d not been poisoned. He sees how many ugly
things are covered by the superficial gloss of fashion, but he does not
condescend to travesty the facts in order to gratify a morbid taste for
the horrible. When he wants a good man or woman he knows where to find
them, and paints from Allen or his own wife with obvious sincerity and
hearty sympathy. He is less anxious to exhibit human selfishness than to
show us that an alloy of generosity is to be found even amidst base
motives. Some of his happiest touches are illustrations of this
doctrine. His villains (with a significant exception) are never
monsters. They have some touch of human emotion. No desert, according to
him, is so bare but that some sweet spring blends with its brackish
waters. His grasping landladies have genuine movements of sympathy; and
even the scoundrelly Black George, the game-keeper, is anxious to do Tom
Jones a good turn, without risk, of course, to his own comfort, by way
of compensation for previous injuries. It is this impartial insight into
the ordinary texture of human motive that gives a certain solidity and
veracity to Fielding's work. We are always made to feel that the actions
spring fairly and naturally from the character of his persons, not from
the exigencies of his story or the desire to be effective. The one great
difficulty in 'Tom Jones' is the assumption that the excellent Allworthy
should have been deceived for years by the hypocrite Blifil, and blind
to the substantial kindliness of his ward. Here we may fancy that
Fielding has been forced to be unnatural by his plot. Yet he suggests a
satisfactory solution with admirable skill. Allworthy is prejudiced in
favour of Blifil by the apparently unjust prejudice of Blifil's mother
in favour of the jovial Tom. A generous man may easily become blind to
the faults of a supposed victim of maternal injustice; and even here
Fielding fairly escapes from the blame due to ordinary novelists, who
invent impossible misunderstandings in order to bring about intricate
perplexities.

Blifil is perhaps the one case (for 'Jonathan Wild' is a satire, not a
history, or, as M. Taine fancies, a tract) in which Fielding seems to
lose his unvarying coolness of judgment; and the explanation is obvious.
The one fault to which he is, so to speak, unjust, is hypocrisy.
Hypocrisy, indeed, cannot well be painted too black, but it should not
be made impossible. When Fielding has to deal with such a character, he
for o