"Tractarian as to phraseology and Pantheistic as to essence."

 

The religiosity of Thomas Hardy's tragic heroine in Tess of the d'Urbervilles intrigues me. I won't go so far as to speculate whether or not she represents her creator's own religiosity, but his obvious love for this character gives me pause. 

In an article published in The Thomas Hardy Journal in May 1986, Ian Gregor quoted a reminiscence of Hardy published in 1938 by Ford Madox Ford: "I think one of the most memorable occasions of my life occurred when before the fair-sized house-party at Mr Clodd's at Aldeburgh, Thomas Hardy made the curiously shy avowal that he was a practising and believing communicant of the Church of England."

Gregor's article tries to reconcile this remembrance with a mid-life (1890) confession of Hardy's in his Autobiography: "I have been looking for God for 50 years, and I think if he had existed, I should have discovered him. As an external personality, of course, the only true meaning of the word."

 According to an "Explanatory Note" Hardy appended to the first edition of Tess, the novel was written in 1889. 

When it came to his personal views, Hardy tended to play his cards close to the vest: see Ralph Pite's biography, Thomas Hardy: The Guarded Life (2007).

What, then, to make of Ford's late (and I emphasize the adjective) recollection? And, given Pite's research into Hardy's autobiographical reticence, what to make of his mid-life "confession"?

I will suggest--but only suggest--that his description of Tess's religiosity (the title of these notes) may reconcile the two statements.

And leave it at that. In the end, my remarks are, at best, tangentially relevant to Hardy's artistic achievement. To borrow from Martin Luther's famous statement about God: "Let Hardy be Hardy."