is what Hegel, in the Phänomenologie des Geistes, described under the name of Das Unglückliche Bewusstsein, and what is more familiarly known to us as the Byronic frame of mind. The very strength of the previous emotion renders this consciousness of the hollowness of emotion the more insupportable: —
- “When the lamp is shattered
- The light in the dust lies dead.”
The brighter the lamp, the deeper the darkness that follows its breaking.
The romantic despair thus described took many forms in the poetry of the early part of the century. To describe them all were to go far beyond our limits. A few forms suggest themselves. If we are condemned to fleeting emotions, we are still not deprived of the hope that some day we may by chance find an abiding emotion. Thus, then, we find many poets living in a wholly problematic state of mind, expecting the god stronger than they, who, coming, shall rule over them. Such a man is the dramatist and writer of tales, Heinrich von Kleist. “It can be,” writes this poet to a friend, December, 1806, “it can be no evil spirit that rules the world, only a spirit not understood.” In such a tone of restless search for the ideal of action, Kleist remains throughout his life. No poet of the romantic school had a keener love of life-problems purely as problems. Each of his works is the statement of a question. In so far Kleist resembles that more recent representative of the problematic school of poetry, Arthur Hugh Clough. Kleist answered his own ques-
