he Polish cause.
But here again the personal element is strongly in evidence. A chance
acquaintance, which afterward became an intimate friendship, with Polish
fugitives, seems to have been the immediate occasion of his Polenlieder,
so that his enthusiasm for Polish liberty must be regarded as incidental
rather than spontaneous. Needless to say that with a Greek cult such as
Hoelderlin's Lenau had no patience whatever. "Dass die Poesie den
profanen Schmutz wieder abwaschen muesse, den ihr Goethe durch 50 Jahre
mit klassischer Hand gruendlich einzureiben bemueht war; dass die
Freiheitsgedanken, wie sie jetzt gesungen werden, nichts seien als
konventioneller Troedel,--davon haben nur wenige eine Ahnung."[121]

All these considerations tend to convince us that Lenau's Weltschmerz is
after all of a much narrower and more personal type than Hoelderlin's.
Again and again he runs through the gamut of his own painful emotions
and experiences, diagnosing and dissecting each one, and always with the
same gloomy result. Consequently his Weltschmerz loses in breadth what
through the depth of the poet's introspection it gains in intensity.

One of the most striking and, unless classed among his numerous other
pathological traits, one of the most puzzling of Lenau's characteristics
is the perverseness of his nature. His intimate friends were wont to
explain it, or rather to leave it unexplained by calling it his
"Husarenlaune" when the poet would give vent to an apparently unprovoked
and unreasonable burst of anger, and on seeing the consternation of
those present, would just as suddenly throw himself into a fit of
laughter quite as inexplicable as his rage. He takes delight in things
which in the ordinarily constructed mind would produce just the reverse
feeling. Speaking once of a particularly ill-favored person of his
acquaintance he says: "Eine so gewaltige Haesslichkeit bleibt ewig neu
und kann sich nie abnuetzen. Es ist was Frisches darin, ich sehe sie
gerne."[122] And in not a few of his poems we see a certain predilection
for the gruesome, the horrible. So in the remarkable figure employed in
"Faust:"

Die Traeume, ungelehr'ge Bestien, schleichen
Noch immer nach des Wahns verscharrten Leichen.[123]

This perverseness of disposition is in a large measure accounted for by
the fact that Lenau was eternally at war with himself. Speaking in the
most general way, Hoelderlin's Weltschmerz had its origin in his conflict
w