René's sufferings are the birth-throes of genius in the modern soul. He is the moment in which the chosen spirit, like the Hebrew prophet of old, hears the voice that calls him, and timidly draws back, shrinking despairingly from the task, and saying: "Choose not me, O Lord; choose another, my brother; I am too weak, too slow of speech." René is this first stage, the stage of unrest, of election. The chosen waits to see another follow the call; he looks around but sees none arise, and the voice continues to call. He sees all that he loathes and scorns triumph, and all that worsted for which he would so willingly sacrifice everything if another would but lead the way. With amazement and dread he realises that there is not one who feels as he does; he wanders about seeking a leader and finding none, until at last the certainty is borne in upon him that, as none appears, as he can discover no helper, no guide, it must be because it is he himself who is destined to be the guide and support of weaker souls. At last he follows the call; he sees that the time for dreaming and doubting is past, that the time to act has come. The crisis leaves him, not, like Werther, prepared to commit suicide, but with a firm resolve and a higher opinion of himself. Genius, however, is always a curse as well as a blessing. Even the greatest and most harmoniously constituted natures have, all their lives, been aware of the curse it carries with it. In René, Chateaubriand has shown us the curse alone. His own nature and the position in which he stood to the ideas of his time caused genius, as _he_ knew it, to seem merely a source of lonely suffering, or of wild, egotistical pleasure, marred by the feeling of its emptiness and worthlessness.