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 finishe