ilosophic pessimist
will sometimes revert, when a strong sense of his own individuality
asserts itself.

If we attempt a classification of Weltschmerz with regard to its
essence, or, better perhaps, with regard to its origin, we shall find
that the various types may be classed under one of two heads: either as
cosmic or as egoistic. The representatives of cosmic Weltschmerz are
those poets whose first concern is not their personal fate, their own
unhappiness, it may be, but who see first and foremost the sad fate of
humanity and regard their own misfortunes merely as a part of the common
destiny. The representatives of the second type are those introspective
natures who are first and chiefly aware of their own misery and finally
come to regard it as representative of universal evil. The former
proceed from the general to the particular, the latter from the
particular to the general. But that these types must necessarily be
entirely distinct in all cases, as Marchand[3] asserts, seems open to
serious doubt. It is inconceivable that a poet into whose personal
experience no shadows have fallen should take the woes of humanity very
deeply to heart; nor again could we imagine that one who has brooded
over the unhappy condition of mankind in general should never give
expression to a note of personal sorrow. It is in the complexity of
motives in one and the same subject that the difficulty lies in making
rigid and sharp distinctions. In some cases Weltschmerz may arise from
honest conviction or genuine despair, in others it may be something
entirely artificial, merely a cloak to cover personal defects. Sometimes
it may even be due to a desire to pose as a martyr, and sometimes
nothing more than an attempt to ape the prevailing fashion. To these
types Wilhelm Scherer adds "Muessiggaenger, welche sich die Zeit mit uebler
Laune vertreiben, missvergnuegte Lyriker, deren Gedichte nicht mehr
gelesen werden, und Spatzenkoepfe, welche den Pessimismus fuer besonderen
Tiefsinn halten und um jeden Preis tiefsinnig erscheinen wollen."[4]

But it is with Weltschmerz in its outward manifestations as it finds
expression in the poet's writings, that we shall be chiefly concerned in
the following pages. And here the subdivisions, if we attempt to
classify, must be almost as numerous as the representatives themselves.
In Hoelderlin we have the ardent Hellenic idealist; Lenau gives
expression to all the pathos of Weltschmerz, Heine is its satir