SOURCE: "Character and Theme in Hardy," in English, Vol. 22, No. 110, Summer, 1972, pp. 45-53.

[In the following essay, Rachman perceives two major themes in Jude the Obscure—those relating to the flesh and those relating to the spirit—and describes how these two themes come into conflict in the novel.]

Whether it be The Return of the Native, Tess of the D'urbervilles, or Jude the Obscure that is Hardy's best, all-round achievement in the field of the novel is a matter not yet indisputably settled. Divided opinion in this respect can only lead to further fruitful critical discussion. What needs to be recognized however, is that Jude has a particular importance, not only among Hardy's own novels but among all English novels of the close of the nineteenth century. This importance confers upon Jude a singular position, not so much in terms of the developing craft of fiction as in the history of the novel as a reflection of man in society and in the cosmos. Both in date of publication, 1895, and in the vision of the world it embodies, Jude marks the point of division between nineteenth-century moderate optimism and twentieth-century pervasive gloom. The book looks back to early nineteenth-century Romanticism, and foreshadows the restlessness, the isolation of the individual, the collapse of old values, and the groping towards new ones, all of which have become the hall-marks of serious twentieth-century fiction. Jude himself is the last full-blooded romantic. In his passionate nature and in his high aspirations he shares much with Dorothea Brooke, but his world is shot through with elements utterly unknown in hers. The causes for this century's change in the conception of human nature are many, but if we want to look for some of them in the field of the novel, one of the books that will be most rewarding for such a study is Jude. When Hardy wrote the book he had never heard of any Freudian theories, and certainly did not think a world war likely, and yet somehow the book anticipates these two turning-points which have left indelible imprints on the consciousness of this century. After reading the book many developments of the twentieth century seem hardly surprising.

In what is to my mind one of the most perceptive essays on Hardy's novels, Eugene Goodheart makes the following remarks:

'Hardy's novels are in a sense demonstrations of the inadequacy of the Romantic conception … Hardy, though possessing the old Romantic feeling for personality, shared the Victorian burden of society … The dates of his birth and death, 1840-1928, dramatise the situation. By temperament a Romantic, he was born too late to be one. Born too early to be a modern, he lived too far into the modern period, sharing to some extent its awareness, to be considered a true Victorian.'¹

The peculiar characteristics of Hardy, the man and his times, are suggested here, and these are particularly demonstrated in Jude since, as Walter Allen says, Jude 'is his one attempt to write a novel strictly of his own times'. ² Hardy's temperament was fundamentally poetic, and this accounts not only for his achievement in poetry but also for the special quality of his fiction. Nature, time, society, institutions, religion, heredity, all engaged his interest. In Jude he held nothing back and projected his total awareness of man and his universe. The handling of a multiplicity of issues poses for the artist the basic problem of the organization of his material, and partly because of the variety of issues dealt with, partly because he was more a feeler than a thinker, the question of organization was beyond Hardy's ability to solve satisfactorily.

To introduce all the themes into the novel and to bring it to its envisaged end, Hardy found it necessary to create coincidences and manipulate events in a manner that is unsuited to what is essentially a realistic novel. The case of Little Father Time is often cited as the most glaring example of an artistic blunder, but the objections raised on this account are not completely justified. J. I. M.

Stewart's stricture that 'his [Father Time's] final deed has no more substance than last night's nightmare, and in the whole book it is perhaps this small epitome of woe that chiefly gives the game away' is, I think, questionable, and betrays a lack of patience in understanding what Hardy is doing or what he is trying to say. Stewart goes on to say that 'we are having foisted on us as human life a puppet show that is not human life; and this is something which neither tragedy nor comedy—and far less anything bearing the credentials of realistic fiction—ought to be'. ³ But it is precisely because of its human life, the characters in it, that Jude for all its shortcomings remains a considerable achievement.

In the preface to the first edition of the book, Hardy wrote:

' …Jude the Obscure is simply an endeavour 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.' ⁴

It is here that the crux of a critical assessment of Jude is to be found. I take it that the coherence of the 'seemings' and the 'personal impressions' has to do with the characters. However, the explicit problematic aspects of Jude and the intrinsic states of Jude and Sue are not always consistently harmonized. The above statement is evidence enough that Hardy was aware of the dissonant notes struck in the book, and that his interest predominantly lay in the personal, human predicament rather than in the complex of forces introduced, in respect of which he was not quite sure of his stand. No wonder then mat the book has fared poorly at the hands of the critics.

Albert J. Guerard's study of Hardy is generally a highly competent and accomplished piece of work. About Jude, however, he starts off by stating that it is 'an impressive tragedy in spite of its multiplicity of separated and detachable problems', ⁵ repeats later that 'it is not realism but tragedy, and like all tragedy is symbolic', ⁶ and finally says that 'Jude is not… a tragic hero—if only because he is a modern',⁷ and that 'the cosmos, whether just or unjust indifferent, necessarily dwarfs tragedy'.⁸ Guerard also argues that Jude's dying words are condemnation of the cosmos and that the tragic attitude lays the blame not on the stars but on ourselves. Obviously there is some inconsistency here. If Jude's dying words can be taken as a condemnation of the cosmos, they can equally be taken as a condemnation of his own nature as part of the cosmos. If the novel is an 'impressive tragedy', it cannot at the same time be a dwarfed one. The so-called cosmic forces in Jude are not conceived of as the sole determinants of Jude's fate, and why does the cosmos necessarily dwarf the tragedy? Why cannot it enhance it? Hardy's intention, as stated in his preface to the first edition, was 'to point the tragedy of unfulfilled aims'. If what is basic to all conceptions of tragedy is the opposition of an individual human being to some huge undefeatable force or forces, then Jude is a tragedy. It is not of the Greek type, as Lascelles Abercrombie points out.⁹ It is not of the Shakespearian type, by which standard Arthur Mizener examines it and finds it wanting. ¹⁰ It is a tragedy of the romantic temperament frustrated in all the spheres in which it seeks to express itself. It is an awakening of the consciousness to all the contradictory aspects of the combined forces, inner and outer, which evoke the desire of complete fulfilment and yet, at the same time, thwart and defeat it. The only attainable wish which remains is death.

In the speech Jude makes to the crowd of people around him at Christminster on his return there with Sue and their children he says, 'I am in a chaos of principles—groping in the dark—acting by instinct and not after example' (p. 337). Earlier in the book in a conversation with Sue, he tells her that feelings rule thoughts (p. 211). The book as a whole reflects the state of perplexity of its characters, of its time, and of its author. The inconsistency in Hardy's 'impressions' is, to no small extent, the reason for the 'chaos of principles'. There is greater certainty as regards feeling and uncertainty as regards thought. This is not to suggest that there is a paucity of thought in the book. On the contrary, there is a good deal of thought in it, but the difficulty arises out of the contradictory aspects seen in each issue, and the impossibility of reconciling the contrarieties. Thought, therefore, loses its authority and feeling alone is left as a guide. Yet to resolve the perplexity it is necessary for feeling and thought to harmonize.

At one point in the book Hardy makes the following statement:

'The purpose of a chronicler of moods and deeds does not require him to express his personal views upon the grave controversy above given (p. 298).' [The grave controversy has to do with the indeterminate attitudes of Jude and Sue in regard to their marriage.]

Hardy records not only moods but also the conditions out of which the moods arise. In Jude he makes little direct authorial comment. The characters' deeds are given in the narrative; their moods and views are presented either through internal analysis or in dialogue. The author's view emerges indirectly from the combined statements of the action and reaction of the characters. Action and re-action are of course related to the problems with which the characters are concerned, and the problems involve the numerous themes. The various images introduced are used to help express character and theme, and to establish the connection between them. Each group of images is related to a theme, but it also forms a facet of a character.

Arabella, we are told, is a 'female animal', and she is very often associated with pigs and strong drink. The pig's pizzle that Arabella throws at Jude is the direct cause for the beginning of the relationship between them.

Critics point out that no better image could be found to hint at the nature of the attraction that brings the two together. Pigs, pizzle, strong drink, the picture of Samson and Delilah at the inn where Jude and Arabella have a drink, masculine strength and passion, and female sexuality and treachery, all bring out Jude's susceptibility to fall prey to physical desire, female wiles, and drink. This is perhaps the simplest illustration of the manner by which a cluster of images centre on a theme—the flesh—and at the same time serve as a means by which the character is created. A more complex example is the theme of Christminster worked out through Jude's and Sue's subjective vision of it and through the actual events of indeed the whole novel.

Marriage is another theme that is used to qualify the intrinsic qualities of the characters. Whilst Jude and Sue discuss the legal questions of marriage or its religious implications, it is primarily their personal states that are revealed. Their views on the subject as such, unorthodox as they may have seemed at the time of the book's publication, are of secondary importance. Sue's and Jude's involvement in marriage is part of the method by which their characters are established. We may say that Hardy weaves his themes into the very fibres of his characters. Hence it is necessary to examine the themes and how they are presented.

Two contradictory and irreconcilable aspects of Nature are put forward in the novel. On the one hand, there is what we may call the romantic view of nature, nature as the source of freedom, joy, and happiness. On the other hand, we have a growing awareness of the indifference and even inimical tendencies in Nature towards those elements with which, it would seem, she must most be in accord. After Jude gets a thrashing from Farmer Troutham for letting the birds eat off the soil from which he should have kept them away, he reflects that 'Nature's logic was too horrid for him to care for. That mercy towards one set of creatures was cruelty towards another sickened his sense of harmony' (p. 23). A few lines later we read, 'Then, like the natural boy, he forgot his despondency, and sprang up'. Nature's logic is horrid and incomprehensible, yet she works in a manner that conduces to further growth and is favourable to existence.

Nature has her own laws, 'People go on marrying because they can't resist natural forces…' (p. 268). Sue explains to little Father Time that people have children 'because it is a law of nature' (p. 344). When Jude returns to Melchester, a place near Shaston, where Sue, now married to Phillotson, lives, we are told that he did not remember that 'insulted Nature sometimes vindicated her rights' (p. 201). The rights seem to be vindicated and the two, Jude and Sue, are united, and for a short while live in relative happiness. After the disaster of the death of the children, Sue says this to Jude:

'We said—do you remember?—that we would make a virtue of joy. I said it was Nature's intention, Nature's law and raison d'être that we should be joyful in what instincts she afforded us—instincts which civilisation had taken upon itself to thwart' (p. 350).

There is considerable irony here. The instincts Nature afforded Sue are not at all what is normally taken as 'Nature's intention'. But what she says is fully applicable to Jude. Later, he implores her not to think ill of their union, pleading, 'Nature's own marriage it is, unquestionably!' (p. 363) and that 'human nature can't help being itself' (p. 365), thus attempting to justify his own conduct.

As against all this, we have Sue saying, upon realizing that her sold pigeons are destined to be slaughtered, 'O , why should Nature's law be mutual butchery' (p. 318), and Jude telling Sue that she had been intended by Nature to be left intact. Most of all, as things go ill for Jude from the start, he soon comes to realize 'the scorn of Nature for men's finer emotions, and her lack of interest in his aspirations' (p. 185). This is an awareness Sue arrives at later. She ends her speech about Nature's law and raison d'être quoted above by saying, 'An d now Fate has given us this stab in the back [the children's death] for being such fools as to take Nature at her word'. What Jude interprets as Nature's scorn, Sue sees as the working of Fate. Finally, we have Phillotson making the following statement when he considers Sue's and his own misfortunes: 'Cruelty is the law pervading all nature and society' (p. 329). Nature's laws are disharmonious. Nature and Fate conspire against men. Human nature is part of Nature, yet Nature is in opposition to it. Society is much more in accord with the cruelty in Nature than the individual with either, though Phillotson's remark implies that the individual too may not altogether be free of cruelty. The unadulterated, romantic sensibility of the early nineteenth century has been disturbed by the impact of Darwinism, and recent social theories, and there is a growing awareness that the old, established standards are no longer adequate to sustain belief of any sort. What is to be noted is that the conflicting views are not presented as objectively observed experience, but arise out of and define specific, personal states.

Nowhere is the inconsistency Hardy alludes to in the preface to the first edition of the book more apparent than in the treatment of the marriage theme. Marriage qua institution is much abused by both Jude and Sue, but if we take the numerous protests against the marriage laws at their face value, we shall most probably overlook what really happens to the characters. Sue considers that marriage is no sacrament (p. 174), that in fact it is a sordid contract (p. 218), a hopelessly vulgar institution. She says to Jude, 'I think I should begin to be afraid of you, Jude, the moment you had contracted to cherish me under a Government Stamp, and I was licensed to be loved on the premises by you' (p. 267). This is not a view she holds as a result of her previous, unfortunate experience with Phillotson. Whilst she was still in Phillotson's house as his wife, she confided to Jude that

'the social moulds civilisation fits us into have no more relation to our actual shapes than the conventional shapes of the constellations have to the real star-patterns' (p. 214).

Sue's actual shape, her delicate, disproportionate makeup, will not really fit into even the most flexibly conceived social mould, so long as it is a matrimonial mould. Her saying, 'It is none of the natural tragedies of love that's love's usual tragedy in civilised life, but a tragedy artificially manufactured for people' (p. 224) is a statement contrary to the evidence of events in the novel. What is actually shown in the novel is that love's tragedy is not at all artificial tragedy, but natural tragedy. It is Sue's fastidious and weak sexuality, or in other words her frigidity, that is the basic cause of love's tragedy in Jude. Sue's idea of having domestic laws made according to classified temperaments is fanciful and impracticable. In short, all Sue's pronouncements on marriage are a highly skilful camouflaging on her part of the fact which, put plainly as Jude puts it once to her, is her incapability of real love (p. 250). Had Hardy written the novel a decade or two later, he would most probably have made Sue's utterances carry allusions to modern psychological theories. As it is, she inveighs against conventions, institutions, and laws of her time to state a condition which, though not unrelated to them, is fundamentally not caused by them. Sue is not deliberately and coldly decrying the institution of marriage. She is simply making use of concepts and images at her disposal to construct her defensive arguments.

Similar instances are to be found in Jude's thoughts and utterances, in his case revealing a different aspect of character. Jude's thinking

'Is it that the women are to blame; or is it 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?' (p. 226).

is no more than putting to himself a purely rhetorical question, for this is what he has come to believe. Although the domestic springes have noosed him, he has not been held back by them. His marriage to Arabella had only been a brief interlude after which he resumed his intended course, and what stands in his way to progress has, in the main, little to do with any domestic gins. The effect of couching Jude's reflections in such images is that the intellect of a man entertaining scholastic ambitions is somewhat blunted. At the same time his thought reveals that the momentary trouble is not progress, nor his own marital state, but his need of love, the sort of love Sue can never give him, though at this stage he does not know it yet.

Ostensibly there is a strong protest against the marriage laws of the time, but we are actually shown that what matters most is compatibility, and since in Jude we have both conditions—marriage and the 'natural state'—both leading to unhappiness, the edge of the protest is taken off. Marriage itself is much less of a problem than the way people go about it. Divorce is not unobtainable, and in fact is granted in both cases—Jude and Arabella; Sue and Phillotson; but the problem of compatibility remains, and it is the crucial aspects of the characters' different needs of fulfilment and the concomitant personal difficulties that are delineated through the associated theme and images.

Another central theme in Jude is that of Time. Jude's tragedy is occasioned by problems arising at a certain point of time as well as by timeless dilemmas. In so far as Jude is defeated by the prevailing conditions of his own time, he is a victim of forces against which the future may hold a remedy, but in so far as his fortunes are thwarted by the very fact of his existence in an unfriendly and inscrutable universe, there can never be a complete solution to man's predicament on this earth. The awareness that man is subject to time-bound and timeless agencies both of which happen to be in opposition to one's self, is overwhelming and tends to undermine the will to live.

The tragedy of Tess starts with her going to Alec D'urberville to claim kin, and there is good reason to believe that but for that step forced upon her by the economic difficulties of her family, all may have turned out well for her. In Jude's case there is no apparent reason for his turning away from the station of life in which he finds himself placed. At one point, whilst at Christminster at his work, he experiences '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. But he lost it under stress of his old idea' (p. 91). His old idea of learning is partly due to his own characteristic bent, but for the greater part it is somehow induced by the spirit of his time, and we are told that the fact that he regards his trade as a provisional means only is 'his form of the modern vice of unrest'. Sue's tremulous psyche and Jude's high aspirations are seen as products of their time.

The spirit of the time conducing to change and displacement is everywhere at work, affecting people in different ways. Jude feels that a mere interest in books is not enough to gain 'rare ideas'. Every working man has now a taste for books, he thinks (p. 73). What he wants is the scholarly study he believes Christminster can offer him. It is not any new idea that stirs people to action; it is a general fret that sends them in quest of a better lot, without knowing exactly where and how it can be found. All four principal characters keep moving from place to place, and never find any rest. The direction of the impetus is from the lower social stratum upwards, but the energy is dissipated by the endless misadventures and no one reaches a rung higher.

When Jude realizes that he does not stand a chance in Christminster and contemplates entering the Church as a licentiate, he wonders whether his initial, more ambitious scheme 'had degenerated to, even though it might not have originated in, a social unrest which had no foundation in the nobler instincts; which was purely an artificial product of civilisation' (p. 135). As already observed above, Jude's desire for learning springs from his nobler instincts, but it is also related to his time. The social unrest is an artificial product of civilization but it is also the force that sets off Jude to seek fulfilment of his ambition. Are we then to take Jude's intent as a vice? An d if it is a vice, how can it be connected with the nobler instincts? The book does not provide an answer to such questions. Jude perceives in the stone yard that his trade is as dignified an effort as any, but from his childhood there are tendencies in his nature that make him the sort of man that could never really be content with the work of a stonemason.

Although Jude's thirst for knowledge is shared by thousands of young men, and although all are characteristic of the trend of the time, Jude's personal quest stands apart from the general stream. Whereas the mass of young men are 'self-seeking', Jude aims chiefly at altruism, at doing good and benefiting others. This is like facing in the opposite direction from the way things go. Soon after his arrival at Christminster, we are told that 'the deadly animosity of contemporary logic and vision towards so much of what he held in reverence was not revealed to him' (p. 91). It does not take him long to find that out, and though conditions change and the colleges of Christminster become accessible even to such as he later in his own days, his logic and his vision remain out of accord with contemporary tendencies. It is possible to trace the pattern of the changing trends. The widow Edlin, who is used as a choric figure, is there to remind us of a calm and simple past contrasted with the turmoil of the present, and there are two contradictory visions of the future. While Sue considers that in fifty or a hundred years people will act and feel still worse than she and Jude do (p. 296), Jude, on the other hand, lying on his death-bed, says that the time was not ripe for him and Sue—'Our ideas were fifty years too soon to be any good to us' (p. 414). The note of uncertainty as regards the future is unmistakable, but whatever the future may hold, the sombre undertones of the whole novel as well as its ending give little support to Jude's optimistic belief. To give substance to such a view it is necessary to consider Little Father Time, the only truly symbolic figure in the book.

Little Father Time is the embodiment of all the ill winds that have put the time out of joint, a sensitive creature sapped of the joy of life by his perception of the antagonistic turn of events that makes for a denial of life, not for an encouragement of it. When his experience of adversity reaches a new peak upon Jude's and Sue's return to Christminster, and when he hears from Sue, who is pregnant, of a new life that is to come to share the misery, he protests according to his own logic by killing himself and the two other children. In himself, Little Father Time is not incredible. Aged-looking and weird boys or girls are fortunately not representative of childhood even in the most calamitous of times. The vital force usually asserts itself in the early years of life at least. But such children do exist in all times. The boy has inherited from his father a hypersensitivity which engenders an unwillingness to grow up, and when circumstances heighten instead of allaying such a disposition, the death-wish forces itself into consciousness. The monstrous deed is not a fanciful invention on Hardy's part. If we read the column of faits-divers in the daily newspapers with attention, we shall come across such astonishing realities at one time or another. In the novel the boy's suicide is jarring because his act, which is an unrepresentative reality, is introduced into the reality of Jude and Sue which, in spite of the differences that mark them as individuals, is representative. The disaster also serves to provide a tangible cause for the next development in Sue's and Jude's affairs. This development is the result of a latent condition in their relationship which is basically unrelated to the boy's deed, but the extremity he creates helps make the latent overt. In short, on the realistic level of the book, the figure of Little Father Time seems very much like a deus ex machina.

However, on the symbolic level his creation is not a failure at all. Little Father Time is the concrete expression of the impersonal dislocating forces of the time and of the very personal and conscious reaction to the problem of existence of his father, a man whose impulses have been thwarted and whose lurking wish the boy enacts. The boy looks old, partly because the problem of existence is old and timeless, and partly because he as well as Jude never really experienced the joy of youth. His death foreshadows the equally untimely death of his father, but more important still it signifies the end of Jude's brand of idealism as well as the end of the race of Judes. The name Little Father Time is another way of pointing to the agency that is most responsible for the tragedy. Jude's recounting to Sue that according to the doctor the boy's death is a sign of 'the beginning of the coming universal wish not to live' (p. 348), may be taken as a prophetic vision on Hardy's part. For though the World War is in one sense an indication of the determination to live, in another it is also a sign of the 'wish not to live'. The theme of time is used by the author to create individual character as well as general atmosphere.

Christminster (Oxford), both as theme and image, is of major importance in Jude. In a sense, Jude's life-story is presented as a challenge to the citadel of learning. The outcome of the 'deadly war waged between flesh and spirit' might be different if the architects of man's soul dealt less with phantoms and grappled more with the realities of human existence. Jude's spirit is enkindled from the start with the idea of Christminster, and he dies in the city of his dreams with its sounds re-echoing in his ears. Illusion and reality alternate in the complex image of Christminster. Jude's illusions of the place are part of his reality, and his own existence is immaterial to Christminster. Similarly, a preoccupation with the remote, the spectral, is the reality of Christminster academical, whereas the real life of the city is unsubstantial to its scholars. The tendency of man's spirit is to take flight from the real and build its abode in the shadowy. The true need, however, is to apply the intellect to the actual and fashion its moulds accordingly. The proper study of man is Man , that is, the whole of Man, the whole of his life. The pursuit of chimeras and of what ought to be leads to distortion and unhappiness. Only regard for what is and what can be may conceivably reduce human misery.

Jude's arrival at the city of his dreams at night, and his communing with the spirits of its departed, eminent sons is one of the most beautiful passages in the book. An isolated 'self-spectre' himself, he wanders about the medieval colleges, recalling the words of the men of heart and the men of head who had spent their lives within them. The following morning the perfect and ideal apparitions of the night are replaced by the imperfect real. His realization that his presence in Christminster has in no way brought him nearer to his goal does not alter his view of the place as 'the centre of thought and religion—the intellectual and spiritual granary of this country' (p. 120). It is Sue who introduces a dispassionate and more realistic view of Christminster, realistic both from the point of view of its relevance to the spiritual questions of the time and its attitude to people like Jude. Sue has had a platonic relationship with a Christminster graduate, is witty and well read, and has lived in the city long enough without being emotionally attached to it. She tells Jude that 'the mediaevalism of Christminster must go' (p. 157), and that 'at present intellect in Christminster is pushing one way, and religion the other; and so they stand stock-still, like two rams butting each other' (p. 158), that 'it is a place full of fetichists and ghost-seers'. Jude answers that he too is fearful of life, 'spectre-seeing always'. Parallel to the picture of Christminster as abstracted from reality there is the picture of the actual life of the city, and Jude is involved in both pictures. He notices the wide gap that exists between the gown life and the town life and that the latter is a compendious book of humanity little scrutinized by students or teachers. Tinker Taylor, a local labourer and a casual acquaintance of Jude, half mocking his scholastic pursuit tells him that 'there is more to be learnt out-side a book than in' (p. 128), and Sue too is of the opinion that the townspeople see more life as it is than the college people do (p. 158). Though Jude perceives that there is much truth in all this, it is also because of this that his desire for learning remains unshaken throughout. He believes that Christminster is the place for him and such as he, and that instead of its scorning and excluding the so-called self-taught, it should be the first to acknowledge the efforts of men ambitious of learning and offer them the opportunity of fulfilling their aims. However, this is far from being the case.

A number of years later, by which time Jude has realized that his life has been a complete failure, he comes back to Christminster with Sue and the children on the day of its festivities. Standing in the crowd among whom are some of his old acquaintances, who remark that he has not made the grade, Jude says to the people around him:

'I may do some good before I am dead—be a sort of success as a frightful example of what not to do; and so illustrate a moral story' (p. 337).

This is an ambiguous statement. Does Jude mean that he ought not to have set his heart on learning, and because of his having done so, he has ruined his life? Such a view is not borne out by the novel. Other factors, not directly related to learning, have been much more detrimental to his happiness than his disappointed hopes of study. In any case, he had not deliberately chosen his aim; it had sprung directly from his nature and was enhanced by the spirit of the time. Does he mean that poor people like him, who are not 'cold-blooded' and 'selfish', ought not to pursue goals the achievement of which depends on the possession of such inhumane qualities? This is not an unlikely meaning, though it contradicts other views of his and Sue's, namely that Christminster is just the place for men with a passion for learning. Or does Jude mean that the whole pattern of his life, everything that has gone into the making of it, should serve as an example, not to other men like him—since they, like him, are inevitably bound to set their feet on the same path as he has—but to the colleges of Christminster and what they ought not to do? They ought not to shut out men desirous of knowledge; they ought not to ignore the reality of the time and hold on to outworn modes of thought. It seems to me that the general drift of the novel would justify such an interpretation.

In the same speech Jude goes on to say:

'I perceive there is something wrong somewhere in our social formulas; what it is can only be discovered by men and women with greater insight than mine—if, indeed, they ever discover it—at least in our time' (p. 338).

The social formulas have to do with the sum total of designs that make up the fabric of society. They set the patterns of economics, educational opportunities, jurisdiction, public opinion, and conventions, but more important still they are conditioned by religion and intellectual accomplishment, and it is from these two spheres, of which Christminster is the centre, that the regeneration of the formulas must come. Jude's appeal, and we may say Hardy's, is made to the authority in whose power it is to control that part of man's fortunes that is given to man to control. For his own part, Jude vows never to care any more about the 'infernal, cursed place'. The disaster of the children's death that befalls him in Christminster is a fateful event underscoring the 'example', but it also points to a power which by its incomprehensibility sets limits to human endeavour.

When Jude returns from his last visit to Sue, now back with Phillotson, he walks with Arabella through the streets of the city, seeing the spirits of the dead as he did on his first arrival in the place. He explains to Arabella:

'I seem to see them and almost hear them rustling. But I don't revere them as I did. I don't believe in half of them … All that has been spoiled for me by the grind of stem reality … They seem laughing at me … The phantoms all about here …' (p. 406).

To this Arabella retorts: 'Come along do! Phantoms! There's neither living nor dead hereabouts except a damn policeman!' Kathleen R. Hooper remarks that 'Arabella gave the final, earthly comment of a world which Jude never understood'.¹¹ On the contrary, Jude has learnt from his bitter experience to look at his world with disillusioned eyes and to understand what is wrong with it and what hopes may be entertained as regards it. Lying on his death-bed, his mind is still preoccupied with the dream that has for ever haunted him. He tells Arabella that he has heard there are schemes to make the University less exclusive and to extend its influence (p. 413), but he knows only too well that for him it is too late.

Essentially there are only two major themes in Jude: one relating to everything connected with the flesh, and the other relating to everything connected with the spirit. Hardy dramatizes the conflict between these two themes, and stresses the need for their integration. Ideally the flesh should inform the spirit and the spirit the flesh. Jude would not have been completely happy if he had been given the opportunity of fulfilling his dreams of learning, but proper studies could have better equipped him to cope with 'stern reality'. One might argue that such studies were not available in his time, but towards such at any rate he aspired. The characters are created through the themes and in a sense they are the themes. They interpret the world and themselves in terms of old systems and outworn modes of thought, whereas their situation cries out for new terms of reference, new concepts, new values. Jude foresaw that the new was bound to come, and it cannot be said that his 'example' was to go un-heeded, but the new formulas that were to emerge and the influence they were to spread were not to be of the kind to foster that good in life, that type of fulfilment at which he had originally aimed. In other words, in Jude Hardy laments the passage of an age and adumbrates the attitudes, or if we want, 'the formulas', that were to characterize the first half of the present century: formulas the latter-day Judes, battering against the walls of the establishment, hope to change.

¹ Eugene Goodheart, 'Thomas Hardy and the Lyrical Novel' in Nineteenth Century Fiction, no. 3, December 1957.

² Walter Allen, The English Novel, Penguin Books, 1958, p. 255.

³ J. I. M. Stewart, Eight Modern Writers, Clarendon Press, 1963, p. 45.

⁴ Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure, Macmillan, London 1957, p. 1 (all further references will be to this edition).

⁵ Albert J. Guerard, Thomas Hardy: The Novels and Stories, O.U.P., London, 1949, p. 32.

⁶ Ibid., p. 110.

⁷ Ibid., p. 152.

⁸ Ibid., p. 153.

⁹ Lascelles Abercrombie, Thomas Hardy: A Critical Study, Martin Secker, London, 1912, p. 26.

¹⁰ Arthur Mizener, 'Jude the Obscure as Tragedy', in Modern British Fiction, ed. Mark Schorer, O.U.P., N.Y. , 1961.

¹¹ Kathleen R. Hooper, 'Illusion and Reality in Jude the Obscure', in Nineteenth-Century Fiction, no. 2, September 1957, p. 157.