and the
music was reinforced on that side of the Atlantic in a shrill crescendo.
    In my own eyes the sad feature of the attack was that the greater part of
the story - that which presented the shattered ideals of the two chief
characters, and had been more especially, and indeed almost exclusively, the
part of interest to myself - was practically ignored by the adverse press of the
two countries; the while that some twenty or thirty pages of sorry detail deemed
necessary to complete the narrative, and show the antitheses in Jude's life,
were almost the sole portions read and regarded. And curiously enough, a reprint
the next year of a fantastic tale that had been published in a family paper some
time before, drew down upon my head a continuation of the same sort of invective
from several quarters.
    So much for the unhappy beginning of Jude's career as a book. After these
verdicts from the press its next misfortune was to be burnt by a bishop -
probably in his despair at not being able to burn me.
    Then somebody discovered that Jude was a moral work - austere in its
treatment of a difficult subject - as if the writer had not all the time said in
the Preface that it was meant to be so. Thereupon many uncursed me, and the
matter ended, the only effect of it on human conduct that I could discover being
its effect on myself - the experience completely curing me of further interest
in novel-writing.
    One incident among many arising from the storm of words was that an American
man of letters, who did not whitewash his own morals, informed me that, having
bought a copy of the book on the strength of the shocked criticisms, he read on
and on, wondering when the harmfulness was going to begin, and at last flung it
across the room with execrations at having been induced by the rascally
reviewers to waste a dollar-and-half on what he was pleased to call a religious
and ethical treatise.
    I sympathized with him, and assured him honestly that the misrepresentations
had been no collusive trick of mine to increase my circulation among the
subscribers to the papers in question.
    Then there was the case of the lady who having shuddered at the book in an
influential article bearing intermediate headlines of horror, and printed in a
world-read journal, wrote to me shortly afterwards that it was her desire to
make my acquaintance.
    To return, however, to the book itself. The marriage laws being used in
great part as the tragic machinery of the tale, and its general drift on the
domestic side tending to show that, in