Mephistopheles lives and works. Yet he lives and works as the unwilling
servant of the Lord, and the service he renders is to provoke men from
indolence to activity.

Into the influence of Rousseau, on the contrary, and into the general
movement of feeling to which Rousseau belonged, Goethe in his youth was
caught, almost inevitably; and he abandoned himself to it for a time, it
might seem without restraint.

Yet Goethe differed from Rousseau as profoundly as he differed from
Voltaire. Rousseau's undisciplined sensibility, morbidly excited by the
harshness or imagined harshness of his fellows, by bodily torment, by
broodings in solitude, became at last one quivering mass of disease. "No
tragedy had ever a fifth act so squalid." What a contrast to the closing
scenes of Goethe's life in that house of his, like a modest temple of
the Muses, listening to Plutarch read aloud by his daughter-in-law, or
serenely active, "ohne Hast aber ohne Rast" (without haste, but without
rest), in widening his sympathies with men or enlarging his knowledge of
nature.

How was this? Why did the ways part so widely for Rousseau and for
Goethe?

The young creator of 'Werther' may seem to have started on his career as
a German Rousseau. In reality, 'Werther' expressed only a fragment of
Goethe's total self. A reserve force of will and an intellect growing
daily in clearness and in energy would not permit him to end as Rousseau
ended. In 'Goetz von Berlichingen' there goes up a cry for freedom; it
presents the more masculine side of that spirit of revolt from the bonds
of the eighteenth century, that "return to nature," which is presented
in its more feminine aspects by 'Werther.' But by degrees it became
evident to Goethe that the only true ideal of freedom is a liberation
not of the passions, not of the intellect, but of the whole man; that
this involves a conciliation of all the powers and faculties within us;
and that such a conciliation can be effected only by degrees, and by
steadfast toil.

And so we find him willing during ten years at Weimar to undertake work
which might appear to be fatal to the development of his genius. To
reform army administration, make good roads, work the mines with
energetic intelligence, restore the finances to order,--was this fit
employment for one born to be a poet? Except a few lyrics and the prose
'Iphigenie,' these years produced no literary work of importance; yet
Goethe himself speaks of them as