findung nicht nachspringen, sondern sie
laufen lassen, weil wir den Blick fuer das schmerzliche Ganze nicht
verlieren, sondern eine gewisse kummervolle Sammlung behalten wollen,
die bei aller scheinbaren Aussenheiterkeit recht gut fortbestehen
kann."[107] Hoelderlin, 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 Opferhuegel
Fuer's Vaterland, zu bluten des Herzens Blut,
Fuer's Vaterland....[109]

Lenau, on the other hand, is anxious to sacrifice himself to his muse.
"Kuenstlerische Ausbildung ist mein hoechster Lebenszweck; alle Kraefte
meines Geistes, meines Gemuetes betracht' ich als Mittel dazu. Erinnerst
Du Dich des Gedichtes von Chamisso,[110] wo der Maler einen Juengling 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 Hoelderlin and Heine. It is more
self-centred than Hoelderlin'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 wis