslept himself and then said:

"By Jove--I had quite forgotten my sweet-faced cousin, and that she's

here all the time! ... and my old schoolmaster, too." His words

about his schoolmaster had, perhaps, less zest in them than his words

concerning his cousin.