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.