Jude the Obsure - Page 21/318

On a day when Fawley was getting quite advanced, being now about

sixteen, and had been stumbling through the "Carmen Saeculare," on

his way home, he found himself to be passing over the high edge of

the plateau by the Brown House. The light had changed, and it was

the sense of this which had caused him to look up. The sun was going

down, and the full moon was rising simultaneously behind the woods in

the opposite quarter. His mind had become so impregnated with the

poem that, in a moment of the same impulsive emotion which years

before had caused him to kneel on the ladder, he stopped the horse,

alighted, and glancing round to see that nobody was in sight, knelt

down on the roadside bank with open book. He turned first to the

shiny goddess, who seemed to look so softly and critically at his

doings, then to the disappearing luminary on the other hand, as he

began:

"Phoebe silvarumque potens Diana!"

The horse stood still till he had finished the hymn, which Jude

repeated under the sway of a polytheistic fancy that he would never

have thought of humouring in broad daylight.

Reaching home, he mused over his curious superstition, innate or

acquired, in doing this, and the strange forgetfulness which had led

to such a lapse from common sense and custom in one who wished, next

to being a scholar, to be a Christian divine. It had all come of

reading heathen works exclusively. The more he thought of it the

more convinced he was of his inconsistency. He began to wonder

whether he could be reading quite the right books for his object

in life. Certainly there seemed little harmony between this pagan

literature and the mediaeval colleges at Christminster, that

ecclesiastical romance in stone.

Ultimately he decided that in his sheer love of reading he had taken

up a wrong emotion for a Christian young man. He had dabbled in

Clarke's Homer, but had never yet worked much at the New Testament

in the Greek, though he possessed a copy, obtained by post from a

second-hand bookseller. He abandoned the now familiar Ionic for a

new dialect, and for a long time onward limited his reading almost

entirely to the Gospels and Epistles in Griesbach's text. Moreover,

on going into Alfredston one day, he was introduced to patristic

literature by finding at the bookseller's some volumes of the

Fathers which had been left behind by an insolvent clergyman of the

neighbourhood.

As another outcome of this change of groove he visited on Sundays all

the churches within a walk, and deciphered the Latin inscriptions on

fifteenth-century brasses and tombs. On one of these pilgrimages he

met with a hunch-backed old woman of great intelligence, who read

everything she could lay her hands on, and she told him more yet

of the romantic charms of the city of light and lore. Thither he

resolved as firmly as ever to go.