Innocence doesn't make...a good story. So, whereas Hardy is fascinated by Tess's freshness, by her being "a mere vessel of emotion untinctured by experience"(15), it is hard to see where that goes as a story. It can only serve as an opening of a novel.
Even as an opening, it is hardly plausible and Hardy struggles to pull it off. Even youthful, fresh Tess, "a genuine daughter of nature"(120), has had experience. She clearly has a loving connection with her father and has experienced the disappointments and shame often attendant upon such connections. She has experienced the loss of two siblings to whom she was close (37). And, although Tess loves her, her mother causes her pain: "As she grew older, and began to see how matters stood, she felt Malthusian vexation with her mother for thoughtlessly giving her so many little brothers and sisters" (37). Tess is the adult in the family. She worryies for their welfare and attempts to scheme around the mayhem brought about by her thoughtless and immature parents whom she's forced to parent.
Tess is untinctured by experience of the romantic kind. She is "heart-whole as yet"(19) at the time of the fateful dance where she and Angel cross paths. Does innocence have a story? Perhaps, here's where it would've begun according to Hardy. Or, if not a story, here's where her unique self in its freshness, its wholeness, would have met "a...man, the exact and true one in all respects-as nearly as human mutuality can be exact and true"(43). Here, Hardy hedges: does he believe in a human mutuality exact and true?
Such mutuality would seem dependent on their being a larger plan or pattern in place. Of such a pattern, Hardy expresses a sceptically nostalgia. After Alec and Tess first meet, he quite dourly concludes, "Thus the thing began." After the mention of human mutuality above, he goes on to lament how "[i]n the ill judged execution of the well-judged plan of things the call seldom produces the comer, the man to love rarely coincides with the hour for loving. Nature does not often say 'See!' to her poor creature at a time when seeing can lead to happy doing"(43).
Yet, Hardy has a troubled relation with nature. Although he often portrays it as beneficient, as in synch with human thought, emotion and purpose, at other points, he decidedly rejects these attractive notions. Writing of Wordsworth, Hardy quips, "Some would like to know whence the poet whose philosophy is in these days deemed as profound and trustworthy as his verse is pure and breezy, gets his authority for speaking of 'Nature's holy plan'"(24).
So, is there a plan? Yes and no. Of Angel and Clare, he writes of there being "two halves of an approximately perfect whole" that do "not confront each other at the perfect moment." If the perfect whole had met at the perfect moment, innocence would come to some perfection; Tess as natural would have received the finish of Angel's 'tutelage; Tess as a "second Eve" would have come to some perfection of the human. A certain logic would suggest these things but it's hard to conceive of Tess as more perfect without her struggle and pathos. These allow expression of her valor. Does Hardy agree? Hard to say. As he puts it at one point, circumstance, fate, conspire against Tess and Angel. They fail to come together till after the perfect moment and out of this "maladroit delay sprang anxieties, disappointments, shocks, catastrophes-what was called a strange destiny"(44).
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