SOURCE: "Jude the Obscure As a Tragedy", in Southern Review, Vol. 6, 1940-41, pp. 193-213.

[In the following essay, Mizener argues that Jude the Obscure is not a tragedy in the sense that it represents the contrast between the ideal life and the "permanently squalid real life of man," but rather a "history of a worthy man's education."]

… who cannot seeWhat Earth's ingrained conditions are.   —"Seventy-four and Twenty."

I suppose no one will question Hardy's right to the title of "the first great tragedian in novel form," taking tragedy in its looser sense. Yet there seems to be a general feeling that somehow his novels are not successful, are not, for all their deep sense of the horror of ordinary life, really tragic. "There is," as Mr. E. M. Forster says, "some vital problem that has not been answered, or even posed, in the misfortunes of Jude the Obscure." The cause of that feeling is, I think, an attitude which is probably more the product of his age than of Hardy's own understanding. In a sense the courage of Hardy's profoundest conviction failed him, precisely as Tennyson's did, under the pressure of the reasoning of his age.

Hardy, to be sure, refused to identify what he called "the ideal life" with the conventional views of his times, and this refusal saved him from the superior fatuousness of people like Tennyson and Browning at their worst. He could, indeed, be devastating about these conventional views: "How could smug Christian optimism worthy of a dissenting grocer find a place inside a man [Browning] who was so vast a seer and feeler when on neutral ground?" Yet at bottom Hardy's attitude suffered from the same kind of fault as Browning's. Browning tried to convince himself that because God was in his heaven all must be right with the world. Hardy's objection to this view of things was that it believed in heaven at all; for Hardy, using Browning's logic in reverse, tried to convince himself that because all was obviously not right with the world, there could be no heaven. The only source of hope left him, therefore, was the belief that the world would, by a process of moral evolution, become a kind of heaven in time. This kind of hope was the only kind Hardy could discover, once he had denied any independent reality to the dream of perfection, and without some hope not only tragedy but life itself is impossible.

The trouble with this view, for tragedy, is that its possessor is incapable of facing squarely the paradox of evil. Browning felt that, having accepted the proposition that God is the all-great and the all-loving too, he had committed himself to a denial of evil; life was therefore an exhilarating battle in which one proved his worth for heaven—

Only they see not God, I know,
Nor all that chivalry of his,
The soldier-saints who, row on row,
Burn upward each to his point of bliss—
  Since, the end of life being manifest,
He had burned his way thro' the world to this.

Hardy, feeling profoundly the ingrained evil of human and animal life, thought that feeling committed him to a denial of heaven. Thus both Browning and Hardy found it impossible not to deny, for the sake of a smaller consistency, one of the realities which must be recognized and accepted for the larger consistency of tragedy. Both found it impossible to believe in "the goodness of God" and "the horrors of human and animal life"; neither, in Keats's phrase, was "capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason." They felt called upon either to explain the real life as a logical corollary of the ideal life, or to explain the ideal life as a logical corollary of the real. They were thus incapable of representing in the same fiction the meaning and splendor of both lives and of using each to illuminate the limitations of the other.

But this inability to escape the smaller consistency was the central weakness of late nineteenth-century literature as a whole: "there is the assumption that Truth is indifferent or hostile to the desires of men; that these desires were formerly nurtured on legend, myth, all kinds of insufficient experiment; that, Truth being known at last in the form of experimental science, it is intellectually impossible to maintain illusion any longer, at the same time that it is morally impossible to assimilate Truth." It is in this sense that Hardy's attitude is more the product of his age than of his own understanding. It is probably more remarkable, under the circumstances, that he came as close as he did to escaping from the trap his age unconsciously set for itself than that he was, in the end, caught.

The code Hardy evolved as a description of the ideal life is a secularized version of the Sermon on the Mount, a thoroughly fumigated New Testament morality. The real subject of Jude is the evolution of this code in Jude's mind ("a species of Dick Whittington, whose spirit was touched to finer issues than a mere material gain"). In so far as this code is a statement of the potentialities of humanity, it is the possibility of dieir realization somewhere, somehow, which gives Jude's death meaning. In so far as it is not a statement of the potentialities of humanity Jude is mad and his death meaningless: this alternative was obviously no part of Hardy's intention. But Hardy had no place outside of die actual world of time where he could visualize these potentialities as being realized; he saw no possibility that the nothing of death itself, when the long sickness of health and living begins to mend, would bring all things. So he ended by implying the realization of these human potentialities in this world; ended, that is, by denying his most profound conviction, that earth's conditions are ingrained. And if it is difficult to believe that life is evil and God good, it is even more difficult to believe that the evil of life is ingrained and mat it will nevertheless presently come unstuck.

That Hardy produced such powerful novels, in spite of his inability to conceive an ideal life with an existence either very strong or outside of time and in spite of the formal limitations which this attitude inevitably imposed on him, is a tribute to his profound rectitude: The power of Hardy's novels is the power of Hardy's character; the consistency and purity of the feeling throughout both the novels and the poems proves that his vision of evil is, quite simply, what he saw. Such feeling cannot be faked. This power makes itself felt in spite of Hardy's fumbling inability to think his way through to an understanding of his personal impressions or to a form which would organize them in terms of their meaning.

2

About his idea in Jude Hardy was quite explicit: Jude was "to show the contrast between the ideal life a man wished to lead, and the squalid real life he was fated to lead.… [This] idea was meant to run all through the novel." It was to be a tragedy "of the WORTHY encompassed by the INEVITABLE." Such an idea requires for its successful representation a form which is consciously an artifice, a verisimilar and plausible narrative which the novelist values, not for its own sake, but as the perfect vehicle for his idea. He must keep his narrative alive at every turn with his idea, for he cannot, once committed to it, afford the luxury of a meaningless appeal to his reader's delight in recognition and suspense. The characters of such a novel, as Aristotle said of the characters in the tragedy of his day, are there for the sake of the action, and the action or fable is mere, ultimately, for the sake of the idea—is the idea.

Yet Hardy, with such an essentially tragic idea never freed himself wholly from the naturalistic assumption that narrative must be significant historically rather than fabulously. In the case of Jude this assumption forced him to identify himself as author with his hero instead of with the action as a whole. Jude is not a character in a larger composition, the dramatization of one of several presented points of view which go together to make up the author's attitude, because Hardy's attitude was not complex and inclusive but simple and exclusive. He therefore sought to contrast the ideal life wit h the real life, not of man but of a man. That is to say, he wrote a naturalistic novel, a history of his hero, in which the hero is the author, for Jude is obviously autobiographical in the general sense. The essential meaning of his fiction for Hardy is its narrative or "historical" meaning, and Jude's understanding of that history is Hardy's. Al l mat the narrative which is a perfect artifice ever proves according to Hardy is me historical existence of a "consummate artist"; all that it even tempts us to believe in is the historical reality of the events it presents. Hardy never really faced the possibility that a great work of art aims at a kind of truth superior (but not necessarily contradictory) to a scientific and historical verisimilitude. For Hardy, therefore, the true narrative was one which conformed to a historical conception of the truth from which the fabulous was very carefully excluded; and the truest of these was, in the general sense, autobiographical, since only the man who had lived through experiences generally like those described in the narrative could represent with historical accuracy not only the external events but the thoughts and opinions of a participant in these events.

Yet because Hardy had an idea he was not content simply to tell a story. If that idea was not finely enough conceived to drive him to discard the naturalistic form, it was strong enough to make him stretch that form to the breaking point by the use of devices which have no place in his kind of novel. There is, for example, nothing to be said against the use of a certain amount of coincidence in the novel which is consistently an artifice, but it only weakens a novel which depends for its acceptance on the reader's conviction of the distinguishably historical trath of its hero's career. In the same way Hardy's carefully devised contrasts fail of their full purpose because he is writing a novel at whose center there is no final contrast. These contrasts are not, therefore, means for enriching a central contrast between a vision of the ideal life and a vision of the real life; they are but means for contrasting a single view of things, which is true, with all other views of things, which are false. And this is the contrast of melodrama rather than of tragedy. In the same way, too, Hardy's use of symbolic incident, for all its immense immediate effectiveness, remains a kind of desperate contrivance in a novel which is not itself a symbol but "a true historie." These incidents do not, that is, have in them implications of contrasted views of experience; they are merely poetic projections of the hero's view of things. The result of all this is a novel which is formally neither fish, flesh, nor good red herring, a novel whose tremendous verisimilar life is constantly being sapped by a series of irrelevant devices and yet remains, as a systematic artifice, "a paradise of loose ends."

3

The nearest Hardy came to escaping from the strangling limitations of his attitude and the naturalistic form to which it committed him was in his pastoral idealization of the life of his Wessex peasants. He might, by completing this idealization, have produced profound romantic comedy; for he could see so clearly that "it is the on-going—i.e., the 'becoming'—of the world that produces its sadness. If the world stood still at a felicitous moment there would be no sadness in it. The sun and the moon standing still on Ajalon was not a catastrophe for Israel, but a type of Paradise" (The Early Life). It is his feeling that the world had come perceptibly closer to standing still at a felicitous moment for his Wessex peasants in the old days which tempted him to see their life as a type of Paradise.

Yet he did not know how to subdue the rational fact of the matter. The on-going of the world worked among the Wessex people too, if more slowly; and even if it did not, only the illusion of nostalgia could make one who knew that earth's conditions are ingrained suppose there had even been a felicitous moment in the past. The life of these peasants can be, for Hardy, only a charming anachronism; and their comments, though Hardy uses them chorically in his novels, are really irrelevant to any meaning which is possible for him. When Mrs . Edlin comments on Sue's marriage—"In my time we took it more careless, and I don't know that we was any the worse for it!" (438) [Page citations are from the Modern Library edition of Jude]—or when she is to be heard "honestly saying the Lord's Prayer in a loud voice, as the Rubric directed" (333), she is only an example of how much simpler and easier life was before man had progressed in the hands of inescapable time to his present high state of nervous and emotional organization. She cannot be, as Hardy's use of her sometimes seems to imply she is, an image from a timeless and ideal pastoral world, an Arden to which his hero will escape from the squalid real world of Duke Frederick's court. For much as Hardy longed, however unconsciously, to make out of the world of his Wessex peasants an ideal pastoral world, the weary weight of its unintelligible actuality so burdened him that he was never able to see it as a type of Paradise, to make it a part of his means for "holding in a single thought reality and justice." It was indeed Hardy's tragedy as a writer that he never found any such means. Mrs. Edlin and the rest of his peasants remain meaningful only at the level of history; they are samples of the simpler and easier way of life in the past, preserved for Hardy's day by an eddy in time.

The moments of happiness which come in most of Hardy's novels just before the catastrophes are particular instances of his inability to make the country life a type of Paradise. Grace and Giles in Sherton Abbey while they still believe the divorce possible, Tess and Angel between the murder of Alec and the arrest at Stonehenge, Jude and Sue at the Wessex Agricultural Show, these felicitous moments are always moments when the protagonists believe they have won their way back to the Garden of Eden, to purity of heart and to a kindly country world which will be a satisfactory home for the pure in heart. Only a rather staggering amount of coincidence in the narrative or naïveté in the characters can provide moments of such delusion in the real world as Hardy knew it; and because Hardy was committed to a naturalistic form he not only had to produce these moments by coincidence and naïveté, but to demonstrate that, except as faint foreshadowings of a reformed humanity, they were fool's paradises. Thus Hardy's time-bound universe and the naturalistic form which it forced on him as a novelist prevented his imagining or presenting an artificial world which contained both reality and justice.

Committed as he was to the truth of abstract reason rather than the truth of imagination, Hardy therefore had no choice but to conceive his ideal life as a felicitous moment some place in the future of the real life, since this ideal life was the only kind which could be reached by strict reason from his premise. Hardy's faith in this kindly country world to which humanity would win in the course of history is seldom explicit in the novels, since to make it explicit is to make explicit also the contradiction between this faith and Hardy's overwhelming conviction that Earth's conditions are ingrained. That faith is, however, of necessity everywhere implicit in his presentation of the events of human and natural life; it is his only source for the light which reveals the horror of these events.

In that Hardy's novels rest, in this indirect fashion, on a belief in the world's progress toward a felicitous future, their meaning is the meaning of sentimental pastoral. They are what As You Like It would be without Jaques to remind us and the senior Duke that "the penalty of Adam" was not merely "the season's difference" but the knowledge of good and evil, without Touchstone to show us that weariness of the legs is as significant in its way as weariness of the spirit in its, and his love of Jane Smile as real as Silvious's love of Phebe or Orlando's of Rosalind. For however much Hardy failed to recognize it, his whole view of things was based on the assumption that the world of The Woodlanders without Fitzpiers and Mrs . Charmond and an educated Grace would be an ideal world, a world of

Men surfeited of laying heavy hands
     Upon the innocent,
The mild, the fragile, the obscure content
Among the myriads of thy family.
Those, too, who love the true, the excellent,
And make their daily moves a melody.
                        [The Dynasts, Fore Scene]

The success of such poems as "I n Time of 'The Breaking of Nations'" depends on the implication that the life of the man harrowing clods and the maid and her wight is not only eternal—a world that stands still; but felicitous—a world which knows only the sweet adversity of "the season's difference" and not the adversity of evil. Such a pastoral vision of a still point of the turning world was the source of Hardy's sense of the squalid evil of real life. But because he refused to use the life of his Wessex peasants, or any other life, to body forth his forms of things unknown, he was unable to turn those forms to shapes at all.

But if Hardy's combination of half-despairing, scientific humanitarianism, and the naturalistic form which he thought it committed him to, was incapable of pastoral, it was even more incapable of tragedy. Hardy's feeling that the evil of this world was incurable is tragic. But because he was unable to place the source of the idealism by which he measured the world and found it wanting outside of time and therefore, faute de mieux, came to believe "in the gradual ennoblement of man," his attitude is such as to preclude a formal structure which pits the idealist against the practical man in equal combat. There is no basic, unresolvable tragic tension between the real and the ideal in his attitude, and there is as a consequence no tragic tension in the formal structure it invokes as its representation. The objection to Hardy's form for tragedy is, therefore, not a matter of his occasional awkwardness or carelessness; it is radical.

The assumption which justifies the naturalistic novel is that there can be only one kind of reality, and this is Hardy's assumption. But if there is only one kind of reality there can be also only one kind of truth, and that truth, in Jude, is the melioristic view of the world which is the only belief Hardy can find. As author Hardy is therefore unable to represent justly in Jude those kinds of men according to whose ideas the world must be run if earth's conditions are ingrained. In his fictional world such people can be shown only in the light of the single true view of things which Hardy and Jude share. It is as if Shakespeare had first made Hamlet altogether incapable of believing the evil of the world incurable and had then shown us Claudius only as Hamlet saw him. Hardy's Claudiuses are not mighty opposi tes; they are inexplicable villains. At best he can give them credit for being better adjusted to the world as it is at the moment. And for the same reason the only irony he can direct against his hero is the irony to be derived from a demonstration of his temporary maladjustment in a world which, if it is not meaningless, will presently realize that hero's ideal. There is thus neither permanent justification in Hardy for the Arabellas nor permanent irony for the Judes. Jude cannot display the very real if limited truth of Claudius's

For what we know must be, and is as common
As any the most vulgar thing to sense,
Why should we in our peevish opposition
Take it to heart? Fie! 'tis a fault to heaven,
A fault against the dead, a fault to nature,
To reason most absurd…

nor the very real if terrible absurdity of Hamlet's "Go to, I'll no more on't; it hath made me mad. I say, we will have no moe marriage: …"

But if the actions of the Arabellas are seen only as Jude saw them, they must remain for the reader what they were for Jude, the consequences of an inexplicable and brutal stupidity rather than of a different kind of wisdom to Jude's. Thus Hardy's attitude and the form it invoked excluded from his representation, despite the fact that no one knew them better than he did, the point of view of those men and women for whom "the defence and salvation of the body by daily bread is still a study, a religion, and a desire." It excluded, too, an understanding of how a woman like Sue might, not in weakness but in strength, deny the validity of Jude's humanitarian idealism. It is one thing, that is, for Jude to preach to Sue the horror of her final surrender to Phillotson and conventional conduct or for Hamlet to preach to his mother the horror of surrender to Claudius and a "normal" life. It is quite another for Hardy, who does, or Shakespeare, who does not, to commit himself completely as author to this sermon.

At the same time, however, that Hardy presents the almost universal opposition to Jude as inexplicably cruel, he is forced to present people and animals—of which there are a great many in Hardy—in such a way as to support Jude's view of them. In other words, Hardy presents the same kinds of objects at once unjustly and sentimentally. And this is the manifestation in the "verbal correlative" of Hardy's attitude of the contradiction inherent in that attitude. Because he can see only a single reality, that of the time-bound actual world, the life of that reality has to be at once incurably evil and potentially good.

4

Jude the Obscure is, then, the history of a worthy man's education. Part One, for example, is primarily an account of Jude's youth up to the moment he departs for Christminster in search of learning. From the very beginning, however, Jude and the world through which he moves are presented as they appear to the eyes of one who has accepted the view of things which will be the end-product of Jude's education. In so far as Jude understands this view of things, he is not dramatized; he is the author. In so far as, in his innocence, he ignores the necessities and their implications which this view sees, he is dramatized, objectified by Hardy's irony. Hardy's narrative is, then, secondarily, a demonstration of the consequences of Jude's innocent ignorance of "Nature's logic"—in Part One in the matter of sex. Nature takes its revenge by entangling Jude irretrievably with Arabella. Hardy gives this demonstration a complex poetic elaboration, and it is easy to suppose as a consequence that his narrative is fundamentally symbolic, the pitting of two different views of experience—Jude's and Arabella's—against each other in a neutral arena. That it is not is evident from the fact that Hardy as the narrator takes advantage of every opportunity to support Jude's attitude. Furthermore, this part cannot, as symbolic narrative, be fitted into any pattern which runs through the book as a whole, for the only pattern Jude has is the pattern of history.

Nevertheless the poetic elaboration of this episode is interesting as an example, characteristic of the procedure of the book as a whole, of how Hardy's idea, striving to establish a form which will make sense of it, is constantly breaking through the limits of the naturalistic form. The meeting of Arabella and Jude, for example, is brought about by Arabella's hitting Jude with a pig's pizzle. No better image for what drew Arabella and Jude together could be found, and, a symbol of their meeting, the pig's pizzle hangs on the bridge rail between them throughout their first meeting. Thereafter, Arabella scarcely appears in this part unaccompanied by pigs. In the same way Jude's dream of an education which will take him through Christminster to a career as a philanthropic bishop is associated with a vision of Christminster as seen from the roof of the old Brown House against the blaze of the setting sun, like the heavenly Jerusalem, as the child Jude says solemnly to the tiler. It is also associated with the New Testament. The New Testament, in its strictly moral aspect, is the textbook of Hardy's humanitarian morality, and in so far as Jude values its morality he is demonstrating his instinctively humanitarian feelings. But Jude's Testament represents for him also religion and, in that it is a Greek text, learning; and in valuing it on these counts he is demonstrating his illusions.

During the wooing of Arabella by Jude there are sporadic recrudescences of these symbols. For example, Hardy is constantly bringing the two lovers back to the rise on which the old Brown House stands, from which Jude had once seen his vision of the heavenly Jerusalem and where, under the influence of an impulse rather awkwardly explained on the narrative level, he had also once knelt and prayed to Apollo and Diana, the god and goddess of learning and chastity (33). Under the influence of Arabella, Jude "passed the spot where he had knelt to Diana and Phoebus without remembering that there were any such people in the mythology, or that the sun was anything else than a useful lamp for illuminating Arabella's face" (46). Hardy carefully notes, too, that a picture of Samson and Delilah hangs on the wall of the tavern where the two lovers stop for tea but instead, partly at Arabella's suggestion, drink beer (48, 79, 451). The linkage of Arabella and liquor (she had been a bar-maid) is valuable to Hardy not only as a piece of naturalism but because it makes Arabella an incarnation of what Jude later calls "my two Arch Enemies … my weakness for women and my impulse to strong liquor" (420).

Yet these symbols, effective as they are, are sporadic and unsystematized. Hardy never deserts his naturalistic narrative and commits his meaning to them completely, and so the reader never feels to the full in him what Henry James once so beautifully called the renewal "in the modern alchemist [of] something like the old dream of the secret of life." Hardy never thought of himself as a modern alchemist but only as a historian. This fact is plain enough in the climactic scene of this part, the pig-killing scene, for here the pig is not primarily a symbol but an object at the naturalistic level. Arabella takes toward it, as such, an attitude perfectly consistent with the attitude she has maintained throughout. Her concern is for the salableness of the meat, and even her urging that Jude kill the pig quickly when it cries out is determined by her conventional fear lest the cry reveal to the neighbors that the Fawley's have sunk to killing their own pig. "Poor folks must live," she says when Jude protests against the inhumanity of slowly bleeding the pig to death (72). And though Hardy's description of the incident precludes any sympathy for Arabella, this statement is profoundly true within the limits of the world Arabella is aware of.

In direct contrast to Arabella's practical view of this killing, Hardy sets Jude's idealistic view of it: "The white snow, stained with the blood of his fellow-mortal, wore an illogical look to him as a lover of justice, not to say a Christian; …" (73). There is irony here, of course, but it is directed solely to the point that Hardy "could not see how the matter was to be mended" (73), not at all to the point that in one very real sense—the sense that Arabella understood—it could and ought never to be mended. This is so because Hardy is in fact and, as a consequence, by the form he has chosen committed to Jude's view of this incident. That commitment is clear in every word Hardy himself writes about the pig; for example: "The dying animal's cry assumed its third and final tone, the shriek of agony; his glazing eyes rivetting themselves on Arabella with the eloquently keen reproach of a creature recognizing at last the treachery of those who had seemed his only friends" (71).

The consequence of the author's putting the full weight of his authority in this way behind one of the conflicting views of the events is to take the ground out from under the other. The events are presented only as Jude saw them, so that Arabella's view of them seems to the reader simply inexplicably hard-hearted, however common-place. Hardy can see that Arabella's attitude, in its complete ignorance of Jude's, is grimly funny: "''Od damn it all!' she cried, 'that ever I should say it! You've over-stuck un! An d I telling you all the time—'" (71). But he cannot see that it is in any sense justified. The result of this commitment of the author is that the scene as a whole becomes sentimental; and it is difficult to resist the temptation to read it as "a burlesque of the murder of Duncan" with the pig substituted for the king ("Well—you must do the sticking—there's no help for it. I'll show you how. Or I'll do it myself—I think I could." [70]).

This pig-killing scene is of course meant to connect in the reader's mind with the earlier episode where Farmer Troutham whips Jude for allowing the rooks to eat his corn. For Jude the rooks "took upon them more and more the aspect of gentle friends and pensioners.… A magic thread of fellow-feeling united his own life with theirs. Puny and sorry as those lives were, they much resembled his own" (10). Here again Hardy presents these birds and Jude only as Jude sees them. For all his knowledge of "the defence and salvation of the body" he signally fails to do justice to Farmer Troutham's view of them, just as he fails to do justice to Arabella's view of Jude and the pig, because he cannot present two kinds of truth in a naturalistic novel. Hamlet, to say nothing of Shakespeare, could understand and yet defy augury both for himself and the sparrow, since he knew well in the end from experience what was well enough known to him from his reading from the start, that there is a "special providence" in these matters, so that "the readiness is all." Hardy, like Jude and Jaques, could only weep, knowing no providence at all. Shakespeare could therefore write "The Phoenix and the Turtle," Hardy only "Compassion: An Ode in Celebration of the Centenary of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals."

Part Two (at Christminster) brings Hardy's spiritual Whittington to his London where he is taught that his desire for learning had been only "a social unrest which had no foundation in the nobler instincts; which was purely an artificial product of civilization" (151). At the very beginning he catches a glimpse of the truth: "For a moment there fell on Jude a true illumination; that here in the stone-yard was a centre of effort as worthy as that dignified by the name of scholarly study within the noblest of the colleges" (96). Apart from his narrative function, Phillotson is used in this part to foreshadow Jude's discovery of this truth and to reveal what happens to a weaker person at such a disappointment (116-17). Arabella's temporary conversion after Cartlett's death has the same kind of formal relation to Sue's conversion, with the additional irony that Sue's conversion involves a return to active sexual life which she hates, Arabella's a loss of it which she cannot endure (373). Jude's discovery of the fraudulence of learning leaves him only his Christianity; that he will discover this too is "as dead as a fern-leaf in a lump of coal" Hardy tells us directly (96-7). That it has been replaced by a German-Gothic fake he suggests by his references to the tearing down of the "hump-backed, wood-turreted, and quaintly hipped" Marygreen church and to the "tall new building of German-Gothic design" erected in its place (6, 146).

Meanwhile Jude meets his cousin Sue, whom Hardy always keeps before the reader as Jude first saw her in the picture at Marygreen, "in a broad hat, with radiating folds under the brim like the rays of a halo" (88), not only because she remains always for Jude a saint but because, by a terrible irony, she literally becomes one at the end of the book. Sue has twice Jude's quickness of wit and half his strength of character. She therefore saw from the beginning that there was nothing in the universe except "Nature's law"; but because of her lack of real profundity, she thought also that it was "Nature's … raison d'être, that we should be joyful in what instincts she afforded us …" (403). When she discovered that nature had no raison d'être and that paganism was as false as Christianity had seemed to her, she did not have the strength to face it and went back to conventional wifehood and conventional Christianity. All this, even the impermanence of Sue's paganism (the figures of Venus and Apollo are plaster and come off on her gloves and jacket), is implicit in the episode of the images in Chapter II and in the recollections of Sue's childhood in Chapter VI . By a fine piece of irony—since Sue is, while her strength lasts, a saint of Hardy's humanitarian faith—Hardy has Jude focus not only his physical but his religious feelings on Sue. Gradually he learns from her and experience the omnipotence of Nature's law. But meanwhile Jude sees this imperfect saint of humanitarianism as an Anglican saint. Of the irony of this illusion Hardy makes much (e.g., 123), and in incident after incident, until Jude unlearns his Christianity, he reëmphasizes the irony of this love between the pagan and delicately sexed Sue and the Christian and passionate Jude.

In Part Three Jude, having realized that learning is vain and that only his "altruistic feeling" had any "foundation in the nobler instincts," goes to Melchester, partly because it is "a spot where worldly learning and intellectual smartness had no establishment" (152), partly because Sue is there. There follows a series of episodes which represent the conflict between Sue's daring humanitarian faith and her weak conventional conduct, on the one hand, and Jude's "Tractarian" faith and courageously honest conduct, on the other. In the end, of course, Hardy arranges events so as to demonstrate the omnipotence of "the artificial system of things, under which the normal sex-impulses are turned into devilish domestic gins and springes to noose and hold back those who want to progress" (257), and Sue marries Phillotson. In Part Four Jude's education is almost lost sight of in the welter of narrative detail. Occasionally its progress is marked for the reader, as when Jude replies to Sue's question whether she ought to continue to live with Phillotson: "Speaking as an order-loving man—which I hope I am, though I fear I am not—I should say yes. Speaking from experience and unbiassed nature, I should say no" (248). Though Sue and Jude determine to sacrifice their love to right conduct, their coming together on the occasion of their aunt's death at Marygreen finally forces Jude to recognize the evil of the church's marriage system and Sue to realize that she must leave Phillotson for Jude. Sue tries at first to avoid marriage and an active sexual life, but Arabella's return, ironically, forces her to yield to Jude in order to hold him.

There follows in Part Five a period when "the twain were happy—between their times of sadness …" (341). Hardy shows them as devoted lovers at the Great Wessex Agricultural Show, where they are carefully contrasted with the conventional married couple Arabella and Cartlett (Chapter V) . But the pressure of the conventional world on them as unmarried lovers forces them down and down until Jude, "still haunted by his dream" (395), brings Sue and the children to a "depressing purlieu" of Christminster. Here Jude makes a speech, from the cross, as it were, to the Roman soldiers of Christminster in which he states the result of his education: "I perceive there is something wrong somewhere in our social formulas: what it is can only be discovered by men or women with greater insight than mine—if, indeed, they ever discover it—at least, in our time" (388).

It is here at Christminster that Hardy makes the most extreme use of his one completely symbolic character, Father Time. Al l through Part Five he has been used to strike the ominous note which reminds us that Sue and Jude's moderate happiness is a snare and a delusion. Now, under the influence of his perfectly arbitrary melancholy and the misinterpretation of something Sue says, he kills all the children, including himself. Father Time is Jude and Arabella's son brought up by Jude and Sue, in order that Hardy may say (400):

On that little shape had converged all the inauspiciousness and shadow which had darkened the first union of Jude, and all the accidents, mistakes, fears, errors of the last. He was their nodal point, their focus, their expression in a single term. For the rashness of those parents he had groaned, for their ill-assortment he had quaked, and for the misfortunes of these he had died.

The effect of this incident on Jude and Sue is to place each of them in the position from which the other had started at the beginning of the book (409):

One thing troubled him more than any other, that Sue and himself had mentally travelled in opposite directions since the tragedy: events which had enlarged his own views of life, laws, customs, and dogmas, had not operated in the same manner on Sue's. She was no longer the same as in the independent days, when her intellect played like lambent lightning over conventions and formalities which he had at that time respected, though he did not now.

Sue returns to Christianity and Phillotson as a consequence of this change; and Jude, partly because of a kind of stunned indifference (he takes to drink), and partly because of Arabella's predatory sexuality, returns to his first wife. It is perfectly apparent that in Hardy's opinion Sue has done an unforgivably inhuman thing to save a perfectly imaginary soul.

But Hardy is at least willing to suggest a conflict in Sue between her affection for Jude and her religious belief, even if he is capable of seeing only one right in that conflict. Thus, when Jude departs from their last meeting, to which he had gone knowing that he was committing suicide, "in a last instinct of human affection, even now unsubdued by her fetters, she sprang up as if to go and succor him. But she knelt down again, and stopped her ears with her hands till all possible sound of him had passed away" (466). On his way home Jude feels "the chilly fog from the meadows of Cardinal as if death-claws were grabbing me through and through" (469); Hardy catches the whole complex of "stern reality" in this symbolic statement by Jude. College, church, social convention, the very things which Jude had at the beginning believed in as the representatives of his ideal, have killed him, either by betraying him directly or by teaching Sue to betray him.

When Hardy comes to Jude's actual death, he also presents Arabella with a choice, the choice of staying with the dying Jude or going to the Remembrance games. The representation of her here is perhaps the best brief illustration in the book of the melodramatic effect which resulted from Hardy's exclusive attitude toward his material. There is not the slightest sign of conflict in Arabella over her choice; she goes without question to the games, flirts with the quack physician Vilbert, and is upset only by the thought that "if Jude were discovered to have died alone an inquest might be deemed necessary" (485). As in the pig-killing scene, Arabella is shown as feeling only brute passion and fear of convention; she is the parody villainess of melodrama, not the mighty opposite of tragedy. Thus the immediate pathos of Jude's death in part derives from Arabella's villainous neglect of him; like the cheers of the Remembrance day crowd which are counterpointed against Jude's dying quotation from Job, however, this neglect illustrates only the complete indifference of society to Jude's dream of an ideal life. The rest of the pathos derives from Jude's uncertainty as to why he had been born at all. But the meaning of his death, in so far as it has one, derives from such conviction as Hardy can muster that Jude's life has not been in vain, but the unfortunate life of a man who had tried to live the ideal life several generations before the world was reformed enough to allow him to. Jude's death is not, therefore, in our ordinary understanding of the word, tragic; since it is the result of a conflict between the ideal life a man wished to lead and the only temporarily squalid real life which he was forced to lead.

Jude the Obscure is then, not a tragedy, not a carefully devised representation of life the purpose of which is to contrast, at every turn, the permanently squalid real life of man, with the ideal life (or, if you will, man's dream of an ideal life). It is the history of how an obscure but worthy man, living a life which Hardy conceived to be representative, learned gradually "that the social moulds civilization fits us into have no more relation to our actual shapes than the conventional shapes of the constellations have to the real star-patterns" (242), learned what the true morality of "unbiassed nature" is. In the process of learning this optimistic morality he discovered also that neither nature nor society even recognized it, to say nothing of living by it. In so far as Hardy gave him hope at the end that in time they would, he denied what he otherwise saw so clearly, that earth's conditions are ingrained; in so far as he did not give Jude this hope he denied the possibility of the only ideal life he could conceive and made his hero's life and death essentially meaningless.

The instructive comparison to Jude is of course Hamlet. For Shakespeare too saw most profoundly the horror of life's ingrained conditions. But because he could also understand and represent the attitude of those who sought to adjust themselves to life's conditions, he saw that the only hope he could give his hero was for that consummation he so devoutly wished, and death is the only felicity Hamlet ever deems possible. Hamlet's death is not death in a universe in which there is no place without bad dreams; neither is it a death justified by a hope that some day the world's ingrained conditions will come unstuck. Jude's death is a little bit of both.

Hardy says in the preface to Jude that it "is simply an endeavor to give shape and coherence to a series of seemings, or personal impressions, the question of their consistency or their discordance … being regarded as not of the first moment." In that the feeling of the presented life in Jude has a powerful coherence this is a justified defense of it. But it is precisely because Hardy never really posed for himself the question of how the meaning of his impressions could be coherent without being consistent that Jude, for all the power of its presented life, is not a tragedy.