embering 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
calculations on the character of the Moor, Iago despises Othello's
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 [Greek: gastros ananke], that craving of
the stomach, makes a difference quite infinite. 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. 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
virtues, and not blush to read it there. What sin is there in the
Decalogue in w