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 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.
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