Jude the Obscure (Oxford World's Classics)

At Marygreen
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o
fficial 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 Sæcu-
lare’ 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 impreg-
nated with the poem that in a moment of the same impulsive emo-
tion 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 litera-
ture 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
Jude the Obscure
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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 Sun-
days 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 hunchbacked old woman of great intelli-
gence, 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.
What was most required by citizens? Food, clothing, and shelter.
An income from any work in preparing the 
first would be too
meagre; for making the second he felt a distaste; the preparation of
the third requisite he inclined to. They built in a city; therefore he
would learn to build. He thought of his unknown uncle, his cousin
Susanna’s father, an ecclesiastical worker in metal, and somehow
mediæval art in any material was a trade for which he had rather a
fancy. He could not go far wrong in following his uncle’s footsteps,
and engaging himself awhile with the carcases that contained the
scholar souls.
As a preliminary he obtained some small blocks of freestone, metal
not being available, and suspending his studies awhile occupied his
spare half-hours in copying the heads and capitals in his parish
church.
There was a stone-mason of a humble kind in Alfredston, and as
soon as he had found a substitute for himself in his aunt’s little
business he o
ffered his services to this man for a trifling wage. Here
Jude had the opportunity of learning at least the rudiments of
freestone-working. Some time later he went to a church-builder in
the same place, and under the architect’s direction became handy at
restoring the dilapidated masonries of several village churches round
about.