A terrible danger thus lurks in the whole modern programme: it is a programme that makes for a formidable mechanical efficiency and so tends to bring into an ever closer material contact men who remain ethically centrifugal. The reason why the humanitarian and other schemes of communion that have been set up during the last century have failed is that they do not, like the traditional schemes, set any bounds to mere expansiveness, or, if one prefers, they do not involve any conversion. And so it is not surprising that the feeling of emptiness[267] or unlimitedness and isolation should be the special mark of the melancholy of this period. René complains of his “moral solitude”;[268] but strictly speaking his solitude is the reverse of moral. Only by cultivating his human self and by the unceasing effort that this cultivation involves does a man escape from his nightmare of separateness and so move in some measure towards happiness. But the happiness of which René dreams is unethical--something very private and personal and egoistic. Nothing is easier than to draw the line from René to Baudelaire and later decadents--for instance to Des Esseintes, the hero of Huysmans’s novel “A Rebours,”[269] who is typical of the last exaggerations of the movement. Des Esseintes cuts himself off as completely as possible from other men and in the artificial paradise he has devised gives himself up to the quest of strange and violent sensation; but his dream of happiness along egoistic lines turns into a nightmare,[270] his palace of art becomes a hell. Lemaître is quite justified in saying of Des Esseintes that he is only René or Werther brought up to date--“a played-out and broken-down Werther who has a malady of the nerves, a deranged stomach and eighty years more of literature to the bad.”[271]