Len. Werke, Vol. I, p. 147.]

[Footnote 172: Werke, Vol. I, p. 51 f]

[Footnote 173: "Der Kranich," Werke, Vol. I, p. 328.]

[Footnote 174: "Herbstlied," Werke, Vol. I, p. 299.]

[Footnote 175: "Mondlied," Werke, Vol. I, p. 310.]

[Footnote 176: Hoeld. Werke, Vol. I, p. 146.]

[Footnote 177: Werke, Vol. I, p. 299.]

[Footnote 178: Schurz, Vol. II, p. 104.]

[Footnote 179: For an exhaustive discussion of Lenau's nature-sense cf.
Prof. Camillo von Klenze's excellent monograph on the subject, "The
Treatment of Nature in the Works of Nikolaus Lenau," Chicago, University
Press, 1902.]

[Footnote 180: Frankl, p. 116.]

CHAPTER IV

=Heine=

Heine was probably the first German writer to use the term Weltschmerz
in its present sense. Breitinger in his essay "Neues ueber den alten
Weltschmerz"[181] endeavors to trace the earliest use of the word and
finds an instance of it in Julian Schmidt's "Geschichte der
Romantik,"[182] 1847. He seems to have entirely overlooked Heine's use
of the word in his discussion of Delaroche's painting "Oliver Cromwell
before the body of Charles I." (1831).[183] The actual inventor of the
compound was no doubt Jean Paul, who wrote (1810): "Diesen Weltschmerz
kann er (Gott) sozusagen nur aushalten durch den Anblick der Seligkeit,
die nachher verguetet."[184]

But although Heine may have been the first to adapt the word to its
present use, and although we have fallen into the habit of thinking of
him as the chief representative of German Weltschmerz, it must be
admitted that there is much less genuine Weltschmerz to be found in his
poems than in those of either Hoelderlin or Lenau. The reason for this
has already been briefly indicated in the preceding chapter. Hoelderlin's
Weltschmerz is altogether the most naive of the three; Lenau's, while it
still remains sincere, becomes self-conscious, while Heine has an
unfailing antidote for profound feeling in his merciless self-irony. And
yet his condition in life was such as would have wrung from the heart of
almost any other poet notes of sincerest pathos.

In Lenau's case we noted circumstances which point to a direct
transmission from parent to child of a predisposition to melancholia. In
Heine's, on the other hand, the question of heredity has apparently only
an indirect bearing upon his Weltschmerz. To what extent was his long
and terrible disease of hereditary origin, and in what measure may we
ascribe his Weltschmerz to the s