Records of Later Life

by Fanny Kemble

I went to the Duchess of Sutherland's fancy ball in my favorite costume, a Spanish dress, which suited my finances as well as my fancy, my person, and my purse; for I had nothing to get but a short black satin skirt, having beautiful flounces of black lace, high comb, mantilla, and, in short, all things needful already in my own possession.

I have told you of Adelaide's new prospects, in which I rejoice as much as I can rejoice in anything. She is herself very happy, poor child! and 'tis a pleasure and a positive relief to see her face, with its bright expression of newly dawned hope upon it.

Good-night, dear. My head aches, and I feel weary and worn out; our life just now is one of insane, incessant dissipation. Thank God, I have a bed, and have not lost the secret of sleeping.

Ever yours,

Fanny.

KOTZEBUE'S "STRANGER." [A long discussion with my wise and excellent friend and connection, Mr. Horace Wilson, induced me to think a good deal upon the possibility of a man, in the position of Kotzebue's "Stranger," receiving back his wife to the home she had deserted. Mr. Wilson condemned the idea as absolutely inadmissible and fatally immoral. In our Saviour's teaching it is said that a man shall put away his wife for only one cause; but is it said that he shall in every case put her away for that cause? and is the offence a wife commits against her husband the one exception to the universal law of the forgiveness which Christ taught? Men have so considered it; and in the general interest of the preservation of society, a wife's fidelity to her duties becomes one of the most important elements of security; the protection of the family, the integrity of inheritance, the rightful descent of property, are all involved in it. But these are questions of social expediency, and, though based on deep moral foundations, are not of such overwhelming moral force as to forbid the contemplation of any possible exception to their authority. I have heard—I know not if it is true—that in some parts of Germany, formerly, where the practice of divorce obtained to a degree tolerated nowhere else in Christendom, it occasionally happened that, after a legal separation and intermediate marriages (sanctioned also by the law), the original pair, set free once more by death or second divorce, resumed their first ties—a condition of things which appears monstrous, considered as that which we call marriage, with the English and American branch of the Anglo-Saxon family, the holiest of human ties; with Roman Catholic Christians, an indissoluble bond, sacred as a sacrament of their Church.

Without being able to determine the question satisfactorily in my own mind with reference to the supposed conclusion of the play of "The Stranger," in which Mr. Wilson said that the husband, receiving his repentant wife in his arms, was highly offensive to all morality, which demanded imperatively her absolute rejection and punishment, I began to consider what sort of escape from punishment it might be which would probably follow the forgiveness of her husband, her readmission to her home, and the renewal of her intercourse with her children. In Kotzebue's play the persons are all German, and their nationality has to be borne in mind in contemplating Waldburg's possible forgiveness of his wife. Steinforth, his dearest friend, and a man of the highest honor and morality (as conceived by the author), urges upon Waldburg the pardon of Adelaide; urges it almost as a duty, and zealously assists Madame von Wintersen's plan of bringing the unhappy people together, and effecting a reconciliation between them by means of the unexpected sight of their children. Moreover, when Waldburg rejects his friend's advice and entreaties that he will forgive his wife, it is hardly upon the ground of any deep moral turpitude involved in such a forgiveness, but upon the score of the insupportable humiliation of reappearing in the great world of German society to which they both belong with "his runaway wife on his arm," and the "whispering, pointing, jeering" of which their reconciliation would be the object, winding up with the irrevocable "Never! never! never!"

Nevertheless, in Kotzebue's play he does receive his wife in his arms as the curtain falls, and the German public go home comforted in believing her forgiven. I do not know how the dumb-show at the end of the English play is generally conducted; but in my father's instance, I know he so far carried out my friend Horace Wilson's sentiment (which was also his own on the subject) that, while his miserable wife falls senseless at his feet, he turns again in the act of flying from her as the curtain drops, leaving the English public to go home comforted in the belief that he had not forgiven her.

The result of these discussions, as I said, led me to imagine how far such a woman would escape her righteous punishment, even if restored to her home; and in the sequel to "The Stranger," which I endeavored to construct, I worked out my own ideas upon the subject.

Forgiveness of sin is not remission of punishment; and the highest justice might rest satisfied with the conviction that God, who forgives every sinner, punishes every sin; nor can even His mercy remit the righteous consequence ordained by it. God's punishments are consequences, the results of His all-righteous laws, never to be escaped from, but leaving forever possible the blessed hope of His forgiveness; but no one ever yet outran his sin or escaped from its inevitable result.