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    Jude the Obscure (with an Introduction by Morton Dauwen Zabel)
    Jude the Obscure (with an Introduction by Morton Dauwen Zabel)
    Jude the Obscure (with an Introduction by Morton Dauwen Zabel)
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    Jude the Obscure (with an Introduction by Morton Dauwen Zabel)

    By Thomas Hardy

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    Thomas Hardy’s final novel “Jude the Obscure” began as a serial publication on December 1894 before being published in book form the following year. It is the story of its titular character Jude Fawley, a young lower-class man with dreams of being a scholar, and his relationships with his wife, Arabella, and his free-spirited cousin, Sue Bridehead. The novel follows the life of Jude from his youth living in a village in southern England where he works in a bakery and studies Classical Greek and Latin in his spare time with hopes of one day becoming a scholar at Christminster, a fictional city modeled after Oxford. His dreams are dashed however when he becomes ensnared by deceit into marriage with Arabella Donn, a coarse and superficial girl. What follows is a classic and tragic tale that plays upon many themes, principally of which is the idea that one’s ruinous downfall is the product of having lived a sinful life. Having been harshly criticized in its day for its scandalous portrayals, “Jude the Obscure” has since been recognized as one of Hardy’s finest and most intricate works. This edition includes an introduction by Morton Dauwen Zabel and a biographical afterword.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDigireads.com Publishing
    Release dateDec 26, 2017
    ISBN9781420956689
    Jude the Obscure (with an Introduction by Morton Dauwen Zabel)
    Author

    Thomas Hardy

    Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) is best known for his novels, Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), Return of the Native (1878), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891), and Jude the Obscure (1895), which was denounced as morally objectionable. Hardy, disgusted with this reaction, declared he would never write fiction again and devoted the rest of his literary career to poetry.

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      Jude the Obscure (with an Introduction by Morton Dauwen Zabel) - Thomas Hardy

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      JUDE THE OBSCURE

      By THOMAS HARDY

      Introduction by MORTON DAUWEN ZABEL

      Jude the Obscure

      By Thomas Hardy

      Introduction by Morton Dauwen Zabel

      Print ISBN 13: 978-1-4209-5667-2

      eBook ISBN 13: 978-1-4209-5668-9

      This edition copyright © 2017. Digireads.com Publishing.

      All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

      Cover Image: a detail of General view and High Street, Oxford, England, 1 photomechanical print: photochrom, color, c. 1895, Photoglob Zürich, reprinted by Detroit Publishing Co.

      Please visit www.digireads.com

      CONTENTS

      Introduction

      Preface to the First Edition

      Postscript to the Preface

      The First Part—At Marygreen

      I

      II

      III

      IV

      V

      VI

      VII

      VIII

      IX

      X

      XI

      The Second Part—At Christminster

      I

      II

      III

      IV

      V

      VI

      VII

      The Third Part—At Melchester

      I

      II

      III

      IV

      V

      VI

      VII

      VIII

      IX

      X

      The Fourth Part—At Shaston

      I

      II

      III

      IV

      V

      VI

      The Fifth Part—At Aldbrickham and Elsewhere

      I

      II

      III

      IV

      V

      VI

      VII

      VIII

      The Sixth Part—At Christminster Again

      I

      II

      III

      IV

      V

      VI

      VII

      VIII

      IX

      X

      XI

      Biographical Afterword

      Introduction

      1

      Jude the Obscure, the last of Hardy’s novels and the book with which he closed his career in fiction, was published in London early in 1896 and thereby marked a significant date not only in Hardy’s own life but in the fortunes of the modern English novel.

      Behind him lay his quarter-century as a novelist—the career which, after its groping beginnings in the 1860’s, had commenced with Desperate Remedies in 1871 and had advanced by clearly defined stages through both his lesser books—Under the Greenwood Tree, A Pair of Blue Eyes, The Hand of Ethelberta, The Trumpet-Major, A Laodicean, and Two on a Tower—and the novels that showed his greater powers and more certain claims in his art—Far from the Madding Crowd in 1874, The Return of the Native in 1878, The Mayor of Casterbridge in 1886, The Woodlanders in 1887, and Tess of the D’Urbervilles in 1891, With these six books he had become a recognized master in his late-Victorian time—the last of the English novelists who had taken the nineteenth century, with its human drama, its historical crisis, and its moral challenge, as their subject, and who had consciously addressed themselves to the ordeal of conscience, social justice, and intellectual doubt the age had imposed on its witnesses and spokesmen.

      To this task Hardy brought the combination of purposes his greater contemporaries in England, France, and Russia had shown. He wrote as a teller of tales for the general public, a dramatist of contemporary life and an entertainer ambitious to gain the widest possible audience of magazine and fiction readers; but he also sought to make the novel embody the most serious problems, the gravest responsibilities, that taxed the modern intelligence. He knew himself to be, by the circumstances of his birth, ambition, and native temperament, a child of his time, and he never tried to repudiate his involvement in his age as his more willfully rebellious or aesthetic contemporaries did. But he also knew that he was fated to be the skeptic and questioner of his age, the doubter of its hopes and confidences, the challenger of its complacency, the critic of the moral universe and cosmic order in which the destiny of man is cast. It was this divided vision, this conflict in himself of an intensely human sensibility with an intuition of the abstract or impersonal justice, the immanent and unknowable intention, that presides in the workings of nature, that permitted Hardy to create the men and women in whom his drama of the fate of man is focused. Of these characters—Dick Dewy, Gabriel Oak, Bathsheba Everdene, Clym Yeobright and Eustasia Vye, Michael Henchard of Casterbridge, Giles Winterbourne, Angel Clare and Tess Durbeyfield—he made a dramatis personae as typical of his thought and theme as the characters of Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, and Meredith are of theirs.

      Book by book, these creatures of Hardy’s imagination had enacted a progressive and unfolding drama, now pathetic, now comic, now satirical, but steadily tragic in its bent and workings. It is a drama which, for all the variations of situation and treatment to which he subjected it, is single and persistent throughout his books. But even after the lengths of logic and ruthlessness to which he had carried it in his stories of Clym Yeobright, Michael Henchard, and Tess, it called for yet another version, a more remorseless and total statement, if it were to be brought to its final expression and pathos. It was thus that the story of Jude Fawley and his role in Hardy’s drama were conceived. Though Hardy could not have known, when he first began sketching the tale, that Jude was to be the last of his heroes, the novel has the effect of recapitulating his essential subject from his beginnings as a writer. That theme was still to occupy him in the poetry to which he turned during the last thirty years of his life, but Jude the Obscure stands as its central summary and point of highest resolution, and thus as one of the key novels of its age.

      The idea for the book came to Hardy while he was still writing Tess of the D’Urbervilles. According to his own account, the theme of Tess had first come to him when he saw a milkmaid of the Wessex country riding in a farm cart along the edge of Egdon Heath; now the conception of Jude was suggested when a country baker’s boy stopped his cart and asked the novelist if he might borrow his Latin grammar. Interrupting his work on Tess Hardy began to make notes for his new novel in 1887; the scheme was jotted down in 1890; the scenes of the tale (including the scene of Oxford itself, the dream and goal of Jude’s ambition) were revisited in 1892 and 1893; the narrative was written in outline during the same years; and the full manuscript was composed from August, 1893, onwards into the next year. Hardy had been negotiating with J. Henry Harper of New York, who wished to serialize his next novel in Harper’s Magazine, but when he saw his story taking its undaunted course he realized that there would be objections to its appearance in a popular magazine, and by the spring of 1894 he asked Harper to release him from their agreement. But a meeting between the two men in London in October, 1894, resulted in a compromise. Hardy, with the painstaking docility he had already shown in modifying certain of his earlier books for serialization or in subduing the franker episodes of Tess when The Graphic ran that novel in London in 1891, agreed to alter the stronger passages of his manuscript. In that form it began in Harper’s Magazine in December, 1894, and continued through the twelve months of 1895—not under its own title but first as The Simpletons and then as Hearts Insurgent. He then patiently set about restoring his manuscript, and the novel was published as Jude the Obscure in London and New York in 1896.{1}

      The storm that then broke upon his head was the most furious he encountered in his career. The new literature of the 1880’s and ’90’s had already aroused the fury of critics and moralists repeatedly in recent decades; and in the five or six years before Hardy’s book was published the plays of Ibsen, particularly Ghosts and Hedda Gabler, had been heaped with an opprobrium usually reserved for the vilest of criminals by the conventional reviewers on their first London productions. The wrath that greeted Jude took on the proportions of an epic of outrage and vituperation. The Bishop of Wakefield, who announced that he had thrown the book into the fire, wrote a denunciation that caused the novel to be withdrawn from the circulating libraries. Mrs. Oliphant in Blackwood’s Magazine declared that Hardy was attempting to launch an anti-marriage league. The Bookman called the tale a novel of lubricity. The critic in the New York World, Jeannette L. Gilder, professing herself shocked and appalled, said that Jude was almost the worst book I have ever read and that Hardy’s mind seems to be grovelling all through this story and going out of his way to write of nastiness; and Harry Thurston Peck was quoted in The Critic as branding the work as one of the most objectionable books he has ever read. Though Swinburne, Havelock Ellis, and other sympathizers rose to Hardy’s defense, and the brilliant novelist of the ’90’s John Oliver Hobbes (Mrs. Craigie) told him he was the greatest man in Europe, such features of the novel as the pig-sticking episode, Jude’s religious iconoclasm, his recital of the Nicene Creed to Bower o’Bliss and the other denizens of the tavern, above all Phillotson’s offer to set his wife Sue free for a union with her lover and the attack on the marriage laws that runs through the story—were all taken as offenses to taste, morality, and religious orthodoxy beyond any of the previous and long-standing criticisms to which these standards had been subjected by earlier Victorian critics. Hardy remained publicly silent. Tragedy, he noted, may be created by an opposing environment either of things inherent in the universe, or of human institutions. If the former be the means exhibited and deplored, the writer is regarded as impious; if the latter, as subversive and dangerous; when all the while he may never have questioned the necessity or urged the non-necessity of either. He gradually came to a decision. Swinburne, on reading the novel, had told him that the tragedy . . . is equally beautiful and terrible in its pathos. The beauty, the terror, and the truth, are all yours and yours alone. . . . The man who can do such work can hardly care about criticism or praise. . . . Balzac is dead, and there has been no such tragedy in fiction—on anything like the same lines—since he died. But even such praise did not deflect him from his resolution to give up the writing of novels.

      The misrepresentations of the last two or three years, Hardy said in the biography published after his death, turned out ultimately to be the best thing that could have happened; for they well-nigh compelled him, in his own judgment at any rate, if he wished to retain any shadow of self-respect, to abandon at once a form of literary art he had long intended to abandon at some indefinite time, and resume openly that form of it which had always been more instinctive with him, and which he had just been able to keep alive from his early years, half in secrecy, under the pressure of magazine writing. He would turn back to the writing of verse, the first and, as it proved, the last devotion of his life. The change, after all, was not so great as it seemed. It was not as if he had been a writer of novels proper, and as more specifically understood, that is, stories of modern artificial life and manners showing a certain smartness of treatment. He had mostly aimed at keeping his narratives close to natural life and as near to poetry in their subject as the conditions would allow, and had often regretted that those conditions would not let him keep them nearer still—It was now with a sense of great comfort that he felt he might leave off further chronicles of that sort. He spent part of 1896 revising a short novel he had serialized in the Illustrated London News in 1892, and he published it as The Well-Beloved in 1897. Sixteen years later he assembled an additional volume of his shorter tales, under the title A Changed Man, for his collected edition. But with the completion and publication of Jude the Obscure in 1896 his account with prose fiction was closed. His work from now on would be in the other language and music of verse. In 1898, at the age of fifty-eight, he published his volume of Wessex Poems, many of them dating back to his early manuscripts of the 1850’s and ’60’s, and so began the thirty-year career in poetry which, lasting until his death in 1928, made him one of the radical talents and influences in the verse of the twentieth century and, in a more intimate form and a more trenchant style, the kind of artist he had meant and hoped to be from his earliest years in authorship.

      2

      For a novel addressed by a man to men and women of full age; which attempts to deal unaffectedly with the fret and fever, derision and disaster, that may press in the wake of the strongest passion known to humanity; to tell, without a mincing of words, a deadly war waged between flesh and spirit; and to point the tragedy of unfulfilled aims, I am not aware that there is anything in the handling to which exception can be taken. It was thus that Hardy declared his intention in the writing of Jude the Obscure when he wrote his preface to its first edition in August, 1895, expressing in a characteristic flash of phraseology—the fret and fever, derision and disaster, that may press in the wake of the strongest passion known to humanity—what a later writer, Graham Greene, has called that moment of crystallization when the dominant theme [of a writer’s work] is plainly expressed and when the private universe becomes visible even to the least sensitive reader.{2}

      It has become our habit, in judging the work of the greater novelists, especially those of the nineteenth century, to see in their work the existence of a private universe, an order of values, a self-created world of scene, society, characters, action, and moral atmosphere, which becomes the containing organism of their imagination and vision of life. The novel in its descent from the epic tradition became from its modern beginnings the medium of such an organism. Whether we trace it in the work of Balzac, Stendhal, Zola, or Proust; of Dickens, Trollope, George Eliot, or Joyce; of Melville, Henry James, or Faulkner; or of Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and the greater Russians, we recognize it as the special world of its creator, the matrix of his thought and his comprehension of the human destiny. In Hardy the conception of a private universe takes on a more explicit and overt significance. His universe is more than private; it operates as cosmic and impersonal. It refers to the physical universe itself, the greater and vaster organism of physical nature in which the earth is located and by which the life of man is measured, tested, and comprehended in its smallness as well as its greatness, its pathos as well as its tragic nobility. This mode of measuring the human fate had become increasingly urgent in the nineteenth century. It figures in the thought of speculators who were major influences on Hardy’s thinking—Schopenhauer in The World as Will and Idea, Herbert Spencer in the Synthetic Philosophy, Eduard von Hartmann in The Philosophy of the Unconscious, Winwood Reade in The Martyrdom of Man, above all Darwin in Origin of Species and The Descent of Man. In Hardy the mode found its poet and dramatist.

      We become aware, in tracing his work through its full development, of what may be called the concentric circles, the widening periphery, of his imagination. We also become necessarily aware of what various commentators have emphasized: that unlike Schopenhauer’s, his work was wholly post-Darwinian—that it was no longer human idea and human will that set the boundaries of man’s speculations on his destiny but the larger mystery and embracing order of universal nature itself. His private universe sought its mirror and equivalent, its standard and authority, in the universe of space and time. This image of fate first took on the modest and familiar appearance of the English life and local traditions of Hardy’s own origins. It is the world of Under the Greenwood Tree and Far from the Madding Crowd. We are in England, in Wessex, in a rural domain of farms, villages, ancient woodlands; and the characters we meet there work out their destinies in a narrow orbit of ancient custom and long-tested moral conventions. But as the novels follow each other we observe a progressive expansion of the scene and a deepening plunge of time—the widening and fathoming perspective that Hardy ultimately employed as his device of vision in The Dynasts. Egdon Heath looms in its indifferent vastness behind the human drama. Its ancient roads and barrows, vestiges of old Roman highways and fortifications, spell out the long reach of history. The rats of the Via Iceniana or Watling Street trace the roadways of the Caesars. Stonehenge with its spectral enigma evokes a prehistoric mystery. And beyond the Romans, beyond Stonehenge, lie fathoms of time and process more ancient still.

      The face of the sea cliff to which Mr. Knight clings for his life in A Pair of Blue Eyes discloses its stratified record of the geologic ages and the eyeless gaze of the petrified mollusk in the rock before his eyes speaks of their fellowship in insignificance. The stars and interstellar spaces which the young astronomer Swithin St. Cleve studies through his telescope in Two on a Tower measure the pathos of his passion for Lady Constantine. When Clym Yeobright waits for Eustacia Vye on the heath in The Return of the Native he scans the nocturnal heavens and the geography of the moon and senses the littleness of their passion even while it possesses them. When Henchard in The Mayor of Casterbridge matches his will against the moral fact and circumstance of his community his furies take on a Greek-like force of the timeless and the implacable. When Jude challenges his fate as one of the obscure he questions not only the ghostly shades of Christminster and English history that haunt the stones and sanctities of the ancient university but the God who has become for him an ineluctable logos. And when Hardy wrote his epic-drama of the Napoleonic wars and the fate of Europe in The Dynasts his questioning of chance and destiny is taken over by voices that are no longer even human. It is spoken by the Ancient Spirit and Chorus of the Years, by the Chorus of the Pities, by the Chorus of Rumors, by the Shade of the Earth, by Recording Angels, and by the Spirits Sinister and Ironic. Where once the laws of man’s fate were uttered by the canny voices of the Wessex rustics, they are finally spoken by the voices of an impersonal mind and an empyrean mystery.

      Thus there is revealed the expanding dimension, the scale and reach, of Hardy’s drama. It becomes one of the most comprehensive symbolic dramas in the literature of the nineteenth century—an allegory of what the theory and speculations of modern science had imposed on man as the riddle of his existence. Nature is the central fact of his work—its meaning, its logic, its mind: what Hardy called, in the key phrase of his thought, its Immanent Will. All these terms imply, in his usage, a basic incongruity. They convey, beyond any definition Ruskin or other critics have given to the phrase, a profound pathetic fallacy—the ascription to abstract nature of attributes of intelligence, purpose, and intention which man knows or boasts of only in his own mind and nature.{3}

      Between those two natures, man’s and the universe’s, there exists a baffling hiatus, a radical and insoluble irony; and that irony is the condition of all of Hardy’s work, as it was the condition of his own temperament and of the poetry in which it found its most intimate expression. Beyond their personal conflicts and frustrations, beyond their collisions with society or ethical law, his heroes face the larger question of their existence, and they face it with the desolating sense of having lost what Yeats called their great enemy—a conscious force that resists, defies, or condemns them. Far back, in his young manhood, Hardy had defined his theme and the mystery of the human fate in a poem of 1866 called Hap, and it remains the key to his work in its entirety:

      If but some vengeful god would call to me

      From up the sky, and laugh: "Thou suffering thing,

      Know that thy sorrow is my ecstasy,

      That thy love’s loss is my hate’s profiting!"

      Then would I bear it, clench myself, and die,

      Steeled by the sense of ire unmerited;

      Half-eased in that a Powerfuller than I

      Had willed and meted me the tears I shed.

      But not so. How arrives it joy lies slain,

      And why unblooms the best hope ever sown?

      —Crass Casualty obstructs the sun and rain,

      And dicing Time for gladness casts a moan. . . .

      These purblind Doomsters had as readily strown

      Blisses about my pilgrimage as pain.

      This was Hardy’s version of that Titanism which so many spokesmen of the modern mind’s dilemma, from Milton’s Satan to Byron’s Cain and Manfred, Shelley’s Prometheus, Melville’s Ahab, and Mann’s Faustus, have voiced as their predicament—the spirit of revolt against an order felt to be unjust. Hardy’s Jude is a humble member of their company. If, says one of Hardy’s recent interpreters, I were asked what the total effect of Darwin, Mill, Huxley, and Herbert Spencer upon their age had been, I should answer somehow thus. They made it difficult, almost to impossibility, for their younger contemporaries to retain the notion of a transcendent, governing Providence. . . . To those who pass that way, the various devices with which believers of another sort reconcile Providence with Evil, or with Pain, will almost necessarily seem servile or sophistical. . . . The injustice of uncompensated pain, the darkening of our hours of happiness by the thought that they too are passing toward Nothing, round these two themes Pessimism revolves in a closed circle. Men of an abundant, active temperament will not often think of them; men absorbed in some intellectual pursuit will have little time to think of them. But for the meditative man there is no escape, and no consolation, except perhaps in constraining his temper to such an indifference as the ancient philosophies, Stoic and Epicurean, inculcated.{4} No protests that Hardy made against being called a pessimist; no argument he offered against having his work interpreted as a consistent philosophy instead of as the series of seemings or personal impressions he preferred to consider it; no plea he raised that his thought embodied an emergent morality, a tentative metaphysic, or an evolutionary meliorism; not even the gleam of final hope he expressed in the closing Semi-chorus of the Pities in The Dynasts—

      But—a stirring thrills the air

      Like to sounds of joyance there

      That the rages

      Of the ages

      Shall be cancelled, and deliverance offered from the darts that were,

      Consciousness the Will informing, till It fashion all things fair!—

      can relieve his mind or the meaning it conveys to us of a radical and temperamental desolation, a fundamental bent toward pessimism and pathos. He, more than any other English writer of his age, marks that stage and painful moment in the ordeal of modern man. Had he written as an abstract thinker or systematic skeptic he would have left his inheritors a record of disillusionment and spiritual dispossession even darker than that of Schopenhauer or of his somber English contemporaries—Matthew Arnold, James Thomson, Winwood Reade, A. E. Housman, George Gissing.

      But he wrote out of deeper reserves than those of skepticism or systematic agnosticism. He wrote as a man and poet of intensely human needs and sensibility, of inescapable moral sympathies and almost helplessly unguarded sensitiveness to man’s suffering and anguish. His intellectual innocence corrected his logical rigor; his naiveté of emotion redressed his philosophic fatalism; his compassion relieved his misanthropy and moral pride. What these opposing elements of his temperament yielded in his work was the same combined melancholy and pride in the human race which Thomas Mann, in a passage closely relevant to Hardy’s meaning, once traced in the thought of Hardy’s deeply pondered ancestor, Schopenhauer:

      His pessimism—that is his humanity. His interpretation of the world by the concept of the will, his insight into the overweening power of instinct and the derogation of the one-time godlike reason, mind, and intellect to a mere tool with which to achieve security—all this is anti-classic and in its essence inhumane. But it is precisely in the pessimistic hue of his philosophy that his humanity and spirituality lie; in the fact that this great artist . . . lifts man out of the biological sphere of nature, makes his own feeling and understanding soul the theatre where the will meets its reverse, and sees in the human being the savior of all creation.{5}

      3

      In Jude the Obscure Hardy wrote his final testament as a novelist. The book stands in the same relation to his other fiction as The Dynasts does to his poetry. He consciously considered it to be—since there was always likely to be a latent Shakespearean reference in his conceptions—his King Lear. Like The Dynasts it was written out of a deliberate and summary intention. It was meant to bring Hardy’s reading of the human fate to its most complete and exhaustive statement; and Jude, in his desire, ambition, daemonic passion, and defeat, issues from the earlier ordeals of Dick Dewy, Boldwood, Henchard, Clym Yeobright, and Tess. It has rightly been noted how little a novelist’s choice of story and character widens or changes between his first book and his last. "In an obvious way there seems to be no kinship between Hardy’s Under the Greenwood Tree and Jude the Obscure, but reading these books again we see their differences are of the surface. Only age separates the youthful pastoral from the middle-aged tract. One is the sapling, pretty in its April leafage, the other is the groaning winter oak, stark with argument, but the same bitter juice rises in both their stems. Sue Bridehead is one of the consequences of being Fancy Day, Jude is a Dick Dewy become conscious of his obscurity; the tantalized youth has become the frustrated man."{6}

      Where, in the early novel and most of its successors in the 1880’s, Hardy planted his drama deep in the life and landscape of ancient Wessex, he now moves to the outer boundaries of his rural kingdom and sets the crucial scenes of Jude in that northern outpost where Wessex touches the larger world of thought and intellect—in Oxford, which becomes the Christminster of Jude’s hopes and death. Following his old schematizing habit, Hardy thus establishes the symbolic basis of his tale. Wessex stands for Jude’s native obscurity and humble origins; Christminster stands for the fame and conquest of knowledge to which he aspires. The strongest passion known to humanity which Hardy defined as the theme of his tale is not Jude’s love for Sue Bridehead alone. It is also those other passions which possess men and with which physical love is always likely to be joined in the novels—the drive of an egoism which compels Jude to realize his personal identity, and the desire for the power by which that identity will be enforced and justified to the world.

      From this basic symbolism the other symbolic elements in the novel depend, Phillotson becomes the man of professed faith, the cleric, confused between his vocation and the casuistry which, induced by his physical desire, corrupts his faith and character. Sue is the modern woman, the most emancipated of Hardy’s heroines, ready to defy conventional morality in order to justify and prove the truth of her passion, but who finds herself, when misfortune daunts her courage, succumbing to her essential femininity and finally surrendering to her ancestral fears and conscience (very much as Ibsen’s emancipated heroine, Rebecca West in Rosmersholm, eventually succumbs to the trolls of an avenging conscience). Arabella is the earth woman, the creature of natural instinct and predatory will, who defies Jude’s claim to superiority and in the end reclaims him to his obscurity. And their child, little Father Time, embodies the extreme result and explicit symbol of Jude’s confusions, the pathetic token of his defeat. 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; and Jude recognizes in the child’s suicide the outcome of new views of life—the beginning of the coming universal wish not to live.

      When a novel shows so overt an argument and symbolic scheme, so deliberate a contrivance, it is bound to raise fundamental questions about its fidelity to experience and its truth as art. Around Jude the Obscure there has centered during the past seven decades some of the most strenuous criticism to which the art of modern fiction has been subjected. Its tragic validity has been impugned—for how can valid tragedy exist when the moral intelligence upon which tragedy depends becomes as helpless and baffled as Jude’s does in the face of forces to which no intelligent resistance can be opposed?{7} Its plot becomes so riddled by accident and coincidence that these longstanding factors in Hardy’s drama become weakened as devices of credible fatality or ironic justice and suggest not the irony of chance but its absurdity. Hardy’s old usage of the choric rustics, with Arabella as their spokesman, threatens to lapse into an exorbitant convention. The style of the book, pitched precariously between realism and rhetoric, veers from a convincing truth to question-begging argument, from ironic detachment to a self-indulgent emotionality, and thus recalls what T. S. Eliot once said of Hardy’s writing: that its excesses of self-absorption and self-expression are symptoms of a basic decadence; that he wrote sometimes overpoweringly well, but always very carelessly; and that at times his style touches sublimity without ever having passed through the stage of being good.{8}

      But to raise these criticisms is only to describe the kind of novelist and poet Hardy was, and to suggest his quality as a mind and his constitution as a man of character. In the most empirical of all the modes of literature, fiction, he is a case of the extreme and deliberate empiric, the recorder of seemings, as in the most subjective of all the forms of verse, the lyric, he is the most self-centered, the most wayward, and as a consequence one of the most unself-protective, sincere, and intimate of modern poets. He stood at a point of crisis and division not only in modern thought and morality but in modern art. One side of his nature was simple, intuitive, natively sympathetic and faithful to experience—a recorder of human fact, emotion, and circumstance who was unsparing and at his best uncannily searching in his fidelity to their truth and reality. But on the other side he was compelled by the scientific and skeptical temper of his age toward moral and philosophic ambition and abstract thought—toward reading into a universe dispossessed of divine authority a new meaning and logic, and thus toward an art not merely of that scientific naturalism which he appears at times to share with Zola and the French anatomists of society but of allegorical dimensions that strive toward a new cosmic and spiritual mythology. He forecasts, that is to say, the age and art of Proust, Lawrence, Mann, Gide, and Kafka. He found himself pitched desperately between an old tradition of belief that was disintegrating before his eyes and a new faith in the energy of matter and spirit in which he could find little assurance or comfort.

      This was his predicament as an intelligence, and he made it the predicament of his radical characters. The incongruity of his style and expression was the equivalent of the irony of his personal and moral dilemma. When these joined in his tales and poems they gave him his subject and medium as a writer and his classic role in the drama of the modern spirit. Jude the Obscure is one of the works in which he most forcefully defined his character, and as such it marks a moment in modern literature. It also remains one of the novels which, however much we may accept or dispute its findings, and whatever we see in it to resist or criticize, has become part of the record of human ordeal in an age of crisis, and as such it is likely to become unforgettable in the memory and experience of its readers.

      MORTON DAUWEN ZABEL.

      1962.

      Preface to the First Edition

      The history of this novel (whose birth in its present shape has been much retarded by the necessities of periodical publication) is briefly as follows. The scheme was jotted down in 1890, from notes made in 1887 and onwards, some of the circumstances being suggested by the death of a woman in the former year. The scenes were revisited in October 1892; the narrative was written in outline in 1892 and the spring of 1893, and at full length, as it now appears, from August 1893 onwards into the next year; the whole, with the exception of a few chapters, being in the hands of the publisher by the end of 1894. It was begun as a serial story in Harper’s Magazine at the end of November 1894, and was continued in monthly parts.

      But, as in the case of Tess of the d’Urbervilles, the magazine version was for various reasons an abridged and modified one, the present edition being the first in which the whole appears as originally written. And in the difficulty of coming to an early decision in the matter of a title, the tale was issued under a provisional name, two such titles having, in fact, been successively adopted. The present and final title, deemed on the whole the best, was one of the earliest thought of.

      For a novel addressed by a man to men and women of full age; which attempts to deal unaffectedly with the fret and fever, derision and disaster, that may press in the wake of the strongest passion known to humanity; to tell, without a mincing of words, of a deadly war waged between flesh and spirit; and to point the tragedy of unfulfilled aims, I am not aware that there is anything in the handling to which exception can be taken.

      Like former productions of this pen, 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.

      August 1895.

      Postscript to the Preface

      The issue of this book sixteen years ago, with the explanatory Preface given above, was followed by unexpected incidents, and one can now look back for a moment at what happened. Within a day or two of its publication the reviewers pronounced upon it in tones to which the reception of Tess of the d’Urbervilles bore no comparison, though there were two or three dissentients from the chorus. This salutation of the story in England was instantly cabled to America, and the music was reinforced on that side of the Atlantic in a shrill crescendo.

      In my own eyes the sad feature of the attack was that the greater part of the story—that which presented the shattered ideals of the two chief characters, and had been more especially, and indeed almost exclusively, the part of interest to myself—was practically ignored by the adverse press of the two countries; the while that some twenty or thirty pages of sorry detail deemed necessary to complete the narrative, and show the antitheses in Jude’s life, were almost the sole portions read and regarded. And curiously enough, a reprint the next year of a fantastic tale that had been published in a family paper some time before, drew down upon my head a continuation of the same sort of invective from several quarters.

      So much for the unhappy beginning of Jude’s career as a book. After these verdicts from the press its next misfortune was to be burnt by a bishop—probably in his despair at not being able to burn me.

      Then somebody discovered that Jude was a moral work—austere in its treatment of a difficult subject—as if the writer had not all the time said in the Preface that it was meant to be so. Thereupon many uncursed me, and the matter ended, the only effect of it on human conduct that I could discover being its effect on myself—the experience completely curing me of further interest in novel-writing.

      One incident among many arising from the storm of words was that an American man of letters, who did not whitewash his own morals, informed me that, having bought a copy of the book on the strength of the shocked criticisms, he read on and on, wondering when the harmfulness was going to begin, and at last flung it across the room with execrations at having been induced by the rascally reviewers to waste a dollar-and-half on what he was pleased to call ‘a religious and ethical treatise.’

      I sympathized with him, and assured him honestly that the misrepresentations had been no collusive trick of mine to increase my circulation among the subscribers to the papers in question.

      Then there was the case of the lady who having shuddered at the book in an influential article bearing intermediate headlines of horror, and printed in a world-read journal, wrote to me shortly afterwards that it was her desire to make my acquaintance.

      To return, however, to the book itself. The marriage laws being used in great part as the tragic machinery of the tale, and its general drift on the domestic side tending to show that, in Diderot’s words, the civil law should be only the enunciation of the law of nature (a statement that requires some qualification, by the way), I have been charged since 1895 with a large responsibility in this country for the present ‘shop-soiled’ condition of the marriage theme (as a learned writer characterized it the other day). I do not know. My opinion at that time, if I remember rightly, was what it is now, that a marriage should be dissolvable as soon as it becomes a cruelty to either of the parties—being then essentially and morally no marriage—and it seemed a good foundation for the fable of a tragedy, told for its own sake as a presentation of particulars containing a good deal that was universal, and not without a hope that certain cathartic, Aristotelian qualities might be found therein.

      The difficulties down to twenty or thirty years back of acquiring knowledge in letters without pecuniary means were used in the same way; though I was informed that some readers thought these episodes an attack on venerable institutions, and that when Ruskin College was subsequently founded it should have been called the College of Jude the Obscure.

      Artistic effort always pays heavily for finding its tragedies in the forced adaptation of human instincts to rusty and irksome moulds that do not fit them. To do Bludyer and the conflagratory bishop justice, what they meant seems to have been only this: ‘We Britons hate ideas, and we are going to live up to that privilege of our native country. Your picture may not show the untrue, or the uncommon, or even be contrary to the canons of art; but it is not the view of life that we who thrive on conventions can permit to be painted.’

      But what did it matter. As for the matrimonial scenes, in spite of their ‘touching the spot’, and the screaming of a poor lady in Blackwood that there was an unholy anti-marriage league afoot, the famous contract—sacrament I mean—is doing fairly well still, and people marry and give in what may or may not be true marriage as light-heartedly as ever. The author has even been reproached by some earnest correspondents that he has left the question where he found it, and has not pointed the way to a much-needed reform.

      After the issue of Jude the Obscure as a serial story in Germany, an experienced reviewer of that country informed the writer that Sue Bridehead, the heroine, was the first delineation in fiction of the woman who was coming into notice in her thousands every year—the woman of the feminist movement—the slight, pale ‘bachelor’ girl—the intellectualized, emancipated bundle of nerves that modern conditions were producing, mainly in cities as yet; who does not recognize the necessity for most of her sex to follow marriage as a profession, and boast themselves as superior people because they are licensed to be loved on the premises. The regret of this critic was that the portrait of the newcomer had been left to be drawn by a man, and was not done by one of her own sex, who would never have allowed her to break down at the end.

      Whether this assurance is borne out by dates I cannot say. Nor am I able, across the gap of years since the production of novel, to exercise more criticism upon it of a general kind than extends to a few verbal corrections, whatever, good or bad, it may contain. And no doubt there can be more in a book than the author consciously puts there, which will help either to its profit or to its disadvantage as the case may be.

      T. H.

      April 1912.

      The First Part—At Marygreen

      "Yea, many there be that have run out of their wits for women, and become servants for their sakes. Many also have perished, have erred, and sinned, for women… O ye men, how can it be but women should be strong, seeing they do thus?"—ESDRAS.

      I

      The schoolmaster was leaving the village, and everybody seemed sorry. The miller at Cresscombe lent him the small white tilted cart and horse to carry his goods to the city of his destination, about twenty miles off, such a vehicle proving of quite sufficient size for the departing teacher’s effects. For the schoolhouse had been partly furnished by the managers, and the only cumbersome article possessed by the master, in addition to the packing-case of books, was a cottage piano that he had bought at an auction during the year in which he thought of learning instrumental music. But the enthusiasm having waned he had never acquired any skill in playing, and the purchased article had been a perpetual trouble to him ever since in moving house.

      The rector had gone away for the day, being a man who disliked the sight of changes. He did not mean to return till the evening, when the new school-teacher would have arrived and settled in, and everything would be smooth again.

      The blacksmith, the farm bailiff, and the schoolmaster himself were standing in perplexed attitudes in the parlour before the instrument. The master had remarked that even if he got it into the cart he should not know what to do with it on his arrival at Christminster, the city he was bound for, since he was only going into temporary lodgings just at first.

      A little boy of eleven, who had been thoughtfully assisting in the packing, joined the group of men, and as they rubbed their chins he spoke up, blushing at the sound of his own voice: Aunt have got a great fuel-house, and it could be put there, perhaps, till you’ve found a place to settle in, sir.

      A proper good notion, said the blacksmith.

      It was decided that a deputation should wait on the boy’s aunt—an old maiden resident—and ask her if she would house the piano till Mr. Phillotson should send for it. The smith and the bailiff started to see about the practicability of the suggested shelter, and the boy and the schoolmaster were left standing alone.

      Sorry I am going, Jude? asked the latter kindly.

      Tears rose into the boy’s eyes, for he was not among the regular day scholars, who came unromantically close to the schoolmaster’s life, but one who had attended the night school only during the present teacher’s term of office. The regular scholars, if the truth must be told, stood at the present moment afar off, like certain historic disciples, indisposed to any enthusiastic volunteering of aid.

      The boy awkwardly opened the book he held in his hand, which Mr. Phillotson had bestowed on him as a parting gift, and admitted that he was sorry.

      So am I, said Mr. Phillotson.

      Why do you go, sir? asked the boy.

      Ah—that would be a long story. You wouldn’t understand my reasons, Jude. You will, perhaps, when you are older.

      I think I should now, sir.

      Well—don’t speak of this everywhere. You know what a university is, and a university degree? It is the necessary hallmark of a man who wants to do anything in teaching. My scheme, or dream, is to be a university graduate, and then to be ordained. By going to live at Christminster, or near it, I shall be at headquarters, so to speak, and if my scheme is practicable at all, I consider that being on the spot will afford me a better chance of carrying it out than I should have elsewhere.

      The smith and his companion returned. Old Miss Fawley’s fuel-house was dry, and eminently practicable; and she seemed willing to give

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