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.