says that he was not altogether without generous and humane feelings; another suggests that he clung feebly, after all, to a few of the less important virtues.  What on earth does all this mean?  Fielding described Tom Jones as going on in a certain way, in which, most unfortunately, a very large number of young men do go on.  It is unnecessary to say that Henry Fielding knew that it was an unfortunate way of going on.  Even Tom Jones knew that.  He said in so many words that it was a very unfortunate way of going on; he said, one may almost say, that it had ruined his life; the passage is there for the benefit of any one who may take the trouble to read the book.  There is ample evidence (though even this is of a mystical and indirect kind), there is ample evidence that Fielding probably thought that it was better to be Tom Jones than to be an utter coward and sneak.  There is simply not one rag or thread or speck of evidence to show that Fielding thought that it was better to be Tom Jones than to be a good man.  All that he is concerned with is the description of a definite and very real type of young man; the young man whose passions and whose selfish necessities sometimes seemed to be stronger than anything else in him.

The practical morality of Tom Jones is bad, though not so bad, spiritually speaking, as the practical morality of Arthur Pendennis or the practical morality of Pip, and certainly nothing like so bad as the profound practical immorality of Daniel Deronda.  The practical morality of Tom Jones is bad; but I cannot see any proof that his theoretical morality was particularly bad.  There is no need to tell the majority of modern young men even to live up to the theoretical ethics of Henry Fielding.  They would suddenly spring into the stature of archangels if they lived up to the theoretic ethics of poor Tom Jones.  Tom Jones is still alive, with all his good and all his evil; he is walking about the streets; we meet him every day.  We meet with him, we drink with him, we smoke with him, we talk with him, we talk about him.  The only difference is that we have no longer the intellectual courage to write about him.  We split up the supreme and central human being, Tom Jones, into a number of separate aspects.  We let Mr. J.M.  Barrie write about him in his good moments, and make him out better than he is.  We let Zola write about him in his bad moments, and make him out much worse than he is.  We let Maeterlinck celebrate those moments of spiritual panic which he knows to be cowardly; we let Mr. Rudyard Kipling celebrate those moments of brutality which he knows to be far more cowardly.  We let obscene writers write about the obscenities of this ordinary man.  We let puritan writers write about the purities of this ordinary man.  We look through one peephole that makes men out as devils, and we call it the new art.  We look through another peephole that makes men out as angels, and we call it the New Theology.  But if we pull down some dusty old books from the bookshelf, if we turn over some old mildewed leaves, and if in that obscurity and decay we find some faint traces of a tale about a complete man, such a man as is walking on the pavement outside, we suddenly pull a long face, and we call it the coarse morals of a bygone age.