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.

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.

And her own character made this relation a natural one.