Pursuit of the Well Beloved by Thomas Hardy REVIEW
I think this review will require a little
introduction. And since it is early in the morning and I have the time I might
as well supply some.
Understanding the point of Thomas Hardy’s novel The Pursuit of the Well Beloved may require a peek back into Greek philosophy. Plato argues that there are abstract ideals that we all can imagine with our minds that we may not be able to see with our eyes. He calls these ideals, “the forms.” The main words, εἶδος (eidos) and ἰδέα (idea) comes from an earlier word meaning “to see.” It was the prerogative of the gifted and the wise to see these unseen forms by deducing what they looked like from their imperfect manifestations. Thus, one might see many imperfect horses and deduce what the perfect “form horse” would look like if they could see it. These forms do not exist in time or space so they can only be glimpsed by means of thought. Once glimpsed, the artist, the architect, the painter, and most celebrated, the sculptor could bring them into the world of sense for others. For Plato, the pursuit of an understanding of the forms was something of a philosophical obsession. I suppose it might be akin to a surfer looking his whole life for the perfect wave or a dog breeder for the perfect dog or a connoisseur for the perfect wine. A vision of the perfect is for the Platonist, “the pearl of great price.”
I will just note that Hardy’s main character in The Pursuit of the Beloved is a sculptor and he has something of an addiction for what he calls “The Well Beloved” – essentially, a vision of the feminine ideal that he hopes to “capture” in some way. More on that in a moment.
It is worth noting that this pursuit of perfection is something that gets culturally expressed in a variety of ways. There are Stoic versions of it and Christian versions of it and Buddhist versions of it and Hindu versions of it. There are Hedonist versions and Utilitarian versions and Daoist versions. And I deal with many of them in the course of several of my classes. For example, the Stoic version of perfection is a life of complete equanimity and repose. For the Stoic, life perfectly lived is life undisturbed by anything external. One uses their minds to bend their emotions to their will. “Men are disturbed not by the things which happen, but by the opinions about the things,” Epictetus says, “Seek not that the things which happen should happen as you wish; but wish the things which happen to be as they are, and you will have a tranquil flow of life.” Nothing, says Epictetus should be allowed to disturb that perfect repose.
“Never say about anything, I have lost it, but say I have restored it. Is your child dead? It has been restored. Is your wife dead? She has been restored. Has your estate been taken from you? Has not then this also been restored?”
In many ways, this pursuit of perfect sublime repose was translated into Christianity and the anti upped as Paul asserts that the ideal of the Stoics (a state of emotional stasis) is not to be compared with the Christian ideal of a state of perpetual joy. Thus in Philippians, Paul asserts not that he is merely content in all circumstances but that he is joyful in all circumstances. For Paul, the character of Christ takes on the same role as “the form” in Greek philosophy. Only it is a form incarnate. “In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus,” he writes the Philippian church, describing to them how life is to be a pursuit of “Christilingness” (my word). In Paul’s mind, the pursuit of the life that empties itself of its own self-centeredness is the pursuit of the only ideal worth aspiring to.
This, of course, will provoke many religious and philosophical counter-arguments throughout the last 2,000 years of Western History. Ayn Rand will argue that Paul has gotten it all wrong and that the perfection that one should pursue is a perfection of reason and self-reliance not faith and dependence. “Achievement of your happiness is the only moral purpose of your life,” she writes,
“and that happiness, not pain or mindless self-indulgence, is the proof of your moral integrity, since it is the proof and the result of your loyalty to the achievement of your values. . . . I swear, by my life and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine. . . . If any civilization is to survive, it is the morality of altruism that men have to reject.”
For some, the perfect life is cast in material terms. It is about the pursuit of stuff – of more and better stuff. For others, it is about the reduction of work down to zero. “I got a C in that class and I did not even open the book,” I heard one student say to another in a computer lab at college one day. “Yeah. Well I got a B and I never even bought the book,” says another. Ultimately, for them, the “pursuit of the well beloved (the ideal that mattered to them) was a pursuit of the most reward for the least work. I suspect that we all know someone like that. I might add that others might see an ideal domestic life as their ideal. Others, perfect knowledge of something. Others perfect children.
But I digress. Lets get back to the subject at hand; Thomas Hardy’s novel. In The Pursuit of the Well Beloved, the main character, a talented sculptor by the name of Jocelyn Pierston finds himself as a young man on a search for what he calls “The well-beloved” an incarnation of the feminine ideal. For him it is both an artistic and a romantic quest. Alas, his “problem” is that this ideal keeps moving from person to person. One is reminded of Shakespeare’s Romeo who opens the play by despondently telling his cousin Benvolio of the surpassing perfections of his lasted heartthrob, Rosalind. Romeo’s affections being unrequited, Benvolio tells Romeo to look elsewhere. “Be ruled by me, forget to think of her, says Benvolio. “O, teach me how I should forget to think,” replies Romeo. “By giving liberty unto thine eyes;” Benvolio advises, “Examine other beauties.”
To this, Romeo infers that it will be impossible to replace Rosalind as none can compare (of course we all know that he is about to find exactly such a one in a matter of hours). Soon the despondant Romeo will be gazing into the hypnotizing crystal orbs of Juliet’s eyes and forgetting Rosalind ever existed.
Here is how Hardy describes Jocelyn Pierston’s frustrated search for his ideal.
"To his intrinsic Well−Beloved he had always been faithful; but she had had many embodiments. Each individuality known as Lucy, Jane, Florence, Evangeline, or what−not, had been merely a transient condition of her. He did not recognize this as an excuse or as a defense, but as a fact simply. Essentially she was perhaps of no tangible substance; a spirit, a dream, a frenzy, a conception, an aroma, an epitomised sex, a light of the eye, a parting of the lips. God only knew what she really was; Pierston did not. He knew that he loved the Protean creature wherever he found her, whether with blue eyes, black eyes, or brown; whether presenting herself as tall, fragile, or plump. She was never in two places at once; but hitherto she had never been in one place long."
"By making this clear to himself some time before this date, he had escaped a good deal of ugly reproach which he might otherwise have incurred from his own judgment, as being the very embodiment of fickleness. It was simply that she who always attracted him, and led him whither she would, as by a silken thread, had not remained the occupant of the same fleshly tabernacle throughout her career so far. Whether she would ultimately settle down into one, he could not say."
For Jocelyn Pierston, the ideal woman was, in his mind, an undefined but migratory constant that flitted about from one actual person to another. The reader will no doubt suspect that this theory might provide perfect cover for a shameless philanderer wishing to see himself as the epitome of faithfulness throughout what looks to be a “love-em-and-leave-em” romantic lifestyle. Suffice it to say that for Jocelyn, his pursuit of the Platonic ideal amounts to a search for a woman in whom the vision of the ideal will not fade. “Good luck,” we might say to him.
The novel opens with Jocelyn burning old love letters from his assorted “failed experiments.”
“He had no longer heart to burn them. That packet, at least, he would preserve for the writer's sake, notwithstanding that the person of the writer, wherever she might be, was now but as an empty shell which had once contained his ideal for a transient time.”
Further on we read that Jocelyn Pierston,
“had quite disabused his mind of the old−fashioned assumption that the idol of a man's fancy was an integral part of the personality in which it might be located for a long or a short while.”
Visiting his father back in his home town on an Island off the coast of England, Jocelyn meets a childhood friend by the name of Avice Caro, now a young woman that Pierston believes may well be the end of his search. Let me just say at this point that if you have ever been “dumped” by someone with a philosophy like Jocelyn Pierston, you know what sort of yellow lights should be blinking on the dashboard of your romantic radar detector at this point in the story. You find yourself whispering to the poor lass “Don’t even look at this man you poor thing.” I can assure you that Jocelyn Pierston is not going to be the sort of character that you read about to your young children with hopes that they will appreciate his qualities and emulate him. J.Pierston is a “player” to put it succinctly, eventually, a wealthy and successful player, and a player with a philosophy to justify him, perhaps the most dangerous kind.
But it should be noted that over the course of his life, Hardy does show us a transitional trajectory in the character development of his little Frankenstein. Over the course of his long life, Jocelyn Pierston’s pursuit of “the well beloved” – at firs, simply to find her (or them), to sculpt her (or them), to seduce her (or them), to buy her affections (or theirs), to marry her (or them), and ultimately to own her (or them) – becomes a quest to be the well-beloved. Over time, he realizes that life cannot be an extended search for some ideal in others, for that is chasing after the wind. That ideal can never survive the intimacy that it inspires. What life can be is a pursuit of “well-belovedness.” As Immanuel Kant says, morality is “not properly the doctrine of how we are to make ourselves happy, but of how we are to become worthy of happiness.”
By the end of his life, Pierston has not stopped looking for his ideal (indeed, he finds reason to see it in three generations of Avice Caros). But he does gain the sense that love for these people entails sacrificing not that he might own them, but that they might find happiness.
Albert Einstein once said that “confusion of goals and perfection of means” was the characteristic problem of modern life. By this, I assume that he was suggesting that in life as we know it, we are constantly getting better and better at pursuing goals that are less and less worthy and that ultimately we will develop the perfect tool and the perfect app for achieving precisely the perfection that we thought most important, only to find that we had aimed entirely in the wrong direction.
“What shall it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his own soul?” we might well ask ourselves again. It takes Jocelyn Pierston a lifetime to learn what he might have benefitted himself much to know at the age of 20. But can we not all say the same of ourselves?
Question for Comment: What does your “pursuit of the well beloved” look like?
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