Jude the Obsure

He did not wake till morning. The ghostly past seemed to have gone,

and everything spoke of to-day. He started up in bed, thinking he

had overslept himself and then said: "By Jove--I had quite forgotten my sweet-faced cousin, and that she's

here all the time! ... and my old schoolmaster, too." His words

about his schoolmaster had, perhaps, less zest in them than his words

concerning his cousin.

II

Necessary meditations on the actual, including the mean

bread-and-cheese question, dissipated the phantasmal for a while, and

compelled Jude to smother high thinkings under immediate needs. He

had to get up, and seek for work, manual work; the only kind deemed

by many of its professors to be work at all.

Passing out into the streets on this errand he found that the

colleges had treacherously changed their sympathetic countenances:

some were pompous; some had put on the look of family vaults above

ground; something barbaric loomed in the masonries of all. The

spirits of the great men had disappeared.

The numberless architectural pages around him he read, naturally,

less as an artist-critic of their forms than as an artizan and

comrade of the dead handicraftsmen whose muscles had actually

executed those forms. He examined the mouldings, stroked them as

one who knew their beginning, said they were difficult or easy in

the working, had taken little or much time, were trying to the arm,

or convenient to the tool.

What at night had been perfect and ideal was by day the more or

less defective real. Cruelties, insults, had, he perceived, been

inflicted on the aged erections. The condition of several moved him

as he would have been moved by maimed sentient beings. They were

wounded, broken, sloughing off their outer shape in the deadly

struggle against years, weather, and man.

The rottenness of these historical documents reminded him that he was

not, after all, hastening on to begin the morning practically as he

had intended. He had come to work, and to live by work, and the

morning had nearly gone. It was, in one sense, encouraging to think

that in a place of crumbling stones there must be plenty for one of

his trade to do in the business of renovation. He asked his way to

the workyard of the stone-mason whose name had been given him at

Alfredston; and soon heard the familiar sound of the rubbers and

chisels.

The yard was a little centre of regeneration. Here, with keen edges

and smooth curves, were forms in the exact likeness of those he had

seen abraded and time-eaten on the walls. These were the ideas in

modern prose which the lichened colleges presented in old poetry.

Even some of those antiques might have been called prose when they

were new. They had done nothing but wait, and had become poetical.

How easy to the smallest building; how impossible to most men.