BACKGROUND

The opinions and actions of a man in middle life are the outcome primarily of his character, that “geprägte Form, die lebend sich entwickelt”; but they are determined also by the material on which his character has to work— by his environment. The influence of environment begins at birth, before the human individual is conscious of itself; and throughout life it works for the most part unconsciously. At a certain age we begin to realise that we have been influenced by this or that experience, by this or that writer or work of art; but far more profoundly and inescapably our minds are moulded by the things we scarcely notice, by the colour of the sky, by the outlook from our window, by the pattern of the wallpaper, by the talk of our parents and their friends at tea or after dinner. All such things should be taken into account, when an attempt is made to follow from within the development of one of the great minds of the past; but of course this cannot be, for of all historical phenomena such “atmospheres” are the least enduring and the hardest to reconstruct.

A modern reader of Goethe will find especial difficulty in understanding Goethe's attitude to the Greeks, if he knows nothing of the background of knowledge and ignorance, of understanding and fallacy, about Greek things, against which Goethe's earliest impressions were formed.