CHARLOTTE MARY YONGE.* HALF-A-CENTURY has passed since men read the
novels of the young writer who felt and expressed the stirrings of what we know in looking back to have been an epoch of romance, an • Charlotte Mary Tong.. By Chriatabel Coleridge. London: Macmillan and Co. [12a. ed. net] epoch in which Thackeray, Dickens, Tennyson,. Kingsley, Maurice, were at work. From the pen of Miss Yonge, of good pedigree, well-known connection, good-looking, intensely shy— as report said, when accurate—had appeared these entirely domestic stories, such as The Heir of Bedclyffe and Heartsease, representing aspirations of which, the countryside had never been conscious, but which it now recognised to be its own, at least in ideal. They were religious in tendency, they repre- sented the feminine side of the Oxford Movement, they were known to be inspired by Tractarian influences, and indeed to be directly supervised by the author of The Christian Year. Yet Kingsley wrote of Heartsease that " it is the most delight- ful and wholesome novel that I ever read "; Lord Raglan was absorbed in it as he went to the Crimea, and in the hospital. there it was read and re-read. The race of delightful old gentlemen of perfect manners and generous hearts, of whom each day now bereaves us, were not, in their then respen- Bible middle age, as they have told us, ashamed of tears, or of betraying such interest as Tennyson later showed when be exclaimed : " I see it all ; he's going to be confirmed !"
Charlotte Mary Yonge has commented upon incidents in her own childhood as a lesson to parents. She herself was on terms of extraordinary intimacy with her mother, devoted to her and other members of the family. No hint of any love- story appears in these pages, and while others were sorry for the severe Edgeworthian discipline she underwent in early life, she thought her father's treatment deserved by what she always characterised as her innate slovenliness and laziness,— faults which no one else perceived. Invaluable traditions of truthfulness and obedience were part of her life. She recalls one lie, told when at seven years of age she was a teacher, and when, having permitted a favourite scholar to attain unmerited honour, she was questioned, and burdened her childish con- science with what was untrue. She remembered that there was another equivocation, but she was not able to recall what it was ! Another childish trouble was that of her own ugli- ness and of her mental deficiencies,—so studiously it had been kept from her that she was a specially pretty and intelligent child. While she herself has suggested some comments on her bringing up, she never blamed it, as others do, for what created the greatest difficulties in her life, her intense shy- ness. With the children she so brilliantly taught and with her most ardent admirers she was often miserable, for she snubbed them in her agony of shyness, and knew it without being able to help it.
At her ease, Miss Yonge's fine countenance in late years was ideal in its expression of intelligence and sympathy. But she had little or no personal magnetism. Her influence in life was disseminated through her books, and in her self- lessness she has evidently made the biographer's task hard enough ; she threw away material, rarely kept occasional papers, seldom dated her letters, and did not preserve those of her friends. Miss Coleridge has made selections as she best could, perhaps not always with the finest selective faculty, or in the most lucid ordering; and she has furnished us with a list, which Miss Yonge herself said was impossible to make, of her books in chronological order. We regret that Miss Coleridge did not attempt also a classification of the some hundred and fifty publications, for one of a biographer's tasks is to direct attention to an author's writings. It can scarcely be expected that those to whom Miss Yonge's name, is, unknown should discern at a glance what are the different styles, and rare must be the beings who in these days can wish omnivorously to read.elementary, parochial, and schoolroom stories, lesson- books. (some out of.. date), stories for girls which, merge into novels, the romances and novels already alluded to as forming her title to honour among her contemporaries, her series of historical novels, her histories, biographies, and ethical works.
It would have been of some service had Miss Coleridge given the chronological succession of the historical group, and surely there are few readers under forty who could describe the exact order of the cycles of domestic history represented by The Castle Builders, Countess Kate, The Stokesley Secret, Hopes and Fears, The Daisy Chain, The Trial, The Pillars of the House, and Modern Broods, a volume published not long ago representing about seventy characters of this group. A few pages of the biography would have sufficed for such a guide to readers, and although the American and Continental sales of Miss Yonge's publications cannot be traced, more bibliography
would have been valuable. A veil is drawn over several points on which we should have liked more information, and we might have had some guide to other sources of elucidation. Miss Yonge's editorial work on the Monthly Packet, with which of late years Miss Coleridge was associated, is lightly touched.
It continued for forty years, and meant many friendships and much kindness to others. She edited also Mothers in Council in late years, and a most useful publication, the Monthly Paper of Sunday Teaching, was dear to hundreds of religious women. The activities of her literary life were as great as her cour- tesies ; and yet her personal existence was framed within a small circle, and she had very few changes of scene.
While we regret to find the Life lacking in some of the qualities of well-written biography—proportion, perspective, and atmosphere, occasionally in information, and as a whole in arrangement—we most heartily welcome its picture of a sane, sweet, and saintly life. Miss Christabel Coleridge is qualified for her task on several counts, not least by Miss Yonge's wish that her late co-editor should " do it if it had to be done." We thank her for tracing for us many lines of interest in the character of a most noble influence in the world of women. If we miss somewhat that we looked for, we find much to reward the reading.
More than a third of the volume is occupied by an auto- biography—an unfinished work, we believe, begun in the "seventies "—and the biography is, as far as possible, a con- tinuation of the same. If there is almost silence as to Miss Yonge's religious life, nothing could be more sympathetic than the treatment of the romantic side of her character; and many who are doing valuable parochial drudgery may well be cheered by seeing how its "humdrum" side appealed to a woman of undoubted intellect ; and the way in which she rendered to all their due, suffered changes, recognised official positions, and bore the displacement of projects will read a lesson to many. Her methods and motives are seen in her tales, but it is in two books above all that we find the expression of her personal views,—in the long novel, The Pillars of the House, and in Womankind; while at the time of her last illness she was engaged on a series of papers, Why I am a Catholic and not a Roman Catholic, which, though written for popular pur- poses, represented her ripest convictions. Miss Yonge was a faithful, as she was a distinguished, daughter of the Church of England, which ever since the earliest days of Christianity in this land has produced and sanctified many a woman with brains. She was taught by Keble to consecrate a new form of usefulness to her Church, and by the same spirit, in a singularly old-world domestic life, to do as her spiritual predecessors had done in toil or asceticism. The whole lesson of this biography, as it will strike those for whom it is chiefly intended, is that Miss Yonge lived in the spirit of the well-known saying of St. Augustine : Deus in nobis dona coronat sua. The keynote of the Oxford Movement, as described by Dean Church, was "personal holiness," and to suggest the method of its attainment by her popular pen was a great work ; but her whole life is best summed up in the simple words inserted in an address from representative people of all classes given to her on her seventieth birthday,—she has "done much good."
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