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Men are not born with any art in its perfection, and Reineke 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.
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?
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 true that, like Iago, Reineke 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.
Grimbart, the badger, Reineke's father confessor, had been obliged to speak severely of the seriousness of the offence. 'You see, Reineke 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.
There he had to lie groaning until our brave Reineke, who was killed later on at Spion Kop, saw a chance of carrying him away. Some of us fell asleep from fatigue. One of our men on waking heard the hiss of a bullet over his head at regular intervals, and thought that a khaki had got closer up to him, and was firing at him from the side.
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.
'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?
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.
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.
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