the title of a German Tyrtaeus; and in the second
place, Theodor Koerner’s soul was most ardently
engrossed with the supposed and the real sufferings
of his time, with the dignity and the misfortune of
his people, and with the necessity and sacredness of
the war. Let no one scent any bombast in all
this, but, on the contrary, let him admire my cleverness
in condensing into three lines, everything that Theodor
Koerner expressed in a whole volume, in Lyre and
Sword! If, therefore, his war-songs are bad,
we shall be justified in concluding that we need expect
still less from his other poems, in which he is concerned
with sentiments which certainly affected him more slightly
than those which placed the sword in his hand.
I turn over the index of his war-songs, and find Call
to the German Nation, Before the Battle, Germany,—in
short, titles that all point to material very often
handled, and therefore grown trivial. I do not,
indeed, immediately conclude therefrom that the poems
are trivial, but I have the right to conclude that
the man who attempts such worn out subjects must be
either a very great or a very small poet. May
I be permitted to analyze one of these poems?
I will choose, as the most significant, the well known
Battle Song of the Confederation. In this
poem the poet has striven to collect everything that
could serve to make the soldiers who were to take
part in the battle of Danneberg more indifferent to
the bullets. I should not, however, have liked
to advise the commanding general actually to use it
for this purpose. Mr. Koerner quite forgets with
what sort of people he is dealing when, in the third
strophe, he expects the soldiers to let themselves
be slaughtered for German art and German song.
This is more than a joke, for I have the right to demand
that a Battle-Song of the Confederation shall
be comprehensible and intelligible to all who are
to take part in the battle; and art and song are,
in any case, not important enough to be named together
with the causes that made the fighting of a battle
necessary, together with the enslavement of a people;
quite apart from the fact that both, art and song,
belong to those national treasures which are most secure
in the time of hostile invasion. But in order
not to give my logic a bad reputation, I will begin
at the beginning. Mr. Koerner not only began
there but even ended there—this in parenthesis.
The first strophe aims to give the picture of a battle;
but it is fortunate that we already know, from the
superscription, with what battle we are concerned;
we should scarcely find it out from this first strophe,
which finishes, but does not complete the picture.
In the second strophe we learn rather more; we learn
that the beloved German oak is broken, that the language—thank
God, not the women—has been violated, and
we find it quite natural that revenge should blaze
up at last, even though we cannot escape a slight
feeling of surprise that dishonor, shame and such