"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.[Pg 6394] 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 attempt to degrade Faust is a failure. In the orgy of Auerbach's cellar, while the boisterous young bloods clash their glasses, the old scholar sits silent, isolated, ashamed. It is only by infecting his blood with the witch's poison that Mephistopheles can lay hold of the spirit of Faust even for a time; and had he not seen in the mirror that vision of Helena, whom he rightly loves, and whom indeed he needs, he could not have put to his lips the filthy brewage of the witch. But now indeed he is snared; the poison rages in his veins; for one hour he is transformed into what the world basely calls a man of pleasure. Yet Faust is not wholly lost: his better self, the untrained, untamed idealist, begins to reassert its power; the fumes of the poison dissipate themselves. Guilty though he be, his love of Margaret is not what Mephistopheles requires that it should be: it is not calculating, egoistic, cynical, nor dull, easeful, and lethargic. It is not the crime of an experienced worldling nor of a dull, low liver: it is the crime of one whose unwise heart and untaught imagination delude him; and therefore though his fall be deep, it is not fatal. The wrong he has wrought may be blind and terrible as that of Othello to Desdemona; but it is not the serpentine stinging of an