This, though Beyle at least meant to season the misanthropy with irony (he might be compared with Meredith for some slightly cryptic views of "the Comic Spirit"), is rather poor stuff, and certainly shows no improvement or likelihood of improvement on the earlier productions. It is even somewhat lamentable, not so much for the presence of grime as because of the absence of any other attraction. _Le Rouge et le Noir_ is not exactly rose-pink, but it derives hardly any, if any, interest from its smirches of mud and blood and blackness. In _Lamiel_ there is little else. Moreover, that unchallengeable "possibility of humanity" which redeems not merely _Le Rouge et le Noir_ but the less exciting books, is wanting here. Sansfin, the doctor, is a mere monstrosity in mind as well as in body, and, except perhaps when she ejaculates (as more briefly reported above), "Comment! ce fameux amour, _ce n'est que ca_?" Lamiel herself is not made interesting. [Sidenote: The _Nouvelles Inedites_.] The _Vie de Henri Brulard_, of high importance for a History of Novelists, is in strictness outside the subject of a historian of the Novel, though it might be adduced to strengthen the remarks made on Rousseau's _Confessions_.[144] And the rest of the "resurrected" matter is also more autobiographical, or at best illustrative of Beyle's restless and "masterless" habit of pulling his work to pieces--of "never being able to be ready" (as a deservedly unpopular language has it)--than contributory to positive novel-achievement. But the first and by far the most substantive of the _Nouvelles Inedites_, which his amiable but not very strong-minded literary executor, Colomb, published soon after his death, needs a little notice. [Sidenote: _Le Chasseur Vert._]