the home life of the family; and the relations
between father and son emphasise the fact that the early influences
under which the son grew up left something to be desired. Their
permanent mutual attitude was misunderstanding, resulting from
imperfect sympathy. "If"--so wrote Goethe in his sixty-fourth year
regarding his father and himself--"if, on his part as well as on the
son's, a suggestion of mutual understanding had entered into our
relationship, much might have been spared to us both. But that was not
to be!" It is with dutiful respect but with no touch of filial
affection that Goethe has drawn his father's portrait in _Dichtung und
Wahrheit_. As the father is there depicted, he is the embodiment of
Goethe's own definition of a Philistine--one naturally incapable of
entering into the views of other people.[5] Yet Goethe might have had
a worse parent; for, according to his lights, the father spared no
pains to make his son an ornament of his generation. Strictly
conscientious, methodical, with a genuine love of art and letters, he
did his best to furnish his son with every accomplishment requisite to
distinction in the walk of life for which he destined him--the
profession of law, in which he had himself failed through the defects
of his temperament. Directly and indirectly, he himself took in hand
his son's instruction, but without appreciation or consideration of
the affinities of a mind with precociously developed instincts. The
natural result of the father's pedantic solicitude was that his son
came to see in him the schoolmaster rather than the parent. Knowledge
in abundance was conveyed, but of the moulding influence of parental
sympathy there was none. What dubious consequences followed from these
relations of father and son we shall afterwards see.

[Footnote 5: To Chancellor von Mueller Goethe said: "Mein Vater war ein
tuechtiger Mann, aber freilich fehlte ihm Gewandtheit und Beweglichkeit
des Geistes."]

Goethe's mother has found a place in German hearts which is partly due
to the portrait which her son has drawn of her, but still more to the
impression conveyed by her own recorded sayings and correspondence.
Goethe's tone, when he speaks of his father, is always cool and
critical; of his mother, on the other hand, he speaks with the
feelings of a grateful son, conscious of the deep debt he owed to
her.[6] His relations to her in his later years have exposed him to
severe animadversion, but their mutu