Ever since his first ecstasy or vision of Christminster and its
possibilities, Jude had meditated much and curiously on the probable
sort of process that was involved in turning the expressions of one
language into those of another. He concluded that a grammar of the
required tongue would contain, primarily, a rule, prescription, or
clue of the nature of a secret cipher, which, once known, would
enable him, by merely applying it, to change at will all words of his
own speech into those of the foreign one. His childish idea was, in
fact, a pushing to the extremity of mathematical precision what is
everywhere known as Grimm's Law--an aggrandizement of rough rules to
ideal completeness. Thus he assumed that the words of the required
language were always to be found somewhere latent in the words of the
given language by those who had the art to uncover them, such art
being furnished by the books aforesaid.
When, therefore, having noted that the packet bore the postmark of
Christminster, he cut the string, opened the volumes, and turned to
the Latin grammar, which chanced to come uppermost, he could scarcely
believe his eyes.
The book was an old one--thirty years old, soiled, scribbled
wantonly over with a strange name in every variety of enmity to the
letterpress, and marked at random with dates twenty years earlier
than his own day. But this was not the cause of Jude's amazement.
He learnt for the first time that there was no law of transmutation,
as in his innocence he had supposed (there was, in some degree, but
the grammarian did not recognize it), but that every word in both
Latin and Greek was to be individually committed to memory at the
cost of years of plodding.
Jude flung down the books, lay backward along the broad trunk of the
elm, and was an utterly miserable boy for the space of a quarter of
an hour. As he had often done before, he pulled his hat over his
face and watched the sun peering insidiously at him through the
interstices of the straw. This was Latin and Greek, then, was it
this grand delusion! The charm he had supposed in store for him was
really a labour like that of Israel in Egypt.
What brains they must have in Christminster and the great schools, he
presently thought, to learn words one by one up to tens of thousands!
There were no brains in his head equal to this business; and as the
little sun-rays continued to stream in through his hat at him, he
wished he had never seen a book, that he might never see another,
that he had never been born.