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 "Müssiggänger, welche sich die Zeit mit übler
Laune vertreiben, missvergnügte Lyriker, deren Gedichte nicht mehr
gelesen werden, und Spatzenköpfe, welche den Pessimismus für 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 Hölderlin we have the ardent Hellenic idealist; Lenau gives
expression to all the pathos of Weltschmerz, Heine is its satirist, the
misanthrope, while in Raabe we even have a pessimistic humorist.

This brief list needs scarcely be supplemented by other names of poets
of melancholy, such as Reinhold Lenz, Heinrich von Kleist, Robert
Southey, Byron, Leopardi, in order to command our attention by reason of
the tragic fate which ended the lives of nearly all of these men, the
most frequent and the most terrible being that of insanity. It is of
course a matter of common knowledge that chronic melancholy or the
persistent brooding over personal misfortune is an almost inevitable
preliminary to mental derangement. And when this melancholy takes root
in the finely organized mind of genius, it is only to be expected that
the result will be even more disastrous than in the case of the ordinary
mind. Lombroso holds the opinion that if men of genius are not all more
or less insane, that is, if the "spheres of influence" of genius and
insanity do not actually overlap, they are at least contiguous at many