Jude the Obscure
letter inside the case of the instrument, and it would be sure to reach
the desired eyes. Why not ask him to send any old second-hand copies,
which would have the charm of being mellowed by the university
atmosphere?
To tell his aunt of his intention would be to defeat it. It was
necessary to act alone.
After a further consideration of a few days he did act, and on the day
of the piano’s departure, which happened to be his next birthday,
clandestinely placed the letter inside the packing-case, directed to
his much-admired friend, being afraid to reveal the operation to his
aunt Drusilla, lest she should discover his motive, and compel him to
abandon his scheme.
The piano was despatched, and Jude waited days and weeks, calling every
morning at the cottage post office before his great-aunt was stirring.
At last a packet did indeed arrive at the village, and he saw from the
ends of it that it contained two thin books. He took it away into a
lonely place, and sat down on a felled elm to open it.
Ever since his first ecstasy or vision of Christminster and its
possibilities, Jude had meditated much and curiously on the probable
sort of process that was involved in turning the expressions of one
language into those of another. He concluded that a grammar of the
required tongue would contain, primarily, a rule, prescription, or clue
of the nature of a secret cipher, which, once known, would enable him,
by merely applying it, to change at will all words of his own speech
into those of the foreign one. His childish idea was, in fact, a
pushing to the extremity of mathematical precision what is everywhere
known as Grimm’s Law—an aggrandizement of rough rules to ideal
completeness. Thus he assumed that the words of the required language
were always to be found somewhere latent in the words of the given
language by those who had the art to uncover them, such art being
furnished by the books aforesaid.
When, therefore, having noted that the packet bore the postmark of
Christminster, he cut the string, opened the volumes, and turned to the
Latin grammar, which chanced to come uppermost, he could scarcely
believe his eyes.
The book was an old one—thirty years old, soiled, scribbled wantonly
over with a strange name in every variety of enmity to the letterpress,
and marked at random with dates twenty years earlier than his own day.
But this was not the cause of Jude’s amazement. He learnt for the first
time that there was no law of transmutation, as in his innocence he had
supposed (there was, in some degree, but the grammarian did not
recognize it), but that every word in both Latin and Greek was to be
individually committed to memory at the cost of years of plodding.
Jude flung down the books, lay backward along the broad trunk of the
elm, and was an utterly miserable boy for the space of a quarter of an
hour. As he had often done before, he pulled his hat over his face and
watched the sun peering insidiously at him through the interstices of
the straw. This was Latin and Greek, then, was it this grand delusion!
The charm he had supposed in store for him was really a labour like
that of Israel in Egypt.
What brains they must have in Christminster and the great schools, he
presently thought, to learn words one by one up to tens of thousands!
There were no brains in his head equal to this business; and as the
little sun-rays continued to stream in through his hat at him, he
wished he had never seen a book, that he might never see another, that
he had never been born.
Somebody might have come along that way who would have asked him his
trouble, and might have cheered him by saying that his notions were
further advanced than those of his grammarian. But nobody did come,
because nobody does; and under the crushing recognition of his gigantic
error Jude continued to wish himself out of the world.
V
During the three or four succeeding years a quaint and singular vehicle
might have been discerned moving along the lanes and by-roads near
Marygreen, driven in a quaint and singular way.
In the course of a month or two after the receipt of the books Jude had
grown callous to the shabby trick played him by the dead languages. In
fact, his disappointment at the nature of those tongues had, after a
while, been the means of still further glorifying the erudition of
Christminster. To acquire languages, departed or living in spite of
such obstinacies as he now knew them inherently to possess, was a
herculean performance which gradually led him on to a greater interest
in it than in the presupposed patent process. The mountain-weight of
material under which the ideas lay in those dusty volumes called the
classics piqued him into a dogged, mouselike subtlety of attempt to
move it piecemeal.
He had endeavoured to make his presence tolerable to his crusty maiden
aunt by assisting her to the best of his ability, and the business of
the little cottage bakery had grown in consequence. An aged horse with
a hanging head had been purchased for eight pounds at a sale, a
creaking cart with a whity-brown tilt obtained for a few pounds more,
and in this turn-out it became Jude’s business thrice a week to carry
loaves of bread to the villagers and solitary cotters immediately round
Marygreen.
The singularity aforesaid lay, after all, less in the conveyance itself
than in Jude’s manner of conducting it along its route. Its interior
was the scene of most of Jude’s education by “private study.” As soon
as the horse had learnt the road and the houses at which he was to
pause awhile, the boy, seated in front, would slip the reins over his
arm, ingeniously fix open, by means of a strap attached to the tilt,
the volume he was reading, spread the dictionary on his knees, and
plunge into the simpler passages from Caesar, Virgil, or Horace, as the
case might be, in his purblind stumbling way, and with an expenditure
of labour that would have made a tender-hearted pedagogue shed tears;
yet somehow getting at the meaning of what he read, and divining rather
than beholding the spirit of the original, which often to his mind was
something else than that which he was taught to look for.
The only copies he had been able to lay hands on were old Delphin
editions, because they were superseded, and therefore cheap. But, bad
for idle schoolboys, it did so happen that they were passably good for
him. The hampered and lonely itinerant conscientiously covered up the
marginal readings, and used them merely on points of construction, as
he would have used a comrade or tutor who should have happened to be
passing by. And though Jude may have had little chance of becoming a
scholar by these rough and ready means, he was in the way of getting
into the groove he wished to follow.
While he was busied with these ancient pages, which had already been
thumbed by hands possibly in the grave, digging out the thoughts of
these minds so remote yet so near, the bony old horse pursued his
rounds, and Jude would be aroused from the woes of Dido by the stoppage
of his cart and the voice of some old woman crying, “Two to-day, baker,
and I return this stale one.”
He was frequently met in the lanes by pedestrians and others without
his seeing them, and by degrees the people of the neighbourhood began
to talk about his method of combining work and play (such they
considered his reading to be), which, though probably convenient enough
to himself, was not altogether a safe proceeding for other travellers
along the same roads. There were murmurs. Then a private resident of an
adjoining place informed the local policeman that the baker’s boy
should not be allowed to read while driving, and insisted that it was
the constable’s duty to catch him in the act, and take him to the
police court at Alfredston, and get him fined for dangerous practices
on the highway. The policeman thereupon lay in wait for Jude, and one
day accosted him and cautioned him.
As Jude had to get up at three o’clock in the morning to heat the oven,
and mix and set in the bread that he distributed later in the day, he
was obliged to go to bed at night immediately after laying the sponge;
so that if he could not read his classics on the highways he could
hardly study at all. The only thing to be done was, therefore, to keep
a sharp eye ahead and around him as well as he could in the
circumstances, and slip away his books as soon as anybody loomed in the
distance, the policeman in particular. To do that official justice, he
did not put himself much in the way of Jude’s bread-cart, considering
that in such a lonely district the chief danger was to Jude himself,
and often on seeing the white tilt over the hedges he would move in
another direction.
On a day when Fawley was getting quite advanced, being now about
sixteen, and had been stumbling through the “Carmen Sæculare,” on his
way home, he found himself to be passing over the high edge of the
plateau by the Brown House. The light had changed, and it was the sense
of this which had caused him to look up. The sun was going down, and
the full moon was rising simultaneously behind the woods in the
opposite quarter. His mind had become so impregnated with the poem
that, in a moment of the same impulsive emotion which years before had
caused him to kneel on the ladder, he stopped the horse, alighted, and
glancing round to see that nobody was in sight, knelt down on the
roadside bank with open book. He turned first to the shiny goddess, who
seemed to look so softly and critically at his doings, then to the
disappearing luminary on the other hand, as he began:
“Phœbe silvarumque potens Diana!”
The horse stood still till he had finished the hymn, which Jude
repeated under the sway of a polytheistic fancy that he would never
have thought of humouring in broad daylight.
Reaching home, he mused over his curious superstition, innate or
acquired, in doing this, and the strange forgetfulness which had led to
such a lapse from common sense and custom in one who wished, next to
being a scholar, to be a Christian divine. It had all come of reading
heathen works exclusively. The more he thought of it the more convinced
he was of his inconsistency. He began to wonder whether he could be
reading quite the right books for his object in life. Certainly there
seemed little harmony between this pagan literature and the mediæval
colleges at Christminster, that ecclesiastical romance in stone.
Ultimately he decided that in his sheer love of reading he had taken up
a wrong emotion for a Christian young man. He had dabbled in Clarke’s
Homer, but had never yet worked much at the New Testament in the Greek,
though he possessed a copy, obtained by post from a second-hand
bookseller. He abandoned the now familiar Ionic for a new dialect, and
for a long time onward limited his reading almost entirely to the
Gospels and Epistles in Griesbach’s text. Moreover, on going into
Alfredston one day, he was introduced to patristic literature by
finding at the bookseller’s some volumes of the Fathers which had been
left behind by an insolvent clergyman of the neighbourhood.
As another outcome of this change of groove he visited on Sundays all
the churches within a walk, and deciphered the Latin inscriptions on
fifteenth-century brasses and tombs. On one of these pilgrimages he met
with a hunch-backed old woman of great intelligence, who read
everything she could lay her hands on, and she told him more yet of the
romantic charms of the city of light and lore. Thither he resolved as
firmly as ever to go.
But how live in that city? At present he had no income at all. He had
no trade or calling of any dignity or stability whatever on which he
could subsist while carrying out an intellectual labour which might
spread over many years.