The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller | Page 4

his horse and rode away to the land of his
birth to visit his relations. Reaching Marbach--it was now the spring of
1749--he put up at the 'Golden Lion', an inn kept by a then prosperous
baker named Kodweis. Here he fell in love with his landlord's daughter
Dorothea, a girl of sixteen, and in the course of the summer married her.
He was at this time about twenty-six years old. He now settled down In
Marbach to practice his crude art, but the practice came to little and
Kodweis soon lost his property in foolish speculation. So the quondam
soldier fell out of humor with Marbach, went into the army again, and
when the Seven Years' War broke out, in 1756, he took the field with a
Württemberg regiment to fight the King of Prussia. He soon reached
the grade of lieutenant, in time that of captain; fought and ran with his
countrymen, at Leuthen, floundered at peril of life in the swamps of
Breslau and otherwise got his full share of the war's rough-and-tumble.
From time to time, as the chance came to him, he visited his young
wife in Marbach.
These were the parents of the poet Schiller, who was born November
10, 1759, ten years after Goethe, ten years before Napoleon. It is worth
remembering that he who was to be in his way, another great protestant
came into the world on an anniversary of the birth of Lather. He was
christened Johann Christoph Friedrich.
The childhood of little Fritz unfolded amid conditions that must have
given to life a rather somber aspect. After the close of the war Captain

Schiller moved his little family to Lorch, a village some thirty miles
east of Stuttgart, where he was employed by the Duke of Württemberg
in recruiting soldiers for mercenary service abroad. This hateful
business, which was in due time to form a mark for one of the sharp
darts of 'Cabal and Love', seems to have been managed by him with a
degree of tact and humanity; for he won the esteem of all with whom
he had to do. At home, being of a pious turn and setting great store by
the formal exercises of religion, he presided over his household in the
manner of an ancient patriarch. Between him and his son no very tender
relation ever existed, though the poet of later years always revered his
father's character. The child's affections clung rather to his mother,
whom he grew up to resemble in form and feature and in traits of
character. She was a woman of no intellectual pretensions, but worthy
of honor for her qualities of heart.[1] Of education in the modern sense
she had but little. Her few extant letters, written mostly in her later
years, tell of a simple and lovable character, tenderly devoted to
husband and children. Tradition credits her with a certain liking for
feeble poets of the Uz and Gellert strain, but this probably did not
amount to much. Her sphere of interest was the little world of family
cares and affections. Her early married life had been darkened by
manifold sorrows which she bore at first with pious resignation,
becoming with the flight of time, however, more and more a borrower
of trouble.[2] At Lorch her trials were great, for Captain Schiller
received no pay and the family felt the pinch of poverty. Here, then,
was little room for that merry comradeship, with its Lust zum
Fabulieren, which existed between the boy Goethe and his playmate
mother at Frankfurt-on-the-Main.
In after-time, nevertheless, Schiller was wont to look back upon the
three years at Lorch as the happiest part of his childhood. The village is
charmingly situated in the valley of the Rems, a tributary of the Neckar,
and the region round about is historic ground. A short walk southward
brings one to the Hohenstaufen, on whose summit once stood the
ancestral seat of the famous Suabian dynasty, and close by Lorch is the
Benedictine monastery in which a number of the Hohenstaufen
monarchs are buried. Here was the romance of history right at hand, but
we can hardly suppose that it meant much to the child. The Middle

Ages were not yet in fashion even for adults, and little Fritz had other
things to think of. With his sister Christophine, two years older than
himself, he was sent to the village school, where he proved so apt a
pupil that his parents became ambitious for him and sent him to the
village pastor, a man named Moser, to be taught Latin. The child
looked up to his august teacher and resolved to become himself some
day a preacher of the word. Not much is known of Moser, but to judge
from his namesake in 'The Robbers', where all