The foregoing illustrations are ample to show what sort of influence Sophie exerted over the poet's entire nature, and therefore upon his Weltschmerz. Whereas in their hopeless loves, Hölderlin and to an even greater extent Goethe, struggled through to the point of renunciation, Lenau constantly retrogrades, and allows his baser sensual instincts more and more to control him. He promises to subdue his wild outbursts a little,[101] and when he fails he tries to explain,[102] to apologize.[103] If with Hölderlin love was to a predominating degree a thing of the soul, it was with Lenau in an equal measure a matter of nerves, and as such, under these conditions, it could not but contribute largely to his physical, mental and moral disruption. With Hölderlin it was the rude interruption from without of his quiet and happy intercourse with Susette, which embittered his soul. With Lenau it was the feverish, tumultuous nature of the love itself, that deepened his melancholy.
The charge of affectation in their Weltschmerz would be an entirely baseless one, both in the case of Hölderlin and Lenau. But this difference is readily discovered in the impressions made upon us by their writings, namely that Hölderlin's Weltschmerz is absolutely naïve and unconscious, while that of Lenau is at all times self-conscious and self-centered. Mention has already been made, in speaking of Lenau's pathological traits,[104] of his confirmed habit of self-diagnosis. This he applied not only to his physical condition but to his mental experiences as well. No one knew so well as he how deeply the roots of melancholy had penetrated his being. "Ich bin ein Melancholiker" he once wrote to Sophie, "der Kompass meiner Seele zittert immer wieder zurück nach dem Schmerze des Lebens."[105] Innumerable illustrations of this fact might be found in his lyrics, all of which would repeat with variations the theme of the stanza:
Du geleitest mich durch's Leben
Sinnende Melancholie!
Mag mein Stern sich strebend heben,
Mag er sinken,—weichest nie![106]
The definite purpose with which the poet seeks out and strives to keep intact his painful impressions is frankly stated in one of his diary memoranda, as follows: "So gibt es eine Höhe des Kummers, auf welcher angelangt wir einer einzelnen Empfindung nicht nachspringen, sondern sie laufen lassen, weil wir den Blick für das schmerzliche Ganze nicht verlieren, sondern eine gewisse kummervolle Sammlung behalten wollen, die bei aller scheinbaren Aussenheiterkeit recht gut fortbestehen kann."[107] Hölderlin, as we have noted,[108] not infrequently pictures himself as a sacrifice to the cause of liberty and fatherland, to the new era that is to come:
Umsonst zu sterben, lieb' ich nicht; doch
Lieb' ich zu fallen am Opferhügel
Für's Vaterland, zu bluten des Herzens Blut,
Für's Vaterland....[109]
Lenau, on the other hand, is anxious to sacrifice himself to his muse. "Künstlerische Ausbildung ist mein höchster Lebenszweck; alle Kräfte meines Geistes, meines Gemütes betracht' ich als Mittel dazu. Erinnerst Du Dich des Gedichtes von Chamisso,[110] wo der Maler einen Jüngling ans Kreuz nagelt, um ein Bild vom Todesschmerze zu haben? Ich will mich selber ans Kreuz schlagen, wenn's nur ein gutes Gedicht gibt."[111] And again: "Vielleicht ist die Eigenschaft meiner Poesie, dass sie ein Selbstopfer ist, das Beste daran."[112] The specific instances just cited, together with the inevitable impressions gathered from the reading of his lyrics, make it impossible to avoid the conclusion that we are dealing here with a virtuoso of Weltschmerz; that Lenau was not only conscious at all times of the depth of his sorrow, but that he was also fully aware of its picturesqueness and its poetic possibilities. It is true that this self-consciousness brings him dangerously near the bounds of insincerity, but it must also be granted that he never oversteps those bounds.
Regarded as a psychological process, Lenau's Weltschmerz therefore stands midway between that of Hölderlin and Heine. It is more self-centred than Hölderlin's and while the poet is able to diagnose the disease which holds him firmly in its grasp, he lacks those means by which he might free himself from it. Heine goes still further, for having become conscious of his melancholy, he mercilessly applies the lash of self-irony, and in it finds the antidote for his Weltschmerz.
Fichte, says Erich Schmidt, calls egoism the spirit of the eighteenth century, by which he means the revelling, the complete absorption, in the personal. This will naturally find its favorite occupation in sentimental self-contemplation, which becomes a sort of fashionable epidemic. It is this fashion which Goethe wished to depict in "Werther," and therefore Werther's hopeless love is not wholly responsible for his suicide. "Werther untergräbt sein Dasein durch Selbstbetrachtung," is Goethe's own explanation of the case.[113] And it is in this light only that Werther's malady deserves in any comprehensive sense the term Weltschmerz. Here, then, Lenau and Werther stand on common ground. Other traits common to most poets of Weltschmerz might here be enumerated as characteristic of both, such as extreme fickleness of purpose, supersensitiveness, lack of definite vocation, and the like; all of which goes to show that while for artistic purposes Goethe required a dramatic cause, or rather occasion, for Werther's suicide, he nevertheless fully understood all the symptoms of the prevailing disease with which his sentimental hero was afflicted.
While the personal elements in Lenau's Weltschmerz are much more intense in their expression than with Hölderlin, its altruistic side is proportionately weaker. So far as we may judge from his lyrics, very little of Lenau's Weltschmerz was inspired by patriotic considerations. There is opposition, it is true, to the existing order, but that opposition is directed almost solely against that which annoyed and inconvenienced him personally, for example, against the stupid as well as rigorous Austrian censorship. Against this bugbear he never ceases to storm in verse and letters, and to it must be attributed in a large measure his literary alienation from the land of his adoption. That we must look to his lyrics rather than to his longer epic writings, in order to discover the poet's deepest interests, is nowhere more clearly evidenced than in the following reference to his "Savonarola," in a letter to Emilie Reinbeck during the progress of the work: "Savonarola wirkte zumeist als Prediger, darum muss ich in meinem Gedicht ihn vielfach predigen und dogmatisieren lassen, welches in vierfüssigen doppeltgereimten Iamben sehr schwierig ist. Doch es freut mich, Dinge poetisch durchzusetzen, an deren poetischer Darstellbarkeit wohl die meisten Menschen verzweifeln. Auch gereicht es mir zu besonderem Vergnügen, mit diesem Gedicht gegen den herrschenden Geschmack unseres Tages in Opposition zu treten."[114] The inference lies very near at hand that his opposition to the prevailing taste was after all a secondary consideration, and that the poet's first concern was to win glory by accomplishing something which others would abandon as an impossibility. While recognizing the fact that Lenau's "Faust" and "Don Juan" are largely autobiographical, it is, I think, obvious that an entirely adequate impression of his Weltschmerz may be gained from his letters and lyrics alone, in which the poet's sincerest feelings need not be subordinated for a moment to artistic purposes or demands. And nowhere, either in lyrics or letters, do we find such spontaneous outbursts of patriotic sentiment as greet us in Hölderlin's poems:
Glückselig Suevien, meine Mutter![115]