Jude the Obscure (Oxford World's Classics)

Jude the Obscure
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‘By Jove––I had quite forgotten my sweet-faced cousin, and that
she’s here all the time! . . . and my old schoolmaster, too.’ His words
about his schoolmaster had perhaps, less zest in them than his words
concerning his cousin.
At Christminster
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II.–ii.
N
 meditations on the actual, including the mean bread-
and-cheese question, dissipated the phantasmal for a while, and
compelled Jude to smother high thinkings under immediate needs.
He had to get up, and seek for work, manual work; the only kind
deemed by many of its professors to be work at all.
Passing out into the streets on this errand he found that the col-
leges had treacherously changed their sympathetic countenances:
some were pompous; some had put on the look of family vaults
above ground; something barbaric loomed in the masonries of all.
The spirits of the great men had disappeared.
The numberless architectural pages around him he read, natur-
ally, less as an artist-critic of their forms than as an artizan and
comrade of the dead handicraftsmen whose muscles had actually
executed those forms. He examined the mouldings, stroked them as
one who knew their beginning, said they were di
fficult or easy in the
working, had taken little or much time, were trying to the arm, or
convenient to the tool.
What at night had been perfect and ideal was by day the more or
less defective real. Cruelties, insults, had, he perceived, been
in
flicted on the aged erections. The condition of several moved him
as he would have been moved by maimed sentient beings. They were
wounded, broken, sloughing o
ff their outer shape in the deadly
struggle against years, weather, and man.
The rottenness of these historical documents reminded him that
he was not, after all, hastening on to begin the morning practically as
he had intended. He had come to work, and to live by work, and the
morning had nearly gone. It was, in one sense, encouraging to think
that in a place of crumbling stones there must be plenty for one of
his trade to do in the business of renovation. He asked his way to the
workyard of the stonemason whose name had been given him at
Alfredston; and soon heard the familiar sound of the rubbers and
chisels.
The yard was a little centre of regeneration. Here, with keen edges
and smooth curves were forms in the exact likeness of those he had
seen abraded and time-eaten on the walls. These were the ideas in

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modern prose which the lichened colleges presented in old poetry.
Even some of those antiques might have been called prose when they
were new. They had done nothing but wait, and had become poet-
ical. How easy to the smallest building; how impossible to most men.
He asked for the foreman, and looked round among the new tra-
ceries, mullions, transoms, shafts, pinnacles, and battlements, stand-
ing on the bankers half worked, or waiting to be removed. They were
marked by precision, mathematical straightness, smoothness, exacti-
tude: there in the old walls were the broken lines of the original idea;
jagged curves, disdain of precision, irregularity, disarray.
For a moment there fell on Jude a true illumination; that here in
the stone yard was a centre of e
ffort as worthy as that dignified by the
name of scholarly study within the noblest of the colleges. But he
lost it under stress of his old idea. He would accept any employment
which might be o
ffered him on the strength of his late employer’s
recommendation; but he would accept it as a provisional thing only.
This was his form of the modern vice of unrest.
Moreover he perceived that at best only copying, patching, and
imitating went on here; which he fancied to be owing to some tem-
porary and local cause. He did not at that time see that mediævalism
was as dead as a fern-leaf in a lump of coal; that other developments
were shaping in the world around him in which Gothic architecture
and its associations had no place. The deadly animosity of con-
temporary logic and vision towards so much of what he held in
reverence was not yet revealed to him.
Having failed to obtain work here as yet he went away, and
thought again of his cousin, whose presence somewhere at hand he
seemed to feel in wavelets of interest, if not of emotion. How he
wished he had that pretty portrait of her! At last he wrote to his aunt
to send it. She did so, with a request, however, that he was not to
bring disturbance into the family by going to see the girl or her
relations. Jude, a ridiculously a
ffectionate fellow, promised nothing,
put the photograph on the mantelpiece, kissed it––he did not know
why––and felt more at home. She seemed to look down and preside
over his tea. It was cheering––the one thing uniting him to the
emotions of the living city.
There remained the schoolmaster––probably now a reverend par-
son. But he could not possibly hunt up such a respectable man just
yet; so raw and unpolished was his condition, so precarious were his