From Fawley the scene of Jude’s tragedy changes to Christminster, the Oxford of everyday commerce. Oft had he, as a boy, seen from this vantage-point the faint radiance of its lights reflected from the sky at night, twenty miles away. His anticipations and disillusionments, his strong resolves and stumblings by the way, over stumbling-blocks of his own and of extraneous making, picture a strong character brought low, like Samson by Delilah—cheated of scholarly ambition by the guardians of learning, who open its gates only to wealth or scholarships acquired by early opportunity. Take Jude the Obscure as you will, it forms a somewhat serious indictment of university procedure: “They raise pa’sons there, like radishes in a bed. ’Tis all learning there—nothing but learning, except religion.” Jude sought learning there, and Holy Orders, but never rose beyond his trade of stonemason, and, after many fitful wanderings through Wessex, ends tragically at Oxford.
Since Jude the Obscure was written Oxford has gained another historic personality, none the less real than the great figures of actual life who have trodden the pavements of its High Street. You may follow all the innermost thoughts of that mere character in a novel, and see fully exposed the springs that produce his actions; and thus he is made seem more human than all your Wolseys and great dignitaries, whose doings, smothered in dust, and whose motives, buried deep beneath their own subterfuges and the dark imaginings of historians with little but ancient verbiage to rely upon, seem only the spasmodic, involuntary capers of so many irresponsible jumping-jacks. Nowadays, when I think of Oxford, it is to recall poor Jude Fawley’s fascination by it, like the desire of the moth for the star, or for the candle that eventually scorches its wings and leaves it maimed and dying. “It is a city of light,” he exclaimed, not knowing (as how should he have known?) that the light it emits is but the phosphorescent glow of decay. And when I walk the High Street, “the main street—that ha’n’t another like it in the world,” it is not of Newman or his fellow Tractarians I think, but of Jude the stonemason, feeling with appreciative technical fingers the mouldings and crumbling stones of its architecture.
In one novel, A Pair of Blue Eyes, Mr. Hardy has made an expedition far beyond the confines of his Wessex. Away beyond “Lower Wessex,” or Devonshire—itself scarce more than incidentally referred to in the whole course of his writings—he takes the reader to the north coast of Cornwall, the “furthest westward of all those convenient corners wherein I have ventured to erect my theatre for these imperfect little dramas of country life and passions; and it lies near to, or no great way beyond, the vague border of the Wessex kingdom, on that side which, like the westering verge of modern American settlements, was progressive and uncertain.”
“Castle Boterel” he styles the stage of his tragical story of A Pair of Blue Eyes; a place to be found on maps under the style and title of Boscastle. That tiny port and harbour on the wildest part of a wild coast obtains its name, in a manner familiar to all students of Cornish topography, by a series of phonetic corruptions. Originally the site of a castle owned by the Norman family of De Bottreaux, its name has in the course of centuries descended from that knightly designation to that it now bears. Leland, four hundred years ago, described the place as “a very filthy Toun and il kept,” and probably had still in mind and in nostrils when he wrote the scent of the fish-cellars and the fish-offal which to this day go largely towards making up the bouquet of most of the smaller Cornish fishing-ports.
Still, as in Leland’s time, goes the little brook, running down from the tremendously hilly background “into the Severn Se betwixt 2 Hylles,” and still the harbour remains, from the mariner’s point of view, “a pore Havenet, of no certaine Salvegarde,” winding, as it does, in the shape of a double S, between gigantic rocky headlands, and most difficult of approach or exit. It will thus be guessed, and guessed rightly, that, although poor as a harbour, Boscastle is a place of commanding picturesqueness. Its Cornish atmosphere, too, confers upon it another distinction. In the romantic mind of the novelist the district is “pre-eminently (for one person at least) the region of dream and mystery. The ghostly birds, the pall-like sea, the frothy wind, the eternal soliloquy of the waters, the bloom, of dark purple cast, that seems to exhale from the shoreward precipices, in themselves lend to the scene an atmosphere like the twilight of a night vision.”
But it is not always like that at Boscastle. There are days of bright sunshine, when the sea is in colour something between a sapphire and an opal, when the cliffs reveal unexpected hues and the sands of Trebarrow—the “Trebarwith Strand” of the novel—shine golden, in contrast with the dark slaty headland of Willapark Point—the “cliff without a name” where Elfride, the owner of that pair of blue eyes, saves the prig, Henry Knight, by the singular expedient none other than the author of the Wessex novels would have conceived. The average reader may perhaps be allowed his opinion that it had been better for Elfride had she saved her underclothing and allowed Knight to drop from his precarious hand-hold on the cliff’s edge into the sea below waiting for him.
The town of “St. Launce’s” mentioned in the book is of course Launceston, and “Endelstow” is the village of St. Juliot’s.
CHAPTER II
WINCHESTER: THE ANCIENT CAPITAL OF WESSEX
But, to have done with these preliminary triflings in the marches of the Hardy Country, let us consider in what way the Londoner may best come to a thoroughgoing exploration of this storied land. On all counts—by force of easy access, and by its ancient circumstance—Winchester is indicated. “The city of Wintoncester, that fine old city, afore-time capital of Wessex,” stands at the gate of this literary country and hard by the confines of the New Forest, to which by tradition and history it is closely akin. At one in feeling with that hoary hunting preserve, it is itself modern in but little measure, and loves to linger upon memories of the past. Here the Saxon and the Norman are not merely historical counters with which, to the ideas of unimaginative students, the dusty game of history was played; but do, by the presence of their works, make the least impressionable feel that they were creatures of blood and fibre, strong to rule, to make and unmake nations; groping darkly in superstition, without doubt, but perceiving the light, distant and dim, and striving with all the strength of their strong natures to win toward it. They fought as sturdily for Christianity as they had done for paganism, and were not—it really seems necessary to insist upon it—creatures of parchment and the wax of which seals are sealed; but lived as human a life as ourselves, and loved and hated, and despaired and triumphed, just as keenly, nay, with perhaps even greater keenness, than any Edwardian liege of this twentieth century. Still runs the Itchen, bright and clear as when the Romans came and the Saxons followed, to be in their turn ousted in governance by the Norman-French; and still, although this England of ours be yet overlorded by the relics of Norman domination, it is the broad-shouldered, level-headed, stolid, and long-suffering Saxon who peoples Winchester and Wessex, and in him that ancient kingdom, although unknown to modern political geographies, survives.