"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 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 Iago or a Mephistopheles.
So through anguish and remorse Faust is doing off the swathe-bands of delusion, learning to master his will, learning his own heart, learning the meaning of existence: he does not part from his ideal self, his high aspirations, his ardent hopes; he is rather transforming these into realities; he is advancing from dreams to facts, so that in the end, when his life becomes a lofty prose, it may be interpenetrated by a noble poetry.
It were long to trace the history of Faust through the ever purifying and ascending scale of energies exhibited in the Second Part of the drama. Affairs of State, science, art, war—all that Goethe had known by experience—appear in this encyclopædic poem. One word, however, must be said respecting the 'Helena.' It is a mistake to view this central portion of the Second Part as solely or chiefly an allegory of the wedlock of classic and romantic art. As science is shown to form a needful part of Faust's turning from the inane of metaphysics to the positive world, so from the Greek spirit he learns sanity and strength; the deliverance of the ideal man in Faust is aided by the beauty and the healthfulness of classic art. Through beauty, as Schiller tried to show in his letters on 'Æsthetic Culture,' we attain to freedom. Faust is not an artist, but a man; Helena is but one of the spirits whose influence is needed to make him real and elevated. It is she who qualifies him for achieving practical work in a high, ideal spirit.
The Fourth Act of the Second Part is wholly concerned with practical work. What is this which engages the student of the metaphysic cell, who had gone through the four Faculties, and is now once again grown old? What is this? Only well-defined and useful activity. He has rescued some acres of arable land from the rage of the barren sea.
But Faust is not yet wholly delivered from evil; his activity is useful, indeed, but it lacks the finer grace of charity. He commissions Mephistopheles to destroy the cottage of old Philemon and Baucis, which stands in the way of his territorial improvements. It is the last crime of the unregenerate will. The four gray women—Care and Blame and Want and Crime—now assail him; but there is virtue in him to the last. However it may be with himself, grant only that ages hence the children of men, free and happy, may dwell upon the soil which he has saved for their place of labor and of love,—grant but this, and even in the anticipation of it he is made possessor of the highest bliss. Nor indeed is higher permitted to man on earth. And now that Faust has at last found satisfaction, and said to the passing moment, "Stay, thou art so fair," the time has come for Mephistopheles to claim his soul. But in this very aspiration after the perfect joy of others—not his own—Faust is forever delivered from the Evil One. The gray old man lies stretched upon the sand. Higher powers than those of his own will take him, guard him, lead him forward. The messengers of God bear away his immortal part. All Holy Hermits, all Holy Innocents, all Holy Virgins, the less and the greater Angels, and redeemed women who have sinned and sorrowed and have been purified, aid in his ultimate purification. It is the same thought which was interpreted in a lower key when Wilhelm Meister's fate was intrusted to Natalia. Usefulness is good; activity is good: but over all these should soar and brood the Divine graces of life, and love the chief of these. That which leads us farther than all the rest is what Goethe names "the imperishable womanly grace," that of love. And so the great mystery-play reaches its close.
