Goethe greeted the new undertaking with enthusiasm and urged the editors to "keep their poetic archives clean, strict, and in good order." He, too, urged that "this book should be in every house where joyful humans dwell, by the window, under the mirror, or where song book and cook book lie. There it should remain, ready to be opened, and there something should be found for every varying mood." While this fate has not been granted the work, it has grown deservedly popular. Philological criticism has caviled at the free hand which Arnim, especially, used in remolding the songs, but the editors are freed of any possible charge of intellectual dishonesty toward reader and source in that their object was to present artistic unities and not material for further study and dissection.
A folk-song is a song which has become a part of the lyric consciousness of the people; often the singers do not know that what they are singing has a literary origin—they have thoroughly assimilated it. In the best sense of the term, the songs of The Boy's Magic Horn are folk-songs. They are both narrative and dramatic as well as pure lyric in form, and are simple, powerful, and direct in expression. They treat all phases of German life of the past, from a crude version of the Lay of Hildebrant to the riddles, lullabies, and counting-out rhymes of children. Pictures of the moral and social life of peasant Germany are followed by poems of nature and of the supernatural. Tragedies vary with humorous skits, extravagant and mocking, and the collection is enlivened with many flyting poems about tailors—a favorite butt of the peasant past. Ballads of popular origin and ballads with an added sentimental touch, such as the famous Strassburg poem with the added Alpine horn motif, are found here. Delicate, haunting rhymes alternate with crude assonances, and occasionally one meets with banalities; but, as a whole, the collection is of surprising merit. It is a product of the Romantic return to the past, but is filled with a poetic outlook toward the future. Of the work as a whole Heine says, "I cannot praise the book enough. It contains the most graceful flowers of the German spirit, and he who wishes to know the German people at their best, let him read these folk-songs. * * * In these songs one feels the heart-beat of the German folk. It is a revelation of all melancholy cheerfulness, all their foolish reason. Here German anger beats its drum, here is the pipe of German scorn, the kiss of German love."
The part which the Romantic mood played in the Wars of Liberation is definite and well-recognized. The soldier, Gneisenau, felt that the politics of the future lay in the poetry of the day, and Adam Muller proudly proclaimed poetry to be a war-power: The Romantic longing for the distance, for love, when directed to the remote past of the Fatherland, not only yielded a new life in art and religion but induced a tremendous patriotism as well. The cosmopolitan temper which caused Lessing to say that love of country was an unknown feeling to him, gave way before an intenser nationalism. The earlier Romanticists began it; in the later group it took more specific form and became a propaganda. It was also precipitated in verse and prose. The spark came from Fichte, who was gradually led to see in the destiny of the German people a large cultural fact. Fichte, like a true German, emphasized education as the means of progress: Arnim grasped the problem from another side; he felt himself autochthonous, and consciously set out to make his connection with the soil react on those sprung from the soil. In him, as well as in Fichte, dawns the ideal of the German people as an entity, as a nation.
There are three poets whose main value lies in the appeal they made to the belligerent spirit of the day. They represent three phases of the German character. Ernst Moritz Arndt (1769-1860), the eldest of the group, is the pamphleteer, the politician, and the teacher, as well as the poet. He is the hard-headed, earnest intellectual whose lyric poetry, whatever its esthetic weaknesses, arouses to action by its deadly insistence on an idea, on hatred of the French, on salvation by the sword. Arndt is all virility and fire.
The life of Theodor Körner (1791-1813), the son of Schiller's intimate friend, shows that mixture of idealism and practicality for which the Germans are becoming more and more noted. Körner was aroused from his poetic diletantism by the alarms of war. He enlisted in the famous Lützow corps and died a soldier's death, thus becoming the symbol of all that was ideal for the patriotic youth of his day, the hero and the poet, the man of "Lyre and Sword." His patriotic poems, often composed on the very field of battle, were sung by the soldiers to the roll of cannon and the beat of drum. The trace of Schiller's rhetoric in Körner's poems adds to their effectiveness, spurring to action and firing young minds to patriotic emulation of high ideals. Like Arndt's lyrics, Körner's poems are actual documents in the struggle for liberty-verses which affected men.
The German mystic trait, the touch of the religious, marks the poetry of Max Schenkendorf (1783-1817). His was a quieter nature, which loved the Fatherland, its language, its romantic scenes and past. Characteristic also is his veneration for Queen Luise, whose beauty, tenderness, and fortitude had endeared her to the people as well as to the poets.
Though every Romantic poet took some stand on the questions of the day, the most distinctly lyric of them, Joseph von Eichendorff (1788-1857), was not of a military temperament. Even he, however, followed the King of Prussia's call to arms but, significantly enough for "the last Knight of Romanticism," as he was called, arrived a day too late on the field of Waterloo. The somewhat fanciful title by no means indicates a jouster at windmills; it implies, rather, that in Eichendorff there were gathered for the last time with all their poetic brilliancy, the declining rays of the Romantic movement. After him, the enthusiasm is in its decline or changes to forms which lie outside the confines of the Romantic spirit.
Eichendorff is a thorough pleinairiste, filled with the atmosphere of his native Silesia and, in some measure, hardly intelligible apart from its landscape. His birth-place, the castle of Lubowitz, near Ratibor, rising high on a hill in full sight of the Oder, is the ultimate background of all his nature-poetry. Here must be localized the ever-recurring hill and valley, wood, nightingale, and castle. Here, too, he heard the rustling of the forest leaves and the splashing of the fountain; here he was grounded in the strong and pious, if somewhat narrow, Catholicism of his race. It was a Catholicism, however, which was genuinely Romantic in that it sought comfort in sorrow directly from nature, a tendency which gives rise to some of the best and most heartfelt religious poetry in German literature. A fine example of this is to be found in Eichendorff's beautiful poems on the death of his child. It is interesting to see how, in this spiritual poetry, there is a constant melting of nature into religion, a dissolving of the Romantic atmosphere, of that youthful fervor which Eichendorff never really outgrew but continued to draw upon for inspiration for all his later work, into a broad, deep, manly piety.
Eichendorff's poetry began with Tieckian notes; it was influenced by Brentano, and, unfortunately, was colored by the productions of Count Otto von Löben (1786-1825), a pseudo-Romanticist of less than mediocre ability. But Eichendorff's individuality, with its constant accentuation of the acoustic, soon made itself felt and brought into German poetry what Tieck had tried for and failed in—an effect of perfect musical synthesis. The melody of the verse receives a peculiar lilt by frequent changes in metre between stanzas or in the midst of the stanza, and is thus saved from monotony. Were its metrical harmony tiring in any way, it could not have been set to music with such surprising success. As it is, Eichendorff's poetry has become a permanent part of the musical life of the nation. The Broken Ring has passed into a folk-song, and "O valleys wide!" with Mendelssohn's music is a popular choral of deep religious import.
Yet Eichendorff does not attract either by the variety of his themes or of his rhymes. It is his very repetitions which so endear him to the popular heart. His is not passionate poetry, nor does it subjectively portray the soul-life of its author. In fact, it is saved from monotony of content at times only by its extreme honesty and its lovable simplicity. There is none of Goethe's power of suggesting landscape in a few touches, none of Goethe's logic of description, none of Goethe's clear inner objectivity, but a certain haze lies over Eichendorff's landscapes—the haze of a lyric Corot; at the same time, this landscape has the power of suggestion to the German mind. Paul Heyse, himself a poet, makes one of his characters say, "I have always carried Eichendorff Is book of songs with me on my travels. Whenever a feeling of strangeness comes over me in the variegated days, or I feel a longing for home, I turn its leaves and am at home again. None of our poets has the same magic reminiscence of home which captures our hearts with such touching monotony, with so few pictures and notes. * * * He is always new, as the voices of Nature itself, and never oppresses, but rather lulls one to sweet dreams as if a mother were singing her child to sleep."