al relations in these early years
present the most attractive chapter in the record of his private life.
Married at the age of seventeen to a husband approaching forty, the
mother, as she herself said, stood rather as an elder sister than as a
parent to her children. And her own character made this relation a
natural one. An overflowing vitality, a lively and never-failing
interest in all the details of daily life, and a temperament
responsive to every call, kept her perennially young, and fitted her
to be the companion of her children rather than the sober helpmate of
such a husband as Herr Goethe.[7] How, by her faculty of
story-telling, she ministered to the side of her son's nature which he
had inherited from herself Goethe has related with grateful
appreciation. But he owed her a larger debt. It was her spirit
pervading the household that brought such happiness into his early
home life as fell to his lot. A commonplace mother and a prosaic
father would have created an atmosphere which, in the case of a child
with Goethe's impressionable nature, would permanently have affected
his outlook on life. For the future poet, the mother was the admirable
nurse; she fed his fancy with her own; she taught him the art of
making the most of life--a lesson which he never forgot; and she gave
him her own sane and cheerful view of the uncontrollable element in
human destiny. For the future man, however, we may doubt whether she
was the best of mothers. Her education was meagre--a defect which her
conscientious husband did his best to amend; and all her
characteristics were fitted rather to evoke affection than to inspire
respect. Though her son always speaks of her with tender regard, his
tone is that of an elder brother to a sister rather than of a son to a
parent. She was herself conscious of her incompetence to discharge all
the responsibilities of a mother which the character of the father
made specially onerous. "We were young together," she said of herself
and her son, and she confessed frankly that "she could educate no
child." Thus between an unsympathetic father and a mother incapable of
influencing the deeper springs of character, Goethe passed through
childhood and boyhood without the discipline of temper and will which
only the home can give. And the lack of this discipline is traceable
in all his actions till he had reached middle life. Wayward and
impulsive by nature, he yielded to every motive, whether prompted by
t