In talking once with my sister of self-condemnation, and our condemnation of others, I used an expression which she took up as eminently ridiculous; but I think she did not quite understand me. I said that there was a feeling of modesty which prevented one's uttering the extent of one's own self-accusations, at which she laughed very much, and said she thought that modesty ought to interfere in behalf of others as well as one's self; but there are some reasons why it does not. Severely as one may judge and blame others, it is always, of course, with the perception that one cannot know the whole of the case for or against them; nevertheless, even with this conviction, there are certain words and deeds of others which one condemns unhesitatingly. Such sentences as these I pronounce often and without scruple (harshly, perhaps, and therein committing most mischievous, foul sin in chiding sin), but one does not utter that which one feels more rarely (however strongly, in particular instances), one's impression of the evil tendency of a whole character, the weakness or wickedness, the disease which pervades the whole moral constitution, and which seems to denote certain inevitable results; on these one hesitates to pronounce opinion, not so much, I think, because of the uncertainty one feels, as in the case of a special motive, or temptation to any special act, and the liability to mistake, both in the quality of motive and quality of temptation; as because so much deeper a condemnation is involved in such judgments. It is the difference between a physician's opinion on an acute attack of illness or a radical and fatal constitutional tendency. This sort of condemnation requires such intimate knowledge that one can hardly pass it upon any but one's self. One cannot tear off all coverings from the hearts and minds of others, whereas one could strip one's own moral deformities naked, and that species of self-accusation does seem to me a kind of immodesty. One naturally shrinks, too, from speaking of deep and awful things, and then there is the all but insuperable difficulty of putting one's most intimate convictions, the realities of one's soul, into words at all....
Oh, my dear Harriet, I have told you nothing of John and Natalia's mesmeric practices [my brother and his German wife]. If you could have seen them, you would have split your lean sides more than you did at my aspect and demeanor while listening to A—— reading her favorite French novels to me.
"MATHILDE." By-the-by, do you know that that very book, "Mathilde," which I could not listen to for a quarter of an hour with common patience, is cried up everywhere and by everybody as a most extraordinary production? At Bowood everybody was raving about it; Mrs. Jameson tells me that Carlyle excepted it from a general anathema on French novels. Sometimes I think I will try again to get through it, and then I think, as little F—— says when she is requested to do something that she ought, "Eelly, now, me tan not."
I am finishing George Sand's "Lettres d'un Voyageur," because in an evil hour I began them. Her style is really admirable, and in this book one escapes the moral (or immoral) complications of her stories.
God bless you, dear Harriet. Good-bye. Time and opportunity serving, you surely see that I am not only faithful, but prompt, in the discharge of my debts.
Ever yours,
Fanny.
I forgot to tell you that my poor Margery [my children's former nurse] has at length applied to the tribunals of Pennsylvania for a separation from her cruel and worthless husband. Poor thing! I hope she will obtain it.
[The tribunals of Pennsylvania followed, in the law of divorce, the German and not the English precedent and process. Divorce was granted by them, as well as mere separation, on plea of incompatibility of temper, and also for cause of non-cohabitation during a space of two years. In regard to the laws of marriage and divorce, as well as most other matters, each state in the Union had its own peculiar code, agreeing or differing from the rest. The Massachusetts laws of marriage and divorce were, I believe, the same as the English. In Pennsylvania a much greater facility for obtaining divorce—adopted, I suppose, from German modes of thought and feeling, and perhaps German legislature—prevailed, while in some of the western states, more exclusively occupied by a German population, the facility with which the bond of marriage was dissolved was greater than in any civilized Christian community in the world, I think.]
Harley Street, January 16th, 1842.