Jude the Obscure (Oxford World's Classics)

part; auld crumbling buildings, half church, half almshouse, and not
much going on at that.’
‘You are wrong, John; there is more going on than meets the eye of
a man walking through the streets. It is a unique centre of thought
and religion––the intellectual and spiritual granary of this country.
All that silence and absence of goings-on is the stillness of in
finite
motion––the sleep of the spinning-top, to borrow the simile of a
well-known writer.’*
‘O, well, it med be all that, or it med not. As I say, I didn’t see
nothing of it the hour or two I was there; so I went in and had a pot o’
beer, and a penny loaf, and a ha’porth o’ cheese, and waited till it was
time to come along home. You’ve j’ined a College by this time, I
suppose?’
‘Ah, no!’ said Jude. ‘I am almost as far o
ff that as ever.’
‘How so?’
Jude slapped his pocket.
‘Just what we thought! Such places be not for such as you––only
for them with plenty o’ money.’
‘There you are wrong,’ said Jude, with some bitterness. ‘They are
for such ones!’
Still, the remark was su
fficient to withdraw Jude’s attention from
the imaginative world he had lately inhabited, in which an abstract
Jude the Obscure
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figure, more or less himself, was steeping his mind in a sublimation
of the arts and sciences, and making his calling and election sure to a
seat in the paradise of the learned. He was set regarding his pro-
spects in a cold northern light. He had lately felt that he could not
quite satisfy himself in his Greek––in the Greek of the dramatists
particularly. So fatigued was he sometimes after his day’s work that
he could not maintain the critical attention necessary for thorough
application. He felt that he wanted a coach––a friend at his elbow to
tell him in a moment what sometimes would occupy him a weary
month in extracting from unanticipative, clumsy books.
It was decidedly necessary to consider facts a little more closely
than he had done of late. What was the good, after all, of using up his
spare hours in a vague labour called ‘private study’ without giving an
outlook on practicabilities?
‘I ought to have thought of this before,’ he said, as he journeyed
back. ‘It would have been better never to have embarked in the
scheme at all than to do it without seeing clearly where I am going, or
what I am aiming at. . . . This hovering outside the walls of the
colleges, as if expecting some arm to be stretched out from them to
lift me inside, won’t do! I must get special information.’
The next week accordingly he sought it. What at 
first seemed an
opportunity occurred one afternoon when he saw an elderly gentle-
man, who had been pointed out as the Head of a particular College,
walking in the public path of a parklike enclosure near the spot at
which Jude chanced to be sitting. The gentleman came nearer, and
Jude looked anxiously at his face. It seemed benign, considerate, yet
rather reserved. On second thoughts Jude felt that he could not go
up and address him; but he was su
fficiently influenced by the inci-
dent to think what a wise thing it would be for him to state his
di
fficulties by letter to some of the best and most judicious of these
old masters, and obtain their advice.
During the next week or two he accordingly placed himself in
such positions about the city as would a
fford him glimpses of several
of the most distinguished among the Provosts, Wardens, and other
Heads of Houses;* and from those he ultimately selected 
five whose
physiognomies seemed to say to him that they were appreciative and
far-seeing men. To these 
five he addressed letters, briefly stating his
di
fficulties, and asking their opinion on his stranded situation.
When the letters were posted Jude mentally began to criticize