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.