NOTES
The Pursuit of the Well-Beloved
(1892)
I have made grateful use of previous editions by J. Hillis Miller and E. Mendelson (1975); and by Tom Hetherington (1986). The beginning of each of the twelve weekly instalments in the Illustrated London News is marked below by the insertion of the appropriate date. For Shakespeare I refer to Peter Alexander (ed.) The Tudor Edition of William Shakespeare, the Complete Works (London and Glasgow: Collins, 1951).
1 October 1892
PART FIRST: A YOUNG MAN OF TWENTY
CHAPTER I
Relics
This chapter is omitted in 1897.
1. for a transient time: the recurring idea that the beloved migrates from woman to woman owes much to Shelley (1792–1822) whose Epipsychidion deals with a similar theme of fugitive love: ‘In many mortal forms I rashly sought/The shadow of that idol of my thought’ (lines 267–8). Hardy himself several times refers to it as ‘Platonic’. He did so defensively in a letter to Edmund Gosse (1849–1928) written in reaction to a hostile review (March 1897): ‘the tale was sketched many years ago, when I was virtually a young man & interested in the Platonic Idea’ (Collected Letters II p. 156).
CHAPTER II
A Supposititious Presentment of Her
1. called an island: Portland, which is linked to the mainland by a causeway. Uniquely in Hardy’s novels, the obsessive description of this rocky formation and the sea around it replaces rural Wessex. In September 1890 Hardy visited Portland with Edmund Gosse and later wrote: ‘I wish you wd buy a little house on the “Isle” ’ (Collected Letters II p. 152).
2. one man’s doorstep: a similar description of Portland is found in The Trumpet-Major: ‘The pleasant peculiarity of one man’s doorstep being behind his neighbour’s chimney’ (chapter 34).
3. The melancholy ruins…: from Act IV of Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, part of a cosmic coda sung- by Panthea (IV.288–9). The fossilized rocks are ‘cancelled cycles’ of history, a possible reference to the triple frustration of Pearston with the three Avices.
4. Caro: Hardy in the Life declares that ‘ “Caro” (like all the other surnames) is an imitation of a local name… this particular modification having been adopted because of its resemblance to the Italian for “dear” ’ (p. 304). A hostile reviewer pointed out another possible origin: ‘Caro, carnis [flesh] is the noun with the declension of which Mr. Hardy is perpetually and everlastingly preoccupied in his new book’ (The World 1897.13).
5. roan-mare Caros: since a roan mare is one whose predominant colour is mixed with others, these Caros are perhaps said to be less inbred than others. The text emphasizes repeatedly the intermarriage between islanders generally and even within extended families.
6. Avice: in the Life (p. 10) Hardy explains this as a name taken from a seventeenth-century member of the Talbot family, neighbours of his forbears. It was the original name for Eustacia Vye used in the manuscript of The Return of the Native.
CHAPTER III
The Incarnation is Assumed to be a True One
1. destroying the letters: this scene is deleted from 1897 and with it the detailing of names of Jocelyn’s many previous beloveds.
2. I am – only one – in a long, long row: compare Tess Durbeyfield’s wish not to know more about her heredity: ‘what’s the use of learning that I am one of a long row only’ (chapter 19).
3. To his intrinsic Well-Beloved: this echoes Epipsychidion on the many ‘mortal forms of beauty’: ‘And some were fair – but beauty dies away:/Others were wise – but honeyed words betray:/And One was true…’ (lines 269–71).
4. Protean creature: Proteus, a sea god who had the power of assuming different shapes. Hardy has a poem ‘A Protean Maiden’ beginning ‘This single girl is two girls’ (Poems III p. 125).
5. fleshly tabernacle: a phrase used by Milton in Paradise Regained (IV. 599) to refer to Christ.
6. the risks of matrimony approximate most nearly to nil: the first of many attacks on the institution of marriage made almost casually.
7. local custom: the custom of premarital intercourse to test or ‘prove’ a woman’s fertility. In this text he wonders whether Avice ‘expects’ it. In 1897 he thinks she may ‘regret’ the loss of the practice. See chapter XII note 3.
CHAPTER IV
The Lonely Pedestrian
1. conform to the custom: this discussion of the island custom is omitted from 1897.
8 October 1892
2. cannot agree: in 1897 the letter is altered to one in which she explains her absence as caused by other people’s views and hints about the island custom.
3. a very Juno: the current meaning was ‘a woman of stately beauty’. Juno was the wife of Jupiter and goddess of fertility and power. It is recurrently used of Marcia. See also chapter VIII note 3. She resembles the ‘fine dark-eyed’ Arabella in Jude the Obscure, that ‘complete and substantial female animal’ (Book 1 chapter 6).
CHAPTER V
A Charge
1. son of the Montagues to this daughter of the Capulets: the idea of Pearston as Romeo to Marcia’s Juliet is suggested by the trade hostility between their fathers. The running references to the parallel become increasingly ironic as their relationship deteriorates. See also chapter VI note 1 and chapter VIII note 4. In the Life (March 1884) Hardy writes: ‘Write a novel entitled “Time against Two”, in which the antagonism of the parents of a Romeo and Juliet does succeed in separating the couple and stamping out their love, – alas, a more probable development than the other!’ (p. 171).
2. children of Israel: God divided the waters of the Red Sea so that his chosen people the Israelites could pass safely through them (Exodus 14:21–31).
3. the fair white linen: a similar scene occurs in Jude the Obscure where Jude dries Sue Bridehead’s clothes. Sue denies the sexual implications of the clothes evident here, saying they are ‘sexless cloth and linen’ (Book 3 chapter 3). 1897 omits the details of Marcia’s lacy underclothes.
CHAPTER VI
On the Brink
1. Juliet: see note 1 to chapter v above.
2. Royal Academician: member of the Royal Academy of Arts. Marcia evidently asks the question in an attempt to assess his social and financial prospects. See also chapter IX note 3 below.
3. Doctors’ Commons: up to 1858 this was a centre for some lawyers dealing with marriage, divorce and probate. Pearston intends to procure a marriage licence.
4. Apologia pro vitâ meâ: explanation of my course of life. An allusion to J. H. Newman’s Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864). Hardy has several passages from Newman in his Notebooks. The parallel seems farcical: Newman was explaining his then shocking conversion to Roman Catholicism, not a series of romantic entanglements.
CHAPTER VII Her Earlier Incarnations
1. unpractised condition of Adam: who assumed that the first setting sun he saw had gone for ever. See also Desperate Remedies chapter 2.
15 October 1892
2. crabs had been found clinging: an image used to describe the face of the disillusioned husband who drowns himself in Hardy’s poem ‘The Newcomer’s Wife’: ‘they searched, and at the deepest place / Found him with crabs upon his face’ (Poems II p. 79).
3. to fill with snow: the image of a snow-filled nest is taken from Wordsworth’s sonnet ‘Why art thou silent?’ where it is used to evoke a lover’s emptiness after being rejected.
4. It is all arranged: the hasty marriage resembles that of Jude to Arabella after two or three months because he believes her pregnant.
CHAPTER VIII
A Miscalculation
1. had been married: in 1897 there is no marriage, merely a brief affair. In this text the marriage lasts for four years.
2. City of Flowers: Florence.
3. Juno-wife’s face: see chapter IV note 3.
4. Rosaline: Romeo’s first love who precedes Juliet in Shakespeare’s play. See chapter V note 1.
5. A legal marriage it was: the first explicit questioning of the institution found also at the end of the novel. See chapter XXVIII. The topic is a main strand in Jude the Obscure and Hardy wrote in 1895 that a ‘bad marriage’ is ‘one of the direst things on earth and one of the cruellest’ (Collected Letters II p. 98).
6. despite her Quos egos: despite her arbitrary and obstinate judgements.
CHAPTER IX
Familiar Phenomena in the Distance
1. make our own matrimonial laws: this is what Arabella does in Jude the Obscure when she marries bigamously in Australia. As she says to the startled Jude: ‘Crime! Pooh. They don’t think much of such as that over there! Lots of ’em do it… He was very fond of me, and we lived honourable enough, and as respectable as any married couple’ (Book 3 chapter 9).
2. Parthian fling: Marcia is attempting what the Parthians were skilled at: shooting backwards while retreating.
3. A.R.A.: Associate of the Royal Academy of Arts. See chapter VI note 2.
4. round which honours might crystallize: a strange chemical metaphor referring to the formation of crystals around a nucleus.
5. The study of beauty was his only joy: In the early part of the nineteenth century ‘Ideal Works’ of sculpture were regarded (W. M. Rossetti (1829–1919), brother of D. G. Rossetti, said) as ‘… the highest attempts to which the sculptor can gird himself and not to be meddled with at all save by the fewest’ (B. Read, Victorian Sculpture (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1982), p. 199). By the 1880s a phase had developed in British sculpture which treated the human form in a naturalistic and detailed way (see Read p. 289 on ‘The New Sculpture’). So Pearston belongs to a fading school of artists given to idealized nudes, often with classical subjects.
6. he was green in judgment: this reverses Cleopatra’s view that in her ‘salad days’ she was also ‘cold in blood’ (Antony and Cleopatra I.v.73–4). Pearston’s ardour grows stronger as he ages.
7. Royal Moorish Palace: Alhambra Music Hall.
8. Börne’s phrase: ‘Nothing is permanent but change’. In a speech in 1910 Hardy quotes this as the assertion of ‘a German author’ (Life p. 380). Ludwig Börne (1786–1837).
9. As flesh she dies daily: this reference to St Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians (15: 31–44) parodies his idea that to die ‘in the flesh’ is to be raised in spiritual glory.
CHAPTER X
The Old Phantom Becomes Distinct
1. small and early: a small evening party not meant to last long. They were not popular. Disraeli (1880) writes, ‘How I hate a small and early’; and Henry James in Partial Portraits (1888) refers to the ’late and suffocating “small and early” ’. This seems to be the point here of the party turning into something ‘large and late’ and therefore suffocatingly crowded.
2. the Countess of Channelcliffe’s assembly: according to Millgate, the original of Lady Channelcliffe was Lady Portsmouth, a fact which must have been ‘recognizable at least to those most immediately concerned’ (Biography p. 329). See also notes 4, 6 and 7 below.
3. his Shelleyan ‘One-shape-of-many-names’: This reference to The Revolt of Islam became the epigraph for 1897. In Shelley’s poem it is however the ‘spirit of evil’ that takes many shapes: ‘the Spirit of evil, / One Power of many shapes which none may know, / One Shape of many names’ (I.xxvii.361–3). Hardy’s copy of the poem which he owned from 1866 has many underlinings.
22 October 1892
4. the young lady of the house: according to Millgate, the original was recognizable as Lady Gwendolen Margaret Wallop, Lady Portsmouth’s daughter. See note 2 above.
5. Jill-o’-the Wisp: a joking variation on ‘Will o’ the Wisp’, an elusive sprite; Gill Flirt or Jill Flirt was a traditional name for a wanton woman.
6. Mrs. Pine-Avon: identified by Millgate as based on Mrs Rosamund Tomson (Biography p. 329). She was a poet and writer with whom Hardy had some correspondence. See note 2 above.
7. Lady Mabella Buttermead: Millgate thinks the original was Lady Winifred Burghclere (née Herbert), niece of Lady Portsmouth (Biography p. 329). See note 2 above.
8. Female forms…: from Shelley’s The Revolt of Islam: ‘Some, female forms, whose gestures beamed with mind’ are amongst ‘The Great, who had departed from mankind’ (I.liv.605–8). The last clause is underlined in Hardy’s copy. See also the description of Elizabeth Jane at the end of The Mayor of Casterbridge as having ‘the serene Minerva-eyes of one “whose gestures beamed with mind” ’ (chapter 45).
9. pearl-powder: a cosmetic used to whiten the skin. The whole list is an ironic reference to the artifices mingled with genuine beauty in the fashionable crowd.
10. the nation of every country dwells in the cottage: this unexpectedly democratic comment from Nichola Pine-Avon is from a speech of John Bright in 1858 urging more social equity.
CHAPTER XI
She Draws Close, and Satisfies
1. round, inquiring, luminous: taken from the description of Lady Milnes-Gaskell’s ‘Round luminous enquiring eyes’ (Personal Notebooks pp. 228–9).
2. his Aphrodite: the Greek goddess of love and beauty. See also chapters xv note 6, XVI notes 1 and 6, XXI note 4, XXIV notes 1 and 5.
3. of his wife: not in 1897.
4. Calder Fair: 1897 ‘The Jilt’s Hornpipe’.
5. a leading actress: based on a reference for 1891 in the Life: ‘Presently Ellen Terry arrived – diaphanous – a sort of balsam or sea-anemone, without shadow… like a machine in which, if you press a spring, all the works fly open’ (p. 244).
CHAPTER XII She Becomes an Inaccessible Ghost
1. taken on glass in the more primitive days: glass plates, made by the photographer to support photographic salts, were first used in 1851.
2. our Praxiteles: a renowned Greek sculptor (born c. 390 BC). His work includes a famous naked figure of Aphrodite of Cnidus.
3. that compact: premarital sex. See chapter III note 7.
29 October 1892
PART SECOND: A YOUNG MAN OF FORTY
CHAPTER XIII
She Threatens to Resume Corporeal Substance
1. pitched his nitch: put down his bundle and (evidently) prepared to gossip.
2. Both my names: in 1897 she tells him she is called Ann Avice. In the Life (February 1889) Hardy writes that ‘The story of a face which goes through three generations or more, would make a fine novel or poem of the passage of Time. The differences in personality to be ignored’ (p. 226). The idea is used with a different significance in the poem ‘Heredity’: ‘I am the family face; / Flesh perishes, I live on, / Projecting trait and trace / Through times to times anon, / And leaping from place to place / Over oblivion’ (Poems II, pp. 166–7). See also the Introduction on his erasing of the individual identity of the Avices.
CHAPTER XIV
The Resumption Takes Place
1. nympholepsy (see Glossary): ‘ecstasy or frenzy especially one inspired by the unattainable’. 1897: nymph. A small instance of the less overtly sexual nature of the later text.
CHAPTER XV
The Past Shines in the Present
1. Minerva: goddess of trades and crafts, a classical gloss on her work as a washerwoman.
2. this girl’s frame was doomed to be a real embodiment of that olden, seductive one: in Hardy’s poem ‘The Well-Beloved’ the poet meets this essence on the way to his bride. But she vanishes saying ‘Thou lovest what thou dreamest her; / I am thy very dream!’ (Poems I p. 170).
3. Venus masking as Minerva: the (Roman) goddess of love masquerading as the goddess of trades.
4. past the distracting currents of passionateness: the theme of passion outliving the ageing of the body is one treated seriously in several of Hardy’s poems. See chapter XXV notes 1 and 2.
5. Sapphic terror of love: Sappho’s poem number 31 (quoted by Longinus in On the Sublime) refers to her overpowering and confused emotions for young girls which have an element of terror because the girls will leave her for marriage.
6. the white implacable Aphrodite: the reference is unclear but may allude to a passage in The Iliad III.412 where Aphrodite intervenes after Helen of Troy has refused to go to bed with Paris. The goddess is there referred to in a phrase that could be translated as ‘the bright, wrathful Aphrodite’. For other references to Aphrodite see chapters XI note 2, XVI notes 1 and 6, XXI note 4, XXIV notes 1 and 5.
7. Nubian Almeh: Egyptian dancing girl.
CHAPTER XVI
The New Becomes Established
1. Rubens’s ‘Judgment of Paris’: a reference to the three Avices. Rubens’s late painting now in the National Gallery shows Paris choosing the most beautiful of three goddesses, Hera, Athena and Aphrodite.
2. the world’s desire: Aphrodite.
3. The subject of her discourse he cared nothing about: see Introduction on the significance of his ignoring Avice the second’s distinguishing characteristics.
4. Ultima Thule: ‘remotest Thule’. This was a northern land noticed in the fourth century and never certainly identified. The phrase became a cliché for a place remote from civilization.
5 November 1892
5. island custom: see chapter III note 7.
6. the cruel Aphrodite: though primarily the goddess of love, she was also a goddess of war. See also chapters XI note 2, XV note 6, XXI note 4, XXIV notes 1 and 5.
7. mad with method: he sees himself as Polonius sees Hamlet (II.ii.203–4), acting apparently irrationally for a purpose which has reason in it. For the significance of his self-deceiving glosses on his conduct, see Introduction.
[CHAPTER XVII]
[His Own Soul Confronts Him]
CHAPTER XVIII
Juxtapostions
1. robed in such exceeding glory…: from Shelley’s Epipsychidion (lines 199–200), referring to the eternal image of Beauty for whom he searches in many women. A sharp contrast is provided by its application here to a washerwoman.
2. coigns of vantage: projecting viewing places. An echo of Banquo’s innocently ironic description of Macbeth’s castle as a place of peace (I.vi.7).
12 November 1892
CHAPTER XIX
She Fails to Vanish when Closely Confronted
1. Psyche: another strikingly inappropriate account of Avice the second. Psyche was so beautiful that even Aphrodite was jealous of her; and she is the heroine of a legend often interpreted as an allegory of the soul.
2. new places called flats: flats were originally working-class housing but by the 1880s they were beginning to be built for the middle classes in places like Kensington.
CHAPTER XX
A Homely Medium does not Dull the Image
1. Donizetti’s: Gaetano Donizettí (1797–1848), one of the composers noticed by Hardy in his early days in London (1862–3) as writing the ‘foreign-operas’ which were then in vogue (Life p. 45).
CHAPTER XXI
A Grille Descends Between the Vision and Him
1. Martinmas Fair: 11 November, feast of St Martin, a time for hiring-fairs for servants and labourers in country districts.
2. Faustina’s head: a Roman empress said by ancient writers to be faithless, a possible reference to Avice’s imminent revelation of her marriage.
19 November 1892
3. island custom: see chapter III note 7.
4. Aphrodite was punishing him: see chapter XV note 6. Pearston sees himself, ironically, as too faithful. See also chapters XI note 2, XV note 6, XVI notes 1 and 6, XXIV notes 1 and 5.
CHAPTER XXII
She is Finally Enshrouded from Sight
1. Hymen… Harlequin: Hymen, carrying torch and veil, was the god who presided over weddings. Here he behaves more like the comic figure of Harlequin who vies with a clown for the love of Columbine. Avice, her husband and Pearston make up the analogous trio.
PART THIRD: A YOUNG MAN OF FIFTY-NINE
CHAPTER XXIII
She Returns for the New Season
1. like the quarries of maiden rock at home: an instance of Pearston’s obsession with life on Portland to which everything is made to relate.
2. long-lost wife: this and immediately following references to Marcia as his wife are not in 1897 since in that text there is no marriage.
3. He pursued his inquiries: his only attempt to satisfy the due inquiries for the whereabouts of a missing spouse in order to presume death after seven years of absence. See chapter XXIX note 2. Arabella in Jude the Obscure (Book 3 chapter 9) makes none. She simply contracts a bigamous second marriage in Australia on the grounds that she has no intention of coming back to England where her first husband Jude is living.
26 November 1892
CHAPTER XXIV
Misgivings on this Unexpected Re-embodiment
1. Aphrodite: see also chapters xi note 2, xv note 6, XVI notes 1 and 6, xxi note 4, and note 5 below.
2. Ahasuerus: the Wandering Jew who in legend was fated to roam the world for ever as punishment for urging Christ when carrying his cross to walk faster.
3. to the general: to the mass of people. An allusion to Hamlet’s reference to a play that ‘pleas’d not the million; ’twas caviare to the general’ (II.ii.431–2).
4. her so-called inconstancy: one of Pearston’s agile reworkings of his own conduct: he is only inconstant as the moon is. Her waxing and waning is, he claims, a model of constancy like him in his flitting from one woman to another.
5. He feared Aphrodite, but Selene he cherished: he fears the goddess of love but worships the moon goddess. Aphrodite strikes at random; Selene (as he reads her) is constant. For other Aphrodite references see note 1 above.
6. jeune premier: juvenile lead in a theatrical performance. The concealment of his age is seen as farcical not poignant, unlike the treatment of ageing love in Hardy’s poems.
7. Mephistopheles… usual terms of his firm: if the devil had offered him youth in return for his soul.
CHAPTER XXV
The Renewed Image Burns Itself In
1. It might have been, as far as feelings were concerned: in Hardy’s poem ‘I Look into my Glass’ the ageing speaker laments that Time, by not weakening his passions, still ‘shakes this fragile frame at eve / With throbbings of noontide’ (Poems I p. 106).
2. as he regarded his face in the glass: with this and chapter XXVI compare Hardy’s poem ‘I look into my glass, / And view my wasting skin, / And say, “Would God it came to pass / My heart had shrunk as thin!” ’ (‘Poems I p. 106).
3 December 1892
CHAPTER XXVI
He Makes a Dash for the Last Incarnation
1. bathing-machine women: attendants on small wheeled huts for sea-side bathers. The huts were pushed a short way into the sea and could be used for dressing and undressing and for bathing in privacy. Queen Victoria had one and thought it delightful.
2. their recession as the matron: a similar idea is expressed in Jude the Obscure with reference to the girls in a Training School for Teachers: ‘They formed a pretty, suggestive, pathetic sight, of whose pathos and beauty they were themselves unconscious, and would not discover till, amid the storms and strains of after-years, with their injustice, loneliness, child-bearing, and bereavement, their minds would revert to this experience as to something… insufficiently regarded’ (Book 3 chapter 3).
3. jackal to this lion of a family: a clever twisting of the idea of an ‘artistic lion’ turned into a financial predator to support his handsome wife and daughters who now rule him.
4. throned along the sea: ‘grim Dundagel thron’d along the sea’, from a poem ‘The Quest of the Sangraal’ (1863) by R. S. Hawker, referring to Tintagel as the starting point of the quest for the Holy Grail. Hawker (1803–75) was the vicar of Morwenstow, Cornwall. He knew the Reverend Holder with whom Emma Gifford, Hardy’s first wife, was staying when he met her. The quotation is used also in A Pair of Blue Eyes, chapter 21, in the famous cliff scene where Elfride rescues Knight.
5. angina pectoris: chest pains symptomatic of heart disease.
CHAPTER XXVII
He Desperately Clutches the Form
1. a married couple: in 1897 this marriage does not take place.
2. of the most approved Kensington pattern: from the 1860s on, an increase in red brick in this area caused some controversy, as over the building of the Albert Hall (completed 1872). So Pearston is keeping up with a fashion.
3. Stiè venard’s ‘Lectures Françaises’: a text-book by Leonce Stièvenard, a teacher at King’s College London, where, Hardy says, he studied French ‘for a term or two’ in the 1860s (Life p. 52).
CHAPTER XXVIII
He Possesses it: He Possesses it Not
1. he had no moral right to go further: Avice’s dread at waking to find her husband Pearston in the bedroom is an anticipation of the scene between Phillotson and his wife Sue in Jude the Obscure. After ‘starting up half awake, staring wildly’ Sue throws herself from the window to avoid him (Book 4 chapter 4).
10 December 1892
CHAPTER XXIX
The Elusiveness Continues
1. they buried her: in 1897 Avice’s mother does not of course die after the marriage of her daughter to Pearston, but from the shock of her premarital elopement.
2. more cogent than legal rights: an idea also expressed in Jude the Obscure (1895). As late as 1912 Hardy wrote a piece entitled ‘Laws the Cause of Misery’ in which he says, ‘I can only suppose, in a general way, that a marriage should be dissolvable at the wish of either party, if that party prove it to be a cruelty to him or her’ (Nash’s Magazine V.6.683).
CHAPTER XXX
He Becomes Retrogressive
1. an age of barbarism: this view of marriage is echoed in a passage in the manuscript of Jude the Obscure omitted from the printed version: ‘When men of a later age look back upon the barbarism, cruelty, and superstition of the times in which we have the unhappiness to live, it will appear more clearly to them than it does to us that the irksomeness of life is less owing to its natural conditions… than to those artificial compulsions arranged for our well being’ (p. 427).
2. I had good argument for kissing once… now: Troilus and Cressida IV.v.26–7. The first line is spoken by Helen’s Greek husband Menelaus whom she deserted for the Trojan Paris; the second by Patroclus as a jibe against him when the other Greeks are kissing Cressida in welcome.
17 December 1892
CHAPTER XXXI
The Magnanimous Thing
1. like the poet Keats… like Andrea del Sarto: the suggestion seems to be that he has a Keatsian sensibility and possibly, if Hardy has Browning’s ‘Andrea del Sarto’ (Men and Women 1855) in mind, a love for Avice which is morally debilitating.
2. black framework: Pearston compares his life after the loss of the third Avice to the framework left behind after a firework display.
3. he had never received legal testimony: he has in fact made only the most casual attempts to trace his wife. See chapter XXIII note 3.
CHAPTER XXXII
The Pursuit Abandoned
1. Don’t attack me for casuistry: his argument is not so much casuistry as a willingness to disregard statutory law in favour of what he regards as Natural Law: ‘The moment I have a reasonable belief that Marcia lives Avice is not my wife, it seems to me’. These outrageous views disappear from 1897.
2. joy coming in the morning: Psalms 30:5.
3. I am near my journey’s end: the details of Pearston’s attempted suicide are used in the description of the premarital elopement of Avice the second and Leverre in 1897.
CHAPTER XXXIII
He Becomes Aware of New Conditions
1. that very woman: Marcia (not his wife) returns in 1897 after the elopement of her stepson Henri Leverre with Pierston’s bride-to-be and nurses him through an illness caught while attending the funeral of the second Avice. He marries her later out of pity when she is confined to a wheel-chair.
2. the raspings, chisellings… of forty years: see the reference in ‘The Revisitation’ (Poems I p. 241) to the work of ‘Time’s transforming chisel’ on the face of a once-loved beautiful woman.
3. the Witch of Endor: or ‘pythoness’, who in I Samuel 28:7–13 raises the spirit of Samuel for Saul. Traditionally she was a hag. The reference suggests a malign power in Marcia.
The Well-Beloved, A Sketch of a Temperament
(1897)
TITLE PAGE
1. One shape of many names: from The Revolt of Islam by Shelley (1792–1822) I.xxvii.363 and VIII.ix.3276. However, Shelley uses this phrase for the spirit of evil.
PREFACE
1. The peninsula: Portland. This Preface lays a new stress on Portland, reinforced throughout 1897 by added references to how the place strangely shapes the character of its natives and their destinies.
2. by no means new to Platonic philosophers: to Plato Beauty was an abstraction or ‘Idea’, which did not exist in the world of the senses, though it had some relation to things seen. Jocelyn’s pursuit of the ‘Well-Beloved’ is a vulgarized version of this idea. In writing about this book version of the text in the Life, Hardy later said, ‘The theory on which this fantastic tale of subjective idea was constructed is explained in the Preface… the theory of the transmigration of the ideal beloved one, who only exists in the lover, from material woman to material woman – as exemplified also by Proust (1871–1922) many years later’. This was a response to critics of 1892 who ‘affected to find unmentionable moral atrocities in its pages’ (Life p. 303).
3. one nook: Portland prison.
4. a few chapters: in practice this 1897 version created a different novel minus the two marriages (one bigamous) and Jocelyn’s attempted suicide, which are all found in 1892. See Introduction.
In the 1912 Preface the last paragraph is omitted and two new ones added which are defensive in tone and refer to the 1892 version as ‘experimental’.
PART FIRST: A YOUNG MAN OF TWENTY
CHAPTER I
A Supposititious Presentment of Her
1. Now, if Time knows… it is She: from the last few stanzas of ‘Wishes to his (supposed) Mistresse’ by Richard Crashaw (1612–49), a poem about the impossibility of finding a woman so full of the perfections he describes. The newly inserted epigraphs are part of an increased ‘literariness’ in 1897, which accompanies the toning down of sexual reference and new allusion to some obscure form of destiny at work amongst Islanders.
2. cast up by rages of the se: an addition in 1897; from a sixteenth-century description of Chesil Beach, Portland, in The Itinerary of John Leland in or about the years 1535–43 ed. L. T. Smith (London, George Bell, 1907, III p. 251): ‘a causey al of pible and sand cast up by the rages of the se’.
3. Vindilia: added in 1897 the Roman name for Portland.
4. the Slingers: new in 1897. A reference to the ability of the natives to defend themselves by slinging stones. See Leland p. 252.
5. one man’s doorstep: see 1892, chapter II note 2.
6. The melancholy ruins / Of cancelled cycles: see 1892, chapter II note 3.
7. Caro family: see 1892, chapter II note 4.
8. roan-mare Caros: see 1892, chapter II note 5.
9. Avice: see 1892, chapter II note 6.
CHAPTER II
The Incarnation is assumed to be True
1. I am only one of many: see 1892, chapter III note 2.
2. he had always been faithful: see 1892, chapter III note 3.
3. the ‘wile-weaving Daughter of high Zeus’: an addition in 1897 which connects the object of Pierston’s pursuit with the most powerful of the gods and also links his obsession with his art. ‘Wile-weaving’ is a phrase used for Aphrodite only in a poem by Sappho. It adds to the suggestion that Pierston is hapless at the mercy of the manipulative goddess. See also below Part Second, chapter VI notes 7 and 8.
4. Never much considering… Aphrodite herself indeed: added in 1897. One of several additions which make Pierston’s pursuit of women less earthy and less controllable.
5. fleshly tabernacle: see 1892, chapter III note 5.
6. the risks of matrimony: see 1892, chapter III note 6.
7. The evening… disunite it again: this paragraph is added in 1897. Like Portland itself, the sea is, in this text, endowed with an ability to influence the natives of the place powerfully (though vaguely). It seems to be malign. ‘The Souls of the Slain’ (1900) (Poems I pp. 124–7) describes a similar vision seen off Portland Bill of the spirits of those slain in battle. In the poem some spirits finally plunge into the sea off Portland Bill:
And towering to seaward in legions,
They paused at a spot
Overbending the Race –
That engulphing, ghast, sinister place –
Whither headlong they plunged, to the fathomless regions
Of myriads forgot (Poems I p. 127).
8. It seemed to say… Pierston kissed her: added in 1897, the reference to paganism links with the idea of Portland as a powerfully disturbing place.
9. if… she regretted: 1892 reads ‘if she expected’, in keeping with a plot in which he asks her to conform to the ‘island custom’ of premarital sex. See 1892, chapter III note 7.
CHAPTER III
The Appointment
CHAPTER IV
A Lonely Pedestrian
1. My dearest: the letter is changed from 1892 where she refuses to conform to his request.
2. Juno: see 1892, chapter IV note 3.
CHAPTER V
A Charge
1. son of the Montagues : see 1892, chapter V note 1.
2. Children of Israel: see 1892, chapter V note 2.
3. like Satan’s form… divisible: the quotation, added in 1897, is from Milton’s Paradise Lost VI.330–1. Another equation of the malign forces surrounding Portland with undefined evil.
4. overhauling the robes: see 1892, chapter v note 3 for comparison of the scene there which is more specific. There his reverie is fed by the details of Marcia’s lacy underclothes.
CHAPTER VI
On the Brink
1. Juliet: see 1892, chapter VI note 1.
2. Royal Academician: see 1892, chapter VI note 2.
3. Doctors’ Commons: see 1892, chapter VI note 3.
4. Apologia pro vitâ meâ: see 1892, chapter VI note 4.
CHAPTER VII
Her Earlier Incarnations
1. Suppose you say some men: 1912 changes this to ‘suppose you say the Beloved of some men’.
2. unpractised condition of Adam: see 1892, chapter VII note 1.
3. crabs had been found: see 1892, chapter VII note 2.
4. left it to fill with snow: see 1892, chapter VII note 3.
5. We can’t to-morrow: this is a lie told because of his uncertainty about marrying her. It is not in 1892 where he does marry Marcia.
CHAPTER VIII
‘Too Like the Lightning’
1. Too Like the Lightning: a new title in 1897. From Romeo and Juliet II.ii.119 where Juliet tells Romeo that their love is ‘Too like the lightning, which doth cease to be’.
2. some days longer: in 1892 they live together after marriage for four years.
3. Juno’s classical face: see 1892, chapter IV note 3.
4. Rosaline: see 1892, chapter VIII note 4.
5. Too rash… too like the lightning…: added in 1897. See note 1 above.
6. though so fervid: this implies that the affair was consummated.
CHAPTER IX
Familiar Phenomena in the Distance
1. nearly married wife: see 1892, chapter VIIInote 1.
2. A.R.A.: see 1892, chapter VI note 2.
3. round which honours might crystallize: see 1892, chapter IX note 4.
4. The study of beauty was his only joy: see 1892, chapter IX note 5.
5. Royal Moorish Palace: see 1892, chapter IX note 7.
6. Börne’s phrase: see 1892, chapter IX note 8.
7. As flesh she dies: see 1892, chapter IX note 9.
PART SECOND: A YOUNG MAN OF FORTY
CHAPTER I
The Old Phantom becomes Distinct
1. Since Love will needs… suffer patiently: the addition in 1897 of this self-explanatory epigraph from ‘The lover determineth to serve faithfully’ lines 1–6 by Sir Thomas Wyatt (c. 1503–42) continues the rehabilitation of Jocelyn as compared with 1892. It stresses his helplessness at the hands of fate rather than showing an obsession (with a strong sexual element) for which he is responsible. See also 1897 Part First, chapter I note 1.
2. his father’s sudden death: in 1892 this death takes place within Part First, which ends with the death of the first Avice and so gives her greater prominence in the earlier text.
3. small and early: see 1892, chapter X note 1.
4. Countess of Channelcliffe’s assembly: see 1892, chapter X note 2.
5. his Shelleyan ‘One-shape-of-many-names’: see 1892, chapter X note 3, and above, Title Page note 1.
6. a kindly young lady of the house: see 1892, chapter X note 4.
7. Jill-o’-the-Wisp: see 1892, chapter X note 5.
8. Mrs. Pine-Avon: see 1892, chapter X note 6.
9. Lady Mabella Buttermead: see 1892, chapter X note 7.
10. Female forms… beam with mind: see 1892, chapter X note 8.
11. pearl-powder: see 1892, chapter X note 9.
12. the nation of every country dwells in the cottage: see 1892, chapter x note 10.
13. In this he was aware… deplorably: added in 1897, a further instance of the link made in this text between his pursuit of women and his pursuit of the ideal feminine in art.
CHAPTER II
She Draws Close and Satisfies
1. round, inquiring, luminous: see 1892, chapter XI note 1.
2. the Wandering Jew of the love-world: replaces a more specific account of his history in 1892. See also below Part Third, chapter II note 2.
3. The Jilt’s Hornpipe: replaces 1892 ‘Calder Fair’.
4. a leading actress: see 1892, chapter XI note 5.
CHAPTER III
She Becomes an Inaccessible Ghost
1. taken on glass: see 1892, chapter XII note 1.
2. He began to divine… the old island breed: a significant addition to 1892. It emphasizes again the importance of the fact that Jocelyn and Avice are natives of this ancient place and links his obsession with Venus–Aphrodite who is now given a putative temple there.
3. our Lysippus: added to the Praxiteles of 1892, this is a reference to another Greek sculptor renowned for his realism – inapt for Pierston.
4. that compact: see 1892, chapter III note 7.
5. many a Lycidas… world: an addition in 1897. Lycidas in Milton’s elegy of that name figures his drowned friend Edward King. This convoluted reference to line 158 of the poem presumably alludes to those drowned who die unmourned.
CHAPTER IV
She Threatens to resume Corporeal Substance
1. Sylvania Castle: in 1892 this is Dell-i-th’-rock and in reality it is Pensylvania Castle (Hotel).
2. pitched his nitch: see 1892, chapter XIII note 1.
3. My second name is: here she is Ann Avice; in 1892 merely Avice. Hence his erasure of her identity is more obvious in 1892. See Introduction.
CHAPTER V
The Resumption takes place
1. He thought of nothing… temple there: added in 1897. See above Part Second, chapter III note 2.
2. or rather the capricious Divinity behind that ideal lady: added in 1897, stressing Jocelyn’s blamelessness.
3. nymph: for 1892’s nympholepsy, ‘ecstasy/frenzy especially one inspired by the unattainable’. A change of emphasis from Jocelyn’s frenzy to a more harmless-sounding object of pursuit.
CHAPTER VI
The Past Shines in the Present
1. Minerva: see 1892, chapter XV note 1.
2. like a sea-anemone: added in 1897, suggesting his vulnerability.
3. Passion masking as Indifference: replaces 1892 ‘Venus masking as Minerva’. A less overtly sexual reference.
4. past the distracting currents: see 1892, chapter XV note 4.
5. Isaac: replaces 1892 ‘George’.
6. Sapphic terror of love: see 1892, chapter XV note 5.
7. Weaver of Wiles: added in 1897. See also above, Part First, chapter II note 3.
8. with all her subtle face laughing aloud: in Sappho’s poem, where Aphrodite is referred to as ‘wile-weaving’ (Book I.i.12–13), she is laughing in amusement at Sappho’s amorous predicament.
9. Nubian Almeh: see 1892, chapter XV note 7.
CHAPTER VII
The New becomes Established
1. Rubens’s ‘Judgment of Paris’: see 1892, chapter XVI note 1.
2. the World’s Desire: see 1892, chapter XVI note 2.
3. The subject of her discourse: see 1892, chapter XVI note 3.
4. Ultima Thule: see 1892, chapter XVI note 4.
5. succubus: replaces 1892 ‘sentiment of fancy’. Like other changes, it removes agency from Pierston, since a ‘succubus’ is a demon in female form supposed to have carnal relations with men in their sleep. In 1912 it is replaced by the more neutral word ‘haunting’.
6. paying dearly enough for his Liliths: for his previous infatuations. The reference is added in 1897. Lilith in legend was Adam’s first wife and became a demon.
7. To use a practical eye… not the clay: an elaboration added in 1897, stressing some destined connection between the Caros and Pierston because of their heredity. The mismatch with a girl twenty years his junior is thus romanticized by him.
CHAPTER VIII
His own Soul confronts him
1. he seemed to hear… combined stocks: added in 1897. Another allusion to the pressure of the past (particularly the Isle) upon the present found in this version.
2. found ’ee too old: 1912 changes ‘’ee’ to ‘you’.
CHAPTER IX
Juxtapositions
1. forming the propylœa of the rock: the propylæa were the great roofed gateway and entrance to the Acropolis at Athens. Another reference added in 1897 increasing the suggestion of the Isle’s grandeur and status.
2. robed in such exceeding glory… not: see 1892, chapter XVIII note 1.
3. coigns of vantage: see 1892, chapter XVIII note 2.
4. What are fame and name… I know the perfect and pure quarry she was dug from: a significant addition in 1897. The equation of the second Avice with the rock of the Isle itself is part of the new explanatory account of Pierston’s strange obsession with the Caro women.
5. Demetrius of Ephesus: from Acts 19:23–41. Demetrius was a silversmith who made statues of Diana of the Ephesians and who stirred up riots against St Paul for preaching that the gods such as Diana were mere idols. Pierston now regards himself as a worshipper of Aphrodite, both as a man and as a sculptor.
6. The church of the island… heart: another 1897 addition suggesting a mixture of pagan and Christian fate haunting the place and Pierston.
CHAPTER X
She Fails to Vanish still
1. Psyche: see 1892, chapter XIX note 1.
2. new places called flats: see 1892, chapter XIX note 2.
3. all my Venus failures: added 1897.
CHAPTER XI
The Image Persists
1. Rossin’s: Gioacchino Rossini (1792–1868). This is changed from a reference to Donizetti (1892, chapter XX note 1). Both composers are mentioned in the Life p. 45.
CHAPTER XII
A Grille descends between
1. Martinmas Fair: see 1892, chapter XXI note 1.
2. Empress Faustina’s head: see 1892, chapter XXI note 2.
3. island custom: see 1892, chapter III note 7.
4. to Guernsey: in 1892 it was Australia.
5. Aphrodite, Ashtaroth, Freyja: the last two names added in 1897. Ashtaroth is As-tarte, goddess of fertility (Judges 2:13); Freyja is the Norse goddess of love and beauty. The new mythological references, like the epigraphs, increase the overt literariness of this text.
CHAPTER XIII
She is Enshrouded from Sight
1. Hymen… Harlequin: see 1892, chapter XXII note 1.
PART THIRD: A YOUNG MAN TURNED SIXTY
CHAPTER I
She Returns for the New Season
1. In me thou seest… was nourished by: the third quatrain of Shakespeare’s sonnet LXXIII: ‘That time of year thou mayst in me behold’. The epigraph, added in 1897, suggests a new dignity in the man of sixty. See also 1897, Part First, chapter I note 1.
2. the quarries of maiden rock at home: see 1892, chapter XXIII note 1.
3. in England: changed in 1912 to ‘in the Isle of Slingers’.
4. his long-lostMarcia: replaces 1892’s ‘long-lost wife’.
5. the church at the top: becomes the ‘Church of the Trinita dei Monti’ in 1912.
6. Thus much Marcia: this incident is abbreviated from 1892, since the question of presuming the death of a missing spouse does not arise. See 1892, chapter XXIII note 3.
7. Ike had been killed: in 1892 this news reaches him only after his return to the Isle.
8. Have you guessed: the first of several allusions, added in 1897, to the second Avice’s premeditated plan to marry him to her daughter. Another device removing agency from Pierston.
CHAPTER II
Misgivings on the Re-embodiment
1. His divinity: replaces 1892 Aphrodite. The removal of this and some other Aphrodite references is perhaps part of an attempt to make sexual passion less obtrusive than in 1892.
2. Ahasuerus: see above, Part Second, chapter II note 2.
3. to the general: see 1892, chapter XXIV note 3.
4. the undulating ground: this changed in 1912 to ‘the rugged ground’.
5. his wraith in a changed sex: replaces 1892 ‘his sweetheart in the flesh’. In the same paragraph references to Aphrodite and Selene are removed. See 1892, chapter XXIV note 5; and note 1 above.
6. jeune premier: see 1892, chapter XXIV note 6.
7. Like her granny: added in 1897.
8. Mephistopheles… terms of his firm: see 1892, chapter XXIV note 7.
9. little boot: changed to ‘pretty boot’ in 1912.
CHAPTER III
The Renewed Image burns itself in
1. as far as feelings were concerned: see 1892, chapter XXV note 1.
2. She did not say how simple she thought him: another reference to her having planned this. See above, Part Third, chapter I note 8.
3. lest she might seem to be angling: see above Part Third, chapter I note 8.
4. as he beheld his face in the glass: see 1892, chapter XXV note 2. The theme of physical ageing dominates Part Third in 1897 by being more detailed than in 1892.
5. Upon the whole… press on: this sentence of foreboding was added in 1897.
CHAPTER IV
A Dash for the Last Incarnation
1. bathing-machine women: see 1892, chapter XXVI note 1.
2. their recession as matrons: see 1892, chapter XXVI note 2.
3. jackal to this lion: see 1892, chapter XXVI note 3.
4. throned along the sea: see 1892, chapter XXVI note 4.
5. angina pectoris: see 1892, chapter XXVI note 5.
6. Its voice… ‘There’s tragedy hanging on this!’: added in 1897.
7. It was enough… from this moment: added in 1897 to lead into his confession to Avice that he courted her mother and her grandmother. In 1892 this is not told to her till after their wedding. See 1892, chapter XXVIII.
8. the engagement stood as before: in this text Jocelyn returns, unmarried but engaged, to Kensington. It diverges radically at this point from 1892 where he takes his new wife Avice the third back to London. Now Avice and her mother merely visit him there.
CHAPTER V
On the Verge of Possession
1. of the approved Kensington pattern: see 1892, chapter XXVII note 2.
2. Stièvenard’s ‘Lectures Françaises’: see 1892, chapter XXVII note 3.
3. They retired rather early: at this point in 1892 (chapter XXVIII) Jocelyn makes his unwelcome visit to his wife’s bedroom and is then prompted to tell her of his love for her mother and grandmother. Avice’s frightened reaction to his entering the bedroom is reminiscent of the more extreme scene in Jude the Obscure (Book 4 chapter 4) where Sue Bridehead leaps from a window to escape her husband Phillotson. At this point in 1892 Avice returns to the Isle ahead of him.
4. Anything the matter?: in 1892 the meeting with Leverre does not occur immediately on Jocelyn’s return to the Isle but when they do meet he gets to know the young man well.
5. How is mother?: at this point in the narrative in 1892 the third Avice’s mother dies and Jocelyn goes back to London. Much is omitted in 1897.
CHAPTER VI
The Well-Beloved is – Where?
1. She is gone!: the episode of Avice’s elopement with Leverre is new in 1897. In 1892 it is Pearston who slips out at night in a small boat to attempt suicide.
2. He took the letter: this letter from the third Avice is new in 1897 and replaces Pearston’s note to his friend Somers in 1892 (chapter XXXII) about his own disappearance, meant to facilitate his wife’s marriage to Leverre.
3. He saw that it was death: in 1892 Avice’s mother dies peacefully (chapter XXIX) when the girl is already married to Pearston. The revised version blames Avice for her mother’s death since it is caused by the shock of her elopement with Leverre at a time when she is engaged to Pierston.
4. A little further… steadily south: the lovers’ descent to the beach and departure in the boat draws upon the 1892 description of Pearston’s attempt to drown himself which it replaces (see 1892, chapter XXXII).
CHAPTER VII
An Old Tabernacle in a New Aspect
1. the pictured Trojan women beheld by Æneas: another new literary addition in 1897. A reference to Virgil’s Aeneid I where Aeneas sees depicted on the walls of a temple Trojan women pleading in vain with the goddess Pallas Athena for mercy on the city of Troy. Pierston’s past loves are now seen by him as piteous creatures that he rejected as the goddess did the women.
2. rather it was in all their natural circumstances, weaknesses, and stains: a new reference in 1897 to his recognition that he fictionalized the real women.
3. The October day thickened… in the ideal: this long reverie, an addition in 1897, gives a new meditative and elegiac tone to the conclusion, compared with the abrupt ending of 1892.
4. I am Marcia: in 1892 his encounter with Marcia occurs when he wakes up from his near-drowning to find her nursing him. The episode takes up a single short chapter and ends the novel with her revelation that her apparent beauty is a delusion and that she too is old and withered.
5. after forty years: see ‘The Man who Forgot’ (Poems II p. 286) in which the poet searches for a woman only to realize suddenly that ‘Forty years’ frost and flower/Had fleeted since I’d used to come/To meet her in that bower’.
6. May the lines have fallen to you in pleasant places: an allusion to Psalms 16:6, meaning ‘I hope your life has been fortunate and happy’.
7. one of Time’s revenges: the clown in Twelfth Night referring to the overthrow of the arrogant Malvolio, says that ‘thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges’ (V.i.376–7).
CHAPTER VIII
Alas for this Grey Shadow, once a Man!’
Most of this chapter is new in 1897.
1. Alas for this grey shadow, once a man!: new in 1897; from ‘Tithonus’, line 11, by Tennyson (1809–92). In Greek myth the goddess of dawn Eos procured for her lover Tithonus the gift of immortality but forgot to ask also for eternal youth. The poem thus highlights the physical process of ageing by dealing with it in an extreme way.
2. dangerously ill of a fever: this illness caused by catching cold at the second Avice’s funeral replaces the one caused by near-drowning in 1892. Here, as there, Marcia nurses him.
3. Robinson Crusoe lost a day: a reference not found in 1892. Crusoe slept for two days and thought it was one. Pierston makes the strained comparison to underline his loss of interest in female beauty and because possibly he thinks of himself as metaphorically shipwrecked.
4. Faubourg St. Germain: a high-class suburb of Paris indicating that Marcia and her husband were well-to-do.
5. The rest of me… lies on my dressing-table: in 1892 it is merely the absence of daylight that deceives Jocelyn about Marcia’s appearance. Here it is because she has used ‘beautifying artifices’ now left off. The added detail is part of the extra emphasis in 1897 on the physical processes of ageing.
6. the moth eats: becomes in 1912 ‘the moth frets’.
7. Instead of sweet smell there shall be stink… beauty: Isaiah 3:24. New in 1897. This predicts the same fate for Pierston’s artistic creations and the women he has loved as Isaiah prophesied for the daughters of Zion who ‘are haughty, and walk with stretched forth necks and wanton eyes’ (3:16).
8. the time-defying presentations of Perugino, Titian, Sebastiano: this reference (new in 1897) to three great painters of the Italian Renaissance (Pietro Perugino (1446–1524), Tiziano Vecellio (c. 1487–1576) and Sebastiano Luciani (c. 1485–1547)) makes Pierston’s denigration of his own work ambiguous. He now claims to have lost all artistic judgement and not to be able to distinguish works of genius from those of pavement artists. Like much of the other new material in this Part, it diminishes him.
9. those who knew not Joseph: an ambiguous comment. Exodus 1:8 speaks, after Joseph’s death, of ‘a new king over Egypt, which knew not Joseph’. This suggests that a great man is soon forgotten.
10. his sciatica and her rheumatism: the detailed account of their physical ills is new in 1897.
11. Avice says she wants to be separated from Henri!: this new incident in 1897 seems to start up the cycle of changing affections seen in Jocelyn and also in the second Avice who claimed to have loved fifteen men already. See 1897, Part Second, chapter VIII.
12. His business was… ventilators: this paragraph, added in 1897, has been read as a metaphor for Pierston’s impotence.