morality and immorality in tom jones

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.

But the old idea was almost exactly the opposite; a moral book was a book about immoral people. I have been astounded by the number of the leading articles, literary articles, and other articles written about him just now in which there is a curious tone of apologising for the man.

We let Zola write about him in his bad moments, and make him out much worse than he is. If any ordinary journalist or man of general reading alludes to Villon or to Homer, they consider it a quite triumphant sneer to say to the man, “You cannot read mediaeval French,” or “You cannot read Homeric Greek.”But it is not a triumphant sneer–or, indeed, a sneer at all.
He would be like a man who would not admit that the North Pole was cold until he had been there.

How about receiving a customized one? Whenever he alludes to right and wrong it is always with this old implication.
I have never read Pindar (I mean I have never read the Greek Pindar; Peter Pindar I have read all right), but the mere fact that I have not read Pindar, I think, ought not to prevent me and certainly would not prevent me from talking of “the masterpieces of Pindar,” or of “great poets like Pindar or Aeschylus.”The very learned men are angularly unenlightened on this as on many other subjects; and the position they take up is really quite unreasonable. 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 a philosophical reason for this change.

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. I think a man may praise Pindar without knowing the top of a Greek letter from the bottom.But I think that if a man is going to abuse Pindar, if he is going to denounce, refute, and utterly expose Pindar, if he is going to show Pindar up as the utter ignoramus and outrageous impostor that he is, then I think it will be just as well perhaps–I think, at any rate, it would do no harm–if he did know a little Greek, and even had read a little Pindar.

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. When Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones was published, it was considered by many critics to be an entirely immoral, and thus, quite offensive piece of writing. 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. One critic says that after all he couldn’t help it, because he lived in the eighteenth century; another says that we must allow for the change of manners and ideas; another 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. We let puritan writers write about the purities of this ordinary man. 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.

Even Tom Jones knew that.

One critic says that after all he couldn't help it, because he lived in the eighteenth century; 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.

Hi there, would you like to get such a paper? Every confession that man is vicious is a confession that virtue is visionary. 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 two hundredth anniversary of Henry Fielding is very justly celebrated, even if, as far as can be discovered, it is only celebrated by the newspapers. 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.

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