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 was on that occasion that he poured 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 father 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 bishop 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 passing 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.