Part 2 of Hardy's Jude the Obscure begins with an epigraph from Swinburne's prelude to Songs Before Sunrise: "Save his own soul he hath no star" (stanza 16).(n1) This was a favorite quotation of Hardy's, and he used it on another occasion to describe his own feelings of lively independence as a young man in London in the 1860s. Picturing himself as "an isolated student cast upon the billows of London with no protection but his brains," he added that he was then a "young man of whom it may be said more truly than perhaps of any, that 'save his own soul he hath no star.'"(n2) Lacking social advantages and money, but with ability and determination in plenty, Hardy identified fully with Swinburne's call for self-reliance and with the spirit of an earlier assertion in the poem: "For what has he whose will sees clear / To do with doubt and faith and fear?" (stanza 4).
In his use of the line "Save his own soul he hath no star" in Jude, however, Hardy's intentions are not altogether clear. In what sense does the line apply to Jude? And in fact there is some uncertainty among commentators as to its precise bearing. Does it reinforce the parallel between the young Hardy and the young Jude as characters of talent and ambition?(n3) Is it there to suggest Jude's isolation and vulnerability as a young working-class protagonist?(n4) Or is it ambiguous, indicating either Jude's later freedom from outmoded ideas and codes, or--in stark contrast--an independence of thought and action that Jude signally fails to achieve?(n5) These are all possibilities put forward by various critics but not fully tested by relating the epigraph to a range of associated images in the novel. A further look at the line in context may help to clarify its application to Jude and his tragic destiny.
The quotation itself probably derives from some lines in a Beaumont and Fletcher play (the epilogue to The Honest Man's Fortune) which read: "Man is his own star, and the soul that can / Render an honest and a perfect man / Commands all light, all influence, all fate."(n6) Swinburne himself was a devoted reader of the Beaumont and Fletcher canon.(n7) The idea of man being his own star, controlling his own fate, was one that appealed as much to Victorian individualists as to Jacobean ones.(n8) In recycling the image, Swinburne provided Hardy with a familiar language for the handling of his own debate about the interaction of character and circumstance.
Jude, as soon becomes clear in the novel, is a contradictory individual. On the one hand, he is full of noble aspirations and keen to realize his Arnoldian best self; on the other, he is often passive and uncertain, the victim of his own desires and weaknesses.In one way, as Hardy indicates, Jude is the Tennysonian "gifted man" who "breaks his birth's invidious bar" and "breasts the blows of circumstances / And grapples with his evil star" (In Memoriam, stanza 64)(n9)
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