Someone might have come along that way who would have asked him his trouble, and might have cheered him by saying that his notions were further advanced than those of his grammarian. But nobody did come, because nobody does; and under the crushing recognition of his gigantic error Jude continued to wish himself out of the world.
Thomas Hardy never wrote another novel after the negative critical reception of Jude the Obscure. It is a book which offers no second chances and as such seems very despairing and truly faithless. Innocence and idealism are subjugated to cynicism. Here the possibility for the Good Samaritan is negated by Hardy’s invasive, heavy truth, that we are all alone; in this world and in the next, that in a writer as resolutely atheistic as Hardy, does not exist.
This faithlessness is later represented again in Larkin’s poetry and this particular part of Jude has always resonated with me as it wears its despair casually yet inevitably. This sentence promises nothing but isolation and abscence.
‘But nobody did come because nobody does.’
Does life get any bleaker than this? Hardy’s word pools are grim indeed.
