ing on the pavement outside, we
suddenly pull a long face, and we call it the coarse morals of a bygone
age.

The truth is that all these things mark a certain change in the general
view of morals; not, I think, a change for the better. We have grown to
associate morality in a book with a kind of optimism and prettiness;
according to us, a moral book is a book about moral people. But the old
idea was almost exactly the opposite; a moral book was a book about
immoral people. A moral book was full of pictures like Hogarth's "Gin
Lane" or "Stages of Cruelty," or it recorded, like the popular
broadsheet, "God's dreadful judgment" against some blasphemer or
murderer. There is a philosophical reason for this change. The homeless
scepticism of our time has reached a sub-conscious feeling that morality
is somehow merely a matter of human taste--an accident of psychology.
And if goodness only exists in certain human minds, a man wishing to
praise goodness will naturally exaggerate the amount of it that there
is in human minds or the number of human minds in which it is supreme.
Every confession that man is vicious is a confession that virtue is
visionary. Every book which admits that evil is real is felt in some
vague way to be admitting that good is unreal. The modern instinct is
that if the heart of man is evil, there is nothing that remains good.
But the older feeling was that if the heart of man was ever so evil,
there was something that remained good--goodness remained good. An
actual avenging virtue existed outside the human race; to that men rose,
or from that men fell away. Therefore, of course, this law itself was as
much demonstrated in the breach as in the observance. If Tom Jones
violated morality, so much the worse for Tom Jones. Fielding did not
feel, as a melancholy modern would have done, that every sin of Tom
Jones was in some way breaking the spell, or we may even say destroying
the fiction of morality. Men spoke of the sinner breaking the law; but
it was rather the law that broke him. And what modern people call the
foulness and freedom of Fielding is generally the severity and moral
stringency of Fielding. He would not have thought that he was serving
morality at all if he had written a book all about nice people. Fielding
would have considered Mr. Ian Maclaren extremely immoral; and there is
something to be said for that view. Telling the truth about the terrible
struggle of the human soul is surely a very e