In an inverse order, romanticism consists in putting literature into our
life, in taking the latest literary fashion for our rule of action. This
is not only a proof of want of taste; it is a most dangerous mistake.
The romanticists, who had so many wrong ideas, had none more erroneous
than their idea of love, and in the correspondence between George Sand
and Musset we see the paradox in all its beauty. It consists in saying
that love leads to virtue and that it leads there through change.
Whether the idea came originally from _her_ or from _him_, this was
their common faith.

"You have said it a hundred times over," writes George Sand, "and it
is all in vain that you retract; nothing will now efface that sentence:
'Love is the only thing in the world that counts.' It may be that it
is a divine faculty which we lose and then find again, that we must
cultivate, or that we have to buy with cruel suffering, with painful
experience. The suffering you have endured through loving me was perhaps
destined, in order that you might love another woman more easily.
Perhaps the next woman may love you less than I do, and yet she may be
more happy and more beloved. There are such mysteries in these things,
and God urges us along new and untrodden paths. Give in; do not attempt
to resist. He does not desert His privileged ones. He takes them by the
hand and places them in the midst of the sandbanks, where they are to
learn to live, in order that they may sit down at the banquet at which
they are to rest. . . ." Later on she writes as follows: "Do you imagine
that one love affair, or even two, can suffice for exhausting or taking
the freshness from a strong soul? I believed this, too, for a long
time, but I know now that it is quite the contrary. Love is a fire that
endeavours to rise and to purify itself. Perhaps the more we have failed
in our endeavours to find it, the more apt we become to discover it, and
the more we have been obliged to change, the more conservative we
shall become. Who knows? It is perhaps the terrible, magnificent and
courageous work of a whole lifetime. It is a crown of thorns which will
blossom and be covered with roses when our hair begins to turn white."

This was pure frenzy, and yet there were two beings ready to drink in
all this pathos, two living beings to live out this monstrous chimera.
Such are the ravages that a certain conception of literature may make.
By the example we have of these two illustri