A few specific illustrations will help us to understand how romantic solitude, which was created by the weakening of the traditional communions, was enhanced by the collapse of various sham communions. Let us return for a moment to that eminent example of romantic melancholy and disillusion, Alfred de Vigny. His “Chatterton” deals with the fatal misunderstanding of the original genius by other men. “Moïse” deals more specifically with the problem of his solitude. The genius is so eminent and unique, says Vigny, speaking for himself from behind the mask of the Hebrew prophet, that he is quite cut off from ordinary folk who feel that they have nothing in common with him.[273] This forlornness of the genius is not the sign of some capital error in his philosophy. On the contrary it is the sign of his divine election, and so Moses blames God for his failure to find happiness.[274] If the genius is cut off from communion with men he cannot hope for companionship with God because he has grown too sceptical. Heaven is empty and in any case dumb; and so in the poem to which I have already referred (_Le Mont des Oliviers_) Vigny assumes the mask of Jesus himself to express this desolateness, and concludes that the just man will oppose a haughty and Stoic disdain to the divine silence.[275] All that is left for the genius is to retire into his ivory tower--a phrase appropriately applied for the first time to Vigny.[276] In the ivory tower he can at least commune with nature and the ideal woman. But Vigny came at a time when the Arcadian glamour was being dissipated from nature. Partly under scientific influence she was coming to seem not a benign but a cold and impassive power, a collection of cruel and inexorable laws. I have already mentioned this mood that might be further illustrated from Taine and so many others towards the middle of the nineteenth century.[277] “I am called a ‘mother,’” Vigny makes Nature say, “and I am a tomb.”[278] (“La Maison du Berger”); and so in the _Maison roulante_, or sort of Arcadia on wheels that he has imagined, he must seek his chief solace with the ideal feminine companion. But woman herself turns out to be treacherous; and, assuming the mask of Samson (“La Colère de Samson”), Vigny utters a solemn malediction upon the eternal Delilah (_Et, plus ou moins, la Femme est toujours Dalila_). Such is the disillusion that comes from having sought an ideal communion in a liaison with a Parisian actress.[279]