"FAMILY HAPPINESS"
From this period of transition, during which the genius of the man was
feeling its way blindly, doubtful of itself and apparently exhausted,
"devoid of strong passion, without a directing will," like Nekhludov
in the _Diary of a Sportsman_--from this period issued a work unique
in its tenderness and charm: _Family Happiness_ (1859). This was the
miracle of love.
For many years Tolstoy had been on friendly terms with the Bers family.
He had fallen in love with the mother and the three daughters in
succession.[1] His final choice fell upon the second, but he dared not
confess it. Sophie Andreyevna Bers was still a child; she was seventeen
years old, while Tolstoy was over thirty; he regarded himself as an old
man, who had not the right to associate his soiled and vitiated life
with that of an innocent young girl. He held out for three years.[2]
Afterwards; in _Anna Karenin,_ he related how his declaration to Sophie
Bers was effected, and how she replied to it: both of them tracing with
one finger, under a table, the initials of words they dared not say.
Like Levine in _Anna Karenin_, he was so cruelly honest as to place
his intimate journal in the hands of his betrothed, in order that she
should be unaware of none of his past transgressions; and Sophie, like
Kitty in _Anna Karenin_, was bitterly hurt by its perusal. They were
married on the 23rd of September, 1862.
In the artist's imagination this marriage was consummated three years
earlier, when _Family Happiness_ was written.[3] For these years he had
been living in the future; through the ineffable days of love that does
not as yet know itself: through the delirious days of love that has
attained self-knowledge, and the hour in which the divine, anticipated
words are whispered; when the tears arise "of a happiness which departs
for ever and will never return again"; and the triumphant reality of
the early days of marriage; the egoism of lovers, "the incessant,
causeless joy," then the approaching weariness, the vague discontent,
the boredom of a monotonous life, the two souls which softly disengage
themselves and grow further and further away from one another; the
dangerous attraction of the world for the young wife--flirtations,
jealousies, fatal misunderstandings;--love dissimulated, love lost;
and at length the sad and tender autumn of the heart; the face of love
which reappears, paler, older, but more touching by reason of tears
and the marks of time; the memory of troubles, the regret for the ill
things done and the years that are lost; the calm of the evening; the
august passage from love to friendship, and the romance of the passion
of maternity.... All that was to come, all this Tolstoy had dreamed of,
tasted in advance; and in order to live through those days more vividly
he lived in the well-beloved. For the first time--perhaps the only
time in all his writings--the story passes in the heart of a woman,
and is told by her; and with what exquisite delicacy, what spiritual
beauty!--the beauty of a soul withdrawn behind a veil of the truest
modesty. For once the analysis of the writer is deprived of its cruder
lights; there is no feverish struggle to present the naked truth. The
secrets of the inward life are divined rather than spoken. The art
and the heart of the artist are both touched and softened; there is
a harmonious balance of thought and form. _Family Happiness_ has the
perfection of a work of Racine.
Marriage, whose sweet and bitter Tolstoy presented with so limpid a
profundity, was to be his salvation. He was tired, unwell, disgusted
with himself and his efforts. The brilliant success which had crowned
his earlier works had given way to the absolute silence of the critics
and the indifference of the public.[4] He pretended, haughtily, to be
not ill-pleased.
"My reputation has greatly diminished in popularity; a fact which was
saddening me. Now I am content; I know that I have to say something,
and that I have the power to speak it with no feeble voice. As for the
public, let it think what it will!"[5]
But he was boasting: he himself was not sure of his art. Certainly he
was the master of his literary instrument; but he did not know what to
do with it, as he said in respect of _Polikuskha:_ "it was a matter
of chattering about the first subject that came to hand, by a man who
knows how to hold his pen."[6] His social work was abortive. In 1862 he
resigned his appointment as territorial arbitrator. The same year the
police made a search at Yasnaya Polyana, turned everything topsy-turvy,
and closed the school. Tolstoy was absent at the time, suffering from
overwork; fearing that he was attacked by phthisis.
"The squabbles of arbitration had become so painful to me, the work
of the school so vague, and the doubts which arose from the desire
of teaching others while hiding my own ignorance of what had to be
taught, were so disheartening that I fell ill. Perhaps I should then
have fallen into the state of despair to which I was to succumb fifteen
years later, had there not remained to me an unknown aspect of life
which promised salvation--the life of the family."[7]
[1] When a child he had, in a fit of jealousy, pushed from a balcony
the little girl--then aged nine--who afterwards became Madame Bers,
with the result that she was lame for several years.
[2] See, in _Family Happiness,_ the declaration of Sergius: "Suppose
there were a Mr. A, an elderly man who had lived his life, and a lady
B, young and happy, who as yet knew neither men nor life. As the result
of various domestic happenings, he came to love her as a daughter, and
was not aware that he could love her in another way ..." &c.
[3] Perhaps this novel contained the memories also of a romantic love
affair which commenced in 1856, in Moscow, the second party to which
was a young girl very different to himself, very worldly and frivolous,
from whom he finally parted, although they were sincerely attached to
one another.
[4] From 1857 to 1861.
[5] _Journal,_ October, 1857.
[6] Letter to Fet, 1863 (_Vie et Oeuvre_).
[7] _Confessions._