Diderot's words, the civil law should be
only the enunciation of the law of nature (a statement that requires some
qualification, by the way), I have been charged since 1895 with a large
responsibility in this country for the present shop-soiled condition of the
marriage theme (as a learned writer characterized it the other day). I do not
know. My opinion at that time, if I remember rightly, was what it is now, that a
marriage should be dissolvable as soon as it becomes a cruelty to either of the
parties - being then essentially and morally no marriage - and it seemed a good
foundation for the fable of a tragedy, told for its own sake as a presentation
of particulars containing a good deal that was universal, and not without a hope
that certain cathartic, Aristotelian qualities might be found therein.
    The difficulties down to twenty or thirty years back of acquiring knowledge
in letters without pecuniary means were used in the same way; though I was
informed that some readers thought these episodes an attack on venerable
institutions, and that when Ruskin College was subsequently founded it should
have been called the College of Jude the Obscure.
    Artistic effort always pays heavily for finding its tragedies in the forced
adaptation of human instincts to rusty and irksome moulds that do not fit them.
To do Bludyer and the conflagratory bishop justice, what they meant seems to
have been only this: »We Britons hate ideas, and we are going to live up to that
privilege of our native country. Your picture may not show the untrue, or the
uncommon, or even be contrary to the canons of art; but it is not the view of
life that we who thrive on conventions can permit to be painted.«
    But what did it matter. As for the matrimonial scenes, in spite of their
touching the spot, and the screaming of a poor lady in Blackwood that there was
an unholy anti-marriage league afoot, the famous contract - sacrament I mean -
is doing fairly well still, and people marry and give in what may or may not be
true marriage as light-heartedly as ever. The author has even been reproached by
some earnest correspondents that he has left the question where he found it, and
has not pointed the way to a much-needed reform.
 
After the issue of Jude the Obscure as a serial story in Germany, an experienced
reviewer of that country informed the writer that Sue Bridehead, the heroine,
was the first delineation in fiction of the woman who was coming into notice in
her thousands every year - the woman of the feminist movement - the