_Family Happiness_, written partly in 1858, was published early in 1859. It grew out of the unsuccessful love affair mentioned in the last chapter, and is Tolstoy's imaginative description of what might have been. 1859 The first months of 1859 he spent in Moscow, and here on the occasion of joining the Moscow Society of Lovers of Russian Literature, on 4th February, he for the first time made a public speech: a task for which, he once told me, he had no aptitude, and which he much disliked. He wrote it out, and it was to have appeared in the Proceedings of the Society, but for some reason never got printed. Its subject was 'The Supremacy of the Artistic Element in Literature,' and in it he maintained a position almost the opposite of the one he advocated so ardently and with such full conviction in _What is Art?_ forty years later. He was answered by the Slavophil A. S. Homyakóf, who presided at the meeting, and who in the course of his remarks said: Allow me to remark that the justice of the opinion you have so skilfully stated is far from destroying the legitimacy of the temporary and exceptional side of literature. That which is always right, that which is always beautiful, that which is as unalterable as the most fundamental laws of the soul, undoubtedly holds, and should hold, the first place in the thoughts, the impulses, and therefore in the speech of man. It, and it alone, will be handed on by generation to generation and by nation to nation as a precious inheritance. But on the other hand, in the nature of man and of society there is continual need for self-indictment. There are moments, moments important in history, when that self-indictment acquires a special and indefeasible right, and manifests itself in literature with great definiteness and keenness.... The rights of literature, the servant of eternal beauty, do not destroy the rights of the literature of indictment, which always accompanies social deficiencies and sometimes appears as the healer of social evils.... Of course, Art is perfectly free: it finds its justification and its aim in itself. But the freedom of Art in the abstract, has nothing to do with the inner life of the artist. An artist is not a theory--a sphere of thought and mental activity--but a man, and always a man of his own times, usually its best representative, completely imbued with its spirit and its defined or nascent aspirations. By the very impressionability of his nature, without which he could not be an artist, he, even more than others, receives all the painful as well as joyous sensations of the society to which he is born....