While Goethe was pouring forth his confessions to Kestner and Lotte,
his circumstances at home were not such as to conduce to calm of mind.
Frankfort remained as distasteful to him as ever. "The Frankforters,"
he wrote to Kestner, "are an accursed folk; they are so pig-headed
that nothing can be made of them." With his father his relations had
not become more cordial after his return from Wetzlar. "Lieber Gott,"
he wrote on receiving a letter from his father, "shall I then also
become like this when I am old? Shall my soul no longer attach itself
to what is good and amiable? Strange the belief that the older a man
becomes, the freer he becomes from what is worldly and petty. He
becomes increasingly more worldly and petty."[130] His father's
insistence on his attention to legal business was a permanent cause of
mutual misunderstanding. "I let my father do as he pleases; he daily
seeks to enmesh me more and more in the affairs of the town, and I
submit."[131]
[Footnote 130: Goethe to Kestner, November 10th, 1772. _Werke,
Briefe_, Band ii. 35.]
[Footnote 131: To the same, September 15th, 1773. _Ib._ p. 104.]
In his sister Cornelia, as formerly, he had a sympathetic confidant
equally in his affairs of the heart and in his literary and artistic
ambitions, but in the course of the year 1773 he was deprived of her
soothing and stimulating influence.
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