I

Sixty years after publication, Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure still elicits controversial judgments. The majority of recent critics, such as William R. Rutland, Lord David Cecil, R. A. Scott-James, Douglas Brown, and Evelyn Hardy, have judged the book a relative failure because of its violations of probability, its morbidity, or its philosophical pretentiousness.¹ Other critics, such as Lascelles Abercrombie, H. C. Duffin, Joseph Warren Beach, Arthur McDowall, and Albert Guerard, have acclaimed the book as possibly Hardy's best.² I agree with the most recent critic in this group, Albert Guerard, who finds Jude the Obscure, despite the "naturalistic paraphernalia," a haunting symbolic rendition of the modern age as it appeared to a compassionate pessimist.³ In order to arrive at a sound approach to the novel, I have had recourse less to book-length studies of Thomas Hardy—except for Abercrombie and Guerard these are disappointing—than to articles and incidental treatments of Hardy in more general books.

Though I disagree with them in part, two of the most perceptive of these accounts—Arthur Mizener's and Walter Allen's—can serve as basis for further discussion.⁴ These critics maintain that Hardy's naturalistic technique in Jude sets it off from his earlier fiction. More than in his preceding books, Hardy does stress the effects both of heredity and environment upon his characters, the conviction that social laws operate like natural laws, the presence of a strong if still incomplete determinism in human affairs, the need to present the unsavory and animalistic aspects of experience, the sense that primitive and eruptive forces are part, of human nature, the insistence that Darwinian postulates underlie any modern world view, the belief that individualistic force is needed to break from an inherited morality, and the view mat ethics are inductively derived from experience. Granted that these premises obtrude with greater force in Jude the Obscure than in the other novels, still Thomas Hardy primarily remained faithful in Jude the Obscure to his earlier defined, more fluid theory of the art of fiction.

Thomas Hardy departed from naturalistic convention in Jude the Obscure in being unable to efface his temperament from his work. Jude the Obscure thus illustrates Hardy's view that a writer should be free to select his materials, to give shape and form to them, to explore their poetical and metaphysical implications, and to declare his belief, however tentative or qualified, in values which he deems to have some permanent validity in experience.⁵ Hardy felt that "scientific" novelists were to be commended for their desire to present the full truth and for their hatred of the false and hypocritical; but he also felt that artistic effectiveness derived more from a "sympathetic appreciativeness of life in all its manifestations" than from a sensitive eye and ear alone.⁶. He alleged, therefore, that "art" in poetry and novel writing results in an illumination of subject material, going beyond mere reportage. ⁷ The mission of poetry, he said, is to record impressions and not convictions; ⁸ in the preface to Jude the Obscure he expressed himself similarly upon the art of the novel. This book, he maintained, was like former productions of his in being "simply an endeavor to give shape and coherence to a series of seemings, or personal impressions, the question of their consistency or their discordance, of their permanence or their transitoriness, being regarded as not of the first moment."⁹

Disregard or misconstruction of this statement has led Mizener and Allen to emphasize too completely the realism of Jude the Obscure. Mr. Mizener contends that its symbolic embellishments, which represent Hardy's attempt to give order to his impressions, are ineffective, and represent "a kind of desperate contrivance" in a basically naturalistic novel. ¹⁰ The symbolism in Jude the Obscure, I feel, is not adventitious but organic; it prevades the whole and provides those shades of ineffable and expanded significance which Mizener finds absent.

Allen's view that the power and impressiveness of the novel derive from "Hardy's very refusal to employ his great poetic talents in it" is, I think, similarly debatable." It is just his exercise of these gifts in concentrated form which gives the book its full life. Allen apparently views the symbolism of Jude the Obscure as almost wholly ironic, existing primarily to provide implicit rational commentary upon incident, character, and value. Such is indeed the case, but most of the images in the novel haunt the imagination as well as gratify the mind. In an ineffable and poetic dimension, they give nuance, resonance, and intensity to action, psychology, and idea, and carry the fabric—of which they form part—away from an objectively rendered and obviously typical reality. In Jude the Obscure we have a naturalistic novel, but a naturalistic novel with a difference. Thus when Jude the Obscure is compared with A Mummer's Wife or The Nether World, its imagined universe stands out in far sharper relief.

Norman Holland, in his important "Jude the Obscure: Hardy's Symbolic Indictment of Christianity,"¹² has developed Guerard's insight that Jude is primarily a symbolic depiction of the chaotic modern age. Holland also admirably illustrates Morton D. Zabel's related insight that Hardy is a realist "developing toward allegory" and, in the process, getting away increasingly from "slavery to fact." ¹³ If anything, Holland errs in an opposite direction from Mizener and Allen, and concludes that Jude the Obscure is more allegorical than realistic. In the images of the novel Holland finds a pattern through which Hardy denies the relevance of Christianity to the modern world. The hanging by Father Time—a modern Jesus Christ—of himself and the two Fawley children is, in Holland's view, an atonement which is not efficacious in a spiritually barren society. Holland's interpretation is perhaps extreme: Hardy not only indicts Christianity, but by inference throughout the novel also condemns modern society for its failure to exemplify Christian ethical values. Furthermore, Father Time is "an enslaved and dwarfed Divinity" (p. 336) and in his narrow wilfulness becomes a parody upon, as well as counterpart to, the Christian Saviour. My purpose is to approach the novel with a method similar to Holland's but to give my discussion a less allegorical focus. Thus I shall endeavor to relate, more closely than Holland has done, the images and clusters of images in the novel to the actual lives of Sue Bridehead and Jude Fawley in society.

I wish also to develop the importance of one aspect of Hardy's technique, which Guerard has dismissed with slighting comment: his purposeful use of contrast. ¹⁴ All the contrasts in Jude are not so purely factitious and geometrical as Guerard indicates. Many of the parallel incidents provide a symbolic and metaphysical commentary upon the characters and their problems, just as the characters in parallel situations throw light upon one another and the action as a whole. In short, the ramifications and contortions of plot are in themselves provocative, and open up unexpected ranges of meaning. My examination of Hardy's marshalling of images and symbols in the novel, in conjunction with his skilled use of significant contrasts, will, I think, amplify Guerard's view that the lasting impression produced by Jude is its spiritual "trueness" for a time of moral, intellectual, and spiritual dislocation.¹⁵

II

The first function of the images, symbols, and symbolic or parallel incidents in Jude the Obscure is to deepen and reinforce the realistic and psychological aspects of the narrative, our impressions of the characters who figure in it, and the various developments arising from it. A number of images, first encountered in the early part of the novel, operate in this way. There is, for example, the well at Marygreen into whose depths Jude peered as a boy. Its "long circular perspective" indicates the path of Jude's own existence which many times converges circularly upon Marygreen. In somewhat the same manner, the schoolmaster Phillotson returns recurrently to Marygreen, where he had first been a teacher. The well also suggests infinity, and conveys an impression of the continuity of nature and of life itself. It hints at psychic and spiritual renewal and acts, therefore, as a counter-weight to many of the death-connoting images in the novel. The well is in part a natural phenomenon and as such will survive man-made objects: thus it has outlasted the old church which has been supplanted by a newer, less aesthetically pleasing structure. Along with the suggestion of infinity, the well had given to the young Jude intimations of sadness and of the inscrutability of life; these impressions are, of course, heightened in him and us by his destiny.

The well has possible sexual connotations, too, and suggests the darkness, the mystery, the security, and the fertile energies of the womb. It thus reinforces the animal imagery which betokens physical sexuality and which is especially prominent in the early part of the novel.¹⁶ There art the copulating earthworms which Jude as a boy tries to avoid crushing in a wet pasture. They are responding to the same natural force motivating the peasant youths and maidens who make love in upland privacy and populate thereby the neighboring villages. Somewhat later, Jude and Arabella become such lovers themselves. Arabella is, of course, associated with pigs throughout the novel; she is twice referred to as a "tiger," and at the Aldbrickham hotel when Sue visits her, she springs from bed like a beast from its lair. The most celebrated of the animal images is the pig's pizzle which Arabella throws at Jude to attract his attention when, at the brookside, she is washing a slaughtered pig for her father. One of the most arresting scenes is the subsequent flirtation on the bridge, after Arabella hangs on the rail the pizzle which Jude surrenders to her in a ritualistic yielding of his own virginity to her. The coarse and sensual nature of their soon developing affair is explicit, then, from its outset.

The first of a group of images and incidents relating to music appears early in the book. In the opening section Phillotson has difficulty getting a piano moved which he has never learned to play. His failure to master it is linked with his inability to play, subtly and potently, upon the keyboard of a woman's sensibility; with the defeat of his other aspirations, social, intellectual, and spiritual; and with the absence of emotional depths in his nature. While Sue is Phillotson's wife at Shaston, she and Jude are brought together when he plays upon this piano a newly written hymn which appeals with power to both of them. Almost from the first, then, Sue and Jude share, to Phillotson's detriment, experiences from which he is excluded. In addition to his sexual magnetism, Jude has greater spiritual reserves, in general, than Phillotson. Thus Jude achieves considerable distinction in church music at Melchester, singing with deep feeling the church chants while he accompanies himself with ease on a harmonium.

Events at Christminster are often subtly developed by references to music. Jude is greatly moved by the Gregorian chant which he hears at the cathedral church of Cardinal College: "Wherewithal shall a young man cleanse his way?" (p. 106). At this point he has begun struggling against his feeling for Sue, and the chant seems to have a special significance for him as sinner. His feeling of guilt disappears when he sees Sue in the cathedral and becomes conscious that they are both steeped in the same exalted harmonies. As Jude leaves Christminster in despair at the defeat of his intellectual ambitions, he cannot respond to the gay promenade concert. Some years later upon his return to Christminster he is much more susceptible to the spirited music which, on Remembrance Day, peals from the theater organ. The spell exerted by Christminster upon Jude is greater, therefore, than the bitterness engendered in him by his failure to become part of the university. In ironic counterpoint to the tragedy at Christminster when little Father Time hangs himself and the Fawley children is the joyous tumult of the organ sounding from a nearby chapel ("Truly God is loving unto Israel," [p. 412]) after the bodies have been discovered. The same incongruity obtrudes on the second Remembrance Day when the lilting strains of a waltz from Cardinal College penetrate the chamber where Jude has just died. Sue's early view of ultimate reality, in part Hardy's own, is expressed by a musical metaphor. She had thought that "the world resembled a stanza or melody composed in a dream" (p. 418), full of ineffable suggestion to the half-perceiving mind but "absurd" to the completely awakened intelligence. Sue's later distress, of course, involves a retreat from this position to a less aesthetically satisfying concept of God as an anthropomorphic being who does not hesitate to punish those who flout convention.

Images in the novel drawn from the Bible also serve to intensify its realism and the psychic impulsions of its characters. The relationship between Jude and Arabella is given by the picture of Samson and Delilah at the inn where the lovers decide to get tea during their courtship and are forced to get beer instead. As Holland observes, Arabella thereby combines the two forces which undermine Jude, his passion for women and his developing taste for strong drink. ¹⁷ When he is duped a second time into marrying Arabella, she appropriately thinks of him as "her shorn Samson" (p. 464). Biblical and ecclesiastical images are also associated with Sue Bridehead, who looks like a saint with a halo of light in her portrait at Marygreen and who is engaged in an apparently saintly occupation at Christminster. She is an artist for an ecclesiastical warehouse and is designing, when Jude first sees her through the shop window, the word Alleluia in zinc. Without knowing her "Voltairean" propensities, he feels that she would be a sweet companion for him in the Anglican worship, opening for him new social and spiritual possibilities and soothing him "like the dew of Hermon" (p. 107). In her marital difficulties she identifies herself with the Christian drama in Eden. Writing to Phillotson from her school room, she wishes that Eve had not fallen, so that a more delicate mode of reproduction than sex might have peopled Paradise. In her developing asceticism after the death of her children, she regards the flesh as "the curse of Adam" (p. 421). If, as she had said previously, she was "the Ishmaelite" as a result of her disregard of convention, she feels still more of an outcast after she tries to expiate her tragedy by mortification of the flesh.

In view of his devotion to Christianity in the first half of the novel, Jude is linked even more firmly with Biblical incident man is Sue. At Shaston Sue describes Jude as "Joseph, the dreamer of dreams" (p. 247) and as "St. Stephen who, while they were stoning him, could see heaven opened" (pp. 247-248). Here Sue refers, at least by implication, to Jude's scarcely practicable dreams, first of entering Christminster and then of becoming an altruistic licentiate, to his early vision of Christminster as a "heavenly Jerusalem," and to the scorn merged with indifference which his unusual ambition arouses among his Marygreen and Christminster acquaintances. When Jude gets to Christminster, he is fascinated by a model of ancient Jerusalem while Sue as a skeptic is indifferent to it. This model of Jerusalem anticipates that made by Jude and Sue some years later of his "new Jerusalem," Cardinal College, for the Great Wessex Agricultural Show at Stoke-Barehills.

The completeness of Jude's defeat at Christminster is implied when he climbs into the octagonal lantern of the theater and sees the city spread out before his eyes as if it were a Pisgah view of the Promised Land which he is never to reach. He then leaves the town, broken in spirit, and returns to Marygreen, "a poor Christ" (p. 147). When he comes back to Christminster in the last part of the novel, he lingers nostalgically outside the theater where he had first realized that study at Christminster was impossible for a man of his resources. Like Jude, the New Testament scribe who sought to reclaim his lapsed contemporaries to the love of Christ by citing the punishments meted to those in the Old Testament who defied God, Jude Fawley is a prophetic figure, seeing further than most of his contemporaries and deploring the placid indifference of most of them to the demands of Christian charity. As a stranger, too, to people in his own class, he is likened the last time at Christminster to Paul among the Lycaonians. Jude at this point is translating a Latin inscription and describing a carving to assembled strangers from the town side of Christminster. Jude, "the Tutor of St. Slums," had been thrust out of Christminster as Paul had been from Lystra; and like Paul, who returns to the city after persecution to preach again his gospel, Jude later comes back to Christminster to voice his radical social ideas to the crowd. On this return to his old haunts, he observes that leaving Kennetbridge for Christminster was like going from Caiaphas to Pilate. There is, by implication, no place anywhere for a man of his talents from his humble class.

Images drawn from pagan and classical sources also heighten character and incident. Pagan allusions gather around Sue early in the novel: the atmosphere surrounding her "blew as distinctly from Cyprus as from Galilee" (p. 107). A vivid scene occurs when she is walking on a hill outside Christminster and sees some statuary of classical deities, carved by an itinerant foreigner, spread out before her and half obliterating the distant towers of the city. Sue's pagan skepticism gets between her and the Christian traditions of the city which from the first secure Jude's allegiance. Her Pisgah view of the city shows her that the secular is fast encroaching upon the religious and indeed must continue to do so if the University is ever to recover intellectual leadership.

A pagan in her sympathies, Sue purchases statues of Venus and Apollo which upon nearer view seem to her embarrassingly large and naked. In theory, then, she embraces a pagan abandon which, in the actuality, discomposes her. She wraps the statues in leaves and brings her "heathen load" into the Christian city, much to the later horror of Miss Fontover, Sue's pious employer, who grinds one of the images with her heel and breaks its arm. Like ecclesiastical Christianity, then, pagan humanism is an incomplete philosophy for the modern age and its survival even more precarious, since its enlarged perspectives so often go counter to convention. Sue's own paganism is imperfect, possibly transient: the clay of the statues rubs off easily. At night she places candles before them as before Christian icons and communes with them raptly. At one such time she reads Swinburne, who expresses her own regret that "the pale Galilean" has conquered. While she peruses Swinburne and Gibbon, Jude in his lodging is studying the Greek New Testament. In the diffused light the statues stand out commandingly against the wall ornaments: Christian texts, pictures of martyrs, and a gothic framed Latin cross, the figure on which is shrouded by shadows. This obscurely seen cross, which signifies the present abeyance of Christian sentiment in Sue, is in complete contrast to the brightly jeweled Latin cross in the church of St. Silas under which Jude finds Sue toward the end of the novel when, as a result of personal tragedy, Christian conventions become prominent in her life.

After Sue escapes from the training school at Melchester, where she had previously appeared "nunlike" to Jude, she seems to him "clammy as a marine deity" (p. 171) from having forded the river behind the school. Like a latterday Venus Anadyomene, she seems to have materialized spontaneously out of the waters. If in this sequence she brings to mind the pagan goddess of love, Sue is no sensual Pandemos-like deity but the Venus Urania of heavenly love with whom she somewhat later identifies herself. Her garments also cling to her "like the robes upon the figures in the Parthenon frieze" (p. 171). In her most expansive moods, she seems to Jude, after they live together at Aldbrickham, to be a serene Roman matron or an enlightened woman from Greece who may have just been watching Praxiteles carving his latest Venus. Later, of course, Sue renounces Greek joyousness for Christian asceticism, and "the pale Galilean" in actuality does conquer.

Although Jude is most often seen in a Christian ambience, he is sometimes described in terms of the pagan past. As a devout young aspirant to intellectual culture who momentarily forgets his Christianity before his first sojourn at Christminster, he repeats the "Carmen Saeculare" and invokes on his knees the gods of moon and sun in parallel sequence to Sue's later worship of her statues at night. When Jude returns defeated from Christminster, he is described as a Laocöon contorted by grief; the pagan image implies that the bonds of Christian orthodoxy are loosening even now, primarily as a result of his unpermitted passion for Sue. He is also sensitive to the pessimistic, as well as to the harmonious aspects, of classical antiquity. After the Widow Edlin in Aldbrickham has told the lovers of their ill-fated ancestor who had been hanged as the ultimate result of a marital quarrel, Sue feels that the curse of the house of Atreus hangs over the family, and Jude then compares its doom to that haunting the house of Jeroboam. Later in the novel, however, it is Jude who resorts to the Agamemnon to demonstrate that Sue's premonition concerning the ancestral curse hanging over the Fawleys had been correct: "Things are as they are, and will be brought to their destined issue" (p. 415). After their tragedy, the lovers are seen to be, as they move through the Christminster fog, "Acherontic shades" (p. 440). When the seriously ill Jude perceives the ghosts of the Christminster worthies a second time (after his final trip to Marygreen), he poignantly quotes Antigone to signify his own anomalous and wretched situation: "I am neither a dweller among men nor ghosts" (p. 483). Despite his discouragement and enervation, Jude's persisting moral force resembles that of a stolid, stoic man of antiquity. This is suggested when he is described on his final trip to Marygreen as being "pale as a monumental figure in alabaster" (p. 476), or when he is seen by Arabella to be "pale" and "statuesque" in death with his features like "marble."

Another group of symbolic incidents is concerned with action taking place at windows or casements. At Melchester, Sue jumps from a window at the training college in order to escape the hateful discipline imposed there; at Shaston she jumps from a window to escape from Phillotson and the regimentation imposed by marriage. When Sue springs from the window at the Melchester school and wades neck-deep through the river to escape, she is making a sharp break with her past and is being borne into another life with Jude at its center. Her break for freedom takes her to the lodgings of the man she loves, but destiny prevents her then from seeing where her affections are centered. Hearing from Jude that he had been married previously, she is precipitated into her union with Phillotson, an impulsive action toward Phillotson in contrast with her later bold jump through the window away from him at Shaston. When Jude comes to visit her at Shaston, she talks to him from a casement, strokes his forehead, and calls him a dreamer; a similar episode takes place at Marygreen a few weeks later after Jude mercifully kills a maimed rabbit caught in a gin. She then leans far out of the window at Mrs . Edlin's and lays her tear-stained face on his hair. Seen so often from a relatively inaccessible casement, Sue is in part the immured enchanted maiden, also a kind of inverted Juliet talking to her ardent lover from the safety of a balcony, to which she does not invite him. Somewhat later Jude, living at Aldbrickham with Sue, talks to Arabella from an upper window of the house when she comes to tell him of the existence of the child, Father Time. Whereas Sue had to this time kept the passionate Jude at a distance, the walls of this house—primly erected upon Sue's inconsistent adherence to the conventions she affects to despise—are hardly proof against Arabella's frankly competitive, more direct animal energies. Afraid of losing Jude to Arabella, Sue yields at last to his ardor to possess her.

Other images or symbolic episodes give the novel a richer texture than that usually found in a realistic narrative. Thus the agonies of jealousy experienced by Sue's lovers at various points in the novel gain strength by being counterpointed with each other. Jude is tortured after the marriage at Melchester by the thought that any children born to Sue would be half Phillotson's. After Sue's visit to him in an illness following her departure from him, Phillotson himself is in jealous agony at the thought of Jude as Sue's physical lover (at this point he is not, so Phillotson's jealousy is wasted). Sue also experiences momentary discomfiture when she first sees Father Time, the child of Jude and Arabella, and thinks that he is as much Arabella's as Jude's. In his distressing final interview with Sue at Marygreen, what sustains Jude is her declaration that she is a wife to Phillotson only in name, whereas what later breaks him down is the Widow Edlin's report to him that Sue has physically become Phillotson's wife as a punishment for having returned Jude's kisses with passion. Sue's statement that she was the only mourner to attend the funeral of her early Christminster lover gathers poignancy when one remembers her absence from the deathbed of the man whom she has loved even more. When she excludes Jude from their bedroom at Christminster, the scene is made intense by his ritualistic gesture of farewell: he flings his pillow to the floor, an act which signifies, he says, the rending of the veil of the temple of their marriage.

Sue, in effect, says farewell to the passions of the flesh in a similarly poignant scene toward the end of the novel. By mistake she had brought with her to Marygreen a beautifully embroidered nightgown. She impulsively tears it and throws the tatters into the fire, thus figuratively eliminating from her nature all stain of unpermitted earthly passion. In its place she will wear a plain nightdress, which impresses the Widow Edlin as similar to the sackcloth which Sue, in her passion for self-centered suffering, would now like to wear. The destruction of the nightgown also recalls another strong incident, Jude's burning his divinity books on a kind of funeral pyre to his religious aspirations when he realizes at Marygreen that he can no longer be licentiate in the church and continue to love Sue. In burning the nightgown Sue aspires, almost successfully, to invalidate the flesh; in burning the books, Jude relinquishes, to the stronger call of the flesh, his aspirations. He decides that he will give up all for love, but he later finds with a kind of hopeless irony that Sue has not fully reciprocated. Jude's destruction of his books also anticipates Arabella's thrusting her religious pamphlets into the hedge when as Cartlett's widow she decides she is still in love with Jude; in both cases, formal religion is unable to restrain a powerful passion. Arabella, moreover, seems to act as a kind of catalyst in the varying relationships between Sue and Jude. The effect of her first visit to the married couple at Aldbrickham is to thrust Sue into Jude's arms and to bring about the consummation of their union. Her second visit to the couple, after the tragedy to the children, confirms Sue in her opinion that she is no longer Jude's and must return to Phillotson, since she has come to the orthodox view that her early marriage is indissoluble.

III

The images and symbolic patterns in the novel not only deepen its significance, but give it scope and amplitude. The full and extended representations of locale help give the novel its broadened perspectives and take it again beyond the unadorned content of most naturalistic novels. In Hardy's evocation the physical Christminster is replete with Gothic grace and charming if irregular architectural harmonies. Shaston, "the ancient British Palladour," is described as "the city of a dream" (p. 239) and its past glories are suggested as they would now appeal to the sensitive beholder of the picturesque town. Melchester with its towering cathedral is presented with similar immediacy, though no set description of town or cathedral is given.

Although Marygreen is a desolate and remote spot, Hardy savored its uniqueness and quaintness. In particular, the features of the spacious countryside nearby are assimilated effectively into the action of the novel. The highway ascending the downs from Alfredston to Marygreen is one of the most consistently used topographical images in the novel. This is the road that Jude walks with Arabella in the early days of their relationship, it is along this road that the newly married pair settle, and it is by this road that Jude returns several times to his native village. Along this road occurs the fateful kiss between Jude and Sue; here Arabella, as the "volupshious widow" of Cartlett, relives the early days with Jude and determines to get him back. Phillotson's history is also intimately connected with the highway. The surrounding landscape is full of associations for Jude: the field where he chased the crows for Farmer Troutham, the Brown House from which he first had his view of Christminster in the distance, the milestone upon which he carved the word thither and an arrow pointing toward Christminster, and the gibbet upon which one of his ancestors was reputed to have been hanged. The sequence at Melchester when Jude and Sue climb the downs about Wardour Castle inevitably recalls the courtship walks with Arabella across the heights near Marygreen. One instance of Hardy's skilled use of these topographical images occurs at the novel's close. Jude's inscription on the milestone at Marygreen has now been almost effaced by moss: the implication is that Jude's aspirations have been slowly undermined with the years and are soon to be extinguished in his approaching death.

Other types of nature imagery similarly enlarge the realistic framework of the novel by suggesting that the life of nature underlies the social life of man even when that life is led in urban rather than in rural surroundings. Thus weather becomes as important as the terrain in establishing the emotional impress of Jude the Obscure. The Christminster fog, for example, hangs over the last sequences of the novel and adds to their chill and depressing effect. In one of these scenes, Jude in effect commits suicide by going back to Marygreen in a driving rain after he has begun to show symptoms of consumption. He also lies down to rest by the milestone near the Brown House where wind and rain are fiercest and coldest. Wind and storm continue when Sue that evening forces herself to yield to her husband. In ironic counterpoint to the brilliance of the sun and to the happy Remembrance Day games going on outside, Jude comes to his solitary shadowed end at Christminster. The classical and Biblical allusions, previously analyzed, also give the novel wider reference than a chronicle of contemporary events would normally possess, by suggesting that situations in the present somehow reach back through time and are comparable to conditions at remote dates in the history of humanity.

Both Sue and Jude live in a world of personal fantasy and illusion. The descriptions of their mental reactions and the images used to define them go counter to a strict realism by suggesting that an individualistic life in the mind is often fully as intense as life in society. Jude's inspiriting view of Christminster which his later experience cannot dispel, the lovers' enthusiasm for each other's company as a kind of paradisal union before tragedy strikes, and Jude's imaginative summoning of the spirits of the departed worthies that still haunt the university are all instances in Sue and Jude of concentrated mental vision, related only tangentially to the verisimilar life recorded in the book. Jude at times feels that he is as much a disembodied spirit as a struggling young man, upon occasion a "self-spectre" (p. 91) who is "spectre-seeing always" (p. 180); at the same time he regards Sue, despite her physical beauty, as ethereal and bodiless. Sue and Jude at various times see one another as naive and enthusiastic children; other spectators like Phillotson and Arabella comment upon their childlike quality. Emma Clifford has shown convincingly that part of the imaginative universe of Jude the Obscure consists of a childlike realm of fantasy. ¹⁸ She has demonstrated, moreover, that this realm of fantasy sometimes becomes malignant and approaches nightmare. The malevolence of life is epitomized, for example, by the obtrusive policeman who always acts as a kind of censor whenever the characters are at their most spontaneous. The aged and ageless child, Father Time, with his warped view of life, contributes, too, to the grim fantasy in the novel. Existence seen through the eyes of this precocious and humorless boy becomes a sinister and sick horror, at its most unrelieved, of course, in the hanging of his half-brother, his half-sister, and himself.

IV

The metaphors and metaphorical incidents in the novel often illustrate Hardy's philosophical ideas and values. The indifference of God, or the powers that control the universe, to man and his destiny are indicated figuratively at many points. The hard life of the crows which Jude must scare from Farmer Troutham's field leads him to think that "mercy towards one set of creatures was cruelty towards another" (p. 15); and the selling of her pet pigeons to the poulterer at the removal from Aldbrickham prompts Sue likewise to ask, "Oh, why should Nature's law be mutual butchery!" (p. 376). The imagery deriving from sickness reveals the futility of the characters' lives, their basic neuroticism, and the indifference of the cosmic powers to them. At the close of the novel when Sue as the source of his life's meaning is withdrawn from him, Jude gradually loses the desire to live. In despair he goes to a part of Christminster "where boughs dripped, and coughs and consumption lurked" (p. 444). His life becomes increasingly fevered and reaches a climax of desperation after the sordid saturnalia behind Donn's Christminster sausage shop which leads to his remarriage to Arabella. Subsequently, he is in physical pain from his loss of health and in mental pain from his loss of Sue and from his sense of degradation in having abandoned himself again to Arabella. After his farewell journey to Mary green, "a deadly chill" penetrates his bones; back in Christminster he totters "with cold and lassitude," and becomes more fevered still. The inescapable conclusion is that only in a malignant universe could there be so much undeserved suffering.

The theme of modern restlessness, which Hardy had hitherto explored in The Return of the Native, is also dominating in his last major novel. This theme is not only explicitly stated several times but illustrated through the imagery. Early in the action Jude is described as "a tragic Don Quixote" (p. 247) and as a "Dick Whittington, whose spirit was touched to finer issues than a mere material gain" (p. 89)—the man, in other words, who will give over the ordinary securities and rewards to seek the all but unattainable. In serene Christminster the very buildings seem engaged in an insensate struggle for survival and comment implicitly upon the restlessness and the lack of ideal harmonies in modern society. At Christminister the angularity and precision of the stones cut by modern masons are deceptive. Modern thought is chaotic, less orderly and ordered by far than medieval, even if the relics of medievalism do not have the surface sharpness of modern stones. Jude's social unrest has its counterpart in the vagrancy of the itinerant show people who hibernate at Shaston. Sue, moreover, describes herself as a woman "tossed about, all alone, with aberrant passions and unaccountable antipathies" (p. 248). When Sue and Jude leave a settled life at Aldbrickham for a nomadic existence despite Sue's giving birth thereafter to two children, we may conclude that the social and domestic roots of the couple have dissolved. They spend two and a half years wandering from place to place and finally get back to Christminster. At this juncture Jude describes himself to bystanders as lost in "a chaos of principles—groping in the dark—acting by instinct and not after example" (p. 399). Thus, like Sue, he is symbolic of spiritual malaise and lacks a firm substratum of moral and intellectual values.

The opposition of the forces of life and death, fundamental to the complete meaning of the novel, is conveyed through appropriate images. Thus the past is seen both as a positive and a negative influence. Jude feels the vital energy emanating from Christminster infused into him when he strokes the stones of the buildings during his first night there. Though the university at night is a haunt of the dead, their spirits whisper a message of light and hope to him in these days. Jude remains loyal to the spiritual effluence of the university even when intellectual assent to its values is no longer complete. Jude's continued idealization of the Christian city would, in fact, imply that Christianity can still exert an authentic appeal to the imagination and the moral sensibilities even in a skeptical age. In his early vision of Christminster as a heavenly Jerusalem, he sees its topaz lights go out like "extinguished candles" as he looks toward the city. This image prefigures Jude's own later relation to Christminster, as its Christian influence dwindles over him and as his own hopes for matriculating disappear. His first vision of the lighted city through the momentarily lifted fog also emphasizes his own difficulties in his attempt to reach it and to become identified with its life-giving spirit. The later associations of Christminster with fog indicate that it is not quite the clear intellectual center that Jude felt it to be in his early days. Jude becomes aware, moreover, that he is further away from Christminster when he is living in the town than he had been previously. The division between what he is and what he wants to be is the greater now that only a "wall" lies between him and the colleges. On Jude's final return to Christminster, this image of a separating wall is used again when only a wall quite literally divides his family's temporary lodgings from the college at the back of the house.

The precious spiritual heritage from the past is all present in Christminster but it has been greatly dissipated by inertia and decay. This is the belief of Sue who is oppressed by Sarcophagus College with its "four centuries of gloom, bigotry, and decay" (p. 406). As if to confirm her insight, "the quaint and frost-eaten stone busts" (p. 400) encircling the theater look down with disdain upon intruders like Jude and his family as an affront to their rock-bound conservatism. As an "outsider" to the end of his days (see Sue's earlier description of herself as an Ishmaelite), Jude daily repairs the colleges he will never enter and the windows he will never look from.

The images connected with Sue reveal her as an ambiguous moral force, and illustrate Hardy's conviction that positive and negative energies can be exerted, almost simultaneously and often unconsciously, by a gifted and unusual person. At first she seems to Jude to be a part of the atmosphere of light characterizing Christminster, and the fact that she is in the city helps determine him to come there. At this time she is a figure of mystery and suggestion; when Jude finally sees her he is impressed by her vibrancy and by her graciousness. She possesses "a kindling glance"; and later Jude refers to her intellect in these years as "a shining star" or as "lambent lightning." Phillotson, too, refers to her intellect as sparkling "like diamonds."

In the Melchester sequences before her marriage to Phillotson, her influence becomes more ambivalent. Generally a focus of light and life, she wishes "to ennoble some men to high aims" (p. 182) by infusing into them some of her intellectual energy. Like some women who wish to exert undue control over the destinies of men, she ends by destroying or depressing three men instead of exalting any of them. In the exercise of her vitality she is also curiously irresponsible. Thus she revels in new sensations, irrespective of their influence upon others. An "epicure in emotions" (p. 207), she visits in Jude's company the chapel in which she is to be married at Melchester, little thinking of the torture that this experience entails for the cousin who loves her but who is unable to marry her himself.

Jude's desire to live survives the death of his children; and, despite the horror of the occurrence, he feels that tragedy has enlarged his views while it has narrowed Sue's. Sue's latent revulsion from life, indicated in her Schopenhauerian conviction expressed at Aldbrickham that people in the future may will the extinction of the race, is intensified by the family tragedy. More given to depression than Jude, Sue had felt from the first greater spontaneous sympathy with little Father Time. As a result of his disruption of their family life, Sue embraces the negations that had previously warped the child's nature. Her children's deaths, in part the result of her indiscreet and evasive confidences to Father Time, symbolize her failure to emancipate herself from tradition and, incidentally, her death-bringing influence. The Widow Edlin recalls Sue's uncanny ability as a child to actualize the presence of the raven of death when she recited Poe's poem. Thus Sue, a vessel of the life-force, was also from her early years a potential force for death. Her secret wishes also carry her, she confides to Jude, backward to the security of infancy—ostensibly to the peace of the womb—rather than forward into life: "I like reading and all that, but I crave to get back to the life of my infancy and its freedom" (p. 164).

Jude's comment after the death of the children reveals how delicately balanced the conflicting energies of life and death are in Sue. She is mistaken in feeling that she is an ascetic, he says; rather she is healthy in her emotional responses, delicate but not inhumanly sexless. He does accuse her of never having loved him as he has loved her: her "heart does not burn in a flame" (p. 432), whereas he had been earlier seen with "his ardent affection for her burning in his eyes" (p. 288). In essence, he perceives that she has drained him of his life energies, at the same time that she is their all too volatile source. Now that the cosmic powers seem bent on vengeance, she is deaf to Jude's entreaty for her to stay with him and offers herself in a sacrificial rite to Christian convention by going back to Phillotson. At this point one recalls Sue's own pitying attitude toward the bride at Aldbrickham: Sue had then felt that the woman, bedecked with flowers, was a lamentable sacrifice on the altar of custom, answering a purpose similar to the sacrifice of bedecked heifers on Grecian altars to gods and principles now seen to be superstitions.

Possibly the characters in Jude the Obscure are relatively static, and possibly incident is for the most part contrived, since both men and society alike are controlled by deterministic natural law. Yet this is only one impression produced by the novel, I feel, and not the most important one. If Jude the Obscure possesses some of the stationary quality which often characterizes realism in the graphic arts, still as in the masterworks of realistic painting and sculpture the details of the composition and the relationships among them are not immediately available to the critic. Similarly the full ramifications of pattern emerge in Jude the Obscure only after these details have been studied, that is, only after an exhaustive analysis has been made of. the images and parallel situations in it. New chains of connection among these subsidiary and component elements of the book are continually being suggested to the contemplative, inquiring intelligence. In spite, then, of its somewhat rigid structural lines and philosophical framework, Jude the Obscure, as a pulsating organism within such limits, is continually alive with ever-expanding significance. This novel is, as it were, a kind of kaleidoscope: the pattern formed by image, event, character, and idea continually changes with the angle from which it is viewed. The fluid contours of the novel reform and reshape to furnish changing vistas of meaning; new impressions of the whole which are yet related to our previous impressions continually emerge.

¹Thomas Hardy: A Study of His Writings and Their Backgrounds (New York, 1938), pp. 256-257; Hardy the Novelist (New York, 1943), pp. 172-173, 189-192; Thomas Hardy (New York, 1951: Writers and Their Work, No. 21), p. 26; Thomas Hardy (New York, 1954), pp. 98-100; Thomas Hardy: A Critical Biography (London, 1954), pp. 246, 253.

²Thomas Hardy: A Critical Study (London, 1912), p. 161; Thomas Hardy: A Study of the Wessex Novels (New York, 1916), p. 173; The Technique of Thomas Hardy (Chicago, 1922), pp. 242-243; Thomas Hardy: A Critical Study (London, 1931), p. 88; Thomas Hardy: The Novels and the Stories (Cambridge, Mass., 1949), p. 159.

³Thomas Hardy: The Novels and the Stories, p. 82.

⁴"Jude the Obscure as a Tragedy," Southern Review, VI (Summer 1940), pp. 193-213; and The English Novel (New York, 1954), pp. 285-304.

⁵ See the essays "The Profitable Reading of Fiction" and "The Science of Fiction," reprinted in Life and Art, ed. Ernest Brennecke, Jr. (New York, 1925).

⁶ "The Science of Fiction," p. 89.

⁷ Florence E. Hardy, The Early Life of Thomas Hardy, 1840-1891 (New York, 1928), p. 150.

⁸ Florence E. Hardy, The Later Years of Thomas Hardy, 1892-1928 (New York, 1930), p. 178.

⁹Jude the Obscure, 1895 text as reprinted in The Modern Library Edition, p. vi. Page references in my article are to this edition.

¹⁰Southern Review, VI (Summer 1940), p. 197.

¹¹The English Novel, p. 302.

¹²Nineteenth Century Fiction, IX (June 1954), pp. 50-61.

¹³ "Hardy in Defense of His Art," Craft and Character: Texts, Method, and Vocation in Modern Fiction (New York, 1957), p. 94.

¹⁴Thomas Hardy: The Novels and the Stories, p. 82.

¹⁵ Ibid., p. 33.

¹⁶ The patterns of animal imagery in the novel are more fully analyzed in Holland's article, note 12 above.

¹⁷Nineteenth Century Fiction, IX (June 1954), p. 51.

¹⁸ "The Child: The Circus: and Jude the Obscure," Cambridge Journal, VII I (June 1954), pp. 531-546.