f Goethe and Shakespeare appears
in the presentation of such characters as Iago and Mephistopheles. The
insight of true genius shows us by such examples what is the true
physiology of vice; what is the nature of the man who has lost all faith
in virtue and all sympathy with purity and nobility of character. The
artist of inferior rank tries to make us hate vice by showing that it
comes to a bad end precisely because he has an adequate perception of
its true nature. He can see that a drunkard generally gets into debt or
incurs an attack of _delirium tremens_, but he does not exhibit the
moral disintegration which is the underlying cause of the misfortune,
and which may be equally fatal, even if it happens to evade the penalty.
The distinction depends upon the power of the artist to fulfil
Fielding's requirement of penetrating to the essence of the objects of
his contemplation. It corresponds to the distinction in philosophy
between a merely prudential system of ethics--the system of the gallows
and the gaol--and the system which recognises the deeper issues
perceptible to a fine moral sense.

Now, in certain matters, Fielding's morality is of the merely prudential
kind. It resembles Hogarth's simple doctrine that the good apprentice
will be Lord Mayor and the bad apprentice get into Newgate. So shrewd an
observer was indeed well aware, and could say very forcibly,[16] that
virtue in this world might sometimes lead to poverty, contempt, and
imprisonment. He does not, like some novelists, assume the character of
a temporal Providence, and knock his evildoers on the head at the end of
the story. He shows very forcibly that the difficulties which beset poor
Jones and Booth are not to be fairly called accidents, but are the
difficulties to which bad conduct generally leads a man, and which are
all the harder when not counterbalanced by a clear conscience. He can
even describe with sympathy such a character as poor Atkinson in
'Amelia,' whose unselfish love brings him more blows than favours of
fortune. But it is true that he is a good deal more sensible to what are
called the prudential sanctions of virtue, at least of a certain
category of virtues, than to its essential beauty. So far the want of
refinement of which M. Taine speaks does, in fact, lower, and lower very
materially, his moral perception. A man of true delicacy could never
have dragged Tom Jones into his lowest degradation without showing more
forcibly his abhor