WELTSCHMERZ

(German: world grief), the prevailing mood of melancholy and pessimism associated with the poets of the Romantic era that arose from their refusal or inability to adjust to those realities of the world that they saw as destructive of their right to subjectivity and personal freedoma phenomenon thought to typify Romanticism. The word was coined by Jean Paul in his pessimistic novel, Selina (1827), to describe Lord Byron's discontent (especially as shown in Manfred and Childe Harold's Pilgrimage). Weltschmerz was characterized by a nihilistic loathing for the world and a view that was skeptically blas. In France, where it was called the mal du sicle, Weltschmerz was expressed by Chateaubriand, Alfred de Vigny, and Alfred de Musset; in Russia by Aleksandr Pushkin and Mikhail Lermontov; in Poland by Juliusz Slowacki; in America by Nathaniel Hawthorne.