Hitherto I have been studying for the most part only one main type of modern melancholy. This type even in a Chateaubriand or a Byron and still more in their innumerable followers may seem at once superficial and theatrical. It often does not get beyond that Epicurean toying with sorrow, that luxury of grief, which was not unknown even to classical antiquity.[252] The despair of Chateaubriand is frequently only a disguise of his love of literary glory, and Chesterton is inclined to see in the Byronic gloom an incident of youth and high spirits.[253] But this is not the whole story even in Byron and Chateaubriand. To find what is both genuine and distinctive in romantic melancholy we need to enlarge a little further on the underlying difference between the classicist and the Rousseauist. The Rousseauist, as indeed the modern man in general, is more preoccupied with his separate and private self than the classicist. Modern melancholy has practically always this touch of isolation not merely because of the proneness of the “genius” to dwell on his own uniqueness, but also because of the undermining of the traditional communions by critical analysis. The noblest form of the “malady of the age” is surely that which supervened upon the loss of religious faith. This is what distinguishes the sadness of an Arnold or a Senancour from that of a Gray. The “Elegy” belongs to the modern movement by the humanitarian note, the sympathetic interest in the lowly, but in its melancholy it does not go much beyond the milder forms of classical meditation on the inevitable sadness of life--what one may term pensiveness. Like the other productions of the so-called graveyard school, it bears a direct relation to Milton’s “Il Penseroso.” It is well to retain Gray’s own distinction. “Mine is a white Melancholy, or rather Leucocholy for the most part,” he wrote to Richard West in 1742, “but there is another sort, black indeed, which I have now and then felt.” Gray did not experience the more poignant sadness, one may suspect, without some loss of the “trembling hope” that is the final note of the “Elegy.” No forlornness is greater than that of the man who has known faith and then lost it. Renan writes of his own break with the Church: The fish of Lake Baikal, we are told, have spent thousands of years in becoming fresh-water fish after being salt-water fish. I had to go through my transition in a few weeks. Like an enchanted circle Catholicism embraces the whole of life with so much strength that when one is deprived of it everything seems insipid. I was terribly lost. The universe produced upon me the impression of a cold and arid desert. For the moment that Christianity was not the truth, all the rest appeared to me indifferent, frivolous, barely worthy of interest. The collapse of my life upon itself left in me a feeling of emptiness like that which follows an attack of fever or an unhappy love-affair.[254]