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._ CHAPTER VIII MARRIAGE