The Complete Hardy: 3 The Well-Beloved

It is entirely to be expected that the lesser-known Hardy novels are somehow not as good as the best-known or else they would be just as famous. The Well-Beloved, though, is very likeable and pertinent while being highly unlikely even beyond the considerations of the plot twists and turns that usually accumulate in his stories.

It was the later version I read rather than The Pursuit of the Well-Beloved but that earlier title hints at something thematic. In their turn, three generations of girls called Avice represent the beloved of Jocelyn Pierston, from Portland Bill but a successful sculptor in London. At the ages of 20, 40 and 60 he fancies himself devoted to first one then her daughter and then her grand-daughter, the resemblance recreated in each in a way that echoes the recently read Bruges-la-Morte by Georges Rodenbach and how Jane Scott is the very image of the deceased wife of Hugues Viane. That book was published in 1892, the same year as The Pursuit. 

What it seems to me to 'mean' is that 'love' is a naturally occuring condition that seeks an outlet, a target for its energy to be spent on. It might seem to the beholder that the beloved is some heaven-sent, incomparable 'must-have' but if it wasn't them it would be somebody else. Where the illusion of Jane Scott suddenly becomes disillusion, Pierston also ends his days with Marcia, an apparently Horatio-type character who'd been there all along while he was distracted on more delusional projects.

Pierston explains to his artist friend, Somers, that,

The beloved of this one man, then, has had many incarnations- to many to describe in detail. Each shape, or embodiment, has been a temporary residence only, which she has entered, lived in a while, and made her exit from,

then, not much later,

he was the wandering Jew of the love-world, how restlessly ideal his fancies were.

By our standards today, Pierston might appear as much of a stalker as Sting does in I'll Be Watching You. Quite how, in this late novel, the theme can be related to Hardy's taking for granted of two wives while accommodating a succession of young female writers who approach him for professional advice, is hard to say precisely but there is something to be made of it.

Above and beyond all that, in the end he relinquishes his art,

The artistic sense had left him, and he could no longer attach a definite sentiment to images of beauty recalled from the past.

It is as if he has woken from the unreal existence he inhabited and that the realistic marriage to Marcia would have been a better idea all along. That Hardy foregoes fiction after this and Jude and writes poems for his remaining thirty years, much of it remembering his first wife, Emma, is a profound renunciation by a great writer if not for the most part a great man. The Well-Beloved is full of significance both as philosophy and biography and is evidence of the worth of reading beyond the big titles into what is to be found elsewhere.