Jude the Obsure - Page 58/318

He regarded the statesmen in their various types, men of firmer

movement and less dreamy air; the scholar, the speaker, the plodder;

the man whose mind grew with his growth in years, and the man whose

mind contracted with the same.

The scientists and philologists followed on in his mind-sight in

an odd impossible combination, men of meditative faces, strained

foreheads, and weak-eyed as bats with constant research;

then official characters--such men as governor-generals and

lord-lieutenants, in whom he took little interest; chief-justices and

lord chancellors, silent thin-lipped figures of whom he knew barely

the names. A keener regard attached to the prelates, by reason of

his own former hopes. Of them he had an ample band--some men of

heart, others rather men of head; he who apologized for the Church

in Latin; the saintly author of the Evening Hymn; and near them the

great itinerant preacher, hymn-writer, and zealot, shadowed like Jude

by his matrimonial difficulties.

Jude found himself speaking out loud, holding conversations with

them as it were, like an actor in a melodrama who apostrophizes the

audience on the other side of the footlights; till he suddenly ceased

with a start at his absurdity. Perhaps those incoherent words of the

wanderer were heard within the walls by some student or thinker over

his lamp; and he may have raised his head, and wondered what voice it

was, and what it betokened. Jude now perceived that, so far as solid

flesh went, he had the whole aged city to himself with the exception

of a belated townsman here and there, and that he seemed to be

catching a cold.

A voice reached him out of the shade; a real and local voice: "You've been a-settin' a long time on that plinth-stone, young man.

What med you be up to?"

It came from a policeman who had been observing Jude without the

latter observing him.

Jude went home and to bed, after reading up a little about these men

and their several messages to the world from a book or two that he

had brought with him concerning the sons of the university. As he

drew towards sleep various memorable words of theirs that he had

just been conning seemed spoken by them in muttering utterances;

some audible, some unintelligible to him. One of the spectres (who

afterwards mourned Christminster as "the home of lost causes," though

Jude did not remember this) was now apostrophizing her thus: "Beautiful city! so venerable, so lovely, so unravaged by the fierce

intellectual life of our century, so serene! ... Her ineffable charm

keeps ever calling us to the true goal of all of us, to the ideal, to

perfection."