A Private History of Happiness (29 page)

He was pleased and relieved, too, as they “conversed together with solid delight and pleasure.” Now there was none of the strain that had inhibited them when last they met. The longer they talked, the happier this moment of true communication became. Their conversation was of “boundless confidence,” and “reciprocal love and tenderness” pointed their way to a future together.

The world became full of space and promise. The boundaries separating them apparently dissolved and they felt “the most perfect harmony” of souls.

Sydney Owenson, novelist, writing a letter to her fiancé

DUBLIN
• OCTOBER 31, 1811

I am not half such a little rascal as you suppose; the best feelings only have detained me from you; and feelings better than the best will bring me back to you. I must be more or less than woman to resist tenderness, goodness, excellence, like yours, and I am simply woman, aye, dear, “every inch a woman.” I feel a little kind of tingling about the heart, at once more feeling myself nestled in yours; do you remember? Well, dear, if you don’t, I will soon revive your recollection. I said I would not write to you today, but I could not resist it, and I am now going off to a man of business, and about Lady Abercorn’s books, in the midst of the snow, and pinched with cold. God bless you, love.

Sydney Owenson was already a successful poet, and also a rising novelist, by 1811. She was still young, probably in her mid-twenties (though as she refused to reveal her exact year of birth, her age remains uncertain). She was the daughter of an Irish actor, educated by her mother in Dublin, and very much a self-made success. Presently, she was the companion to the aristocratic Lady Abercorn, whose physician was Thomas Charles Morgan—to whom Owenson wrote this letter. They were recently engaged and would marry the next year.

She began by referring to herself as “not half such a little rascal,” which hinted at the intimate language of their relationship. It was also a hint of something else, her own height being under four feet, which she evidently turned to advantage by creating this persona full of self-mockery and humor. Morgan’s own small stature had been one reason why Lady Abercorn had introduced them to each other, and so these words carry in them the playful response of the couple to other people’s view of them.

Sydney Owenson was able to express intimate feeling with great delicacy but also directness, suggesting how she and her fiancé must have been developing a deep mutual understanding. She felt, she said,
a “tingling about the heart” at the thought of being close to him. It was both the memory of a happy time and a happy feeling in itself. That tingling was the sensation of being loved and in love, the closing of the circle like the closing of the arms round her. It was security and stability after a long and self-possessed journey from poverty and exclusion.

The memory of that moment of closeness was sustaining and she saw the letter as another form of embrace, a kind of closeness achieved through writing. It was as if she wanted to prevent any gap from opening between them. Meanwhile, she was busy with Lady Abercorn’s business in the world outside. The snow-covered streets were the opposite of the warm and tingling embrace of intimacy. They must have made the happiness seem even more vivid and glowing.

Leo Tolstoy, young aristocrat and future novelist, writing in his diary

MOSCOW
•
JANUARY 25, 1851

I have fallen in love, or imagine myself to have fallen in love. It happened at an evening party.

I quite lost my head. I have bought a horse which I do not need.

Rules
—Never to offer anything for that which I do not require. On arriving
at a hall, to invite some lady to dance and to take with her one turn in a polka or a waltz.

This evening I must think out ways and means, and set my affairs in order. Meanwhile, stay at home.

Leo Tolstoy was twenty-three, the son of aristocratic Russian landowners. He had lost his parents while still a child and had been brought up by two aunts, successively. His student days had been unsettled and unhappy. Now he was living in Moscow, plunging into the wealthy social life there. He was already in debt, usually bored, and still uncertain about the future.

On a January evening, he had gone to yet another party. He had not expected anything special, only the usual distractions from his inner unhappiness. Instead, something extraordinary occurred. It was like a thunderbolt in a clear sky when he found: “I have fallen in love.” (Apparently she was a married princess.) He had not set out to find love that evening. He disapproved of these parties, though he could not resist attending. His previous relationships had been superficial. But suddenly the feeling had found him, amid all his introspection.

Tolstoy’s immediate response was the typically skeptical doubt that he might only “imagine myself to have fallen in love.” Yet even his doubts were full of freshness. Nor did they last at all, since he passed instantly on to record how “it happened at an evening party.” The impact of love was too strong to be merely imaginary, though it
might have had some imagination mixed in with it. Did he just have a crush? Or was this a deeper emotion?

The experience did sweep him off his feet: “I quite lost my head.” It was such a sudden sensation and so powerful, unlike his tepid feelings at the time. His happiness expressed itself soon afterwards in a gift to himself, absurd and carefree: “I have bought a horse.” His skeptical self pointed out that he did not need a horse. But the joy persisted. His old inhibitions had been broken. He was free to buy a horse, if he wished to do so. Happiness permitted it.

It was a totally liberating feeling. Now he was simply a young man in love, not a restless, dissatisfied aristocrat.

He began to fight against this sudden liberation and spoke of imposing new “rules,” such as “Never to offer anything for that which I do not require.” But it was too late. There was no great future to this amour, as events transpired. Instead of romance, it was war that called Tolstoy, and he soon enlisted in the Imperial Russian Army. Yet that feeling of love was complete as it was. Even if fleeting, happiness had struck.

Sulpicia, young noblewoman, composing a lyric poem

ROME
• CA. 30 BCE

At last love has come
—and such a love that

I would be more ashamed to have it hidden than revealed.

Venus, won over by my muses, brought him

And dropped him in my lap.

She kept her word. Now let my happiness speak

For itself and others if they have not had their own.

Sulpicia lived during the reign of Emperor Augustus. She was the daughter of a senator and the niece of an even more powerful Roman statesman. We know little about her, and only half a dozen of her poems have survived. But they do speak very directly of her personal life. A theme running through the poems that we have is a relationship outside marriage. Here, the young man—to whom she gives the name Cerinthus—had just come into her life.

She had waited a long time for love to come. She had devoted her muse, her poetry, to making the goddess Venus favorable. How many poems and pleas did it take to win such favor? At last the reward for all her devotion and persistence had arrived. Since Venus had kept her promise, it would be folly to renounce what she was offering.

Of course Sulpicia writes in the manner of a remote period, playing with religious and mythological ideas just as the male poets of the time did. But the words also record an actual moment when happiness broke into a particular woman’s life and she decided to seize it—and her lover.

It was like receiving a sudden present, the abrupt entry of this young man into her world. Venus had “brought him and dropped him in my lap.” It was as if one moment Sulpicia’s arms were empty and the next, there he was clasped in her embrace. Her contemporary, the poet Horace, advised his followers to “seize the moment.” Otherwise happiness would simply pass us by. So she seized her
moment and with it, this young man. Before it was too late and he got away.

Roman women were brought up to be modest. Yet Sulpicia felt at that moment like shouting the news from the rooftops. When happiness was so freely given by the gods, it would be more of a sin to conceal it than to let it be known. It would be ungrateful to Venus not to tell everyone how well she had kept her promise. For her as a poet, the words were part of the feeling: being happy and expressing it this way composed one complete experience.

Sulpicia imagined the reaction. She knew very well how people were going to talk about her. They would say it was shameful, doubly shameful: first the deed and then the confession. But that was only because they themselves had never known such an overwhelming experience of happiness.

Richardson Pack, army officer, writing a poem

ABERDEEN
• OCTOBER 26, 1728

When first I saw you (who says Love is blind?)

Your bending Head was on your Arm reclin’d;

A down-cast Look, but yet superior Grace

Adorn’d with modest Airs your matchless Face.

Richardson Pack was in his late forties. He had had a successful career as a British army officer from which he had been retired prosperously in East Anglia. Then, after years of peaceful retirement, he was called to rejoin his former regiment, initially at Exeter in southwest England. From there they marched to Aberdeen in the far northeast of Scotland, as part of King George II’s campaigns against Jacobite rebels that continued over many years after the unsuccessful rising of 1715. Major Pack had distinguished himself in his earlier career, notably in 1710 when fighting in Spain. Now, however, he was unprepared for the rigors of garrisoning cold northern towns and he died of a fever in Aberdeen in December 1728. These lines of poetry belonged to his very final months.