bles actual life, who will try to baffle and degrade
Faust by degrading all that he now seeks,--action and beauty and life
and love.

It is Goethe himself who is at odds with himself,--the realist Goethe
set over against the idealist Goethe; and Mephistopheles is the base
realist, the cynic whose endeavor is to mar the union of high poetry and
high prose in human life, which union of high poetry with high prose
Goethe always looked upon as the true condition of man's activity. In
the Prologue in Heaven, written when Schiller had persuaded Goethe to
take up the threads of his play, the Lord speaks of Faust as his
servant. Mephistopheles wagers that he will seduce Faust from his
allegiance to the Highest. The Lord does not wager; he _knows_:--

"Though now he serve me in a maze of doubt,
Yet I will lead him soon where all is clear;
The gardener knows, when first the bushes sprout,
That bloom and fruit will deck the riper year."

These vague passionate longings of Faust after truth and reality and
life and love are not evil; they are good: they are as yet indeed but
the sprouting of the immature leaf and bud, but the Lord sees in these
the fruit that is to be. Therefore let Mephistopheles, the spirit of
negation, try his worst, and at the last discover how an earnest
striver's ways are justified by God. Faust may wander, err, fall,
grievously offend,--"as long as man lives, man errs;" but for him who
ever strives upward, through all his errors, there is redemption in the
end.

The poem belongs to its epoch. Faust is the idealist, Mephistopheles is
the realist, of the eighteenth century. Faust aspires to nature and
freedom like one who had drunk deeply of Rousseau. Mephistopheles speaks
like a degraded disciple of Voltaire, who has lost his master's positive
faith in the human reason. Goethe can accept as his own neither the
position of Voltaire nor that of Rousseau; but actually he started in
life as an antagonist of Voltaire and a disciple of Rousseau, and in
like manner his Faust starts on his career as one who longs for a
"return to nature." While from merely negative criticism nothing
virtuous can be born, the vague longings of one who loves and hopes
promise measureless good.

Faust's vast aspirations, then, are not sinful; they only need to be
limited and directed to suitable ends. It is as God's servant that he
goes forth with the Demon from his study to the world. And
Mephistopheles's first attem