Now, of course, if we are content to take a bill and write down Byron and Lamartine, Senancour and _Jacopo Ortis_ (otherwise Ugo Foscolo), Musset, Matthew Arnold, and _tutti quanti_, as debtors to _Rene_, we give the tale or episode a historical value which cannot be denied; while its positive aesthetic quality, though it may vary very much in different estimates, cannot be regarded as merely worthless. Also, once more, there is real pathos, especially as far as Amelie is concerned, though the entire unexpectedness of the revelation of her fatal passion, and the absolute lack of any details as to its origin, rise, and circumstances, injure sympathy to some extent. But that sympathy, as far as the present writer is concerned, fails altogether with regard to Rene himself. If his melancholy were traceable to _mutual_ passion of the forbidden kind, or if it had arisen from the stunning effect of the revelation thereof on his sister's side, there would be no difficulty. But, though these circumstances may to some extent accentuate, they have nothing to do with causing the _weltschmerz_ or _selbst-schmerz_, or whatever it is to be called, of this not very heroic hero. Nor has Chateaubriand taken the trouble--which Goethe, with his more critical sense of art, _did_ take--to make Rene go through the whole course of the Preacher, or great part of it, before discovering that all was vanity. He is merely, from the beginning, a young gentleman affected with mental jaundice, who cannot or will not discover or take psychological calomel enough to cure him. It does not seem in the least likely that if Amelie had been content to live with him as merely "in all good, all honour" a loving and comforting sister, he would have really been able to say, like Geraldine in Coleridge's original draft of _Christabel_, "I'm better now." He is, in fact, what Werther is not--though his own followers to a large extent are--mainly if not merely a Sulky Young Man: and one cannot help imagining that if, in pretty early days, some one had been good enough to apply to him that Herb Pantagruelion, in form not exactly of a halter but of a rope's end, with which O'Brien cured Peter Simple's _mal de mer_, his _mal du siecle_ would have been cured likewise.