The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller | Page 6

his court to Ludwigsburg, where an
ancestor of his, early in the century, had founded a city to match
Versailles and serve the express purpose of a 'Trutz-Stuttgart'.
The removal of the court to Ludwigsburg took place in 1764, three
years before the Schiller family found a home there. From the first a
purely artificial creation, the little city had been going backwards, but it
now leaped into short-lived glory as the residence of a prodigal prince
who was bent on amusing himself magnificently. The existing ducal
palace was enlarged to huge dimensions and lavishly decorated. Great
parks and gardens were laid out, the market-place was surrounded with
arcades, and an opera-house was built, with a stage that could be
extended into the open air so as to permit the spectacular evolution of
real troops. Everything about the place was new and pretentious. The
roomy streets and the would-be gorgeous palaces, flaunting their fresh
coats of yellow and white stucco, teemed with officers in uniform, with
blazing little potentates of the court and with high-born ladies in the
puffs and frills of the rococo age. Here Karl Eugen gave himself up to
his dream of glory, which was to rival the splendors of Versailles. He
maintained a costly opera, procuring for it the most famous singers and
dancers in Europe, and squandered immense sums upon 'Venetian
nights' and other gorgeous spectacles. For all this barbaric ostentation
the people of Württemberg were expected to foot the bills. 'Fatherland!'
said his Highness, when a protest was raised on behalf of the country,
'Bah! I am the fatherland.'
Here it was, then, that the young Friedrich Schiller got his first childish
impressions of the great world; of sovereignty exercised that a few
might strut in gay plumage while the many toiled to keep them in funds;
of state policies determined by wretched court intrigues; of natural
rights trampled upon at the caprice of a prince or a prince's favorite.

There is no record that the boy was troubled by these things at the time,
or looked upon them as anything else than a part of the world's natural
order. It is a long way yet to President von Walter.
The house occupied by Captain Schiller at Ludwigsburg was situated
close by the theater, to which the duke's officers had free admission. As
a reward of industry little Fritz was allowed an occasional evening in
front of the 'boards that signify the world'. The performances, to be sure,
were French and Italian operas, wherein the ballet-master, the
machinist and the decorator vied with one another for the production of
amazing spectacular effects. People went to stare and gasp--the
language was of no importance. It was not exactly dramatic art, but
from the boy's point of view it was no doubt magnificent. At any rate it
made him at home in the dream-world of the imagination, filled his
mind with grandiose pictures and gave him his first rudimentary
notions of stage effect. We are not surprised to learn, therefore, that in
his home amusements playing theater now took the place of playing
church. Sister Christophine was a faithful helper. A stage could be
made of big books, and actors out of paper. When the puppet-show was
outgrown, the young dramatist took to framing plays for living
performers of his own age,--with a row of chairs for an audience, and
himself as manager and protagonist.
Christophine relates that her brother's fondness for this sort of diversion
lasted until he was thirteen years old. In the mean time, however, his
chosen career was kept steadily in view. He was sent to the Latin
school, from which, if his marks should be good, he might hope to
advance in about five years to one of the so-called convent schools of
Württemberg. After this his theological education would proceed for
about nine years more at the expense of the state. The Ludwigsburg
school was a place in which the language of Cicero and the religion of
Luther were thumped into the memory of boys by means of sticks
applied to the skin; Fritz Schiller was a capable scholar, though none of
his teachers ever called him, as in the case of the boy Lessing at
Meissen, a horse that needed double fodder. The ordinary ration
sufficed him, but he memorized his catechism and his hymns diligently,
fussed faithfully over his Latin longs and shorts, and took his

occasional thrashings with becoming fortitude. On one occasion we
hear that he was flogged by mistake and disdained to report the incident
at home. Religious instruction consisted of mechanical repetition
insisted on with brutal severity,--a mode of presenting divine things
that must have contrasted painfully, for the sensitive boy, with his
mother's simple religion of the heart. When it is added that he was