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.
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