Although The Well-Beloved (originally entitled The Pursuit of the Well-Beloved) was published by Osgood, McIlvaine & Co. in March 1897, the bulk of it was written before the publication of Jude the Obscure. This is a novel which stretches both imagination and credulity, but is successful in that it introduces the reader to a concept which he or she may be subconsciously aware of, but may not have hitherto heard articulated. That is, the idea that a person may fall in love, and continue to do so throughout his or her life, not with a particular being, but with a notion of perfect beauty: what Hardy called ‘The Well-Beloved’, which may temporarily reside in an actual person, but is fleeting and soon transmigrates to inhabit somebody else.
The story is set on the Isle of Slingers (Portland Island in Dorset), and its hero is the 20-year-old Jocelyn Pierston, who is a sculptor. Pierston’s ‘wellbeloved’ was:
perhaps of no tangible substance, [but rather] a spirit, a dream, a frenzy, a conception, an aroma, an epitomised sex, a light of the eye, a parting of the lips. He [Pierston] loved the masquerading creature wherever he found her, whether with blue eyes, black, or brown.1
For Pierston, the ‘well-beloved’ is first ‘embodied’ in Avice Caro, a boyhood sweetheart. The couple become engaged, but by this time the embodiment has transferred itself to Marcia Bencomb, a local beauty. However, before he can propose to her she leaves him, and he finds a new incarnation of the ‘well-beloved’ in high-society widow Nichola Pine-Avon. Twenty years later, Avice dies and Pierston returns to the island for her funeral. Here he meets her daughter, Ann Avice (Avice II), and realises that the embodiment has transferred itself to her. Avice II has had her own experience of ‘well-beloveds’, having already experienced no less than fifteen male embodiments herself. Unfortunately for Pierston, it transpires that she is already married.
Another twenty years pass and Pierston duly falls in love with Avice II’s daughter, Avice III. She, On learning of his former attachments not only to her own mother, but also to her grandmother, leaves him for a younger man, who is the stepson of Pierston’s former ‘well-beloved’ Marcia Bencomb. Pierston admits that whenever he grapples with the reality of the ‘wellbeloved’, ‘she’s no longer in it’, so he is unable to ‘stick to one incarnation’ even if he wishes to.2 Finally, Pierston marries his second ‘well-beloved’ Marcia Bencomb, who by this time is an invalid.
The theme of The Well-Beloved is that a person’s preconceived idea of the perfect partner may locate itself in one real-life person, before transferring to another, and then another, and so forth: also, that ‘all men are pursuing a shadow, the Unattainable’ (and here he was no doubt thinking of himself). This, he hoped, Might ‘redeem the tragi-comedy from the charge of frivolity’. In other words, Hardy did not wish to appear irresponsible by condoning flirtation and infidelity.3
Hardy, when he wrote this particular novel, clearly had in mind Portland Island: a long peninsula in South Dorset stretching several miles out into the sea, where stone is to be found of the finest quality for building and sculpting. But what he was principally concerned with, as a romantic person who since his youth had been easily prone to falling in love, was the concept of the passion a person feels for someone being able to migrate to somebody else.
It is not difficult to visualise how Hardy himself may have had the same experiences as Jocelyn Pierston. During his courtship to Emma, Hardy’s ‘well-beloved’ would undoubtedly have found its embodiment in her. However, when severe and intractable problems arose in their relationship, such as have already been alluded to, Hardy’s ‘well-beloved’ may have migrated, perhaps to one of the beautiful society women with whom he was constantly encountering when in London, whether at dinner parties, the theatre or music halls. Given his marital problems, it was only natural that he should look longingly at such women and think to himself, ‘if only’ and ‘what if?’ He may also have thought wistfully of the attractive young ladies whom he had known prior to meeting Emma.
Given that for Hardy his ‘well-beloved’ no longer resided in his wife Emma, and had migrated, then two of the likely candidates for its new embodiment were Florence Henniker, and the beautiful Lady Agnes Grove, author and daughter of General and the Honourable Mrs Pitt-Rivers.4
Former acquaintance of Hardy and member of the original ‘Hardy Players’, Norrie Woodhall, Treats such a notion that Hardy was unfaithful to Emma with incredulity and disdain.5 Nevertheless, the effort of controlling his emotions and (thwarted) desires was a truly superhuman one. Stoical is perhaps the word that describes him best. He had made his marriage vows and he would stick to them, come what may, and at whatever the cost to his own well-being.
In January 1897 Hardy wrote to Edward Clodd in scathing terms of how ‘theology’ had been responsible for the arrest of ‘light and reason’ for 1,600 years. So-called ‘Christianity’, he said, with its ‘terrible, dogmatic ecclesiasticism’, had ‘hardly anything in common’ with the ‘real teaching of Christ’.6 That same month he wrote to Florence Henniker expressing his admiration for the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822). Of all the men whom he (Hardy) would like to meet ‘in the Elysian fields’, he would choose Shelley, not only for his ‘unearthly, weird, wild appearance & genius’, but for his ‘genuineness, earnestness, & enthusiasms on behalf of the oppressed’. Truly, Hardy believed himself to be a kindred spirit of that great poet.7
In 1897 the Hardys departed from their usual routine of renting accommodation in London, and instead opted to stay at Basingstoke, 50 or so miles away, and commute to the capital every few days. In June, the occasion of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, they travelled to Switzerland to escape the crowds. On their return they visited Wells and its cathedral, the ancient ruins of Stonehenge, and Salisbury, where they attended a service in the cathedral.
Hardy’s prodigious efforts on the literary front did not prevent him from taking a keen interest in local architectural affairs. In September he was advising architect Hugh Thackeray Turner on necessary repairs and maintenance to the tower of East Lulworth church, and in October on the re-thatching and re-flooring of the White Horse Inn at Maiden Newton.8 Hardy visited the latter site on a bicycle, and having therefore incurred no expenses, informed Turner that no repayment for his services was necessary. The writer Rudyard Kipling joined Hardy for some of his cycling excursions; the latter having purchased a new Rover Cob bicycle.9
The following year, 1898, saw Hardy, now aged 58, travelling ever further afield on his bicycle, visiting such places as Bristol, Gloucester and Cheltenham, sometimes in company with Emma – who also cycled – and at other times with his brother Henry. Often he would take his bicycle part of the way on the train. The advantage of possessing a bicycle, for literary people he said, was that they could travel a long distance ‘without coming in contact with another mind – not even a horse’s’, and in this way there was no danger of dissipating one’s mental energy.10
That February he wrote an amusing letter to Elspeth Thomson (sister of the artist Winifred Hope Thomson), thanking her for her ‘charming Valentine’ which made him feel young again. He said: ‘I can just remember the time when written Valentines were customary – before people became so idle as to get everything, even their love-making, done by machinery!’11
In April Hardy wrote to Edmund Gosse to tell him of a local belief, ‘still held in remote parts hereabout’, that in the early hours of every Christmas morning, the farm cattle kneel down (as if in prayer).12 The same month, an amusing letter was sent by Hardy to his sister Katharine. Ever one for a good story, he had enquired of a London ‘omnibus conductor’ how it was that young women, who rode their bicycles recklessly into the midst of traffic, did not meet with accidents? Came the reply: ‘Oh, nao [no]; their sex pertects [sic] them. We dares not drive over them, wotever they do; & they do jist wot they likes … No man dares to go where they go.’13
In May Hardy went to see the body of Mr Gladstone, the former prime minister, which lay in state in Westminster Hall, close to the Houses of Parliament ‘where his voice had echoed for 50 years’.14 In July, in a letter to Florence Henniker, he described a visit to Gloucester Cathedral, where the Perpendicular style of architecture was invented. ‘You can see how it grew in the old [medieval] masons’ minds,’ he said. In September he informed Florence that some Americans, who used to rent a house and 700 acres of shooting near Coniston in the Lake District, did so not in order to shoot, ‘but to keep the birds from being shot – a truly charming intention’.15
A letter to William Archer, critic and journalist, revealed Hardy’s total disillusionment with the critics. In his attempt, he said, ‘to deal honestly & artistically with the facts of life’, he was liable ‘to be abused by any scamp who thinks he can advance the sale of his paper by lying about one’.16 In a witty ending to a letter to Edmund Gosse in December, Hardy advanced the view that Gosse’s poems lacked ‘the supreme quality of their author being dead’ or ‘starving in a garret’ – the implication being that if this were the case, the poems would be better appreciated.17 Whoever said that Hardy lacked a sense of humour?
In December 1898 a volume of fifty or so of Hardy’s Wessex Poems were published by Harper & Brothers. In the main, they were written either in the 1860s, or more recently, after a long interval. They were generally well received; some were about the Napoleonic era, others were drawn from Wessex life. However, the most interesting were those which gave insight into Hardy’s state of mind during this period.
In a large proportion of the poems which Hardy wrote the theme is lost love. Did he conjure up such poems out of nowhere? Or were they, as with his novels, based on real-life experiences? If so, then whose experiences were they: those of relatives, friends or acquaintances? Given the depth of feeling expressed by him in such poems, and their great number which runs into not tens, but hundreds, then this is hardly feasible. What is feasible is that virtually all of them allude to Emma, and this being the case, they reveal that his relationship with her was the stuff of which nightmares are made. For example, in Neutral Tones he refers to having learnt, since his youth, ‘keen lessons that love deceives’. In Hap he specifically mentions ‘suffering’ and ‘love’s loss’, and finds himself wondering if some divine power is the cause of it:
If but some vengeful god would call to me
From up the sky, and laugh:
‘Thou suffering thing, Know that thy sorrow is my ecstasy,
That thy love’s loss is my hate’s profiting!’
In At an Inn Hardy longs to put the clock back to a time (presumably) when he and Emma were in love:
As we seemed we were not
That day afar,
And now we seem not what
We aching are.
O severing sea and land,
O laws of men,
Ere death, once let us stand
As we stood then.
In To Outer Nature he reveals that the real-life Emma and what he originally imagined her to be were two completely different things:
Show thee as I thought thee
When I early sought thee …
And then declares sorrowfully:
Thy first sweetness,
Radiance, meetness,
None shall re-awaken.
In Revulsion, however, not only does all hope appear to have been extinguished, but it has been replaced by a sense of overwhelming bitterness and disillusionment:
Let me then never feel the fateful thrilling
That devastates the love-worn wooer’s frame,
The hot ado of fevered hopes, the chilling
That agonizes disappointed aim!
So I may live no junctive law fulfilling,
And my heart’s table bear no woman’s name.
In fact, the very title of the poem sums up Hardy’s sentiments at this time. Finally, in I Look Into My Glass, Hardy, who is now elderly, expresses the fervent wish that his heart (that is, his desires and longings) had shrunk, in the same way that his aged ‘wasting skin’ had.
The depth of sentiment expressed in these poems, and the repetitive and obsessional nature of their themes, leads to the inexorable conclusion that in them, the tormented Hardy is expressing his deepest sentiments with regard to his failed relationship with Emma.
In London as usual with Emma, in the spring of 1899, Hardy continued to fraternise with the literary set, and met with the poet A.E. Housman for the first time. That October he was present in Southampton on the occasion of the departure of troops for the South African War, and saw similar preparations being made by the battery stationed at Dorchester. These events inspired him to write several poems.
In June Hardy wrote from London to his sister Katharine, asking her to remember to instruct the local carpenter to erect a cupboard outside the door of the bedroom at Max Gate that used to be his study, and enclosed a diagram showing exactly where this cupboard should be located.18 He was now writing frequently to Florence Henniker. In July he complained to Florence that one of the problems with life in the country was the unavailability of good music. In October he told her (referring to the South African War) how he deplored the fact that civilised nations had learnt no other way of settling disputes than ‘the old and barbarous one’. In November he sent her his newly composed sonnet entitled Departure – referring to the soldiers leaving Southampton docks, bound for South Africa.19
The coming of the new century in 1900 saw Hardy as energetic as ever: cycling from Max Gate all the way to Portland Bill and back in one day – a distance of 20 miles, up hill and down dale. That February he expressed to Florence Henniker how he was enjoying studying the strategy and tactics of the current war, but also his horror at the fate of Boer general Piet Cronje, whose army, including its womenfolk, was currently trapped in a river bed (by British forces), and whose animals were being ‘mangled’.20
In July Hardy apprised William Earl Hodgson, journalist and author, of his view that the (British) constitution ‘has worked so much better under queens than kings’, and recommended that ‘the Crown should [therefore], by rights descend from woman to woman’.21 (So much for any notion which might be entertained that Hardy had an inherent bias against women.) In October he expressed the opinion to Florence Henniker that the ‘present condition of the English novel, is due to the paralysing effect of English criticism on those who would have developed it’.22 He also enquired whether she had heard from her father, the colonel, currently serving in South Africa with the British army.
In the same month of October, Emma heard that her widowed sister Helen, now resident at Lee-on-Solent in Hampshire, had fallen ill. Emma left Max Gate immediately to go and care for her. Two months later, however, Helen died at the age of 63.
In April 1901 Hardy is to be seen mourning the death of a favourite cat which was ‘mutilated by the mail train’, even though the railway line was quarter of a mile distant from the house. This was Hardy’s own cat – the first he had ever had – and he blamed himself for allowing it to stay out at night.23
A literary society called the Whitefriars Club did Hardy the honour of visiting him at his home in May. His mother, who was now aged 88, got to hear of the visit and was taken by her daughters, Mary and Katharine, In her wheelchair to view the carriages as they conveyed the society’s members to Max Gate. How proud she must have felt of her now famous son.24
In November Hardy remarked that the army had taken possession of part of his beloved Egdon Heath – a place which until now ‘has lain untouched since man appeared on the earth’.25
Hardy’s Poems of the Past and Present was published in November 1901 by Harper & Brothers of New York. The poems cover a variety of subjects: war, other writers and poets (in particular Shelley and Keats), flowers, birds, Rome, Switzerland, and there is one humorous poem entitled The Ruined Maid. Just as many of the happenings described in Hardy’s novels had their root in his own experiences, so the same pattern emerges in his poems, where his main preoccupation is his fraught relationship with Emma. And because the couple’s problems remain unresolved, the outpouring of plaintive poems never ceases. (This continued to be the case, even after Emma’s death.)
A poem which sheds light on Hardy’s tortured mental state is How Great My Grief:
How great my grief, my joys how few,
Since first it was my fate to know thee!
– Have the slow years not brought to view
How great my grief, my joys how few,
Nor memory shaped old times anew,
Nor loving-kindness helped to show thee
How great my grief, my joys how few,
Since first it was my fate to know thee?
Here, Hardy is complaining that although he has displayed love and kindness towards his wife, he feels that this has not been appreciated. Nevertheless, he has decided to accept his fate, despite the fact that the passage of the ‘slow years’ has brought no amelioration of his grief.
Similarly, in I Said to Love, he writes on the subject of love as follows:
It is not now as in old days
When men adored thee and thy ways …
And continues:
I said to him,
‘We now know more of thee than then;
We were but weak in judgement when,
With hearts abrim,
We clamoured thee that thou would’st please
Inflict on us thine agonies!
Having implied that it had been a misjudgement on his part to marry Emma, Hardy goes on to refer to ‘iron daggers of distress’, but says, resignedly, ‘We are too old in apathy’ to fear any further threats from ‘Love’. The inference is quite clear. Hardy once longed for love, but is now totally disillusioned with the hand that fate has dealt him.
In To Lizbie Browne he laments the fact that he once lost the subject of the poem as a lover:
When, Lizbie Browne,
You had just begun
To be endeared
By stealth to one,
You disappeared
My Lizbie Browne.
And he continues:
You were a wife
Ere I could show Love,
Lizbie Browne.
In other words, soon after his meeting with her, Lizbie had gone off and married somebody else. In real life, Lizbie Browne is alleged to be the beautiful, red-headed daughter of a gamekeeper, who was known to Hardy in his youth. As for the inference of the poem, it is obvious. Hardy, In retrospect, feels that it was she he should have married. Instead, he let her slip, when he should have ‘coaxed and caught’ her, ‘ere you [she] passed’.
The poem A Broken Appointment, from his Poems of the Past and Present collection, for once relates not to Emma, but to Florence Henniker. In it, he describes himself as a ‘time-torn man’. This raises the question: what were the likely adverse effects on the mental and physical health of one such as Hardy, who endured years of marital disharmony and enforced sexual abstinence? In a paper entitled ‘How Does Marriage Affect Physical and Psychological Health? A Survey of the Longitudinal Evidence’, Chris M. Wilson and Andrew J. Oswald of the Institute for the Study of Labor in Bonn, Germany, reviewed approximately 100 research papers on the subject, written between 1981 and 2005.
In regard to the possible benefits of marriage, Wilson and Oswald noted the following findings:
Marriage is a source of emotional and instrumental support. Emotional help seems to reduce the incidence of depression and mental illness, and may provide an important buffer against stress. Marriage can also enhance feelings of attachment and belonging, which are thought to affect mental health.26 Individuals who value the permanence and importance of marriage have a larger reduction in depression and suffer more from marriage dissolution.27 Marital harmony is associated with much better sleep, less depression and fewer visits to the doctor.28 The married have higher levels of emotional support.29
The authors also point to the large number of studies which show that marriage increases longevity, and ‘the longer the duration of a marriage the greater the gain’.30 Conversely:
Marital break-up has a large depressive effect. Compared to those continually married, the continually separated/divorced show significantly lower levels of mental health. A transition from marriage to separation or widowhood increases depression and unhappiness.31
(Hardy’s marriage had effectively ‘broken up’, and he lived an increasingly separate life from Emma, albeit under the same roof. Therefore, he falls into the latter category.)
In regard to sexual intercourse, the study showed that: ‘Married people have much more sex than other groups. Sexual activity is strongly and monotonically correlated with happiness. So more sex may be one reason why marriage raises psychological well-being.’32
Wilson and Oswald summarised the vast volume of literature which they reviewed as follows:
Marriage makes people far less likely to suffer psychological illness.
Marriage makes people live much longer.
Marriage makes people healthier and happier.
Both men and women benefit, though some investigators have found that men gain more.
These gains are not merely because married people engage in less risky activities.
Marriage quality and prior beliefs can influence the size of the gains.33
The authors also point to the fact that human beings with good friendship networks (including friendship with their respective spouses) can repel the simple common cold.34 This suggests that marriage has a positive effect on the ability of the immune system to function well.
Wilson and Oswald’s study merely confirms the obvious benefits to well-being of a loving and caring relationship (and this would undoubtedly apply equally well whether within marriage or without), even though the physiological basis of this is not fully understood. What is known is that during orgasm, experienced during sexual intercourse, endorphins are released which create a feeling of euphoria, and also have an analgesic effect. (Endorphins are substances produced by the pituitary gland which are related to the opiate morphine.) It should be noted that endorphins are also released during strenuous or prolonged physical exercise, such as cycling. Hardy was a keen cyclist and this activity was therefore undoubtedly beneficial to his health and well-being, even if it in no way compensated him for enforced sexual abstinence.
Additionally, it is known that being in an unhappy relationship creates excessive stress, which, in turn, may lead to tiredness, tension headaches, increased susceptibility to infections, high blood pressure and peptic ulcers, as well as anxiety, tearfulness, irritability, insomnia, loss of appetite and lassitude. One way of obviating such stress would be to remove its cause, which for Hardy would have meant seeking a divorce from Emma and embarking on a new relationship. This, however, he felt unable to do, for reasons already discussed. Alternatively, it might have helped him to discuss his feelings with loved ones and friends, but as Emma did not welcome them into her home, this avenue was denied to him. As for consulting his doctor about his undoubted depression, there is no record that he ever went so far as to do this.
The fact that Hardy became more and more depressed during his marriage to Emma is reflected in his writings. Compare, for example, the happy scenes portrayed in Under the Greenwood Tree (written in 1871, three years prior to his marriage to Emma), with the harrowing and heart-rending scenes portrayed in Jude the Obscure (written in the seventeenth and eighteenth years of his married life). But was his physical health also affected adversely?
As his letters confirm, Hardy suffered continually with head colds and rheumatism, whether in London or in Dorset, and also with dyspepsia; though whether this was stress related cannot be said with certainty.