Essays in Literature and History Part 17

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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 appet.i.te 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 c.o.c.k-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 a.s.sistance 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 a.s.s 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 ma.s.s 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 trespa.s.sed 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 n.o.bles 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 pa.s.sed 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 grat.i.tude 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-a.s.sumed 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 pa.s.sing Reineke through the moral crucible unless we shall recognise the results when we obtain them; and in these moral sciences our a.n.a.lytical 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 n.o.blest. 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 n.o.ble man is the gifted man; the ign.o.ble 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 n.o.ble; 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 suns.h.i.+ne 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 pa.s.sion 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 a.s.similated 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 pa.s.s 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 pa.s.sing 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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THE COMMONPLACE BOOK OF RICHARD HILLES

In the Library at Balliol College, Oxford, there is a ma.n.u.script which, for want of a better name, I may call a Commonplace Book of an English gentleman who lived in the beginning of the sixteenth century. Its contents display, beyond any other single volume which I have met with, the mental furniture of an average-educated man of the time. There are stories in prose and verse, collections of proverbs, a dissertation on Horticulture, a dissertation on Farriery, a treatise of Confession, a Book of Education, a Book of Courtesy, a Book of "the Whole Duty" of Man; mercantile entries, discourses of arithmetic, recipes, prescriptions, marvels of science or pseudo-science, conundrums, tables of the a.s.size of food; the laws respecting the sale of meat, bread, beer, wine, and other necessaries; while above and beyond all are a collection in various handwritten of ballads, songs, hymns, and didactic poems of a religious kind, some few of which have been met with elsewhere; but of the greater number of them no other copy, I believe, exists.

The owner and compiler was a certain Richard Hilles.

From the entries of the births and deaths of his children on a fly-leaf, I gather that in 1518 he lived at a place called Hillend, near King's Langley, in Hertfords.h.i.+re.

The year following he had removed to London, where he was apparently in business; and among his remarks on the management of vines and fruit trees in his "Discourse on Gardens," he mentions incidentally that he had been in Greece and on the coast of Asia Minor. A brief "Annual Register" is carried down as far as 1535, in which year he perhaps died. One of his latest entries is the execution of Bishop Fisher and of Sir Thomas More. Some other facts about him might perhaps be collected; but his personal history could add little to the interest of his book, which is its own sufficient recommendation. It will be evident, from the description which I have given, that as an antiquarian curiosity this ma.n.u.script is one of the most remarkable of its kind which survives.

The public, who are willing to pay for the production of thousands of volumes annually, the value of which is inappreciable from its littleness, may perhaps not be unwilling to encourage, to the extent of the purchase of a small edition, the preservation in print of a relic which, even in the mere commonplace power of giving amus.e.m.e.nt, exceeds the majority of circulating novels: while readers whose appet.i.tes are more discriminating, and the students of the past, to whom the productions of their ancestors have a memorial value for themselves, may find their taste gratified at least with some fragments of genuine beauty equal to the best extant specimens of early English poetry.

In the hope of contributing to such a result, I am going to offer to the readers of Fraser a few miscellaneous selections from different parts of the volume; and as in the original they are thrown together without order--the sacred side by side with the profane; the devotional, the humorous, and the practical reposing in placid juxtaposition--I shall not attempt to remedy a disorder which is itself so characteristic a feature.

Let us commence, then, as a fitting grace before the banquet, with a song on the Nativity. The spirit which appears in many of the most beautiful pictures of mediaeval art is here found taking the form of words:--

Can I not sing Ut Hoy, When the Jolly shepherd made so much joy.

The shepherd upon a hill he sat, He had on him his tabard and his hat; His tar-box, his pipe, and his flat hat, His name was called Jolly, Jolly Wat, For he was a good herd's boy, Ut Hoy, For in his pipe he made so much joy.

The shepherd upon a hill was laid, His dogge to his girdle was tied; He had not slept but a little brayd When Gloria in Excelsis to him was said.

Ut Hoy!

For in his pipe he made so much joy.

The shepherd upon a hill he stood, Round about him his sheep they yode; He put his hand under his hood, He saw a star as red as blood, Ut Hoy!

For in his pipe he made so much joy.

Now Farewell, Matt, and also Will, For my love go ye all still Unto I come again you till, And evermore Will ring well thy bell; Ut Hoy!

For in his pipe he made so much joy.

Now I must go where Christ was born; Farewell! I come again to morn: Dog keep will my sheep from the corn, And warn well warrock when I blow my horn, Ut Hoy!

For in his pipe he made so much joy.

When Wat to Bethlehem come was, He swat: he had gone faster than a pace.

He found Jesu in a simple place, Between an oxe and an a.s.se; Ut Hoy!

For in his pipe he made so much joy.

Jesu! I offer to thee here my pipe, My skirt, my tar-box, and my scrip; Home to my fellows now will I skippe, And also look unto my shepe, Ut Hoy!

For in his pipe he made so much joy.