Jude the Obscure (Oxford World's Classics)

At Christminster


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them; he wished they had not been sent. ‘It is just one of those
intrusive, vulgar, pushing, applications which are so common in
these days,’ he thought. ‘Why couldn’t I know better than address
utter strangers in such a way? I may be an impostor, an idle scamp, a
man with a bad character, for all that they know to the contrary. . . .
Perhaps that’s what I am!’
Nevertheless, he found himself clinging to the hope of some reply
as to his one last chance of redemption. He waited day after day,
saying that it was perfectly absurd to expect, yet expecting. While he
waited he was suddenly stirred by news about Phillotson. Phillotson
was giving up the school near Christminster, for a larger one further
south, in Mid-Wessex. What this meant; how it would a
ffect his
cousin; whether, as seemed possible, it was a practical move of the
schoolmaster’s towards a larger income, in view of a provision for
two instead of one, he would not allow himself to say. And the tender
relations between Phillotson and the young girl of whom Jude was
passionately enamoured e
ffectually made it repugnant to Jude’s
tastes to apply to Phillotson for advice on his own scheme.
Meanwhile the academic dignitaries to whom Jude had written
vouchsafed no answer, and the young man was thus thrown back
entirely on himself as formerly, with the added gloom of a weakened
hope. By indirect inquiries he soon perceived clearly, what he had
long uneasily suspected, that to qualify himself for certain open
scholarships and exhibitions was the only brilliant course. But to do
this a good deal of coaching would be necessary, and much natural
ability. It was next to impossible that a man reading on his own
system, however widely and thoroughly, even over the prolonged
period of ten years, should be able to compete with those who had
passed their lives under trained teachers, and had worked to
ordained lines.
The other course, that of buying himself in, so to speak, seemed
the only one really open to men like him, the di
fficulty being simply
of a material kind. With the help of his information he began to
reckon the extent of this material obstacle; and ascertained, to his
dismay, that at the rate at which with the best of fortune he would be
able to save money, 
fifteen years must elapse before he could be in a
position to forward testimonials to the Head of a College and
advance to a matriculation examination. The undertaking was
hopeless.
Jude the Obscure
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He saw what a curious and cunning glamour the neighbourhood
of the place had exercised over him. To get there and live there, to
move among the churches and halls, and become imbued with the
genius loci
, had seemed to his dreaming youth as the spot shaped its
charms to him from its halo on the horizon, the obvious and ideal
thing to do. ‘Let me only get there,’ he had said, with the fatuous-
ness of Crusoe* over his big boat, ‘and the rest is but a matter of
time and energy.’ It would have been far better for him in every way
if he had never come within sight and sound of the delusive pre-
cincts, had gone to some busy commercial town with the sole object
of making money by his wits, and thence surveyed his plan in true
perspective. Well, all that was clear to him amounted to this, that
the whole scheme had burst up, like an iridescent soap-bubble,
under the touch of a reasoned inquiry. He looked back at himself
along the vista of his past years, and his thought was akin to
Heine’s:*
‘Above the youth’s inspired and 
flashing eyes
I see the motley mocking fool’s-cap rise.’
Fortunately he had not been allowed to bring his disappointment
into his dear Sue’s life by involving her in this collapse. And the
painful details of his awakening to a sense of his limitations should
now be spared her as far as possible. After all she had only known a
little part of the miserable struggle in which he had been engaged
thus unequipped, poor, and unforeseeing.
He always remembered the appearance of the afternoon on which
he awoke from his dream. Not quite knowing what to do with him-
self he went up to an octagonal chamber in the lantern of a singularly
built theatre* that was set amidst this quaint and singular city. It had
windows all round, from which an outlook over the whole town and
its edi
fices could be gained. Jude’s eyes swept all the views in succes-
sion, meditatively, mournfully, yet sturdily. Those buildings and
their associations and privileges were not for him. From the looming
roof of the great library, into which he hardly ever had time to enter,
his gaze travelled on to the varied spires, halls, gables, streets,
chapels, gardens, quadrangles, which composed the ensemble of this
unrivalled panorama. He saw that his destiny lay not with these, but
among the manual toilers in the shabby purlieu which he himself
occupied, unrecognized as part of the city at all by its visitors and