28 MARCH 1874, Page 15

THE PILLARS OF THE HOUSE. * WHOEVER is acquainted with the

writings of the author of the Heir of Redclide will be prepared to find a new work of hers couched either in one of two styles, the transcendentally sentimental or the minutely prosaic, or in a mixture of both ; and when we say

• The Pillars of (Sr House. By Charlotte M. Yaw. 4 vols. London: Mac- millan and Co.

that the Pillars of the House is a second Daisy Chain, with suffi- cient links to swell it into four closely-printed volumes, the reader will be prepared for the worst, and decline to undertake the serious task of getting through it, unless he should feel himself capable of a sustained interest in thirteen quaintly-named, queer-tempered children (the family of a curate, of course,) who are left alone in the world to bring themselves up, and who meet the ups and downs of life in the spirit of small martyrs and infantine Etaiats. For one thing, however, we are devoutly thankful,—namely, that Miss Yonge limited herself to thirteen, and did not undertake to de- scribe a family of six-and-twenty, for then the four volumes would have become eight. Indeed, as it is, we do not quite see why the book comes to a conclusion, as it fortunately does; for although Stella-Eudora, the survivor of the last batch of twins, is married, the eldest twins have respectively three and seven children, and Edgar, the second brother, has left one, so that the rambling history might have meandered on until they also had become happy fathers and mothers, for Miss Yonge, with her power of individualising, could have found peculiarities for each and all. In our opinion, this excessive indulgence in detail is a huge mistake, even when, as is undoubtedly the case with Miss Yonge, the writer has a considerable acquaintance with human nature. The power of describing character, dissecting motive, and showing the influence of principle and the kind of church-teaching she so strongly affects, leads this author astray, and makes Mr fall so much in love with her own writing as ap- parently to find it impossible to condense and curtail. In two volumes, or even in three, the Pillars of the House would have been a much better story, losing nothing of what is good and artistic, but bereft of various excrescences, and very much bright- ened by their excision. Not only do we follow the fortunes of the thirteen Underwoods minutely for eighteen years, but we meet again with our old friends the Mays, and even with still older ones, such as Lady Constance Somerville and her sisters ; and it is rather hard upon us to be supposed to remember the ins and outs of their histories so as to be able to dovetail them properly into their new relations. Dr. May, of course, is not likely to be for- gotten, nor is Ethel, but the other sons and daughters and their husbands and wives are not quite so fresh in our recollection. The bravely-borne poverty of Mr. Underwood and his wife, poverty which they had no right to anticipate, since Vale Leston and its family living should have descended of right to the curate, who is of good family—Miss Yonge rarely concerns herself with those who are not)—is touch- ingly depicted. The father is fast giving way to decline, the mother, still young, is worn by care and toil, and even the children, thoughtless as most of them cannot fail to be at their ages, have felt the bitterness of being unable to have what others, their equals and inferiors, could claim as of right. Felix, the eldest son, is just sixteen, and his twin sisters a year younger, when, by the death of their father and the incapacity of the mother through softening of the brain, he and Wilmet become the pillars of the house. Felix had already, with his father's consent, given up his hopes of a college education and preparation for the ministry, and • accepted a guinea a week as assistant to a country bookseller ; and Wilmet had become junior teacher in Miss Pearson's school, re- turning, however, to her home every afternoon. A rich Underwood cousin adopts Edgar, and also Aida, Wilmet's twin sister, so that the " pillars " have but nine young ones to take care of; and of these, Geraldine, or Cherry, the lame invalid, has already passed beyond the period of childhood. To assist the young housekeepers in their arduous undertaking, Mr. Underwood has appointed as guardian his friend and fellow-curate, Mr. Audley, entreating him, however, only to be an elder brother to Felix, allowing the boy himself to act as bead of the family. All through the book, from the time we first find him spending his birth-day gift upon his brothers and sisters, and earning money in his play-hours to pay for a bath-chair for poor lame Geraldine, until almost his last act, when, having become owner of Vale Luton, he restores to the church the great tithes which had long been considered the legiti- mate property of the Squire, the life of Felix is one continuous self-sacrifice, self-sacrifice which, if a little ecclesiastical in tinge, is made with a simplicity and nobleness beyond all praise. This manly, self-restrained, high-minded elder brother is a creation of which Miss Yonge may well be proud, for he is given without exaggeration, and with a truth of drawing that makes him command at once our sympathy and our esteem. Wilmet, not less natural, but far less loveable—inasmuch as her habits of close economy and her position as household ruler im- print upon her a certain dignified unapproachableness, until she becomes softened and m'ade to own loving aubmission to a master —is handsome, conscious of her beauty, while despising it, and. terribly sure that in her self-reliant, methodical, well-governed, existence she is always and infallibly right. We confess that we never arrive at liking this admirable Wilma, even when she has become Mrs. John Harewood and the mother of two unruly boys; and the wonder is that her young brothers and sisters preserve for this stately " pillar " such loyal affection. Poor little nervous, excitable Geraldine, who eventually succeeds in overcoming so much of her trouble, and who becomes with Felix the mainstay of the' house of Underwood after Wilmet's departure, is a much more loveable personage, while in Clement we see a character naturally weak and vain, strengthenea and endowed with a dignity of its own by sincere adherence to religious principle. Angela, on the contrary, is unstable, and always getting herself and others into trouble, because her volatile nature has never been really impressed with deep feeling of any kind, and it is a relief when she is at last safely disposed of even irt a sisterhood, under the genial and practical Mother Constance.. Angela's temperament and disposition incline her to be a fast young lady, while conscience, and home precept, and example lead her the other way; the effects of this inner warfare are very well described, and some of the young lady's freaks are droll enough.. Miss Yonge does not disdain to allow her to talk a little slang, which in the case of the boys she carries pretty far. Felix, however, being engaged on the press, is wont to express himself at times with almost prosy exactness, and to incline to lengthy words which come in strangely, as, for instance, just after he has said he was about "to cut and run," he tells Geraldine that poverty only exacerbates the children, which is about as bad as all the stupid jokes about Category, K T, &c., when Lady Caergwent appears upon the scene.

Amongst the host of people who jostle one another con- tinually in this wonderful book, the reading of which leaves the feeling behind it of having spent a long time in a crowd of conflicting characters, and retaining a very hazy impression of the greater part of them, the Harewood family are decidedly the pleasantest. Miss Yonge even makes a. faint approach to humour when she describes the good-natured Mrs. Malaprop, who allows her household to take care of itself, but never fails in motherliness and kindness of heart. Her ugly, red- haired, freckled, and clever sons are worth a dozen of the very prim and proper Underwoods, in whose lives, except, perhaps, is the case of Lance, the effort to be good is always so painfully apparent. Lance getting tea for Cherry at the Harewoods, and providing the master of the house himself with refreshment, is really a good scene, but too long to extract. Marilda, of the other family of Underwoods, is extremely like a character of Anthony Trollope's,—one of those ungainly, vulgar, sensible, and shrewd women he knows how to draw so well ; she is useful, but by no- means ornamental, and contrasts very well with the selfish, showy cousin, who does her beat to make every one unhappy, and ends by being supremely so herself. Aida, although a very disagreeable character, is, however, an extremely natural one, for it is not un- common to meet with people who worship themselves with a fond veneration that prevents the cares of others from having any place in their thoughts, and such is Alda. Miss Yonge fails almost invari- ably when she attempts to enter the region ofthe sensational,— she is at home in recording the minute introspections of her semi-monastic clergy, and she is very good at picturing the struggles of genteel poverty and the home life of large families—indeed, were it not for excess of detail, some of these domestic pictures might be said to be perfect, but she does not understand life as the man of the world sees it and enters into and whenever she brings subjects of this kind upon the tapis we feel that she is retailing them at second-hand, and that they are forced and unnatural. In our opinion, all the Fernando Travis episode, as well as Edgar's Bohemian career and his duel with M. Tanneguy, might have been left out with much advantage to- the story ; and of the whole book, we Cannot help saying that amidst the prosaic and every-day things of which it treats, there runs a vein of false sentiment that leaves with the reader an un- comfortable sense of unreality, and a feeling that the whole fabric. wants substance, and is based upon a foundation which will infal- libly crumble away, leaving nothing but mouldering ruin behind.