he exhibits his youth as he had found him—a “piebald miscellany,”—
“Bursts of great heart and slips in sensual mire;”
and, to our modern ideas, when no one dares, as Thackeray complained, “to depict to his utmost power a Man,” the spectacle is discomforting. Yet those who look upon human nature as keenly and unflinchingly as Fielding did, knowing how weak and fallible it is,—how prone to fall away by accident or passion,—can scarcely deny the truth of Tom Jones. That such a person cannot properly serve as a hero now is rather a question of our time than of Fielding’s, and it may safely be set aside. One objection which has been made, and made with reason, is that Fielding, while taking care that Nemesis shall follow his hero’s lapses, has spoken of them with too much indulgence, or rather without sufficient excuse. Coleridge, who was certainly not squeamish, seems to have felt this when, in a MS. note [Footnote: These notes were communicated by Mr. James Gillman to The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, published by H. N. Coleridge in 1836. The book in which they were made, (it is the four volume edition of 1773, and has Gillman’s book-plate), is now in the British Museum. The above transcript is from the MS.] in the well-known British Museum edition, he says:—
“Even in this most questionable part of Tom Jones [i.e. the Lady Bellaston episode, chap. ix. Book xv.], I cannot but think after frequent reflection on it, that an additional paragraph, more fully & forcibly unfolding Tom Jones’s sense of self-degradation on the discovery of the true character of the relation, in which he had stood to Lady Bellaston—& his awakened feeling of the dignity and manliness of Chastity—would have removed in great measure any just objection, at all events relating to Fielding himself, by taking in the state of manners in his time.”
