The Youth of Goethe | Page 6

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 the intellect or the heart, with an
abandonment which struck his friends as the leading trait of his
character. "Goethe," wrote one of them, "only follows his last notion,
without troubling himself as to consequences," and of himself, when he
was past his thirtieth year, he said that he was "as much a child as
ever."
[Footnote 6: Writing to her grandchild, Goethe's mother says: "Dein
lieber Vater hat mir nie Kummer oder Verdruss verursacht."]
[Footnote 7: When the son of Frau von Stein was about to visit her,
Goethe wrote: "Da sie nicht so ernsthaft ist wie ich, so wirst du dich
besser bei ihr befinden."]
There was another member of the family of whom Goethe speaks with
even warmer feeling than of his mother. This was his sister Cornelia, a
year younger than himself, and destined to an unhappy marriage and an
early death. Of the many portraits he has drawn in his Autobiography,
none is touched with a tenderer hand and with subtler sympathy than
that of Cornelia. Goethe does not imply that she permanently
influenced his future development; for such influence she possessed
neither the force of mind nor of character.[8] But to her even more than
to the mother he came to owe such home happiness as he enjoyed in the
hours of freedom from the father's pedagogic discipline. She was his
companion alike in his daily school tasks and his self-sought
pleasures--the confidant and sharer of all his boyish troubles. To no
other person throughout his long life did Goethe ever stand in relations
which give such a favourable impression of his heart as his relation
with Cornelia. The memory of her was the dearest which he retained of
his early days; and the words in which he recalls her in his old age
prove that she was an abiding memory to the end.
[Footnote 8: Goethe's letters addressed to Cornelia from Leipzig, when

he was in his eighteenth year, are in the tone at once of an affectionate
brother and of a schoolmaster. Their subsequent relations to each other
will appear in the sequel.]
It was an advantage on which Goethe lays special stress that, outside
his somewhat cramping home circle, he had a more or less intimate
acquaintance with a number of persons, who by their different
characters and accomplishments made lasting impressions on his
youthful mind. The impressions must have been deep, since, writing in
advanced age, he describes their personal appearance and their different
idiosyncrasies with a minuteness which is at the same time a
remarkable testimony to his precocious powers of observation. What is
interesting in these intimacies as throwing light on Goethe's early
characteristics is, that all these persons were of mature age, and all of
them more or less eccentric in their habits and ways of thinking. "Even
in God I discover defects," was the remark of one of them to his
youthful listener--to whom he had been communicating his views on
the world in general. In the company of these elders, with such or
kindred opinions, Goethe was early familiarised with the variability of
human judgments on fundamental questions. And he laid the
experience to heart, for on no point in the conduct of life does he insist
with greater emphasis than the folly of expecting others to think as
ourselves.
The method of Goethe's education was not such as to compensate for
the lack of moral discipline which has already been noted. With the
exception of a brief interval, he received instruction at home, either
directly from his father or from tutors under his superintendence. Thus
he missed both the steady drill of school life and the influence of
companions of his own age which might have made him more of a boy
and less of a premature man.[9] It is Goethe's own expressed opinion
that the object of education should be to foster tastes rather than to
communicate knowledge. In this object, at least, his own education was
perfectly successful;