The Youth of Goethe | Page 5

were disadvantages which
left their mark on him throughout his later life. He was born in the
middle-class, the position which, according to Schiller, is most
favourable for viewing mankind as a whole, and, therefore,

advantageous for a poet who, like Goethe, was open to universal
impressions. Though his maternal grandfather was chief magistrate of
Frankfort, and his father was an Imperial Councillor, the family did not
belong to the élite of the city; Goethe, brilliant youth of genius though
he was, was not regarded as an eligible match for the daughter of a
Frankfort banker. It was the father who was the dominating figure in
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 Müller Goethe said: "Mein Vater war
ein tüchtiger 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 mutual 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