The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller | Page 5

passions and qualities
are raised to the _n_th power, he must have been a man for whom the
reproof of sinners was not only a professional duty but a personal
pleasure. The plan of making their Fritz a man of God was eagerly
embraced by the pious parents and became a settled family aspiration.
The boy himself was very susceptible at this time to religious
impressions. Sister Christophine carried with her through life a vivid
memory of his appearance at family worship, when the captain would
solemnly intone the rimed prayers that he himself had composed for a
private ritual. 'It was a touching sight', she says in her recollections[3]
of this period, 'to see the reverent expression on the child's winsome
face. The pious blue eyes lifted to heaven, the light yellow hair falling
about his forehead, and the little hands folded in worship, suggested an
angel's head in a picture.' From the same source we learn that Fritz was
very fond of playing church, with himself in the role of preacher.
Another reminiscence tells how he one day ran away from school and,
having unexpectedly fallen under the paternal eye in his truancy, rushed
home to his mother in tearful excitement, got the rod of correction and
besought her to give him his punishment before his sterner parent
should arrive on the scene. Still another, from a somewhat later period,
relates how the mother was once walking with her children and told
them a Bible story so touchingly that they all knelt down and prayed.
This is about all that has come down concerning Schiller's early
childhood. He may have seen the passion-play at Gmünd, but this is
uncertain. In any case it only added one more to the religious
impressions that already dominated his life.
Toward the end of the year 1766, having exhausted his private
resources at Lorch, Captain Schiller applied for relief and was

transferred to duty at Ludwigsburg, where the family remained under
somewhat more tolerable conditions for about nine years. At
Ludwigsburg he began to interest himself in agriculture and forestry. In
1769 he published certain 'Economic Contributions', which exhibit him
as a sensible, public-spirited man, eagerly bent upon improving the
condition of Suabian husbandry. In 1775, having become known as an
expert in arboriculture, he was placed in charge of the ducal forests and
nurseries at Castle Solitude, and there he spent the remainder of his
days in peaceful and congenial activity. He died in 1796.
For the impressionable Fritz one can hardly imagine a more
momentous change of environment than this which took him from a
quiet rural village to the garish Residenz of a licentious and extravagant
prince. Karl Eugen,[4] Duke of Württemberg, whom men have often
called the curse, but the gods haply regard as the good genius, of
Schiller's youth, came to power in 1744 at the age of sixteen. The three
preceding years he had spent at the Prussian court, where Frederick the
Second (not yet the Great) had taken a deep interest in him and tried to
teach him serious views of a ruler's responsibility. But the youth had no
stomach for the doctrine that he was in the world for the sake of
Württemberg. Having come to his ducal throne prematurely, through
the influence of the King of Prussia, he began well, but after a few
years shook off the restraints of good advice and entered upon a course
of autocratic folly that made Württemberg a far-shining example of the
evils of absolutism under the Old Régime. Early in his reign he married
a beautiful and high-minded princess of Bayreuth, but his profligacy
soon drove her back to the home of her parents. Then a succession of
mistresses ruled his affections, while reckless adventurers in high place
enjoyed his confidence and fleeced the people at pleasure. To gratify
his passion for military display he began to raise unnecessary troops
and to hire them out as mercenaries. In 1752 he agreed with the King of
France, in consideration of a fixed annual subsidy, to supply six
thousand soldiers on demand. The money thus obtained was mostly
squandered upon his private vices and extravagances. On the outbreak
of the Seven Years' War the French king demanded the promised
troops; and so it came about that the Suabian Protestants were
compelled, in defiance of public sentiment, to make war against their

co-religionists of Prussia. In the inglorious campaigns which followed,
the Duke of Württemberg cut a rather sorry figure, but criticism only
exasperated him. He promised another large body of troops to France,
and the men were raised by harsh measures of conscription. The Estates
of the duchy protested against this autocratic procedure, and, as
Stuttgart sided with the opposition, the duke determined to punish his
unruly capital by removing