A bridge between the two centuries: Hardy's novels

By the 4th "phase" of Thomas Hardy's "Tess of the D'urbervilles," in which Angel Clare, the preacher's son who's learning to be a farmer, embraces Tess and (later) asks her to marry him, we see why Hardy is truly (I think, and I can't be the first to think so) a bridge between the two centuries of literature. His frank, open sexuality and carnality - open at least by 19th-century standards - is a definite precursor of Lawrence and all that followed. Interesting to learn from some of the good notes in the Norton Critical Edition, which I'm reading, how much Hardy had to cut from or emend for the original serial publication of Tess - the final text is much more sexual and sensuous: Angel carrying the four women, one by one, across the mu puddle, for example, and even the scene of Tess's ravishment in the dark forest - all cut from the serial edition - disgraceful. But in other ways, he looks backwards, his characters seem to be 20th-century people caught in a 19th-century moral vice - Tess, the main example, so wracked by the guilt of her "sin," of having had (and maybe enjoyed?) sexual relations with the awful Alec D'Urberville, she can tell no one, she believes (rightly?) that Angel, and maybe no man, would want her, a fallen woman - this seems a throwback to Hawthorne (though Tess doesn't bear the guilt of adultery, just of premarital sex) and to the Victorians. And yet the Tess does not feel dated - the characters so fresh and alive, the settings so beautifully evoked, the relation between Hardy and his material so intense and original - like Courbet or Millet - a vision of a whole society, seldom captured in literature, evoked with great sympathy and beauty.