Fielding distinctly takes himself for a moralist.  He preaches as continually as Thackeray.  And his moral is this:  “Let a man be kind, generous, charitable, tolerant, brave, honest—­and we may pardon him vices of young blood, and the stains of adventurous living.”  Fielding has no mercy on a seducer.  Lovelace would have fared worse with him than with Richardson, who, I verily believe, admired that infernal (excuse me) coward and villain.  The case of young Nightingale, in “Tom Jones,” will show you what Fielding thought of such gallants.  Why, Tom himself preaches to Nightingale.  “Miss Nancy’s Interest alone, and not yours, ought to be your sole Consideration,” cried Thomas, . . . “and the very best and truest Honour, which is Goodness, requires it of you,” that is, requires that Nightingale shall marry Miss Nancy.

How Tom Jones combined these sentiments, which were perfectly honest, with his own astonishing lack of retenue, and with Lady Bellaston, is just the puzzle.  We cannot very well argue about it.  I only ask you to let Jones in his right mind partly excuse Jones in a number of very delicate situations.  If you ask me whether Sophia had not, after her marriage, to be as forgiving as Amelia, I fear I must admit that probably it was so.  But Dr. Johnson himself thought little of that.

I am afraid our only way of dealing with Fielding’s morality is to take the best of it and leave the remainder alone.  Here I find that I have unconsciously agreed with that well-known philosopher, Mr. James Boswell, the younger, of Auchinleck: 

“The moral tendency of Fielding’s writings . . . is ever favourable to honour and honesty, and cherishes the benevolent and generous affections.  He who is as good as Fielding would make him is an amiable member of society, and may be led on by more regulated instructions to a higher state of ethical perfection.”

Let us be as good and simple as Adams, without his vanity and his oddity, as brave and generous as Jones, without Jones’s faults, and what a world of men and women it will become!  Fielding did not paint that unborn world, he sketched the world he knew very well.  He found that respectable people were often perfectly blind to the duties of charity in every sense of the word.  He found that the only man in a whole company who pitied Joseph Andrews, when stripped and beaten by robbers was a postilion with defects in his moral character.  In short, he knew that respectability often practised none but the strictly self-regarding virtues, and that poverty and recklessness did not always extinguish a native goodness of heart.  Perhaps this discovery made him leniently disposed to “characters and situations so wretchedly low and dirty, that I,” say the author of “Pamela,” “could not be interested for any one of them.”

How amusing Richardson always was about Fielding!  How jealousy, spite, and the confusion of mind that befogs a prig when he is not taken seriously, do darken the eyes of the author of “those deplorably tedious lamentations, ‘Clarissa’ and ‘Sir Charles Grandison,’” as Horace Walpole calls them!