In a recent dissatisfied perusal of Mr. Macaulay's
collected articles, we were especially offended by his
curious and undesirable Essay on Machiavelli. Declining
the various solutions which have been offered
to explain how a man supposed to be so great could
have lent his genius to the doctrine of "the Prince," he
has advanced a hypothesis of his own, which may or
may not be true, as an interpretation of Machiavelli's
character, but which, as an exposition of a universal
ethical theory, is as detestable as what it is brought
forward to explain ... We will not show Mr. Macaulay
the disrespect of supposing that he has unsuccessfully
attempted an elaborate piece of irony. It is possible that
he may have been exercising his genius with a paradox,
but the subject is not of the sort in which we can
patiently permit such exercises. It is hard work with
all of us to keep ourselves straight, even when we see
the road with all plainness as it lies out before us; and
clever men must be good enough to find something else
to amuse themselves with, instead of dusting our eyes
with sophistry.
In Mr. Macaulay's conception of human nature, the
basenesses and the excellencies of mankind are no more
than accidents of circumstance, the results of national
feeling and national capabilities; and cunning and
treachery, and lying, and such other "natural defences
of the weak against the strong," are in themselves
neither good nor bad, except as thinking makes them
so. They are the virtues of a weak people, and they
will be as much admired, and are as justly admirable;
they are to the full as compatible with the highest
graces and most lofty features of the heart and intellect,
as any of those opposite so called heroisms which we
are generally so unthinking as to allow to monopolize
the name .... Cunning is the only resource of the
feeble; and why may we not feel for victorious cunning
as strong a sympathy as for the bold, downright, open
bearing of the strong? . . . That there may be no
mistake in the essayist's meaning, that he may drive the
nail home into the English understanding, he takes an
illustration which shall be familiar to all of us in the
characters of Iago and Othello. To our northern
thought, the free and noble nature of the Moor is
wrecked through a single infirmity, by a fiend in the
human form. To one of Machiavelli's Italians, Iago's
keen-edged intellect would have appeared as admirable
as Othello's daring appears to us, and Othello himself
little better than a fool and a savage .... It is but a
change of scene, of climate, of the animal qualities of
the frame, and evil has become a good, and good has
become evil .... Now, our displeasure with Mr.
Macaulay is, not that he has advanced a novel and
mischievous theory: it was elaborated long ago in the
finely-tempered dialectics of the Schools of Rhetoric, at
Athens; and so long as such a phenomenon as a
cultivated rogue remains possible among mankind, it
will reappear in all languages and under any number
of philosophical disguises .... Seldom or never,
however, has it appeared with so little attempt at
disguise. It has been left for questionable poets and
novelists to idealize the rascal genus; philosophers
have escaped into the ambiguities of general propositions,
and we do not remember elsewhere to have
met with a serious ethical thinker deliberately laying
two whole organic characters, with their vices and
virtues in full life and bloom, side by side, asking
himself which is best, and answering gravely that it
is a matter of taste.
Mr. Macaulay has been bolder than his predecessors;
he has shrunk from no conclusion, and
looked directly into the very heart of the matter; he
has struck, as we believe, the very lowest stone of our
ethical convictions, and declared that the foundation
quakes under it.
For, ultimately, how do we know that right is right,
and wrong is wrong? People in general accept it on
authority; but authority itself must repose on some
ulterior basis; and what is that? . . . Are we to say
that in morals there is a system of primary axioms, out
of which we develop our conclusions, and apply them,
as they are needed, to life? It does not appear so.
The analogy of morals is rather with art than with
geometry. The grace of heaven gives us good men,
and gives us beautiful creations; and we, perceiving by
the instincts within ourselves that celestial presence in
the objects on which we gaze, find out for ourselves
the laws which make them what they are, not by comparing
them with any antecedent theory, but by careful
analysis of our own impressions, by asking ourselves
what it is which we admire in them, and calling that
good, and calling that beautiful.
So, then, if admiration be the first fact, if the sense
of it be the ultimate ground on which the after temple
of morality, as a system, upraises itself, if we can be
challenged here on our own ground, and fail to make
it good, what we call the life of the soul becomes a
dream of a feeble enthusiast, and we moralists a mark
for the sceptic's finger to point at with scorn.
Bold and ably urged arguments against our own
convictions, if they do not confuse us, will usually send
us back over our ground to re-examine the strength of
our positions: and if we are honest with ourselves, we
shall very often find points of some uncertainty left
unguarded, of which the show of the strength of our
enemy will oblige us to see better to the defence ....
It was not without some shame, and much uneasiness,
that, while we were ourselves engaged in this process,
full of indignation with Mr. Macaulay, we heard a
clear voice ringing in our ear, "Who art thou that
judgest another?" and warning us of the presence in
our own heart of a sympathy, which we could not deny,
with the sadly questionable hero of the German epic,
Reynard the Fox. With our vulpine friend, we were
on the edge of the very same abyss, if, indeed, we
were not rolling in the depth of it. By what sophistry
could we justify ourselves, if not by the very same
which we had just been so eagerly condemning? And
our conscience whispered to us that we had been swift
to detect a fault in another, because it was the very
fault to which, in our own heart of hearts, we had a
latent leaning.
Was it so indeed, then? Was Reineke no better
than Iago? Was the sole difference between them,
that the vales sacer who had sung the exploits of
Reineke loved the wicked rascal, and entangled us in
loving him? It was a question to be asked .... And
yet we had faith enough in the straightforwardness of
our own sympathies to feel sure that it must admit of
some sort of answer. And, indeed, we rapidly found
an answer satisfactory enough to give us time to
breathe, in remembering that Reineke, with all his
roguery, has no malice in him .... It is not in his
nature to hate; he could not do it if he tried. The
characteristic of Iago is that deep motiveless malignity
which rejoices in evil as its proper element, which loves
evil as good men love virtue. In his calculations on
the character of the Moor, he despises his
unsuspicious trustingness as imbecility, while he hates him
as a man because his nature is the perpetual opposite
and perpetual reproach of his own .... Now Reineke
would not have hurt a creature, not even Scharfenebbe,
the crow's wife, when she came to peck his eyes out,
if he had not been hungry; and that gastros ananke,
that craving of the stomach, makes a difference quite
infinite. It is true that, like Iago, he rejoices in the
exercise of his intellect; the sense of his power, and the
scientific employment of his time are a real delight to
him; but then, as we said, he does not love evil for its
own sake; he is only somewhat indifferent to it. If the
other animals venture to take liberties with him, he will
repay them in their own coin, and get his quiet laugh
at them at the same time; but the object generally for
which he lives is the natural one of getting his bread
for himself and his family; and, as the great moralist
says, "It is better to be bad for something than for
nothing." Badness generally is undesirable; but badness
in its essence, which may be called heroic badness,
is gratuitous.
But this first thought served merely to give us a
momentary relief from our alarm, and we determined
we would sift the matter to the bottom, and no more
expose ourselves to be taken at such disadvantage.
We went again to the poem, with our eyes open, and
our moral sense as keenly awake as a genuine wish to
understand our feelings could make it. We determined
that we would really know what we did feel and what
we did not. We would not be lightly scared away from
our friend, but neither would we any more allow our
judgment to be talked down by that fluent tongue of
his; he should have justice from us, he and his biographer,
as far as it lay with us to discern justice and
to render it.
And really on this deliberate perusal it did seem
little less than impossible that we could find any
conceivable attribute illustrated in Reineke's proceedings
which we could dare to enter in our catalogue of
virtue, and not blush to read it there. What sin is
there in the Decalogue in which he has not steeped
himself to the lips? To the lips, shall we say? nay,
over head and ears--rolling and rollicking in sin.
Murder, and theft, and adultery, sacrilege, perjury,
lying his very life is made of them. On he goes to
the end, heaping crime on crime, and lie on lie, and
at last, when it seems that justice, which has been so
long vainly halting after him, has him really in her iron
grasp, there is a solemn appeal to heaven, a challenge,
a battle ordeal, in which, by means we may not venture
even to whisper, the villain prospers, and comes out
glorious, victorious, amidst the applause of a gazing
world; and, to crown it all, the poet tells us that under
the disguise of the animal name and form the world
of man is represented, and the true course of it; and
the idea of the book is, that we who read it may learn
therein to discern between good and evil, and choose
the first and avoid the last. It seemed beyond the
power of sophistry to whitewash Reineke, and the
interest which still continued to cling to him in us seemed
too nearly to resemble the unwisdom of the multitude,
with whom success is the one virtue and failure the
only crime.
It appeared, too, that although the animal disguises
were too transparent to endure a moment's reflection,
yet that they were so gracefully worn that such
moment's reflection was not to be come at without an
effort. Our imagination following the costume did
imperceptibly betray our judgment; we admired the
human intellect, the ever ready prompt sagacity and
presence of mind. We delighted in the satire on the
foolishnesses and greedinesses of our own fellow
mankind; but in our regard for the hero we forgot his
humanity wherever it was his interest that we should
forget it, and while we admired him as a man we
judged him only as a fox. We doubt whether it would
have been possible if he had been described as an open
acknowledged biped in coat and trousers, to have
retained our regard for him. Something or other in
us, either real rightmindedness, or humbug, or
hypocrisy, would have obliged us to mix more censure with
our liking than most of us do in the case as it stands.
It may be that the dress of the fox throws us off our
guard, and lets out a secret or two which we commonly
conceal even from ourselves. When we have to pass
an opinion upon bad people, who at the same time are
clever and attractive, we say rather what we think
we ought to feel than our real sensations; while
with Reineke, being but an animal, we forget to make
ourselves up, and for once our genuine tastes show
themselves freely .... Some degree of truth there
undoubtedly is in this .... But making all allowance for
it--making all and over allowance for the trick which is
passed upon our senses, there still remained a feeling
unresolved. The poem was not solely the apotheosis
of a rascal in whom we were betrayed into taking an
interest. And it was not a satire merely on the world,
and on the men whom the world delight to honour;
there was still something which really deserved to be
liked in Reineke, and what it was we had as yet failed
to discover.
"Two are better than one," and we resolved in our
difficulty to try what our friends might have to say
about it; the appearance of the Wurtemburg animals
at the Exhibition came fortunately apropos to our
assistance: a few years ago it was rare to find a person
who had read the Fox Epic; and still more, of course,
to find one whose judgment would be worth taking
about it; but now the charming figures of Reineke
himself, and the Lion King, and Isegrim, and Bruin,
and Bellyn, and Hintze, and Grimbart, had set all the
world asking who and what they were, and the story
began to get itself known. The old editions, which had
long slept unbound in reams upon the shelves, began
to descend and clothe themselves in green and crimson.
Mr. Dickens sent a summary of it round the households
of England. Everybody began to talk of Reineke; and
now, at any rate, we said to ourselves, we shall see
whether we are alone in our liking--whether others
share in this strange sympathy, or whether it be some
unique and monstrous moral obliquity in ourselves.
We set to work, therefore, with all earnestness,
feeling our way first with fear and delicacy, as conscious
of our own delinquency, to gather judgments which
should be wiser than our own, and correct ourselves, if
it proved that we required correction, with whatever
severity might be necessary. The result of which labour
of ours was not a little surprising; we found that women
invariably, with that clear moral instinct of theirs, at
once utterly reprobated and detested our poor Reynard;
detested the hero and detested the bard who sang of
him with so much sympathy; while men we found
almost invariably feeling just as we felt ourselves, only
with this difference, that we saw no trace of uneasiness
in them about the matter. It was no little comfort to us,
moreover, to find that the exceptions were rather among
the half-men, the would-be extremely good, but whose
goodness was of that dead and passive kind which
spoke to but a small elevation of thought or activity;
while just in proportion as a man was strong, and real,
and energetic, was his ability to see good in Reineke.
It was really most strange, one near friend of ours, a
man who, as far as we knew (and we knew him well)
had never done a wrong thing, when we ventured to
hint something about roguery, replied, "You see, he was
such a clever rogue, that he had a right." Another,
whom we pressed more closely with that treacherous
cannibal feast at Malepartus, on the body of poor
Lampe, said, off-hand and with much impatience of
such questioning, "Such fellows were made to be
eaten." What could we do? It had come to this,--
as in the exuberance of our pleasure with some dear
child, no ordinary epithet will sometimes reach to
express the vehemence of our affection, and borrowing
language out of the opposites, we call him little rogue
or little villain, so here, reversing the terms of the
analogy, we bestow the fulness of our regard on Reineke
because of that transcendantly successful roguery.
When we asked our friends how they came to feel
as they did, they had little to say. They were not
persons who could be suspected of any latent disposition
towards evil doing, and yet though it appeared as if
they were falling under the description of those
unhappy ones who, if they did not such things themselves,
yet "had pleasure in those who did them," they did not
care to justify themselves. The fact was so: arche to
hoti: it was a fact--what could we want more? Some
few attempted feebly to maintain that the book was a
satire. But this only moved the difficulty a single
step; for the fact of the sympathy remained unimpaired,
and if it was a satire we were ourselves the objects of it.
Others urged what we said above, that the story was
only of poor animals that, according to Descartes, not
only had no souls, but scarcely even life in any
original and sufficient sense, and therefore we need not
trouble ourselves. But one of two alternatives it
seemed we were bound to choose, either of which was
fatal to the proposed escape. Either there was a man
hiding under the fox's skin, or else, if real foxes have
such brains as Reineke was furnished withal, no honest
doubt could be entertained that some sort of conscience
was not forgotten in the compounding of him, and he
must be held answerable according to his knowledge.
What would Mr. Carlyle say of it, we thought, with
his might and right? "The just thing in the long run
is the strong thing." But Reineke had a long run out
and came in winner. Does he only "seem to succeed?"
Who does succeed, then, if he no more than
seems? The vulpine intellect knows where the geese
live, it is elsewhere said; but among Reineke's victims
we do not remember one goose, in the literal sense of
goose; and as to geese metaphorical, at least the whole
visible world lies down complacently at his feet. Nor
does Mr. Carlyle's expressed language on this very poem
serve any better to help us--nay, it seems as if he feels
uneasy in the neighbourhood of so strong a rascal, so
briefly he dismisses him. "Worldly prudence is the
only virtue which is certain of its reward." Nay, but
there is more in it than that: no worldly prudence
would command the voices which have been given in to
us for Reineke.
Three only possibilities lay now before us: either we
should, on searching, find something solid in this Fox's
doings to justify success; or else the just thing was not
always the strong thing; or it might be, that such very
semblance of success was itself the most miserable
failure; that the wicked man who was struck down and
foiled, and foiled again, till he unlearnt his wickedness,
or till he was disabled from any more attempting it, was
blessed in his disappointment; that to triumph in
wickedness, and to continue in it and to prosper to the
end, was the last, worst penalty inflicted by the divine
vengeance. Hin' athanatos e adikos on--to go on with
injustice through this world and through all eternity,
uncleansed by any purgatorial fire, untaught by any
untoward consequence to open his eyes and to see in
its true accursed form the miserable demon to which he
has sold himself,--this, of all catastrophes which could
befal an evil man, was the deepest, lowest, and most
savouring of hell, which the purest of the Grecian
moralists could reason out for himself,--under which
third hypothesis many an uneasy misgiving would vanish
away, and Mr. Carlyle's broad aphorism be accepted
by us with thankfulness.
It appeared, therefore, at any rate, to have come to
this--that if we wanted a solution for our sphinx enigma,
no OEdipus was likely to rise and find it for us; and
that if we wanted help, we must make it for ourselves.
This only we found, that if we sinned in our regard for
the unworthy animal, we shared our sin with the largest
number of our own sex; and, comforted with the sense
of good fellowship, we went boldly to work upon our
consciousness; and the imperfect analysis which we
succeeded in accomplishing, we here lay before you,
whoever you may be, who have felt, as we have felt, a
regard which was a moral disturbance to you, and which
you will be pleased if we enable you to justify--
Si quid novisti rectius istis,
Candidus imperti; si non, his utere mecum.
Following the clue which was thrust into our hand
by the marked difference of the feelings of men upon
the subject from those of women, we were at once
satisfied that Reineke's goodness, if he had any, must lay
rather in the active than the passive department of life.
The negative obedience to prohibitory precepts, under
which women are bound as well as men, as was already
too clear, we were obliged to surrender as hopeless.
But it seemed as if, with respect to men whose business
is to do, and to labour, and to accomplish, this negative
test was a seriously imperfect one; and it was quite as
possible that a man who unhappily had broken many
prohibitions might yet exhibit positive excellencies, as
that he might walk through life picking his way with
the utmost assiduity, risking nothing and doing nothing,
not committing a single sin, but keeping his talent
carefully wrapt up in a napkin, and get sent, in the end, to
outer darkness for his pains, as an unprofitable servant;
and this appeared the more important to us, as it was
very little dwelt upon by religious or moral teachers;
and at the end of six thousand years, the popular notion
of virtue, as far as it could get itself expressed, had not
risen beyond the mere abstinence from certain specific
bad actions.
The king of the beasts forgives Reineke on account
of the substantial services which at various times he has
rendered. His counsel was always the wisest, his hand
the promptest in cases of difficulty; and all that
dexterity, and politeness, and courtesy, and exquisite culture
had not been learnt without an effort or without
conquering many undesirable tendencies in himself. Men
are not born with any art in its perfection, and he
had made himself valuable by his own sagacity and
exertion. Now, on the human stage, a man who has
made himself valuable is certain to be valued.
However we may pretend to estimate men according to the
wrong things which they have done, or abstained from
doing, we in fact follow the example of Nobel, the king
of the beasts, and give them their places among us
according to the serviceableness and capability which
they display. We might mention not a few eminent
public servants, whom the world delights to honour--
ministers, statesmen, lawyers, men of science, artists,
poets, soldiers, who, if they were tried by the negative
test, would show but a poor figure; yet their value is
too real to be dispensed with; and we tolerate
unquestionable wrong to secure the services of eminent ability.
The world really does, and it always has really done so
from the beginning of the human history; and it is
only indolence or cowardice which has left our ethical
teaching halting so far behind the universal and
necessary practice. Even questionable prima donnas, in
virtue of their sweet voices, have their praises hymned
in drawing-room and newspaper, and applause rolls over
them, and gold and bouquets shower on them from lips
and hands which, except for those said voices, would
treat them to a ruder reward. In real fact, we take our
places in this world not according to what we are not,
but according to what we are. His Holiness Pope
Clement, when his audience-room rang with furious
outcries for justice on Benvenuto Cellini, who, as far
as half-a-dozen murders could form a title, was as fair a
candidate for the gallows as ever swung from that
unlucky wood, replied, "All this is very well, gentlemen:
these murders are bad things, we know that. But where
am I to get another Benvenuto, if you hang this one
for me?"
Or, to take an acknowledged hero, one of the old
Greek sort, the theme of the song of the greatest of
human poets, whom it is less easy to refuse to admire
than even our friend Reineke. Take Ulysses. It
cannot be said that he kept his hands from taking what
was not his, or his tongue from speaking what was not
true; and if Frau Ermelyn had to complain (as indeed
there was too much reason for her complaining) of
certain infirmities in her good husband, Penelope, too,
might have urged a thing or two, if she had known as
much about the matter as we know, which the modern
moralist would find it hard to excuse.
After all is said, the capable man is the man to be
admired. The man who tries and fails, what is the
use of him? We are in this world to do something--
not to fail in doing it. Of your bunglers--helpless,
inefficient persons, "unfit alike for good or ill," who try
one thing, and fail because they are not strong enough,
and another, because they have not energy enough, and
a third, because they have no talent--inconsistent,
unstable, and therefore never to excel, what shall we
say of them? what use is there in them? what hope is
there of them? what can we wish for them? to mepot'
einai pant' ariston. It were better for them they had
never been born. To be able to do what a man tries
to do, that is the first requisite; and given that, we
may hope all things for him. "Hell is paved with
good intentions," the proverb says; and the enormous
proportion of bad successes in this life lie between the
desire and the execution. Give us a man who is able
to do what he settles that he desires to do, and we have
the one thing indispensable. If he can succeed doing
ill, much more he can succeed doing well. Show him
better, and, at any rate, there is a chance that he will
do better.
We are not concerned here with Benvenuto or with
Ulysses further than to show, through the position
which we all consent to give them, that there is much
unreality, against which we must be on our guard. And
if we fling off an old friend, and take to affecting a
hatred of him which we do not feel, we have scarcely
gained by the exchange, even though originally our
friendship may have been misplaced.
Capability no one will deny to Reineke. That is
the very differentia of him. An "animal capable" would
be his sufficient definition. Here is another very
genuinely valuable feature about him--his wonderful
singleness of character. Lying, treacherous, cunning
scoundrel as he is, there is a wholesome absence of
humbug about him. Cheating all the world, he never
cheats himself; and while he is a hypocrite, he is always
a conscious hypocrite--a form of character, however
paradoxical it may seem, a great deal more accessible
than the other of the unconscious sort. Ask Reineke
for the principles of his life, and if it suited his purpose
to tell you, he could do so with the greatest exactness.
There would be no discrepancy between the profession
and the practice. He is most truly single-minded, and
therefore stable in his ways, and therefore as the world
goes, and in the world's sense, successful. Whether
really successful is a question we do not care here to
enter on; but only to say this--that of all unsuccessful
men in every sense, either divine, or human, or devilish,
there is none equal to old Bunyan's Mr. Facing-both-ways
--the fellow with one eye on Heaven and one on earth
--who sincerely preaches one thing, and sincerely does
another; and from the intensity of his unreality is
unable either to see or feel the contradiction. Serving
God with his lips, and with the half of his mind which
is not bound up in the world; and serving the devil with
his actions, and with the other half, he is substantially
trying to cheat both God and the devil, and is, in fact,
only cheating himself and his neighbours. This, of all
characters upon the earth, appears to us to be the one
of whom there is no hope at all--a character becoming,
in these days, alarmingly abundant; and the abundance
of which makes us find even in a Reineke an
inexpressible relief.
But what we most thoroughly value in him is his
capacity. He can do what he sets to work to do. That
blind instinct with which the world shouts and claps
its hand for the successful man, is one of those latent
forces in us which are truer than we know; it is the
universal confessional to which Nature leads us, and, in
her intolerance of disguise and hypocrisy, compels us
to be our own accusers. Whoever can succeed in a
given condition of society, can succeed only in virtue
of fulfilling the terms which society exacts of him; and
if he can fulfil them triumphantly, of course it rewards
him and praises him. He is what the rest of the world
would be, if their powers were equal to their desires.
He has accomplished what they all are vaguely, and
with imperfect consistency, struggling to accomplish;
and the character of the conqueror--the means and
appliances by which he has climbed up that great
pinnacle on which he stands victorious, the observed of all
observers, is no more than a very exact indicator of the
amount of real virtue in the age, out of which he stands
prominent.
We are forced to acknowledge that it was not a very
virtuous age in which Reineke made himself a great
man; but that was the fault of the age as much as the
fault of him. His nature is to succeed wherever he is.
If the age had required something else of him, then he
would have been something else. Whatever it had said
to him "do, and I will make you my hero," that
Reineke would have done. No appetite makes a slave
of him--no faculty refuses obedience to his will. His
entire nature is under perfect organic control to the one
supreme authority. And the one object for which he
lives, and for which, let his lot have been cast in
whatever century it might, he would always have lived, is
to rise, to thrive, to prosper, and become great.
The world as he found it said to him--Prey upon
us, we are your oyster; let your wit open us. If you
will only do it cleverly--if you will take care that we
shall not close upon your fingers in the process, you
may devour us at your pleasure, and we shall feel
ourselves highly honoured. Can we wonder at a fox of
Reineke's abilities taking such a world at its word?
And let it not be supposed that society in this earth
of ours is ever so viciously put together, is ever so totally
without organic life, that a rogue, unredeemed by any
merit, can prosper in it. There is no strength in
rottenness; and when it comes to that, society dies and
falls in pieces. Success, as it is called, even worldly
success, is impossible, without some exercise of what is
called moral virtue, without some portion of it,
infinitesimally small, perhaps, but still some. Courage, for
instance, steady self-confidence, self-trust, self-reliance--
that only basis and foundation-stone on which a strong
character can rear itself--do we not see this in Reineke.
While he lives he lives for himself; but if it comes
to dying, he can die like his betters; and his wit is not
of that effervescent sort which will fly away at the sight
of death and leave him panic-stricken. It is true there
is a meaning to that word courage, which was perhaps
not to be found in the dictionary in which Reineke
studied. "I hope I am afraid of nothing, Trim," said
my uncle Toby, "except doing a wrong thing." With
Reineke there was no "except." His digestive powers
shrank from no action, good or bad, which would serve
his turn. Yet it required no slight measure of courage
to treat his fellow-creatures with the steady disrespect
with which Reineke treats them. To walk along
among them, regardless of any interest but his own;
out of mere wantonness to hook them up like so many
cock-chafers, and spin them for his pleasure; not like
Domitian, with an imperial army to hold them down
during the operation, but with no other assistance but
his own little body and large wit; it was something to
venture upon. And a world which would submit to be
so treated, what could he do but despise?
To the animals utterly below ourselves, external to
our own species, we hold ourselves bound by no law.
We say to them, vos non vobis, without any uneasy
misgivings. We rob the bees of their honey, the cattle
of their lives, the horse and the ass of their liberty. We
kill the wild animals that they may not interfere with
our pleasures; and acknowledge ourselves bound to
them by no terms except what are dictated by our own
convenience. And why should Reineke have acknowledged
an obligation any more than we, to creatures so
utterly below himself? He was so clever, as our friend
said, that he had a right. That he could treat them
so, Mr. Carlyle would say, proves that he had a right.
But it is a mistake to say he is without a conscience.
No bold creature is ever totally without one. Even
Iago shows some sort of conscience. Respecting nothing
else in heaven or earth, he respects and even reverences
his own intellect. After one of those sweet interviews
with Roderigo, his, what we must call, conscience takes
him to account for his company; and he pleads to it in
his own justification--
"For I mine own gained knowledge should profane
Were I to waste myself with such a snipe
But for my sport and profit."
And Reineke, if we take the mass of his misdeeds,
preyed chiefly, like our own Robin Hood, on rogues who
were greater rogues than himself. If Bruin chose to
steal Rusteviel's honey, if Hintze trespassed in the
priest's granary, they were but taken in their own
evildoings. And what is Isegim, the worst of Reineke's
victims, but a great heavy, stupid, lawless brute?--fair
type, we will suppose, of not a few Front-de-Boeufs and
other so-called nobles of the poet's era, whose will to
do mischief was happily limited by their obtuseness; or
that French baron, Sir Gilbert de Retz, we believe, was
his name, who, like Isegrim, had studied at the universities,
and passed for learned, whose after-dinner pastime
for many years, as it proved at last, was to cut children's
throats for the pleasure of watching them die--we may
well feel gratitude that a Reineke was provided to be
the scourge of such monsters as they; and we have
a thorough pure, exuberant satisfaction in seeing the
intellect in that little weak body triumph over them and
trample them down. This, indeed, this victory of
intellect over brute force is one great secret of our
pleasure in the poem, and goes far, in the Carlyle
direction to satisfy us that, at any rate, it is not given to
mere base physical strength to win in the battle of life,
even in times when physical strength is apparently the
only recognised power.
We are insensibly failing from our self-assumed
judicial office into that of advocacy; and sliding into
what may be plausibly urged, rather than standing fast
on what we can surely affirm. Yet there are cases
when it is fitting for the judge to become the advocate
of an undefended prisoner; and advocacy is only
plausible when a few words of truth are mixed with
what we say, like the few drops of wine which colour
and faintly flavour the large draught of water. Such
few grains or drops, whatever they may be, we must
leave to the kindness of Reynard's friends to distil for
him, while we continue a little longer in the same
strain.
After all it may be said, what is it in man's nature
which is really admirable? It is idle for us to waste
our labour in passing Reineke through the moral
crucible unless we shall recognise the results when we
obtain them; and in these moral sciences our analytical
tests can only be obtained by a study of our own
internal experience. If we desire to know what we
admire in Reineke we must look for what we admire in
ourselves. And what is that? Is it what on Sundays
and on set occasions, and when we are mounted on our
moral stilts, we are pleased to call goodness, probity
obedience, humility? Is it? Is it really? Is it not
rather the face and form which Nature made--the
strength which is ours, we know not how--our talents,
our rank, our possessions? It appears to us that we
most value in ourselves and most admire in our neighbour
not acquisitions, but gifts. A man does not praise
himself for being good. If he praise himself he is
not good. The first condition of goodness is forgetfulness
of self; and where self has entered, under however
plausible a form, the health is but skin-deep, and
underneath there is corruption--and so through everything
We value, we are vain of, proud of, or whatever you
please to call it, not what we have done for ourselves, but
what has been done for us--what has been given to us
by the upper powers. We look up to high-born men,
to wealthy men, to fortunate men, to clever men. Is it
not so? Who do we choose for the county member,
the magistrate, the officer, the minister? The good
man we leave to the humble enjoyment of his goodness,
and we look out for the able or the wealthy. And
again of the wealthy, as if on every side to witness to
the same universal law, the man who with no labour
of his own has inherited a fortune, ranks higher in the
world's esteem than his father who made it. We take
rank by descent. Such of us as have the longest pedigree,
and are therefore the farthest removed from the
first who made the fortune and founded the family, we
are the noblest. The nearer to the fountain the fouler
the stream; and that first ancestor, who has soiled his
fingers by labour, is no better than a parvenu.
And as it is with what we value, so it is with what
we blame. It is an old story, that there is no one who
would not in his heart prefer being a knave to being a
fool; and when we fail in a piece of attempted roguery,
as Coleridge has wisely observed, though reasoning
unwisely from it, we lay the blame not on our own
moral nature, for which we are responsible, but on our
intellectual, for which we are not responsible. We do
not say what knaves, we say what fools, we have been;
perplexing Coleridge, who regards it as a phenomenon
of some deep moral disorder; whereas it is but one
more evidence of the universal fact that gifts are the
true and proper object of appreciation, and as we admire
men for possessing gifts, so we blame them for
their absence. The noble man is the gifted man; the
ignoble is the ungifted; and therefore we have only to
state a simple law in simple language to have a full
solution of the enigma of Reineke. He has gifts
enough: of that, at least, there can be no doubt;
and if he lacks the gift to use them in the way
which we call good, at least he uses them successfully.
His victims are less gifted than he, and therefore less
noble; and therefore he has a right to use them as he
pleases.
And after all, what are these victims? Among the
heaviest charges which were urged against him was the
killing and eating of that wretched Scharfenebbe--
Sharp-beak--the crow's wife. It is well that there are two
sides to every story. A poor weary fox, it seemed, was not
to be allowed to enjoy a quiet sleep in the sunshine but
what an unclean carrion bird must come down and take
a peck at him. We can feel no sympathy with the
outcries of the crow husband over the fate of the
unfortunate Sharpbeak. Wofully, he says, he flew over
the place where, a few moments before, in the glory
of glossy plumage, a loving wife sate croaking out her
passion for him, and found nothing--nothing but a
little blood and a few torn feathers--all else clean gone
and utterly abolished. Well, and if it was so, it was
a blank prospect for him, but the earth was well rid
of her: and for herself, it was a higher fate to be
assimilated into the body of a Reineke than to remain
in a miserable individuality to be a layer of carrion
crows' eggs.
And then for Bellyn, and for Bruin, and for Hintze,
and the rest, who would needs be meddling with what
was no concern of theirs, what is there in them to
challenge either regret or pity. They made love
their occupation.
'Tis dangerous when the baser nature fails
Between the pass and fell incensed points
Of mighty opposites:
They lie not near our conscience:
Ah! if they were all .... But there is one misdeed,
one which outweighs all others whatsoever--a crime
which it is useless to palliate, let our other friend say
what he pleased; and Reineke himself felt it so. It
sate heavy, for him, on his soul, and alone of all the
actions of his life we are certain that he wished it
undone--the death and eating of that poor foolish
Lampe. It was a paltry revenge in Reineke. Lampe
had told tales of him; he had complained that Reineke
under pretence of teaching him his lesson, had seized
him, and tried to murder him; and though he provoked
his fate by thrusting himself, after such a warning, into
the jaws of Malepartus, Reineke betrays an uneasiness
about it in confession; and, unlike himself, feels it
necessary to make some sort of an excuse.
Grimbart had been obliged to speak severely of the
seriousness of the offence. "You see," he answers:--
To help oneself out through the world is a queer sort of
business: one can not
Keep, you know, quite altogether as pure as one can in the
cloister.
When we are handling honey we now and then lick at our
fingers.
Lampe sorely provoked me; he frisked about this way and
that way,
Up and down, under my eyes, and he looked so fat and so
jolly,
Really I could not resist it. I entirely forgot how I loved
him.
And then he was so stupid.
But even this acknowledgment does not satisfy
Reineke. His mind is evidently softened, and it is
on that occasion that he pours out his pathetic
lamentation over the sad condition of the world--so fluent,
so musical, so touching, that Grimbart listened with
wide eyes, unable, till it had run to the length of a
sermon, to collect himself. It is true that at last his
office as ghostly confessor obliged him to put in a slight
demurrer:--
Uncle, the badger replied, why these are the sins of your
neighbours;
Yours, I should think, were sufficient, and rather more now
to the purpose.
But he sighs to think what a preacher Reineke would
have made.
And now, for the present, farewell to Reineke Fuchs,
and to the song in which his glory is enshrined--the
Welt Bibel, Bible of this world, as Goethe called it, the
most exquisite moral satire, as we will call it, which has
ever been composed. It is not addressed to a passing
mode of folly or of profligacy, but it touches the
perennial nature of mankind, laying bare our own
sympathies, and tastes, and weaknesses, with as keen and
true an edge as when the living world of the old Swabian
poet winced under its earliest utterance.
Humorous in the high pure sense, every laugh which
it gives may have its echo in a sigh, or may glide into
it as excitement subsides into thought; and yet, for
those who do not care to find matter there either
for thought or sadness, may remain innocently as a
laugh.
Too strong for railing, too kindly and loving for
the bitterness of irony, the poem is, as the world itself,
a book where each man will find what his nature
enables him to see, which gives us back each our own
image, and teaches us each the lesson which each of us
desires to learn.
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