Jude the Obscure (Oxford World's Classics)

Jude the Obscure
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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 ine
ffable 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 o
ffice
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.’
At Christminster
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Then the sly author of the immortal Chapter on Christianity:
‘How shall we excuse the supine inattention of the Pagan and philo-
sophic 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 inordin-
ate 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: