But René's melancholy is too innate and profound to be caused by Amélie's unhappy passion alone. The reader feels all the time that this passion only provides an occasion for the outburst of the melancholy. René's despondency, his egotism, his outward coldness and suppressed inward fire, are to be found independently of this external cause in many of the gifted authors of that period, and in a number of their best-known characters--Tieck's _William Lovell_, Frederick Schlegel's _Julius_, Byron's _Corsair_, Kierkegaard's _Johannes Forföreren_, and Lermontov's _Hero of our Own Time_. They constitute the European hall-mark with which the heroes of literature are stamped in the early years of the nineteenth century. But what marks _René_ as being more especially a product of the nascent reaction is the aim of the story--an aim which it has in common with only one of the above-mentioned works, Kierkegaard's _Johannes Forföreren_. Forming part of a greater whole which has a distinctly moral and religious tendency, it professes to be written for the express purpose of warning against the mental condition it portrays, of showing the glory and the indispensability of Christianity as a refuge for the disordered soul, and more particularly of proving by means of Amélie's example that the re-establishment of convents is imperative, because salvation from certain errors is only to be found in the cloister. The pious intention of the book and its very profane matter conflict in a manner which is not particularly edifying. But this too is a typical trait of the reaction; we find it again, for instance, in the first parts of Kierkegaard's _Enten-Eller_ and _Stadier_. The prevailing tone is a wild longing of genius for enjoyment, which satisfies itself by mingling the idea of death and destruction, a sort of Satanic frenzy, with what would otherwise be mild and natural feelings of enjoyment and happiness. It avails little that this work, like _Atala_, has an avowedly Catholic, even clerical, tendency; its undercurrent is anything but Christian, is not even religious. But this undercurrent, however impure and diluted it may be in the individual writer, springs from a spiritual condition which is the result of the great revolution in men's minds. All the spiritual maladies which make their appearance at this time may be regarded as products of two great events--the emancipation of the individual, and the emancipation of thought.