But there is yet another and more attractive aspect of the connection—namely, the psychological or aesthetic. The history of literature tells of many such intimacies between remarkable men and women; but in this one there is something unusual and new. A masculine genius of the highest rank, one stage of whose artistic career is already run, but who is still quite young—a feminine genius, great and complete in herself, in appraising whom it may safely be affirmed that no woman before her ever displayed such exuberant creative power—these two influence each other during the exaltation of a passionate attachment.
The science of psychology is still in such a backward condition that the difference between a man's imagination and a woman's has scarcely been determined; still less has it been clearly ascertained how they act upon each other. Here for the first time in modern civilisation the masculine literary creative mind and the feminine come into contact—the highest, finest development of each. The experiment (which was ere long to be repeated in England, on approximative lines, in the case of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning) had never been made on so grand a scale. These are the Adam and Eve of Art. They meet and share the fruit of the tree of knowledge. The curse, that is to say the quarrel, follows; he goes his way, she hers. But they are no longer the same. The works they now produce are of a different stamp from those which they produced before they met.
He leaves her, his feelings lacerated, disappointed, despairing, with a new and heavy complaint against her sex, convinced that: Treachery! thy name is woman!
She leaves him, her soul torn with conflicting emotions, first half-consoled, then distracted with grief, but soon feeling the relief of being past a crisis which was pain to her calm, productive nature; she has a new feeling of woman's superiority to man, and is more strongly convinced than before that: Weakness! thy name is man!
He leaves her with his aversion for all enthusiasms, Utopias, and philanthropic projects strengthened, feeling more than ever convinced that for the artist art is everything. Nevertheless, the contact with the great feminine intellect has not been fruitless. The very suffering makes him truthful. He throws off his affected egotism; we no longer see him making a display of assumed hardness and coldness. The influence of her open-mindedness and charitableness and of her enthusiasm for ideals is plainly perceptible in the works which he now writes—in Lorenzaccio's enthusiastic republicanism, in Andrea del Sarto's whole character—possibly even in the vehement personal protest against Thiers' press laws.
She leaves him, more convinced than ever that the male sex is by nature narrow-minded and egotistical, more prone than ever to yield to the fascination of general ideas. In Horace she devotes her talent to the service of Saint-Simonism; she writes Le Compagnon du Tour de France in the interests of socialism; in 1848 she composes the bulletins for the Provisional Government. Nevertheless, it was contact with De Musset's virile, classic genius which finally moulded her pure and classic style. She learned to love form, to seek the beautiful for its own sake. Dumas, the younger, has said of a sentence of hers that "it is drawn by Leonardo and sung by Mozart"; he should have added that her hand was guided and her ear trained by Alfred de Musset.
After the separation, both artists are fully matured. Henceforward he is the poet with the burning heart, she the sybil with the eloquently prophetic tongue.
Into the gulf which opened between them she cast her immaturity, her tirades, her faults of taste, her man's clothes, and thenceforward was altogether feminine, altogether natural.
Into the same gulf he cast his Don Juan costume, his bravado, his admiration for Rolla, his boyish insolence, and thenceforward was the man, the emancipated intellectual force.