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 Koerner (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. Koerner was aroused from his
poetic diletantism by the alarms of war. He enlisted in the famous
Luetzow 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.
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