CHARLOTTE MARY YONGE. By permission of Miss Bramston, from a photograph taken in Elderfield Garden, 1898.
Frontispiece.
CHARLOTTE MARY YONGE
A\r APP vTION
A. K.
LONDON: 34 GREAT f OXF'
i
CHARLOTTE MARY YONGE
AN APPRECIATION
BY
ETHEL ROMANES
AUTHOR OF
THE LIFE OF G. J. ROMANES,' ' THE STORY OF PORT ROYAL.' 'BIBLE READINGS,' ETC.
A. E. MOWBEAY & CO., LTD.
LONDON: 34 GREAT CASTLE ST., OXFORD CIRCUS, W. OXFORD: 9 HIGH STREET
1908
PR
59/3
Cop. 2
I
PREFACE
THIS little book is not intended to rival or super- sede Miss Coleridge's larger Life.
What the writer set out to do was to show that Miss Yonge was indeed a leader of religion, and that she had a very great share in that movement which we know as the Oxford Movement.
I have therefore tried as much as possible not to repeat anything which is found in Miss Coleridge's Life, and have sought to make the book what I have called it — ' an appreciation.'
My best thanks are due to Miss Coleridge and Messrs. Macmillan for permission to quote from the Life and from the works of Miss Yonge ;• to Messrs. Parker and the editor of Mothers in Council for a like permission ; to Mrs. Knight, Miss Cazenove, Miss Ireland Blackburne, and Miss Patteson for letters ; to Miss Wordsworth for her delightful reminiscences ; and, finally, to Lady Frederick Caven- dish for her interesting contribution.
E. R.
PlTOALfcEAN, 1908.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH 1
II. THE EARLY BOOKS - 28
III. THE ' MONTHLY PACKET ' - 45
IV. ' THE HEIR OF REDCLYFFE ' - 63 V. ' CONVERSATIONS ON THE CATECHISM ' ' DYNEVOR
TERRACE' — A VISIT TO IRELAND - 78
VI. LIFE AT ELDERFIELD ' THE YOUNG STEPMOTHER*
' THE TRIAL/ AND OTHER BOOKS - - 86
vii. MR. KEBLE'S DEATH — THE HISTORICAL TALES — BISHOP
PATTESON - 103
viii. 'THE PILLARS OF THE HOUSE/ AND OTHER FAMILY
CHRONICLES CHANGES - - 128
ix. MISS WORDSWORTH'S VISITS - - 137
X. BOOKS FOR CHILDREN RELIGIOUS BOOKS LATER
YEARS - - 160
THE SECRET OF MISS YONGfi's INFLUENCE - 1,96
By Lady Frederick Cavendish.
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
CHARLOTTE MARY YONGE - Frontispiece
FACING PAGE
HURSLEY CHURCH - 10 HURSLEY VICARAGE : THE FAVOURITE CORNER OF JOHN
KEBLE 3 1
CHARLOTTE MARY YONGE - 38
HURSLEY CHURCH AND VICARAGE - 51
CHARLOTTE MARY YONGfi's WRITING-TABLE AT ELDERFIELD 63
OTTERBOURNE VILLAGE, WITH ELDERFIELD ON THE RIGHT 78
THE LIBRARY, ELDERFIELD - 88
JOHN KEBLE, AFTER THE PAINTING BY G. RICHMOND - 103
BISHOP PATTESON - 118
CHARLOTTE MARY YONGE 140
OTTERBOURNE CHURCH - 152
CHARLOTTE MARY YONGE IN HER GARDEN AT ELDERFIELD 1?2 ROOD SCREEN IN OTTERBOURNE CHURCH - -180 REREDOS IN THE LADY CHAPEL, WINCHESTER CATHEDRAL,
ERECTED TO THE MEMORY OF CHARLOTTE MARY YONGE 1 86
THE GRAVE OF CHARLOTTE MARY YONGE - 194
CHARLOTTE MARY YONGE
CHAPTER I
CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH (1823—1843)
CHARLOTTE MARY YONGE was born on August 11, 1823, and died March 24, 1901.
She was of a good and honourable Devonshire family. Her father, William Yonge, served through the Peninsular War, and was present at Waterloo — a great and lifelong joy to his daughter. He had fallen in love with a certain Miss Fanny Bargus, but the course of true love by no means ran smooth, and for five years the attachment between the young people was unacknowledged by the stern parents. William Yonge's father, Mr. Duke Yonge, Vicar of Cornwood, in Devonshire, reasonably enough, demurred to his son, a young man con- siderably under thirty, throwing up his profes- sion, and Mrs. Bargus, unreasonably, (at least, so it seems to modern people), would not let her only daughter marry a soldier. At last, in 1822, these difficulties were removed. William Yonge resigned his commission, and settled down on a tiny property at Otterbourne, near Winchester, which Mrs. Bargus
1
2 CHARLOTTE MARY YONGE
had bought, and where it was arranged that the young people should live with her.
It must have been a very great sacrifice, for Mr. Yonge loved his profession and Devonshire, and was an active and vigorous man. To us in these days, when it is more the fashion to consider children than parents, the idea of an elderly woman insisting on what seems likely to spoil a man's life is absolutely monstrous ; but Mr. Yonge took it as a matter of course, and was always a dutiful son to his somewhat difficult mother-in-law. It is curious to see how strong Miss Yonge's views always were on the subject of duties to the old.
In Heartsease, for instance, Helen Fotheringham is allowed to spoil not only her own, but also the life of her betrothed lover, John Martindale, by taking care of an imbecile grandfather. Helen was a very beautiful character, and possibly the sacrifice of not merely the best years of her own and of John's life, but of her health, was necessary. What is odd is that Miss Yonge has no doubt or suspicion that Helen could have done anything else ; there was no clash of duties. The grand- mother in Henriettas Wish, we are sure, is a recol- lection of Mrs. Bargus, but we will return to this book later on ; it is such a perfect illustration of the change in ideas of the relations between young and old which has come since 1823.
The numerous cousins ; the associations with good, pious, cultivated forefathers and contemporaries ; the chivalrous ideals among which she was nur- tured ; the sweet English scenery, so quiet and sooth- ing— the landscape, in fact, of the Christian Year
CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH 3
—together with the Devonshire rocks and moors and sea, all made up influences which had much to do with making Charlotte what she became. She was a child of the English Church ; she was a thorough Englishwoman. Loyalty to Church and Throne, an absolute devotion to duty, a love of what was good and beautiful, a deep reverence for sacred things, a certain reserve which resulted in an awk- ward shyness — all these are so truly English. It is probable that much which helped to build up her character is passing away, or has passed away. But so long as the Church which she loved so much and served so well exists, so long will good and holy men and women be trained up to work, if not on the lines she thought best, at least in her spirit and for the same cause, under the same Captain.
Through all the years of her long life she did a noble work, and it was nothing less than this : she showed in all her books how intimately Creed and Character are linked ; she taught in every book that there was one thing, and one only, which everyone, from the crowned monarch on his throne to the little servant-girl in her scullery, had to think about : 1 What ought I to do ? What is it God requires of me ?' Miss Yonge shrank from overmuch talk about religion in her books and in daily life, but in reality she and Brother Lawrence were absolutely agreed. She lived and moved in the Presence of God, and she made the sense of that living Presence a motive power in the lives of her best people.
She showed how every Article in the Creed was, not some theological dogma expressed in technical language, but was a living truth which would act
1—2
4 CHARLOTTE MARY YONGE
on the lives of those who assimilated it, and make them fruitful.
Charlotte Yonge has been sneered at more than once for exalting the domestic virtues, yet it was she who was almost the first story-teller who dared to write of the Religious Life as a normal development. It was she who wrote the life of our great missionary Bishop Patteson, who certainly 'left father and mother and all that he had for Christ's sake and the Gospel.' It was she who, in the magazine she edited for so long, set forth the ideals and the lives of the faithful in the Western and Eastern branches of the Church.
But she was absolutely loyal to the English Church, and recognized that in this much-despised communion there are possibilities of sanctity, and privileges, and peace and joy and access to God.
She has influenced many people who are now themselves old ; she has held up to them an ideal of goodness ; she has made them know the possibilities within their own Church ; she does indeed deserve a place among the leaders of religion in the Church of England.
Of course, as a writer she has limitations : she is not a Jane Austen or a George Eliot; but in her own degree she has a place among the great ones of literature, if it were only for the Little Duke and for creating Dr. May. But of all this we shall say more.
But no one who cares for the Church, no one who really wishes to know something of the history of that extraordinary revival of life and of devotion in the Anglican Communion, ought to ignore Char- lotte Mary Yonge, or think of her as a mere writer
CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH 5
of domestic tales which possess a High Church flavour, and are rather tiresome and prolix. They are much more than this, and some of them deserve to be remembered, and probably will be held in affection, for many a year to come.
Charlotte Mary Yonge was for more than six years her parents' only child. Her brother was born on January 31, 1830. She has told us a great deal about her childhood, which was a happy one, although it lacked much of what is now considered essential to a child's happiness. Companions of her own age she had not many, except during the joyous times of the annual visits to Devonshire to the cousinhood there.
She was taught by father and mother, and they were undoubtedly intelligent and clever people, much inclined to the bracing system which the Edgeworths had introduced, and to overmuch re- pression and snubbing. Possibly a good deal of her awkwardness and shyness might have been over- come had she lived among people with real country tastes and more powers of gratifying them. She never seems to have been taught to ride or drive, or encouraged to do anything except take moderate walks. But it was the fashion of the day that women should be incapable of bodily exertion.
At home there were regular lessons in the morn- ing, walks or play by herself in the afternoon, and not very much more. As a little girl the only children near at hand were the Shipleys of Twyf ord, but, alas ! they did not like ' pretend games.'
It is surely herself whom Miss Yonge describes in Countess Kate. Kate, that most delightful and
6 CHARLOTTE MARY YONGE
natural of little girls, who had no control over a squeaky voice, whose greatest joy was to play at the Lady of the Lake, or at * Hermione descending to soft music ' ; Kate, whose clothes tore of themselves, and to whom dirt and brambles attached themselves, who was warm-hearted and loyal, and loved a stern but just rule, and was too shy to do herself justice, seems a description of Charlotte.
Miss Yonge, especially in her earlier books, was fond of describing fathers and uncles who were stern, upright, rather awe-inspiring, but withal the most delightful of playfellows and the most sym- pathetic of friends. Uncle Geoffrey in Henriettas Wish, Colonel Umfraville in Countess Kate, are, we feel pretty sure, suggested by Mr. William Yonge.
There is also a charming story, The Sea Spleenwort, which first appeared in a set of tales called The Magnet Stories. These volumes charmed not a few little people fifty years ago. The Sea Spleenwort is surely a bit of autobiography, with the delightful account of the seaside home and numerous cousins.
To her father Miss Yonge looked up with un- questioning love and loyalty, but he was a rather impatient and exacting parent. He was an exceed- ingly handsome man, and Miss Yonge speaks of his
* dark keen eyes, with the most wonderful power both for sweetness and for sternness that I ever knew. ... I loved their approval and their look of affection, and dreaded their displeasure more than anything else.
' Even now (1877), when for twenty-three years they have been closed, to think of their beaming
CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH 7
smile seems to me to recall my greatest happiness, of their warning glance my chief dread and shame.'*
The description Miss Yonge gives of her mother is very charming, and shows how bright and intelligent a person Mrs. Yonge must have been ; her married life so much happier than her childhood. Her letters are delightful.
When Charlotte was five years old, Mrs. Yonge took her to the Sunday-school which had been set up by Mr. Yonge in a small cottage in 1822. On week-days the school was taught by a Dame, who certainly did not know much, but could at any rate teach reading, needlework, and — manners. Surely Chantry House and its descriptions of what the Winslows found in their parish was a tolerably exact account of the funny arrangements the Yonges dis- covered at Otterbourne, where a rather odd indi- vidual Mr. Shuckburgh, was curate to Archdeacon Heathcote, who was Vicar of Hursley, to which Otterbourne was united.
In 1834 the Rev. William Henry Walter Bigg- Wither came as curate. He remained there for thirty-seven years, and was Miss Yonge's friend until the day of his death. He was a type of the well- born, old-fashioned, devout Churchman of that day, a Winchester man, and a Fellow of New College, with the complete classical training of both ; and he also belonged to an old Hampshire family. He was strongly influenced by Keble and Oxford, but was always old-fashioned in practice, and hated innova-
* Autobiography, p. 51, in Miss Coleridge's Life.
8 CHARLOTTE MARY YONGE
tions. He is not forgotten even now, and his nieces (he was never married) were some of Miss Yonge's dearest friends.
It is delightful to read of the changes he intro- duced, and of the boys' school with a master who probably was not up to the ' third standard.' Cer- tainly for enthusiastic Church-people, who were fond of school-teaching, those were happy days. They could, if they had the money or could raise it, set up a school, and work out all their theories on the children whom they collected, with no Inspector or County Council before their eyes. And it is a rather curious fact that it was on schools that the energy of Mrs. Yonge and of Charlotte chiefly concentrated. They never seem to have visited the people very much or made friends with them individually, and to the last days of her life Charlotte hardly ever seems to have visited the school-children when they in their turn had become fathers and mothers. The strict and, for a young girl, wise rules of her parents, which prohibited * cottage visiting,' were kept to by her when she was a grown-up woman, and her shy- ness prevented her from expressing the affection and interest which she really felt. This was un- doubtedly a great pity.
The chief events up to 1835 seem to have been a visit to Oxford in 1834 in order to see the Duke of Wellington installed as Chancellor, and the death of a favourite cousin, James Yonge, a Winchester boy of eighteen. There again comes out the like- ness to Countess Kate. Charlotte says of herself how she fell into disgrace for appearing unfeeling, and how glad she was to remember ' the cats must
CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH 9
be fed.' Kate had an impatience of grown-up people in affliction.
Latin and arithmetic were added to her studies, and tears were often the consequence of the lessons given her before breakfast by her impatient father, whose approbation was, however, delightful, and who bestowed on his little pupil a watch as a prize during the winter of 1834, to her unbounded surprise. A French master gave her lessons in his own tongue and in Spanish, and Charlotte's first beginnings of story-telling arose. For her French master she composed a story of the adventures of a family — Emilie, Rosalie, Henriette and Pauline Melville. Some years afterwards she worked this up into a little book, which was sold at a bazaar for Otter- bourne Church, and called Le Chateau de Melville.
The Coleridges became friends when Mr. John Taylor Coleridge was made a Judge, and brought his girls to Winchester and Otterbourne when he went the Western Circuit. With both his daughters Charlotte made great and lifelong friendship. Sir John Taylor Coleridge, the brother-in-law of Mr. Justice Patteson, and biographer of Keble, was one of the best of men.
Mr. Coleridge, Mr. Keble, Sir William Heathcote, were all friends at Oxford, scholars with kindred tastes. No wonder Charlotte, with her father and her cousin, Lord Seaton, and some others, notably Warden Barter, constantly in her view, grew up with a high ideal of what men might be and were. She saw good men in daily life — men with faults and quick tempers, but with noble ideals, high prin- ciples, and lives guided and ruled by a very deep
10 CHARLOTTE MARY YONGE
and practical piety. And in 1835 Dr. Moberly came to Winchester, and Mr. Keble to Hursley.
Mr. Keble was, as Miss Yonge says, the great influence of her life. With Mr. Yonge he formed a deep friendship, which Miss Yonge says reminded her of the bond between Laud and Strafford.
The views of the early Tractarians were not in any way alien to the right-minded Church-people of the day. That the Church of England possessed the Apostolic Ministry and the power of the Keys, and that Sacraments were indeed outward signs of God's favour and grace, were simply neglected truths, which not a few Church-people had always held. There were not a few who, like the Mr. Bowdler of whom Miss Coleridge speaks in her Life of Miss Yonge, were ' High Churchmen before the High Church movement.' Alexander Knox is one of the most conspicuous of these, and with his writings Mr. Keble was well acquainted.
It is forty years since Mr. Keble passed away, but his holy and blessed memory still lingers around Hursley, and bestows on the little village and on the Church an atmosphere which is impossible to describe to those who do not love Keble and the Christian Year. There is still that peculiar sense of peace, of confidence, of hope ; it is still a place where one realizes the possibility of lives which may be in no way outwardly remarkable, but which are blessed for evermore.
It is an essentially quiet English village, with the traditions of Church and State strongly impressed on it. The village school, where the old Dame who made the children ' so good ' taught, is still there.
CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH 11
Will it really benefit anyone when all that made Hursley what it is has been swept away ?
Church-building had become Mr. Yonge's passion. Otterbourne village was no longer near the old church, and he and the clergy set to work to build the present church. Mr. Yonge, his daughter tells us, gave up quite quietly his much-loved expeditions to Devonshire, and both he and his wife denied themselves luxuries in order to have money for the church.
Otterbourne Church is the result of pioneer work. Miss Yonge says :
* It is cross-shaped, but with a chancel purposely shallow, because both [Mr. Keble and Mr. Yonge] felt the impropriety of using it for sittings, and choirs in the country were undreamt of, and altogether it is an effort towards better things.'*
Charlotte had begun to study the Christian Year, and knew that Mr. Keble was a great man when he came into her life, and one can imagine the mingled awe and ecstasy which must have filled the enthu- siastic girl's heart when she was allowed to become his pupil and be prepared by him for her Confirma- tion. Her own account of it is delightful.
She was awed at first, but he was so tender and gentle with her that she lost nervousness and became perfectly happy. Indeed, Mr. Keble's in- fluence and character were, it would seem to us, just what Charlotte needed. The atmosphere of her home was bracing and rather stern, and it had
* Musings on the Christian Year.
12 CHARLOTTE MARY YONGE
made her loyal and upright and dutiful ; but now she encountered loyalty and uprightness, and also that gentleness and sympathy which we find in the real saints, those who most truly reflect our Lord. We are grateful to Mr. Keble for many, many reasons, and the part he had in developing Charlotte Yonge is not the least of these.
He taught her carefully the true value and meaning of Confirmation, and took her through the Catechism, dwelling, she tells us, on what was a favourite thought of his own : that the Jewish nation and all its training, and all that it under- went, are types of God's dealings with each Christian soul.
He also took her through the services of Holy Communion and Holy Baptism as they are set forth in the Prayer Book. William Palmer's Origines Liturgicce had not long been published, and Mr. Keble used this and himself translated from the older liturgies, thus teaching his ardent pupil the true nature of these Sacraments, warning her, she says, at the close of the preparation against * much talk and discussion of Church doctrines,' and against 4 loving these things for the sake merely of their beauty and poetry.' Perhaps if Mr. Keble's ways had been more followed, and doctrine and teaching of the need of holiness rather than ceremonial had been the chief points of attention by the leaders of the Catholic Movement, England might have been more truly Catholic and Christian than she is at present. Those days before Newman's secession were full of vigour and of hope, and the true mean- ing of the Church was grasped by many who had
CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH 13
no outward helps at all. But, of course, it had in no way reached the people, and perhaps the Move- ment needed something more before it could do so. In fact, the people, the vast heathen population of our large towns, will never be reached until Catholics and Evangelical unite, and cease to teach and to preach what is, in fact, only half the Gospel. The truths on which either school insists are all equally valuable, and it is, perhaps, the work of this gener- ation to grasp this truth.
But no training could better have fitted Miss Yonge for the work she was called to do. And we have dwelt a little on her Confirmation teaching, because we see that out of it grew much of her later work of which we shall speak.
A little later on she was allowed to pay a visit to the Kebles, and we can imagine what the peaceful, cultured atmosphere of the Vicarage must have been to her. Mrs. Keble was a perfect wife, full of sympathy and understanding, very gentle, accom- plished in the quiet, ladylike manner of those days, and gifted with everyday common sense and ability. She had very frail health, which seems to us to have been extraordinarily usual among the ladies of the early Victorian age.
It was undoubtedly very good for the eager, enthusiastic, and gifted girl to share in the plea- sures and interests of Hursley. Her home was a very happy one, but the bustling and undoubtedly narrow-minded grandmother must every now and then have been a trial to her nerves and temper, and Hursley was just the place to send her back, not
14 CHARLOTTE MARY YONGE
spoilt or inclined to think herself 'misunderstood,' but braced.
It is one of Miss Yonge's characteristics that she never had undue sympathy with ' misunderstood ' children — that is, children who could not * get on ' with decently behaved parents and guardians. She saw the difficulties of these children — as, for in- stance, her beloved Countess Kate, Elizabeth in the Stokesley Secret, Geraldine in Pillars of the House ; but she always taught by inference that Christian people must use their circumstances, not misuse them, and that a child who tried to be loyal to authority and who struggled against temper gained more than it lost. And here some pages of her article in Mothers in Council — ' A Real Childhood ' — may be inserted :
* I should like to give a few pictures of real child- hood. Perhaps if I begin with my own recollec- tions, others may follow, and I will try to be per- fectly truthful.
* Perhaps there were unusual circumstances to lead to the complete oneness between my mother and myself, for we lived with my grandmother, who for nearly twenty years took the household cares. Moreover, I was an only daughter, an only child for six years, and the object of much more attention and solicitude than I ever was allowed to know.
' It was an old-fashioned upbringing, with much that would shock sanitarians now — only one nur- sery, also the maids' workroom and the nurse's sleeping-room (in a press-bed). However, I was
CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH 15
generally outside the nursery, though it was a home, and all my meals were taken downstairs, except supper — milk and dry bread, "nice crus- tesses," as the maid used to say in a tone of con- gratulation. I have been glad ever since of having been thus taught to enjoy dry bread. The rule was that those who could not eat dry bread were not really hungry — a very good rule. Butter, as a rule, I never had. I remember my indignation when a naughty, good-natured housemaid, in mis- placed pity, brought slices with the buttered side turned down to escape the nurse's eye. I don't know that the absence of such nutritious food is an example, but I am sure the prevention of dainty habits was an advantage. However, dining at luncheon-time, the fat trouble never was sur- mounted, and certain joints recall it to me still. But greediness was treated as despicable. We were rebuked for casting sidelong glances to see what pudding was coming, taught never to meddle with fruit not given to us, and that gathering strawberries was pleasure enough without eating them till the proper time. Sweets we never bought, and, if given, were administered one at a time at bedtime. The denial was never felt as a hardship, and it has certainly been of no small benefit in health and discipline.
' As to the maids sitting with the nurse, I am decidedly of opinion that it was unadvisable. One woman, though really very good-natured, used to put me in a passion for the pleasure of seeing me roll on the floor. The sure way was to incite the nurse to repeat that tragic poem of Jane Taylor's
16 CHARLOTTE MARY YONGE
on the melancholy adventures of Poor Puss, which tore my heart. I remember matters unsuitable to " little pitchers' " ears being discussed, and a cousin of mine heard Pamela being read aloud after she was in her crib.
' The above anecdote shows that I was not too good a child, though naughtiness was never tole- rated for a moment. I think it was chiefly noisi- ness, disobedience, slovenly carelessness, and quick temper, with a certain provoking levity, since I have heard a story (though beyond recollection) of having been put in the corner, and there begin- ning to sing in a high squeak :
' < < Begone, dull care '"
* The only flat falsehood of those early days was so seriously treated that it is a pain to me to re- member it now. One other, some years later, hung on my conscience so heavily that I voluntarily, with many tears, confessed it, after what now seems a long time. Equivocating was shown to be equally heinous, the occasion of my being so taught being that my father detected me making a sort of accompaniment to the responses in church instead of following the words. His displeasure at my thus acting a falsehood was not to be for- gotten. Perfect truth and honour seem to me to have been the strongest of all my early impres- sions.
' My father, a Peninsular and Waterloo soldier, was the hero of heroes to both my mother and me. His approbation was throughout life my bliss ; his anger, my misery for the time, though my elastic,
CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH 17
frivolous spirits so soon recovered that I was thought not to care. No liberty was ever taken with either parent ; the half -saucy, half -petting terms of children to their parents were never dreamt of. My father could be very stern, but also very gentle, and he took great pains with me. The stories he told me and those first books he read to me are still glorified. One needs no glory of association, with Joseph's history ; but Bel and the Dragon will always be linked with the scene in the long journey which he beguiled with it. Then the Pilgrim's Progress he began when I had the measles, and Aladdin s Lamp and the Perambula- tions of a Mouse alway recall the delight of hear- ing them from him. Such kindnesses from an intensely respected father dwell with one for ever.
' He taught me to write, after an idea of his own, in large letters in chalk, done without resting the hand, thinking this would conduce to freedom of hand in drawing. He was not always patient at the time with childish carelessness, but he was most persevering, and most warmly fostered all real attempts to do one's best.
' Daily, before breakfast, he read the Bible with us, from Mant's edition. Nor can I remember a time when I did not say prayers, repeat the Cate- chism every Sunday, and go to church, being taken early that no one might be kept at home. There was teaching of the meaning of these things and of Scripture history, but the manuals of those days were not many nor very helpful. However, a great Dutch Scripture history, with an immense number of prints, impressed Scripture events; and from
2
18 CHARLOTTE MARY YONGE
seven years old my mother took me to the Sunday- school, first to learn, and then to teach, when, how- ever, I was much too young to be put in authority. I was more a conscientious than a religious child. Except a vehement pleasure in the Sunday-school — which was not so much for religion's sake as for the love of teaching — I felt these observances a weariness, though I should have been ashamed to say so, and felt that it was my own fault.
'It was a strict Sunday — two services, two Sunday-schools, books always of a religious cast, (and not too many of them), hymns and Catechism in the evening ; but I grew gradually up from the sense of lengthiness to actual enjoyment, at first through the Sunday-school. Lax Sundays would never have had the same effect.
' Intellectually the religious teaching interested me, but my parents were of the old reticent school, reverent and practical, so as to dread the drawing out of feeling and expression, for fear of unreality, and I do not know of much awakening in me to religious warmth, unless it may be im- pulses of thankfulness for a beautiful day, and an extreme terror of the Last Judgment. Fancying it would only come when nobody was awake, I remember trying to keep off sleep by pulling out the hairs in my mattress. This, however, was only like other terrors that haunted my bedtime, such as wolves in the dark hall, gunpowder plots, and the fate of the Princes in the Tower. These are, I believe, the lot of all imaginative children. My parents were my practical religion and conscience.
* My mother had read and imbibed the Edge-
CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH 19
worth books. She was perfectly regular in her teaching, and never gave holidays unless there was a needful occupation, but there were no lessons after one o'clock. She had the old London school education, and was very thorough, but she had the art of making her teaching pleasant with playful observations. At four years old I could read. The discovery that I was capable of reading to myself was too delightful to be forgotten. It was made over a quarto illustrated Robinson Crusoe, beside a print of him contending with the breakers. French in children's stories was easy to me at seven or eight years old; also the order of Kings of England, and their histories in Bishop Davys's little book ; nor do I think there was the slightest damage to health or brains from what people now call over-forcing.
' It was a happy, healthy childhood, with much joy in play, running about boisterously in upper rooms and out of doors, delighting in dolls and in live creatures, and in all quiet games, having the best of playfellows in my mother, though her health would not permit her to walk out far with me. She was much afraid of my being vain. Once, on venturing to ask if I was pretty, I was answered that all young animals, young pigs and all, were pretty. It would probably have been wiser to tell me her true opinion, for the question of my beauty was a problem to me all my earlier life. My hair in those days was of a rich chest- nut colour, in wavy curls ; but it delighted her that I answered a lady who admired it (out of Miss Edge worth), " You flatter me !"
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20 CHARLOTTE MARY YONGE
* There was hardly any companionship with other children, except in an annual visit to a large family of cousins, whose company was perfect felicity, but who were brought up on the same lines, perhaps even more plainly and strictly. These recollections reach to about seven or eight years old.
' The special point experience would lead me to remember is that justice and strong displeasure at wrong-doing, severe criticism on carelessness, and no weak indulgence promoted the most fervent love and honour to my father, and that my mother's perfect loyalty to all his opinions and measures, and her unfailing tenderness, sym- pathy, and playfulness made a life of happy affec- tion and lasting reverence.
* THE TEENS.
' Looking back, it seems to me that childhood proper ended with me at thirteen. In that year we made a visit to the cousins, which was especially delightful in games and expeditions and other charms, and for five years we did not go again en famille or for a long time, and I remember wonder- ing how it would be when we had passed the stage of romping children and had become mannerly young people. I need hardly say that we were as happy as ever and as playful, for change and death had not yet begun to cast their shadows so as to be felt by our joyous young spirits. Even by the time I was thirteen I had begun s'ome of the pursuits that have been a solace to me all my life — those of flowers and of shells.
CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH 21
1 Rousseau's six letters on botany, translated by Martyn, and with excellent illustrations, were read with my mother, and introduced me to the wonders of a lily, a stock, and a daisy. A former genera- tion had been botanical, and had subscribed for Curtis's Flora Londinensis and his Botanical Maga- zine. The hand - coloured plates are infinitely better than modern chromo-lithographs, though we may be very grateful for these. Though the continuations by Martyn and Priscilla Wakefield had not the touch of genius that made Rousseau charming, still, on the Linnsean system, I knew well all our wood and river flowers in a way that does not seem to occur to the girls who are sup- posed to learn scientifically botany in classes — of maidens, I mean, not plants. It is the fashion to laugh at what used to be called a hortus siccus, and certainly the poor plants do become melan- choly mummies ; but it really offers the only mode of being sure of one's discoveries, and, moreover, is a most innocent means of gratifying the instinct of collecting without sacrifice of animal life, and without needing much space or being liable to be discarded on removals. Botany gives spirit and object to our walks, and opens new fields of interest in every new place. It has been one of my greatest pleasures.
'So have shells. An old gentleman of ninety, noted as a naturalist in his day — Dr. Latham, author of a book on ornithology, exhaustive in its time — lent me Wood's Catalogue of Shells, coloured, and very expensive, and to obtain the same was one of those ambitions the accomplishment of
22 CHARLOTTE MARY YONGE
which verified that everything comes to one who waits. Conchology is not a pursuit quite so desir- able as botany, for shells require space, and are inconvenient in changes of residence. Besides that, beyond the British species, the collecting them, except under special circumstances, is ex- pensive ; but, on the other hand, their heauty is imperishable. My taste was encouraged because it was a sort of inheritance from my father's favourite sister, and my shells were keepsakes, or old treasures from chimney-pieces, or purchases with my own pocket-money, or brought home by a naval relation, and all have a special value and history. My parents shared the pursuit with me, and fostered it by sympathy, but did not stifle it, as people often do, by overdoing encouragement. Many of my treasures still bear the labels my mother wrote for them half a century ago, before my handwriting was neat enough.
' Daily life went on much as when I was younger. There was early rising at six, or soon after, to work at arithmetic and Latin with my father, going on to Euclid. We got as far as the first six books, and then went back again. I had to draw the diagrams with the utmost neatness and pre- cision, and then to write out the proposition from memory in a book without blot or erasure, which I still possess. My father was one of the most accurate of beings, I one of the most slovenly, and my entire life and doings have been a struggle between my conscience, trained to accuracy, and my inclination to slurring my work. How much worse I should have been without the drilling I
CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH 23
went through I cannot guess ; but I was never disheartened, his approbation was so delightful, and such an object to look forward to.
* Breakfast, feeding of chickens, cats, and other animals, then studies — French or Italian exercises, Latin ones to prepare, geography, grammar of one or other of the languages, or else work with the French master, who by-and-by taught me Spanish. Then came historical reading in English or French, and drawing, My mother had been taught by a London master — and drew very well in the old style — exact and minute copying of line engravings, and also of water-coloured drawings of figures, and this she taught so that I could draw about as well as she, perhaps less neatly, but more boldly. There were no schools of art, no good masters within reach, or I think I had talent in that line enough to have gone farther. My father had a real love and appreciation of art, delighted in fine pictures, and accumulated ex- quisite books of prints and engravings. These were my extreme delight as far back as I can remember, and a visit to a gallery or print-shop with him was a memorable pleasure. He took great interest in my drawings, but criticized every defective outline and quizzed failures. I once set to work to copy the likenesses of all the " true knights " to be collected, some of whom remain to this day in portfolios. Montrose, elaborately copied in pencil from Lodge's portraits, but too roughly shaded, was received with, "What! has he been scraped with a small-toothed comb ?" Laughter took out the sting, and there was always
24 CHARLOTTE MARY YONGE
hope of approval. My mother and I went through many a tough volume while one read and the other drew or worked.
'The actual studies ended with luncheon, and then came the time spent out of doors. My mother could not take long walks, and to go far beyond the garden with my father, or even with a maid, was always something of a treat ; but there were endless occupations out of doors, except on the damp days, when three times round the gravel walk which bounded what grandmamma called the premises was reckoned as equivalent to a mile, and made my required exercise, enlivened by many a fancy. There was not cottage-visiting, save within my mother's short tether, or when sent under escort on a definite message. I was a great chatterbox, and my parents had seen evil consequences from carelessness about young people's intercourse, so that all gossip and familiarity with servants, as a rule, and poor people, was decidedly checked. I have often wondered how far this was for the best.
'The elder villagers were much less cultivated than in these days, and would probably have been unconsciously much more coarse, and my tongue would certainly have run away with me, and have been mischievous in every way ; yet, on the other hand, the shyness of other classes that was engendered has never left me ; and though I have been working for my village neighbours all my life, I have never been able to converse with them with any freedom, nor so as to establish mutual confidence, even where there is certainly mutual
CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH 25
esteem and affection, and this has become a serious drawback to helpfulness, though old use and loyalty diminishes the evil effect among the native inhabitants.
' After the daily constitutional, there were divers delights and pursuits besides the pleasure of read- ing the twenty pages of history (Goldsmith's Rome), and then one chapter of Scott, and no limitation to the varieties of chosen story-books or the books of travels. Franklin's Voyages, and an abridg- ment of Waterton, with a charming picture of his ride on the crocodile, stand out in memory among those. I was also free for Bowdler's Shakespeare and Potter's translations of the Greek tragedies.
*I was early promoted to what was then con- sidered as late dinner, at half -past five or six, with a long evening afterwards, spent in reading aloud, needlework, sometimes in games, chess, back- gammon, or even " twenty questions," which, be it observed, is a very useful diversion when ration- ally conducted, so that it is not held fair to guess too soon or without real grounds. It is the way to learn common things, such as what glass is made of, and the like, for it causes the reflecting on what things are " animal substances," " vegetable sub- stances," or " mineral substances," " compound or simple," and a person who was used to the exer- cise would never maintain that salt fish came ready salted out of the sea.
'Sometimes my Latin construing had to be relegated to the evening, but not as a rule, for it made my grandmother unhappy. I think that
26 CHARLOTTE MARY YONGE
here a story of those days must be pardoned, as illustrating both faults and conscientiousness.
* Tea used to come in at eight o'clock, and at the critical moment of an interesting employment grandmamma bade me go and call my father. I rose unwillingly, giving what my mother called my black look and used to say was like Cain. She reproved me sharply, for she had a horror of any disrespect to her mother. Immediately after, on going into the dining-room, my father presented me with two beautifully bound volumes of Mrs. Jameson's Female Characters of Shakespeare as a reward for diligence and good conduct.
* I burst into tears, and sobbed out that I did not deserve the book, as I had just been very naughty to grandmamma.
' He said it should wait for another time, and so it did, till I was recovering from a feverish attack in the winter, and was said to have shown much patience and good humour.
1 My faults were, so far as can be remembered, a strange mixture of indolent carelessness with vehement eagerness, and the temper which was evoked by rebukes, either for omissions and im- perfect work and untidiness, or else for boisterous- ness and noisiness, and losing all self-control in excitement.
* A boy cousin declared that I reminded him of the description in Quentin Durward of Charles the Bold, whose laugh was a diabolical grimace. When we met again long after I had learned to laugh without making horrid faces, he apologized for what, probably, had been a useful, if rather strong,
CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH 27
hint. Such observations, if amusing, never hurt my temper. It was not of that kind. But reproof for idleness did make me very cross for a time, and there were also moods, connected, perhaps, with health, when nothing seemed to go right or be enjoyable. Nor does it seem to me that I was vain. I never knew whether I was good-looking, though I tried to find out, and, having little or no rosy colour, I did not admire myself. As to clever- ness, I seriously wondered at one time whether I was an idiot, knowing that no one would tell me if I was so, and when one evening, something of this wonderful notion having betrayed itself, my mother told me that, on the contrary, if I took pains, I might be a superior person, she said afterwards that elation and excitement made me disagreeable from high spirits all the rest of the evening, when someone was dining with us.'
CHAPTER II
THE EARLY BOOKS (1843—1850)
ANOTHER influence came into Charlotte's life about 1843 — that of Marianne Dyson, the sister of the Vicar of Dogmersfield. Mr. Keble used to call Mrs. and Miss Dyson the Vicar of Dogmersfield's two wives. Mr. Dyson was himself a remarkable man, full of cultivated tastes and great knowledge. He ought, Sir John Coleridge says in his Life of Keble, to have been an ecclesiastical historian. He was a very great and intimate friend of Mr. Keble. When he died, Miss Keble said to Miss Yonge that she had been thinking how little change he would need * where he is gone.' And it was he who persuaded Keble to publish the Christian Year. Miss Dyson was a woman of considerable ability and enthusiasm, and became a great friend of Charlotte and of Mrs. Yonge. For it would seem that there was full sym- pathy between mother and daughter, and not a little joyous and harmless pride by the mother in her gifted child.
From 1840 to 1850, Miss Yonge tells us in her recol- lection of Mr. Keble,* the brightness and/joyousness
* Gleanings Jrom Thirty Years' Intercourse with the Rev. John Keble.
28
THE EARLY BOOKS 29
of the 'forward movement' had a good deal died down. Those years were in many ways most sad and trying. The great loss of 1845, and the sus- picion and unkindness with which ' Puseyites,' as they began to be called, were treated, the growth of unbelief, the changes at Oxford — all these made the years sad. These times come to every generation which starts full of hope in some ' high emprise.' Those who work in the mission-field know it ; those who give themselves to any new movement of Church life at home find it out — this sense of defeat and disappointment. We all in our turn have to learn the lesson Mr. Keble taught us in his poem for the llth Sunday after Trinity, ' Is this a time to plant and build?'
' Of the defeated party,' Dean Church writes — he is speaking of the time after Mr. Ward's book, The Ideal of a Christian Church, had been con- demned— * those who remained had much to think about, between grief at the breaking of old ties, and the loss of dear friends, and perplexities about their own position. The anxiety, the sorrow at differing and parting, seem now almost extrava- gant and unintelligible. There are those who sneer at the " distress " of that time. There had not been the same suffering, the same estrange- ment, when Churchmen turned Dissenters, like Bulteel and Baptist Noel. But the movement had raised the whole scale of feeling about religious matters so high, the questions were felt to be so momentous, the stake and the issue so precious, the " loss and gain" so immense, that to differ on
30 CHARLOTTE MARY YONGE
such subjects was the differing on the greatest things which men could differ about. But in a time of distress, of which few analogous situations in our days can give the measure, the leaders stood firm. Dr. Pusey, Mr. Keble, Mr. Marriott accepted, with unshaken faith in the cause of the English Church, the terrible separation. They submitted to the blow — submitted to the reproach of having been associates of those who had betrayed hopes and done so much mischief ; submitted to the charge of inconsistency, insincerity, cowardice ; but they did not flinch. Their unshrinking atti- tude was a new point of departure for those who believed in the Catholic foundation of the English Church.
' Among those deeply affected by these changes, there were many who had been absolutely uninfluenced by the strong Roman current. They had recognized many good things in the Roman Church; they were fully alive to many short- comings in the English Church ; but the possibility of submission to the Roman claims had never been a question with them.'
Echoes of the storm of course reached Otter- bourne, and Miss Yonge tells us herself how she remembered a long walk by the river with Mr. Keble, in which he went into the question of Rome with her, and ended the talk with —
' No doubt we could ask Roman Catholics many questions they could not answer, and they could ask us many which we could not answer ; we can
THE EARLY BOOKS 31
only each go on in our own way, holding to the truth that we know we have.'*
Mr. Keble was a loyal son of the Church of England ; he felt that to leave her was absolutely wrong ; but he grew to see how much she had lost, and how impossible it was to say that either Rome or England was wholly right or wholly wrong.
Charlotte was certainly established by him. She never seems to have felt any doubt after those first questionings, and one of her latest books is Why am I a Catholic, and not a Roman Catholic ? Yet she was never blind to what was true. Many years after she wrote to a friend (Miss Cazenove), who had said some things in a letter as to the claims of the Church :
' April, 1865.
'MY DEAR ANNIE,
' If only you would not snap your fingers at Rome ! I don't want to give her more than her due, but I do love and honour S. Gregory the Great too much to like what we owe to him and his noble spirit to be so treated.
* You know it is a fact that, though there were British clergy about, they did not choose to try to convert the Saxons, because they wished them to come to a bad end altogether, which was not exactly Christian.
'Bertha [Queen] had a Gallic chaplain, but I don't think he did much. The impulse was given by S. Gregory and Augustine. I know there is a
* Recollections of the Rev. John Keble.
32 CHARLOTTE MARY YONGE
great controversy about S. Patrick, and nobody seems to know certainly whether he came from Gaul or the Lothians before he was stolen,* or whether he was commissioned at Rome or not. People settle it just the way their inclinations lead them. I don't myself think he went to Pope Celestine, but there is no certainty.'
In the midst of these sadnesses Charlotte's rapidly developing powers must have been great joy to Mr. Keble. She had begun to scribble tales inces- santly, and there seems to have been a good deal of opposition to the idea of her publishing. Her grand- mother, especially, seems to have felt a horror at the idea of Charlotte's coming in any way before the public, which even for the early Victorian age was exaggerated.
The Kebles were consulted, and the first story, Abbey Church, was taken to Hursley for criticism. For many years, Miss Yonge says, everything she wrote was read by Mr. Keble in manuscript. He was a most delightful critic and an absolutely faultless reader of proofs. And there is no doubt that there is around all Miss Yonge's early books an atmosphere of refinement, an aroma of — shall we say Hursley ? which does seem lacking in some, at least, of the later ones.
Abbey Church was the first published tale, and, crude as it may seem to modern critics, it is, in the present writer's opinion, very charming and parti- cularly ' Miss Yonge-ish.'
* We must remember that this was written some forty years before Professor Bury's Life of S. Patrick.
THE EARLY BOOKS 33
The story is of the slightest : a party of cousins gathered at the Vicarage of a county town on the occasion of the consecration of a church, and the scrape some of them fall into by attending a lecture at a recently founded Mechanics' Institute.
But the cousins — two of them, at least — are so delightful, especially Elizabeth, who is just a little like her creator in her enthusiasm and youthful in- tolerance and cleverness. And it is all so funny — the horror of the good people at the Mechanics' In- stitute, and the description of the ignorant youth who gives a lecture for the purpose of exposing chivalry. How we have veered round now ! How much Raskin, William Morris, Burne- Jones, and many another, have done even for the British Philis- tine, to make him realize that * on a renonce a faire dater de Luther le reveil de la raison '!*
Elizabeth, the clever daughter, and her cousin Anne's talk must have been a transcript of the sort of thing which went on among the Yonge cousinhood.
* " What did you do all that time?' said Elizabeth. ' Have you read Hereward, and do you not delight in him ?"
' " Yes," said Anne ; " and I want to know if he is not the father of Cedric of Rotherwood."
' " He must have been his grandfather," said Elizabeth. " Cedric lived a hundred years after."
' " But Cedric remembered Torquilstone before the Normans came," said Anne.
' " No, no, he could not, though he had been told
* Ozanam.
3
34 CHARLOTTE MARY YONGE
what it had been before Front de Boeuf altered it," said Elizabeth.
' " And old Ulrica was there when Front de Boeuf s father took it," said Anne.
' " I cannot tell how long a hag may live," said Elizabeth, " but she could not have been less than a hundred and thirty years old in the time of Richard Cceur de Lion."
* " Cceur de Lion came to the throne in 1189," said Anne. ... " But then, you know, Ulrica calls Cedric the son of the great Here ward."
' " Her wits were a little out of order," said Eliza- beth. " Either she meant his grandson, or Sir Walter Scott made as great an anachronism as when he made that same Ulrica compare Rebecca's skin to paper."
' " If she had said parchment, it would not have been such a compliment. . . ."
' " I believe such stories as Ivanhoe were what taught me to like history. . . . They used to be the only history I knew, and almost the only geography. Do not you remember Aunt Anne's laughing at me for arguing that Bohemia was on the Baltic, because Perdita was left on its coast ? And now I believe that Coeur de Lion feasted with Robin Hood and his merry men, although history tells me that he disliked and despised the English. ... I believe that Queen Margaret of Anjou haunted the scenes of grandeur that once were hers, and that she lived to see the fall of Charles of Burgundy, and died when her last hope failed her, though I know that it was not so."
THE EARLY BOOKS 35
' " Then I do not quite see how such stories have taught you to like history," said Anne.
* " They teach us to realize and understand the people whom we find in history," said Elizabeth.
* " Oh yes," said Anne. " Who would care for Louis the Eleventh if it was not for Quentin Dur- ward ? And Shakespeare makes us feel as if we had been at the battle of Shrewsbury."
' " Yes," said Elizabeth, "and they have done even more for history. They have taught us to imagine other heroes whom they have not mentioned. Cannot you see the Black Prince — his slight, graceful figure ; his fair, delicate face full of gentle- ness and kindness, fierce warrior as he is ; his black steel helmet and tippet . . . ; his clustering white plume; his surcoat with England's leopards and France's lilies ? Cannot you imagine his courteous conference with Bertrand du Guesclin . . . and the noble, affectionate Captal de Bach, who died of grief for him? . . ."
* " Give Froissart some of the credit of your picture," said Anne.
"'Froissart is in some places like Sir Walter himself," said Elizabeth ; " but now I will tell you of a person who lived in no days of romance, and has not had the advantage of a practical historian to light him up in our imagination. I mean the great Prince of Conde. Now, though he is very unlike Shakespeare's Coriolanus, yet there is enough resemblance between them to make the comparison very amusing. There was much of Coriolanus' indomitable pride and horror of mob popularity [in Conde]. . . . Not that the hard-
3—2
36 CHARLOTTE MARY YONGE
hearted Conde would have listened to his wife and mother ... or that his arrogance did not degene- rate into wonderful meanness at last, such as Corio- lanus would have scorned ; but the parallel was as amusing. ... I hate abridgments — the mere bare bones of history ; I cannot bear dry facts, such as that Charles the Fifth beat Francis the First at Pa via, in a war for the Duchy of Milan, and nothing more told about them. I am always ready to say, as the Grand Seignior did about some great battle among the Christians, that I do not care whether the dog bites the hog, or the hog bites the dog."
* " What a kind interest in your fellow-creatures you display !" said Anne. "I think one reason why I like history is because I am searching out all the characters who come up to my notion of perfect chivalry, or, rather, of Christian perfection. I am making a book of true knights." '*
Perhaps all this sounds very bookish and pedantic, but how delicious it is ! and, after all, some literary enthusiasm is almost more desirable than perpetual talk about games.
Elizabeth has something about her which makes one love this first of the long line of Miss Yonge's heroines very much, and we are sure she died young, and perhaps rather suddenly.
About this fctime the Mozleys were bringing out the Magazine for the Young, a delightful little two- penny production, and in it Miss Yonge wrote some of her most delicious little tales. ' Langley School '
* Miss Yonge really did this, as we have seen in the little bit of autobiography.
THE EARLY BOOKS 37
is the first of those village tales, of which, perhaps, ' Ben Sylvester's Word ' is the gem.
All these tales are really valuable. They are accurate studies of a state of things fast passing away. The children are as cleverly sketched and are as living as are the best-known characters in the longer book. 'Langley School,' 'Friarswood Post Office/ ' Ben Sylvester's Word,' ' Leonard the Lion- Heart,' are all perfect little tales, and should not be forgotten. And in her later village chronicles the children, who appear as grown-up people, are them- selves— we recognize our old friends. We will quote an admirable notice by Miss Christabel Coleridge :
* These tales of village life during the latter half of the nineteenth century have hardly ever been widely known, and are now, we fear, almost for- gotten by the present generation. The earlier ones describe a world now passed away, but the later ones are still fairly up to date. They all depict village life under favourable, but not ideal, circumstances, and not through the rose-coloured spectacles which Miss Mitford put on when she wrote her delightful Our Village. They are, in fact, the successors of Mrs. Hannah More's Black Giles and Hester Wilmot, and they show what the Church has done to mend the evils to which those clever tracts first called attention. Some day the " Langley Tales " will be reprinted as classics, and the little girls of Langley School will appear in their pink frocks, white tippets, and cottage bonnets trimmed with green, dainty and pic- turesque in " Early Victorian " style. In 1950 or
38 CHARLOTTE MARY YONGE
so they will be valuable evidence of what the Church of England did for education and civiliza- tion when she still had the village schools in her hand. Great as was the influence of The Daisy Chain and The Heir of Redclyffe on the girls of their day, I doubt if either did more to stir up the generation who "did parish work" on High Church lines during the latter half of the last century than Langley School.
4 Langley was a small but prosperous village in a southern county. It was not exactly Otterbourne under another name, though some of its character- istics wTere naturally derived from it, but it was a less considerable place, the only landowner being, apparently, " Squire Manners," and only one, or at most two, farmers being mentioned. Nor were the little Langley girls portraits of Otterbourne school-children. They were created after their kind with unerring truth to life, and an individu- ality which survived through two or three genera- tions. The original " Langley School " began as a series of sketches in the Magazine for the Young in 1847. These consolidated into a story ; the school was th^ connecting link. Miss Edith and Miss Dora Manners taught the children and loved them with the whole enthusiasm of the new " Oxford Movement" in their hearts, though they never talked about their duty towards their neighbour — they only did it. The story ends with the mar- riage of Miss Edith, and with the presentation to her by the children of a patchwork quilt of their own making. The " young ladies " are on a con- siderable elevation, and are never exactly intimate
Photo by
CHARLOTTE MARY YONGE.
To face page 38.
THE EARLY BOOKS 39
with the children; but the whole subsequent relation of Sunday-school teacher and scholar, of G.F.S. associate and member, was there in germ, and whether or no the book made " young ladies " interesting to school-children, it made school- children enchanting to young ladies. There is no Government inspector, but good, sound, and quite intelligent teaching had begun, and the Sunday lessons here and there given are models not excelled by the newest "catechism" in our day. The life described is simple, wholesome, and secure. The virtues inculcated are family affection and duty, absolute truth in word and deed, modesty, and great self-control of manners and conduct. The Langley children learnt "how to behave." Most of them were children of labourers and servants on the estate, and some of small free- holders, and there seems to have been no poverty to speak of.
* The characters of this simple story — all very simple, too — are as distinct as their prototypes in the flesh. None of us who were young in the fifties and sixties will ever forget good Amy Lee ; Kate Grey, who was cleverer, but not quite so good ; Elizabeth Kingsley, who was very superior ; Clemmy Fielding, who was far from being as good as she ought to be ; Emily Morris, who told stories ; and Jane Anstey, who drank her little sister's milk. We remember them as we remember the Kates and Amys of real life, whom we ourselves tried to bring up to the same standard. They were our models, whether our scholars endeavoured to imitate them or not. They certainly lived in a
40 CHARLOTTE MARY YONGE
" dawn-golden " time, and in an " atmosphere" not only of cheerful sunshine and fresh country air, but of secure, uncontroversial respect for religion and virtue, undisturbed by Acts of Parliament; that " atmosphere " which few writers on educa- tional subjects have ever breathed, and which they often misrepresent. The gradual growth of the religious motive, the slow improvement in conduct, is true to life, and is what earnest, careful workers may look to produce. There is one jarring note to our ears. However glad we of this day may be to escape from the naughty little Publicans of juvenile fiction who give thanks that they are not good little Pharisees, we could hardly be content to leave the naughty girl who stole the patchwork, expelled from Sunday and week-day school, and apparently outcast for ever. It is good that she is not the centre of interest, but we should be sorry to leave her without hope.
* Langley was as real a place as Barchester, and after many years, in the early eighties, Miss Yonge returned to its inhabitants. The later " Langley Stories" describe the descendants of our old friends, and depict the village school and common- wealth as it existed, at any rate, up to the Educa- tion Act of 1902. The school is inspected, the teachers are certificated, and all modern advan- tages of education, dress, and habits are freely welcomed and enjoyed. The tales take in older characters, and a much wider air blows through them, but they are quite as accurate and life-like. The village school of the eighties and nineties is quite as vividly shown in The Third Standard and
THE EARLY BOOKS 41
in Left Out as that of the forties in the original Langley School. Miss Dora lives unmarried in Langley, and is the parish " lady of all work." There is, however, more pathos and more humour in the later stories, and much more tenderness towards childish faults. " Frank's Debt" in Langley Lads and Lasses, a tale of a big farm boy, who gradually grows a conscience and repays his good aunt the money she lent him, is as good a piece of character-drawing as can be found in tales of working-class life. Of the two last Langley stories, Sewing and Solving, though longer and more com- plete, is not quite so successful. The Hollises, the daughters of the unsatisfactory Clementina, who, though improved, is still herself, are very clever sketches. But Amy Lee the second, who allows the smart groom to flirt with her, is a little fine- spun. A pretty village maid had better grow up to endure a few compliments with equanimity, and would certainly have heard of her beauty before she left school. The last of all, Pickle and his Page-boy, is quite charming. Pickle is quite as real a Skye terrier as his page is a real boy, and their adventures are at once delightful, funny, and edifying, and if brought out in modern style, with good illustrations, would make an excellent prize- book.
' I do not think that the literary merit of these simple tales has ever been fully recognized — the skill with which local colouring is conveyed with- out long and elaborate descriptions, the excellent construction of the simple plots which always hang together, and, chiefly, the clear-cut characters
42 CHARLOTTE MARY YONGE
described in them. The sound-hearted, sensible, but slow peasant, old and young, who wears a smock-frock in the earlier stories, and a good coat in the latter ones, as he acquires a little more education and knowledge of the world ; the reli- gious and refined village matron or elderly servant, the best outcome of the village school ; the clever youth or bright girl who rises in life, and the stupid, idle ones who fall in it — all these are given "in their habit as they lived." The grades of village society, the relations of farmers and shop- keepers, labourers and head servants, are all given simply as facts, and ungrudgingly recognized/
Tales of another kind were engrossing her. Scenes and Characters ; or, Eighteen Months at Beechcroft, we think, must have been always a favourite of its author, for the fortunes of the Mohun family, who lived at Beechcroft, were always in her mind, and we meet Mohuns again and again in later years.
Scenes and Characters, however, does not seem to us quite so vivid and bright as the two stories which came out in the Churchman's Companion — Henri- etta's Wish and The Two Guardians.
The first of these is an admirable illustration of the extraordinary change which has come over our attitude as to the relative duties of parents and children.
Henrietta and her brother Fred are the children of a Mr. Frederick Langton, who was killed by a fall from his horse when he was on a visit to his father's place in the country. His wife, who is represented as a charming and saintly person, takes up her abode
THE EARLY BOOKS 43
at a seaside place, and brings up her two children there. ' Henrietta's wish/ a perfectly natural, not to say laudable one, is to visit her grandparents and her father's home, and spend Christmas with the numerous cousins who are gathered there. And at last, when she and her brother are fifteen and four- teen, this wish is granted. They all pay a visit to the old home. But the most dire consequences arise.
Fred, who, greatly to his credit, is not an absolute muff, is fretted by continual restraint. He must not drive, must not skate with his cousins until his Uncle Geoffrey has vouched for the safety of the ice. At last he does drive with an impetuous and charming cousin, Beatrice, Uncle Geoffrey's daughter; the horse bolts, he is pitched on his head, and a bad illness ensues. From the overfatigue arising from his illness his mother dies. Fred was certainly wilful and disobedient, but that poor Henrietta should also be blamed for her ' wish ' does seem unjust.
Of course, nowadays the modern mother would be braced, and made to feel that to indulge her nerves was positively wrong, and that her children were rather to be pitied than blamed if they found her nerves tiresome. For the rest, the story is delicious. The different cousins, the delightful Uncle Geoffrey (said to be a picture of Mr. Yonge), the kind old grandfather, the fussy grandmother who thinks private theatricals shocking, the description of the village church and the newfangled Christmas decor- ations, are all vivid, and recall those early days when as yet no one thought that midday Com- munion was undesirable, or that it might be possible for the unconfirmed to be present at the Eucharist.
44 CHARLOTTE MAEY YONGE
The Two Guardians has some charming descrip- tions of Devonshire and some life-like schoolboys. (Miss Yonge's boys are very real.) The heroine is a very fine character, and the book is a real advance. We have in this book the first expression of the author's attitude towards what was then known as ' rationalism ' or * Germanism,' what we call ' higher criticism.' And, by the way, those first attacks of criticism which became known to Churchmen and to English Christians were not made known to them by reasonable scholarly Christians. There was then 110 Westcott, no George Adam Smith, or any of those numerous scholars who have done so much to re- assure us. People might be excused for panic when criticism came, not as the endeavour of true and courageous Christians to ascertain what was truth, but as an attack on Christian faith. We smile, perhaps, at the fears of those who came before us, but they were not unjustified. * The Liberals are deficient in religion, and the religious are deficient in liberality,' said Archbishop Tait.*
Miss Dyson had set up a school for girls of the lower middle class, and for these Charlotte wrote The Chosen People and Kings of England.
* See an admirable sermon by the Bishop of Gloucester on the < Criticism of the Old Testament/ in his book The Old Testament and its Messages.
CHAPTER III
THE * MONTHLY PACKET'
(1851)
IN 1851 a new venture appeared, and with it so much of Miss Yonge's work is identified that we must dwell on it.
This was the beginning of the Monthly Packet. Miss Coleridge tells us that the tone of the Church- mans Companion had become rather controversial, and it was felt that something deeper and less acrimonious might be useful.
The preface to the first number is so beautiful, and the words as to the Church so extraordinarily applicable to this very time, that we venture to reprint it :
1 If the pretty old terms " maidens " and " damsels " had not gone out of fashion, I should address this letter by that name to the readers for whom this little book is in the first place intended — young girls, or maidens, or young ladies, whichever you like to be called, who are above the age of child- hood, and who are either looking back on school- days with regret, or else pursuing the most im- portant part of education, namely, self-education.
45
46 CHARLOTTE MARY YONGE
* It has been said that everyone forms their own character between the ages of fifteen and five-and- twenty, and this magazine is meant to be in some degree a help to those who are thus forming it ; not as a guide, since that is the part of deeper and graver books, but as a companion in times of recreation, which may help you to perceive how to bring your religious principles to bear upon your daily life, may show you the examples, both good and evil, of historical persons, and may tell you of the workings of God's providence both here and in other lands.
'With this view, it is proposed to give you a series of scenes from history, dwelling on the more interesting periods and characters. Suppose we call them Cameos, as they are to present scenes and heroes in relief, and may be strung together with the chain of your former lessons in history. A few tales which, though of course imaginary, may serve to show you the manners and ways of thinking of past times, will be introduced from time to time, with stories of our own days, accounts of foreign lands, biographies, translations, and extracts from books which are not likely to come in your way, or of which the whole may not be desirable reading for you, so as, it is hoped, to conduce to your amusement, and, at the same time, to the instruction of such as are anxious " to get wisdom and understanding." Above all, it is the especial desire and prayer of those who address you through the pages of this magazine, that what you find there may tend to make you more stead- fast and dutiful daughters of our own beloved
THE ' MONTHLY PACKET ' 47
Catholic Church of England, and may go alongside in all respects with the teaching, both doctrinal and practical, of the Prayer Book. For we live in a time of more than ordinary trial, and our middle path seems to have grown narrower than ever. The walls of the glorious Temple in which we have been builded up seem to shake, though that is but seeming, since they are based on a Rock, and the foundations are the Apostles and Prophets, and not one of the smallest of the living stones need fall from its own station, even though larger, more important, and seemingly more precious ones may totter and rend themselves away. Small stones as we may be, yet we can, we may, we must keep our places in the fitly framed building, where it may indeed be vouchsafed to some even of us to be " as polished corners of the Temple." This is speaking more seriously than I meant at first to have done ; but who can speak of the Church in these days and not be grave, even though we know that the gates of hell shall not prevail against her ?
' Though this letter has been chiefly addressed to young girls, it is not intended that the pages of this magazine should be exclusively for them. It is purposed to make it such as may be pleasant reading for boys of the same age, especially school- teachers ; and it is hoped that it may be found useful to younger readers, either of the drawing- room, the servants' hall, or the lending library.'
The Packet began in a very quiet way, a humble little magazine, in 1851. The thirty little black
48 CHARLOTTE MARY YONGE
volumes of those early years (1851 to 1865) are before the writer, and it may be a prejudice, but they do seem much less old-fashioned and behind the times than most of the other magazine literature of those years.
There are not a few men and women who were young people in the flourishing days of the Packet, the seventies and eighties, who could, if they would, say that Miss Yonge's hopes had been realized.
At first Miss Yonge was the chief contributor. She starts off with ' Cameos from English History,' and those * Cameos ' went on for forty-seven years — an extraordinary feat. They are, of course, not all equally good, but they give a wonderful amount of information, of picturesque detail, of anecdote. They have that photographic style, so to speak, in which Miss Yonge excelled. It is quite possible to find abundant fault. Miss Yonge's style was by no means irreproachable, and the very familiar terms on which she lived with the personages of the Middle Ages seems at times to make her forget the depths of her readers' ignorance ; but a more charm- ing set of books to which to refer and with which to lighten up the schoolroom reading of standard histories does not exist. We are anticipating, but who gives a more picturesque account of the Con- queror, of Henry V., of James I. of Scotland, and of various episodes in which English and Continental history were interwoven? That is one of the peculiar merits of Miss Yonge's * Cameos.' The insular view of English history leads to most extra- ordinary ignorance at times, and it would be inter- esting to know how many ordinary people have any
THE ' MONTHLY PACKET ' 49
idea of what is meant by the * Duchy of Burgundy,' the * Holy Roman Empire,' the * Babylonish Cap- tivity,' * Canossa,' and so on.
Then in October she began the ' Conversations on the Catechism.'
Also Miss Yonge began to write the long series of stories so often connected with each other, so that there are links between the Castle-Builders, one of the earliest, and the very latest of her tales.
And it was in those early days that she wrote that gem of historical stories, The Little Duke, which is still as fresh and delightful and as much appreciated by the right-minded youthful reader as it doubtless was in those early days.
It was followed by The Lances of Lynwood and The Prince and the Page, which are delightful, but not equal to the Little Duke, which was never surpassed by Miss Yonge.
The Daisy Chain, The Trial, The Young Stepmother, made their appearance also in these little black volumes. And there were other writers also who did much good work. There was an excellent story which one can still read with pleasure, On the Banks of the Thome. The author wrote one or two other pleasant little stories in the Churchman's Companion, and showed a considerable power of drawing char- acter and of understanding of boys. A slightly tyrannical father is usually to be found in her dra- matis personce — one of the tokens, by the way, of the change in our outlook. Fathers, whether for better or worse, for the most part are not tyrannical now- adays.
The Packet was always full of edifying information
4
50 CHARLOTTE MARY YONGE
from its earliest days, and these little volumes con- tained many excellent papers, and about them there is just that touch of refinement, that note of un- worldliness, that loftiness of ideal, that severity with self, which are noticeable in all the early leaders — men and women alike — of those first days of Church revival.
Bracing oneself to endure is the key-note of even the young. Perhaps the fruit of such teaching is to be found in many a Community of devoted Sisters, in many a holy and obscure life of unwearied good works.
And of course there were papers about Church work, and now and then a description of some cere- mony in the Greek Church, recalling to us now the interest in, and the hopes for, the Greek Communion felt by some of the leaders.
As time went on, writers now well known to us all made their appearance in the Packet, among them Mrs. Alfred Scott-Gatty, the distinguished mother of an even more distinguished daughter. Mrs. Gatty did for children something of the work that Miss Yoiige did for their elders, and certainly no child's magazine has ever taken the place of Aunt Judy.
In 1866 the Packet appeared in an enlarged shape, and the bound volumes are much larger than the first set. The Six Cushions came out in this series. Miss Yonge had a great knack of describing national characteristics ; the high-bred, rather stiff, and alto- gether delightful Scotch family are true portraits. Dante readings began in 1869, and Miss Yonge's beautiful Musings on the ' Christian Year ' and ' Lyra Innocentium*
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THE ' MONTHLY PACKET ' 51
Miss Yonge began the Caged Lion in 1868.
It was just about then that a paper appeared in the Packet which seemed clever and funny, and not likely to have its prophecies realized. Yet something of what it foretold has come to pass.
A very behind-the-age Rector (this was in 1867) goes to visit a college friend, and finds a church restored according to all the fervour of those early days, and he dreams at night that a descendant of his present host comes in and announces that the church is now restored and the whitewash is back, the organ done away with, the singing men in the gallery.
It sounded very ridiculous in 1867, but nowadays, when plainsong comes to the front, the organ is a good deal repressed, galleries for singers and instru- ments are not unknown, and the stained glass of the sixties makes us shudder.
Descriptions of Church work are more frequent, and mentions of Religious Communities occur.
Some excellent papers on English hymnology began in 1867 ; they are still interesting and full of sound criticism.
Miss Yonge, it may be noticed, was always abreast of modern movements. She never joined in the cry against women's colleges, and she had not much of that obscurantist spirit which has done so much harm to the cause of religion — at least, so far as education was concerned. Even in those very early days there appeared a paper on examinations for girls, and another on the advantages of trained nurses for the poor. These things are the common possession of all now ; they were battlefields forty years ago.
4—2
52 CHARLOTTE MARY YONGE
Miss Yonge, also, was anything but exclusively literary in her tastes ; she loved botany, natural history, science (when it did not touch on ultimate problems), and, as time went on, some excellent papers on various branches of science found their way into the Packet — some, if we mistake not, from the pen of the present Canon Wilson of Worcester.
For more directly religious teaching there was Miss Yonge's Womankind, which may be a little old- fashioned, but which will repay reading, and in some ways is quite unique. Dr. Littledale contri- buted a series of papers on Sisterhoods, which have never been republished, and which are full of com- mon sense and information. It is much to be wished that heads of Communities would read and ponder his words about health and the sin of bad cooking in chapter vii.
Various sketches of the work done by nurses in the Franco-German War appeared in these years, and are extremely graphic and interesting.
And there is a description of the cholera at Plymouth in 1849 in the May number of 1871, which will bear reading at this distant date. Mr. Prynne's name is engraved on his people's hearts, and this story of his and of the little band of Sisters' heroism should never be forgotten.*
Magnum Bonum, another family chronicle, ap- peared in 1877, 1878, 1879.
Miss Yonge added two more family chronicles — Two Sides of a Shield and Beechcroft at Rockstone.
Two more of Miss Yonge's historical stories came out between 1880 and 1890. Two Penniless * It now appears in Mr. Prynne's Life.
THE ' MONTHLY PACKET ' 53
Princesses leads us into the byways of history, and so does A Modern Quest of Ulysses.
This was the old Monthly Packet from 1851 to 1890. Perhaps to modern eyes it looks a little dull ; per- haps Miss Yonge had ceased to interest a modern generation. With all its faults, it breathed a frag- rance of bygone days. It was always loyal and high-toned, and seemed to have taken for its motto, ' Whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report, if there be any virtue and if there be any praise, think on these things.'
It did not profess to be written for any but members of the Anglican Branch of the Church ; it did not aim at anything specially exciting. It had no aids in the shape of illustrations. But whatever its limits, or its shortcomings, the old Packet will always be loved by those who, month by month, welcomed it and made through it many dear and never-to-be-forgotten friends.
Miss Coleridge and Mr. Innes took over the editorship in 1890, and, if there was a change in the tone, it was not very perceptible; perhaps it was not quite so strongly Catholic in tone, perhaps there was not much of the devotional element : one could hardly say. It seemed all right, and we hoped the old Packet would prosper in its bright blue dress and its modern ways— when, lo ! with no warning, it ceased to be.
It was a loss, and has never been replaced.
The office of editor gave Miss Yonge plenty of work even in early days. She writes to Miss Barnett :
54 CHARLOTTE MARY YONGE
' November (?1850).
* ... You really must beg, borrow or steal something to help me. After this winter I shall get on better, but there are The Two Guardians and the Landmarks of History to finish before I can feel really at ease in giving my mind to this affair. I am rather afraid of spoiling the Land- marks by getting into a hurry. If you can send me something, I think we could meet the first of January, but I am sure I cannot single-handed. . . . I wish it had found a name ; if there was any word to express "for Confirmation girls" it would be the thing. . . .'
We have said The Little Duke was begun in Vol. I. of the Monthly Packet. In that same volume began the Castle-Builder s. This is, in our judgment, one of the very best bits of work Miss Yonge ever produced. The late Professor Palgrave, who cer- tainly was no mean critic, was very fond of it. It is an exquisite little story, and has all that flavour of refinement, that ethos, which lingered long around the early Tractarians, and of which we have spoken. The motif of the story, if we may use such a word, is the evils of day-dreaming, of religious emotion which is not translated into action. There is no love-story at all, and the whole is an episode in the lives of three sisters.
They, Constance, Emmeline, and Kate Berners, are Indian children who have been sent home to be educated. Their mother has married again, and her husband, Sir Francis Willoughby, has also a son by his first marriage, Frank, who is about the same
THE 'MONTHLY PACKET' 55
age as Emmeline and Kate. Constance, almost directly after she left school, was seen and beloved by a young clergyman, Lord Herbert Somers, younger son of one Lord Liddersdale. They are married before the return of the Willoughbys, and very soon are obliged to go abroad, as Lord Herbert has a bad breakdown in health. The story opens on the eve of Emmeline's and Katherine's Confirmation. They are still at school. Sir Francis and Lady Willoughby return rather sooner than they were expected, and in the excitement of the arrival, and the sight of the two new brothers and a new sister, the Confirmation is pushed aside. Then home-life begins for them. They are taken to a seaside town, where Sir Francis has rented a temporary house, and all their fresh aspirations and longings and their mistakes are described.
Each person in the story is a good sketch of character: Sir Francis, kind-hearted, fussy, im- perious, irascible if provoked; Lady Willoughby, gentle, selfish, absolutely worldly and mindless ; Emmeline, dreamy, full of aspirations and high ideals, and as yet incapable of putting them into practice ; Kate, more good-natured and merry than her sister, but greatly dependent on her.
The girls are eager about good works, and fall into the hands of some kind old ladies who are greatly prejudiced against the Vicar, who is start- ing such innovations as daily service and weekly Communion (it is the year 1849). There is an amusing difference between that year of grace and the present one. The only schools in the town apparently belonged to the new churches, and
56 CHARLOTTE MARY YONGKE
visitors to one of them were freely invited and encouraged to take classes, The new Vicar sternly discouraged all this.
But in these days we all know old ladies, kind and fussy, exact dittoes of the Miss Shaws of this book, very full of horror of what is now called Ritualism, and was then termed Puseyism. Emmie and Kate, indeed, get into trouble because they insist on the Church Catechism being said by their pupils.
On the scene arrives Sir Francis's son. Frank is a charming boy. Miss Yonge, as we have said, had a great gift for describing real boys, and surely one of her numerous cousins suggested the rosy, sweet- tempered, not particularly clever but saintly boy. We use the word quite advisedly. Frank appeared absolutely commonplace to the ordinary observer, and to his new connections, who at once accepted him as a brother, he was a complete puzzle. Gradually they found out that behind his unfailing courtesy and consideration, his thoughtfulness for the poor little governess, his unfailing good temper, was a deep religious principle.
Frank had been brought up by a brother of Sir Francis, at whose Vicarage the boy had spent his holidays. In Mr. Willoughby we are sure Miss Yonge drew a picture of some one of those holy men whom she knew so well. The present writer owns that Mr. Willoughby always made her think of Mr. Keble, in his simplicity, his learning, his gentleness, his old- fashioned courtesy, his love for his parish, of which he had been the parson for forty years. He is a delightful man, and he really cannot have been much more than fifty, although he is spoken of as if he
THE ' MONTHLY PACKET ' 57
were much older, for twenty years later he reappears in The Pillars of the House. Miss Yonge was just a little bit apt to get mixed in her chronology.
Emmie and Kate are by this time rather tired of good works, and have taken up higher learning and culture with great enthusiasm and some selfish- ness.
Frank had assimilated his uncle's teaching, and fully intended to take Orders. His father, however, suddenly announced his intention of putting him into the Guards, and it is with difficulty poor Frank brings himself to consent. Unfortunately, he has been taken away from school to prepare for the army, and his practices and devotional habits cannot be kept quite out of Sir Francis's sight. The poor man cannot endure the idea of a religious soldier, and from pettish exclamations proceeds to denunciations of the system in which Frank has been brought up. Finally, on the Feast of the Annunciation, things come to a crisis : Sir Francis tells the boy to go back to his uncle, as he wishes to have done with sermons and hypocrisy. In the afternoon the girls take Frank and their youngest brother for a walk on the sands; they are overtaken by the tide, and are rescued with much difficulty. Frank is drowned.
The account of this tragedy is most beautifully given, and the effect on all the survivors wonderfully brought out. The bitter grief of Sir Francis, which passes over him like a tornado, and leaves him apparently much the same ; the bracing up of Kate to seek the path Frank had trod, and the opposite effect it produced on Emmeline, who, having shirked all her duties, only found that her illness and bitter
58 CHARLOTTE MARY YONGE
grief made her feel more dissatisfied, unwilling to undergo the inconvenience of a new preparation for Confirmation, and hail with delight the prospect of a London season. And again, to Kate's great sorrow, they lose the opportunity of Confirmation. In London Emmie becomes extremely fascinated by the services at a new Roman Catholic chapel.
Then Herbert Somers breaks in upon us. Herbert has almost died abroad, and his wife, who is not unlike Alexandrine de la Ferronay in some respects, is all that Emmeliiie and Kate aspired to be. Lord Herbert has accepted the living of Dearport, and it is arranged that his sisters-in-law should help Constance to settle in. These two, Herbert and Constance, are extraordinarily charming, merry, clever, and endued with that touch of romance which is the very flower of our religion. They make light of all sorts of disagreeables, and begin to do excellent work at once. Yet they are not the least impossible or unreal. Kate, who has been absolutely won over by Frank's death, is intensely happy ; but Emmie, who is really still extremely unwell, can only feel disillusioned by everything. At last, rather suddenly, a talk with Herbert shows her that it is not her circumstances, but herself, which has been to blame. She has dreamed, not acted.
' " I could not feel to care about religion ; I grew tired of all the good books and thoughts and church-going. Herbert, don't think me wicked for it, but church-going has such a sameness — not always as you manage the service, but at that church in London it did not make one a bit devout.
THE ' MONTHLY PACKET ' 59
Everything is weariness together, and I shall feel so all my life."
' " Stop, stop, Emmeline ! You have not let me ask you how it was that religion failed as you say."
' " Because I must be too bad for anything to do me any good, I suppose," said Emmeline despon- dently.
* " Hush, Emmeline ! None of the chosen people of God have a right to speak in that way. But, tell me, what do you understand by religion?"
1 " Oh, thinking, caring about holy things, stir- ring up one's spirit, feeling love to God — those
kinds of things — liking holy things " hesitated
Emmeline, somewhat puzzled.
' " There is the main-spring ; but that is but half the matter. You had the beginning, but what came of it ? How was it evidenced ? You tried to feel ; what did you try to do ? "
'"I was not well; I could not do much," said Emmeline.
' " But what did you try to do ? Did you try to be more attentive to the home duties in which you had fallen short?"
' " I did not think that was it."
'"Did you try to conquer your reluctance to letting Mr. Brent enter into conversation with you?"
' " Mamma did not wish it."
' " Did you try, when you were taken to London, to keep from following the foolish, undesirable ways of other people of your own age, which you yourself thought wrong at first sight ?"
• " Do you mean the polka, Herbert?"
60 CHARLOTTE MARY YONGE
' " Or did you, in the new scene, allow yourself to relax in the devotional exercises you had taken up ? Don't answer me, but yourself."
6 " I can't think how you know everything, Herbert. But, you see, religion won't do for me."
' " I don't see any such thing. You have had a fit of excitement of feeling, which has passed off, but you are not thinking that you have been without religion all the years of your life."
' " Oh no ; but that is not what one means. That is too shocking."
' " You are a Christian. Each right action or feeling, each act of faith or prayer, through your whole life, have not they been fruits of your bap- tismal grace ? "
' " I suppose so ; but there have been few enough of them."
' " And do you think that is caused by any defect in the grace then given you ? "
4 "Oh, no, no!"
' " But they have been passing, fleeting, unstable of late. You have had no rest in them, no comfort of mind, no true wisdom, nor strength ; no firmness, no abiding sensation of love and fear of God."
'Emmeline gave a sort of groan, that showed that his words went home to her heart.
' " And you say it is the fault of religion ? Emmeline, our religion holds out to us a means of receiving the strength of the Holy Ghost, the Comforter, giving us the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and ghostly strength, the spirit of knowledge and true godli- ness, and the spirit of God's holy fear."
THE ' MONTHLY PACKET ' 61
* " Confirmation ! " said Emmeline. " Oh, Herbert, would it do all that for me ? I do believe it would be peace at last."
'"Emmeline, I am sure it would. It is not I that tell you so ; it is the promise of God through His Church."
' " Yes ; but it is on a condition ! How am I ever to fulfil that condition? I may make the vow, and intend to keep it, and believe fully, but the feeling will go. I shall be unsteady again."
' " If you were to stand in your own strength, not in the all-sufficient grace, you would ; but be- sides prayer, will there not then be open to you the especial means of strengthening and refresh- ing our souls?"
' " But how many there are no better for being confirmed ! "
' " How can we tell ? They may be better, or, if they fail, it may be that their hearts are not pre- pared. They wanted prayer, or they wanted faith, or they were not in earnest, or they fell away through some unresisted temptation, not from any defect in the Confirmation grace, which will yet restore many."
' " Then you think if we had been confirmed we should have avoided our faults ?"
4 "No, I say no such thing. I cannot tell how you would have kept your vow, but I know you would then have been obedient to that summons of the Church ; the grace would have been given to you, and if you had used it rightly "
* " Ah, I do believe that it would have made a difference. I know I should have been jai raid_to
62 CHARLOTTE MARY YONGE
stay away from the Holy Communion after your letter, and then I should have watched myself more, and perhaps been saved from these faults, though I never thought they were so bad before. I knew I was good for nothing, but I could not make out that I did anything very wrong. Oh, I am very glad we are to be confirmed now !" '
And Confirmation is at last bestowed on them, not without some self-sacrifice on their part.
Nothing can be more delightful than the account of the first settling in at Dearport, and all that Her- bert, his curates, and Constance found to do.
CHAPTER IV
' THE HEIR OF REDCLYFFE ' (1850—1854)
IT was the publication of this book which made the fame of Charlotte Mary Yonge. Miss Yonge herself tells us, in the reminiscences of Mr. Keble, how the book arose :
' In the May of 1850 a friend (Miss Dyson) told me there were two characters she wanted to see brought out in a story — namely, the essentially contrite and the self-satisfied. Good men, we agreed, were in most of the books of the day, sub- dued by the memory of some involuntary disaster —generally the killing someone out shooting — whereas the "penitence of the saints" was un- attempted. The self-satisfied hero was to rate the humble one at still lower than his own estimate, to persecute him, and never be undeceived till he had caused his death. This was the germ of the tale, of which mine was the playwright work of devising action and narrative. It is less really my own than the later ones, and therefore rises much higher.
* We were all very happy over it, and Mr. and Mrs. Keble showed their usual patient goodness in
63
64 CHARLOTTE MARY YONGE
listening to romancings of the yet unwritten story and throwing their interest into it ; then in reading and correcting the MS. As an instance or two, in the description of the sunset the sun had been called a circle, but the poet-hand made it an orb. And when Mr. Edmondstone had called Philip a coxcomb, Mrs. Keble made the substitute of a jackanapes. Also, at first, Philip, in his solitude at Redclyffe, had been haunted by dread of in- sanity; but this was altered, because both the kind critics believed it to be absolutely cruel to bring forward that topic to enhance a mere fiction, and they mentioned instances in which the suggestion of the idea had done serious harm to excitable persons already in dread of that visitation. . . . Again, he advised the alteration of the end of an argument which concluded in a sarcastic and over- bearing manner, saying : " I wish you would de- prive the passage of its triumphant air." In general, the purport of the marks was to guard to the utmost both delicacy and reverence. The very least approach to a careless reference to Holy Scripture or that could connect with it a ludicrous idea was always expunged. I wish my words could do justice to the kindness and good judgment of both these dear friends with regard to that book.'
Mr. Yonge conducted the arrangements for the publication, and as he evidently had no idea how to manage the affair, a good deal of delay ensued. For instance, the book, by Sir John Coleridge's advice, was first offered to Mr. Murray, which seems extraordinarily stupid, as at that
4 THE HEIR OF REDCLYFFE ' 65
time that eminent publisher did not issue works of fiction.
However, it was handed over to Mr. Parker, and when it appeared it had an undoubted success.
We all know how such people as Burne-Jones and William Morris loved it, and that young men and young women adored it. It is funny to find from Miss Coleridge that there was evidently fear on the author's side that the family circle might consider it ' too daring/ It is a delightful book, and many of us are fain to confess to having read it at least a score of times.
' It embodied,' says Miss Coleridge, ' the spirit of the Oxford Movement in its purest and sweetest form. It is a delightful picture of the best kind of English upper middle class society of the time, and the talk, the ideas are fresh and bright and amusing. Miss Yonge had a sense of humour and some power of irony. It is almost a pity these gifts were not more encouraged, for Mr. Edmon- stone, the good-humoured, well-bred, rather stupid and lovable father so easily overborne by the righteous Philip, is the most ably drawn, and is one of the most living of the people, who are, how- ever, all alive and creatures of flesh and blood.'
But would Miss Yonge and Mr. Keble and Miss Dyson have considered this heresy ? Guy does not seem to us to belong to the category of those who are penitents first and then saints, but rather to be a modern Sir Galahad, to be one of those who keep ' the princely heart of innocence.'
For did he yield to any temptation? Does the
5
66 CHARLOTTE MARY YONGD
author not make Guy confuse temptation with sin ? Was his anger not the anger of a pure and noble mind when confronted by malicious spite ? It is pos- sible that if he had met Philip the very moment that he had opened the letter he might have sinned ; but the fact remains that before the sun went down Guy had forgiven his enemy. We are not saying this is unreal or impossible — not at all ; only that Guy ought not to have thought of himself as unworthy of Amabel, or have sat down so quietly under his injuries. Why he did not seek an interview with his guardian instead of writing, and how Mr. Ed- monstone could be satisfied to let him go so easily, we cannot see; and beautiful as the story is, we cannot but feel that all the fuss about Guy and his supposed misdemeanours was a real storm in a tea- cup, nor does it seem to us probable that a man of the world, as Mr. Edmonstone must have been, could think a boy of twenty likely to have become a very deep -dyed villain, or have thought a lapse into extravagance — nay, even into betting — an indication of hopeless depravity.
But putting this aside, the story is most delightful ; Charles, Amy, the old doctor, Mr. Edmonstone, Lady Evelyn, are all charming people. Philip is admir- able— his self-deceit, his priggishness, his Philis- tinism, all brought out with a delightful simplicity and irony. Amy is the type of character that her creator dearly loved : gentle, sweet, apparently weak, and rising on occasion to heights of heroism, of which no one would have supposed her capable.
It is a great blessing that no continuation of the Heir ever saw the light. Amy and Charles grown
'THE HEIR OF REDCLYFFE' 67
old would have been too sad, and we could not have borne the Nemesis which undoubtedly would have overtaken Philip and Laura.
Miss Yonge was capable at times of real beauty in her writing, and the story of the death of Guy, so simply told, is beautiful.
And Guy himself is a veritable boy of flesh and blood, and is not at all unreal or impossible. He is so alive that we feel his death is heart-rending, he is so delicious in his young enthusiasm and so un- touched by the world. Perhaps it is this unworldli- ness which gives the Heir and one or two more of Miss Yonge's books their especial charm.
She resembles Scott in one respect, that her heroes are good men. Sir Walter's heroes are often sup- posed to be uninteresting, but some of them, at any rate, do not deserve this reproach. Henry Morton, Frank Osbaldistone, Edmund Tressilian, to take only three, are excellent and delightful young men, all virtuous (one of them, certainly, had fought a duel) and brave and accomplished. Guy is a fitting companion to them, with the additional grace of an Oxford training upon him. It is a delightful trait in Miss Yonge that, unmusical as she was, she much appreciated a gift for music in others. Guy loved music, which love was a deadly offence in the eyes of Philip, who, as we have said, is a perfect type of Philistine before Mr. Matthew Arnold had made Philistinism known to us.
Miss Yonge's letters to Miss Dyson, who was known as Guy's mother, about the Heir and other topics are perfectly delightful. We only wish there were more of them. Here are some to Miss Barnett :
5—2
68 CHARLOTTE MARY YONGE
'June 30, 1851.
[The writer is working on The Heir of Redclyffe.] 1 No. III. is in clover. I have had something of some sort almost every day lately, and am not at all afraid of the 60 pages.
*. . . Sir Guy Morville considers himself much honoured by your invitation, and as much as there is or will be by that time of him shall attend you. It will be a real kindness to take him out of my reach, for he is such pleasant work as to spoil me for more regular business, but there is such a quantity of him all uncondensed and untrimmed that I am afraid you will repent. I hope you have not told Mrs. Butler the story beforehand, for I want much to know the sort of impression the story makes on a new person, and whether Philip is hated as much as by those who know how he is to end.'
1 As for Guy, he is seeking his fortune in London, and I expect every day to hear of his fate, so I hope it may not be long before he comes forth to all the world. He thanks you and Mrs. Butler for kindly inviting him. I don't think it will be quite as much of a " Bustle "* book as erst, for the last critical reading decided that there was rather too much Bustle, and he has been a little curtailed.'
' I am glad Mrs. Butler does not feel like one of our neighbours, who complained that she never would have read the book if she had known what it was coming to. I have had a great deal of
* Guy's dog.
'THE HEIR OF REDCLYFFE' 69
pleasure out of it, I must say, and it has been very amusing to hear the different views that people have taken of Philip.
' Now about Violet [Heartsease]. She is much obliged and honoured by your invitation, but I wanted to tell you the state of the case. . . . She is in a very unfit state for being seen. . . . My opinion is that she is in great danger of being long and stupid, and I am trying to condense her.'
Another letter says :
' Thank you, I have seen the Times. Sir William Heathcote told me there was such an article [a review of The Heir of Redclyffe], but he had not had time to read it, so I had to wait till morning in doubt whether it would be a knock-down one, and it was rather a relief that it was not all abuse. It is very amusing to see how Miss Wellwood* comes in for exactly the same abuse as if she was alive, and with the same discrimination as to facts. It seems to me exactly the world's judgment of Guy and Philip — loving Guy and not understanding him, and sympathizing with Philip as more com- prehensible. However, Marianne's sonf cannot be disliked, in spite of his principles — a great triumph for her.'
It is very helpful to all who have had any literary success to read of the calm, uplifting advice given by Mr. Keble. He was her spiritual guide. We do
* Miss Wellwood was the lady whom Guy wanted to aid in founding a Sisterhood.
t Miss Dyson was always known as f Guy's mother/ as the first idea of the story came from her.
70 CHARLOTTE MARY YONGE
not know if she had yet begun what she did in time practise under his direction — Sacramental Con- fession. To her he spoke of what a successful book might be — ' the trial of one's life.' She writes herself :
' It was in the course of the summer of 1854 that the book, of which I have already said too much, attained its chief popularity, and showed me how little Mr. Keble cared for worldly estimation. Not that one word of depreciation or want of sympathy was said. Far from it. He enjoyed — nay, took a kind pride in — its success ; but when I came to him alarmed at my own sense of vainglory, he told me " a successful book might be the trial of one's life " ; showed me how work (even of this sort) might be dedicated ; how, whenever it was possible, I could explain how the real pith of the work came from another mind ; and dismissed me with the concluding words of the 90th Psalm (the which has most thankfully, I own, so far been realized).
' And when, in spite of all this, he saw me eager to see some " opinion of the press," he smiled, and said : " Oh, you care for such things." Though I know he perfectly entered into the value of a sound criticism examining into a matter, a mere puff was nothing at all to him ; and as to works of his own, I verily believe he much preferred hearing nothing about them. Forcing praise upon a person he considered as unkind, in the truest sense of the word, since where it was not painful it must be hurtful. By praise, however, I do not
'THE HEIR OF REDCLYFFE ' 71
mean approbation, which his soul never stinted ; in fact, he was often quite enthusiastically carried away by admiration of anything he thought excellent or containing the merest germ of ex- cellence.'
About this time were begun the Landmarks in History, and those who have been made in their youth to read them will know something of the salient points of European history.
The weak point of all her histories is a certain confusion of style and an enormous number of proper names ; but for all that they are good books, and are adapted to lay a foundation of historical knowledge which seems so often strangely neg- lected.
Another book was begun in these early fifties, one not less, probably even more, a power for good than The Heir of Ready ffe— The Daisy Chain.
In some ways this is the very best of all Miss Yonge's books. Dr. May, the father of the May family, is a real creation. He is, of all her many most living characters, the most alive ; he is so human, so thorough an Englishman of the best kind, of honourable family of the upper middle class, of good education, possessing cultivated tastes ; a man most loving, tender-hearted, chivalrous, and quick-tempered, who, stricken to the ground by a terrible sorrow, rises through it, and by it, to real self-conquest, to heights of goodness and of self- denial. There is no one in all the long series of Miss Yonge's characters whom some of us long more to meet than dear Dr. Richard May. All the May
72 CHARLOTTE MARY YONGE
family are delightful. And Ethel — so much has been said of her that it seems almost needless to write anything of the girl who has inspired so many of us to work for the Church.
In this most delightful book occur some of Miss Yonge's best bits of schoolboy life. Norman, Harry, Tom, are all typical boys. Norman is, we suppose, hardly less a favourite than Ethel. Perhaps many lovers of The Daisy Chain hardly do justice to Mar- garet, who, Miss Coleridge tells us, was at first the author's chief interest. Margaret is a most beautiful character; she is called to bear a veritable mar- tyrdom, and she does not fail. Everyone is interest- ing in this book : the sailor lover (the pathetic story of Alan Ernescliffe and of Margaret is simply and beautifully told), the delightful sailor brother, the masters at the school, the rather slow and unin- tellectual Richard May, so good and unselfish. Flora, the second daughter, is a study of the character which Miss Yonge most cordially disliked, the person who is worldly in a perfectly unobtrusive and estimable way. Flora is dreadfully punished for sins which were indeed sins, and very soon cured; but if she had been as thoroughly given over to the world as Miss Yonge believed she was, poor Flora's sorrows would not have cured her. She was pathetically young — only about twenty-four — when she repented, and we really think Miss Yonge was inclined to think too hardly of her.
We have said something of one love-story in this book ; all the love-making is so charmingly de- scribed— the perfect marriage of Dr. and Mrs. May, broken so suddenly, so tragically, the romantic little
'THE HEIR OF REDCLYFFE ' 73
love-story of Norman May and Meta Rivers, that dainty little fairylike person.
One great enthusiasm of Miss Yonge's appears now — Foreign Mission work. A connection of hers whose biography twenty years later she was called to write, John Coleridge Patteson — known to her and to all his family as ' Coley ' — had gone out with Bishop Selwyn to New Zealand and the Islands of the Sea, and it was to those regions Miss Yonge sent Norman May and his Meta, to that mission for which she herself cared and worked and gave her best.
There are some Oxford scenes, and some hints are given of the stress and strain which so many of the best of Oxford felt in those years after the dis- appearance of Newman.
The Daisy Chain, in our opinion, is as fresh and delicious as when it delighted people in the fifties. There are not many old-fashioned episodes. The horror of Miss Winter, the very prim governess, at the thought of a ' gentleman ' walking with the girls of the May family, is perhaps the only episode which reminds us that ' 'tis sixty years ' since the Mays gathered in the schoolroom for their last reading with their mother, in the opening chapter, except, indeed, that the family never needed any change of air, never seemed to go away simply for health's sake, and very rarely for any other reason. And they dined in the middle of the day!
The Daisy Chain was begun in the Monthly Packet in 1851, but only Part I. appeared there, and it was not published in book form until 1856.
74 CHARLOTTE MARY YONGE
Heartsease; or, The Brothers Wife, came out in 1854. Probably most of Miss Yonge's lovers would say that these three books — The Heir of Redclyffe, The Daisy Chain, and Heartsease — are the best of the tales of contemporary life. Charles Kingsley, indeed, preferred Heartsease to the Heir, Miss Yonge writes in 1855. It is a very clever story, and the heroine, Violet, is one of those developing charac- ters who out of weakness wax strong, whom Miss Yonge so much loved. Again, in this book the characters are very much alive, and we meet with some extremely disagreeable people. The old aunt, Mrs. Nesbit, is quite a wicked old woman. Miss Yonge herself records that Mr. Keble restrained her once or twice.
'The chief alteration I remember was that a sentence was erased as " coarse," in which Theo- dora said she really had a heart, though some people thought it was only a machine for pump- ing blood. Meeting the same expression in another book recalled to me the scrupulous re- finement of Hursley.'
Heartsease is still very fresh and charming, and has a good deal of knowledge of the world, as the world appears to a lady who met it in cultivated and well-born circles. There is just a slight and very distant knowledge of evil, and the declension of Arthur is quite natural. Not quite so probable is his rapid reformation. The book is in some respects an advance on The Heir of Redclyffe, and deserves to be read even in this century.
'THE HEIR OF REDCLYFFE' 75
Miss Yonge writes in 1855 :
' Mamma told you of the wonderful debut of Violet. I only wonder whether she will thrive as well when the critics have set their claws on her ; the home critics are very amusing in their variety and " characteristicalness " (there's a word !).
'My Colonel correspondent complains of the babies. . . . Sir W. Heathcote says the will [Mrs. Nesbit's, the wicked aunt's, we suppose] would not stand ; Judge Coleridge falls foul of the geography of the Lakes ; and so on.
' Most people say they think others will like it as well as Guy, though they don't themselves, and some few prefer it. It does want papa very much ; but, then, he did set it going, and there is mamma to gloat over it.'
Mr. Yonge died suddenly early in 1854, just as his only boy was starting for the Crimea ; and in the recollections so often quoted in this book Miss Yonge writes :
'It would be vain to tell what Mr. and Mrs. Keble were to us in those hours of affliction — how they came to us in the cold of a February Sunday evening (no trifle for Uer\ shared, soothed, ele- vated our grief; were all that the dearest could be, and never left us till our relations were with us; then, with tender sympathy, helped to bear us up through the long months of anxiety that ensued.'
After Mr. Yonge's death Miss Yonge writes to Miss Barnett :
76 CHARLOTTE MARY YONGE
'DEAR, GOOD OLD SLAVE,
'How nice and kind and understanding your letter was, and how thankful one should be for such friends ! . . .
'The worst will be over when we hear from Julian, poor boy ! Till then it seems like bearing the first stroke. But I am sure it fell mercifully as far as we were concerned, and the flow of feel- ings that meet us from all is very gratifying.
' I believe my uncle, always living in his own town far off, had no notion of the estimation in which his brother was held.
' . . . I know I shall miss him more when he has been away longer.'
We think an extract from one of Mrs. Yonge's letters may well come in here. She was always full of interest and enthusiasm about Charlotte. Writing to Miss Barnett a few months after Mr. Yonge's death, she says :
' I think she [Charlotte] is the one person who has more pleasure from her books than I have. We never tire of talking of them before they are written, and correcting the MS. and the proofs. I have just read the first volume of Guy again, but cannot venture upon the second. My thank- fulness increases, I think, that Charlotte's guide was spared to her till the dangers from a first success were over. I do not see that she loses her unself -consciousness, and if there is danger we have Mr. Keble. . . .'
The little glimpses we get from Mrs. Yonge's
'THE HEIR OF REDCLYFFE' 77
letters show us the sweet, loyal natures of both mother and daughter, and the absolute sympathy which had grown up between them.
The delight in Charlotte's doings never grew less as long as health and life were spared to the mother.
CHAPTER V
'CONVERSATIONS ON THE CATECHISM' — ' DYNEVOR TERRACE' — A VISIT TO IRELAND
(1855—1858)
THERE were many months of anxiety for Charlotte and her mother after the irreparable loss; but in time the brother returned, in bad health indeed, but safe, from the Crimea, and, as he recovered, there was much happiness in their daily life. The large family of Moberlys at Winchester were an increasing joy to her. Indeed, they are said to have suggested the Mays, and, oddly enough, some of the events in the family at Stoneborough seem to have been un- conscious prophecies of similar occurrences to the Moberlys — such as the winning of the Newdigate, and one or two other episodes.
And there was the great joy of meeting Bishop Selwyn at Winchester, and in a delightful letter to Miss Dyson, which is given in Miss Coleridge's Life, she describes the enthusiasm she felt and the joy it was to her to meet the hero Bishop. Her account of great old Warden Barter's speech reminds us of the description in The Daisy Chain of the S.P.G. meeting at Stoneborough, and of Norman May's speech.
In a footnote to Bishop Patteson's Life, Miss Yonge
78
'CONVERSATIONS ON THE CATECHISM' 79
writes that the means for the Southern Cross, Bishop Selwyn's missionary ship, had been raised —
' partly thus. My mother had always been eagerly interested in the mission, and when, on the day of my father's funeral, something brought before her the request for the vessel, she said to Mrs. Keble how much she should like to see the sum raised by contributions from those who liked The Heir of Redclyffe, then in its first flush of suc- cess. Mrs. Keble, pleased to see that anything could interest her, warmly took up the idea, other friends joined, and by their great kindness a sum was raised sufficient to be at least worth present- ing to the Bishop by the hands of a little three- year-old girl, just able to know that she had seen "man" and given him letter, though only able later to value his blessing.'
This was done in Warden Barter's garden on the afternoon of the day of the meeting.
As time went on, Miss Yonge seems to have enjoyed the county society around very much, and the next few years must have been happy ones in the full tide of work and of interests.
The Conversations on the Catechism were put together in 1858, and their author much wished Mr. Keble to write a preface for them. In a letter given in her Recollections he gently refuses, telling her that this 'is not an unknown little bird waiting to be jerked out of the nest/ and that it is undesirable to let people think or say (as they are too likely to do) that this is only Mr. Keble speaking with another
80 CHARLOTTE MARY YONGE
voice, and that he had not seen as a critic the whole of it. Miss Yonge says :
* I never quite knew what he meant by his not having read the whole as a critic — either he forgot how much he had read, or he had kept himself from touching anything that did not strike him as a positive error in fact or doctrine. I incline to this latter opinion, from what he says of inde- pendent testimony. He certainly did not give advice as to the general plan or subjects ; all he did was to read the proofs and mark what was wrong, or when I was in a difficulty help me out by lend- ing books, or consulting them when the point turned upon Greek or Hebrew.'*
He had given her one piece of advice which cer- tainly would not be needed nowadays : ' It occurred to me whether, when the ladies quote Greek, they had not better say they have heard their fathers and brothers say things.'
These Conversations are extraordinarily good. One might wish to alter an expression here and there — f or, naturally, in 1851-1858 people were still feeling their way — but what one really wishes is addition rather than omission. They are full of the most excellent teaching, and might be used by mothers still, especially if they could be re-edited and con- densed. The three Maries — Audrey Mary, Helena Mary, and Mary — who gather round their godmother, are representatives of the three classes Miss Yonge
* Gleanings from Thirty Years' Intercourse with the Rev. John KeUe, p. xxviii.
1 CONVERSATIONS ON THE CATECHISM' 81
knew so well — the county family, the country clergy, the respectable farmers. They are all very individual in their characters, and very attractive in their girlish ways.
Perhaps a quotation or two will show how very good the teaching is. Speaking of idolatry, she says, explaining ' Put my whole trust in Him,' that people, women especially, may be led away by the temper of idolatry.
' Miss 0. Yes, that is one branch ; the other I meant is the temper that enables women to be led captive. I did not so much, at that moment, mean over-love as over-trust. I mean, that we had often rather shape our views of right and wrong, and guide our actions, by the counsel of someone we look up to, than by the rule of God's law.
' Audrey. But I thought it was right not to be self-reliant, and that we ought to be guided.
* Miss O. So we ought, to a certain point, but our guides are but men. There is no safety in giving the whole keeping of our conscience to another. Our rule of right and wrong, and our doctrine, must be what Scripture and our own Church teach us, not merely what an individual or a few indi- viduals may say. We must have an external standard.
'Audrey. And that must be the Bible and Prayer Book.
'Miss O. . . . Enthusiasm, when kept within bounds, is a feeling given, I do believe, to quicken love to God and our neighbour, and to become zeal for all that is excellent ; but if unguarded it be-
6
82 CHARLOTTE MARY YONGE
conies an idolatry. This sort of which you spoke, which I think our Lord forbade in the words, " Call no man father on earth, for One is your Father," has been the means of leading many and many away from our Church on one side or the other, and often, as it seems, through their best feelings.
' Audrey. Their love of goodness, and honour to their pastor, and desire for guidance.
' Miss O. I was once struck with the words that desire for guidance becomes a snare where God has not vouchsafed it. To make God and His law the first, and ever to watch for His invisible hand working through the visible, to listen to His voice through the audible calls to good, to seek only His service, to call upon Him alone at every hour, to keep His Presence and His Mediation ever in our minds, is the only guard from creature- worship in any form, the only hope when in the hour of death and day of judgment all creatures shall fail us, and we shall be face to face with Him alone.'
Of course, part of Miss Yonge's advice about attendance at Holy Communion and on other points would not find favour with some of us now. But all her teaching as to the doctrine of the Sacraments is admirable. She constantly refers to the Fathers and the best Anglican divines.
Dynevor Terrace, which came out in 1857, has a delightful hero, Louis, and a provokingly good heroine. Here again is the situation of a child's obedience strained to the utmost point. Louis and Mary are really too submissive to the un- worthy father of the latter, and, although it all
'DYNEVOR TERRACE' 83
conies right in the end, we cannot see that Mary took a right view of conflicting duties.
Much more natural people are Louis's fiery cousin Jem and his dreamy, beautiful wife, who is roused by poverty and trials, and becomes a real helpmate to her husband. Mrs. Frost, Jem's grandmother, is very delightful, but we cannot feel she is as living and original as Dr. May, with whom Miss Coleridge compares her.
It is a very delightful book to real lovers of Miss Yonge, not so much because of the story, but because Louis himself and his tomboy cousin Clara, and Jem and Mrs. Frost, are such charming people.
In a letter to Miss Barnett, Miss Yonge discusses the pet name of * Debonnaire ' as applied to Louis.
' The folk here,' she writes, ' are quite on my side about " Debonnaire." In the first place, the King was so called as synonymous with Pious, according to Sismondi, and the proper original meaning of this word seems to have been " gracious," in which sense it is constantly applied to the best of the knights. Modern French has debased it, and given it of late the sense of weakness. ... In English it decidedly means graceful. . . . Johnson calls it elegant, civil, well-bred, and no doubt it was such in the chivalrous vocabulary. Now, this was just what I wanted ; if it had no foolish sense it would be flattery. . . .'
Miss Yonge again brings out her favourite idea of a weak character gradually developing under the influences of right principles. Louis, however, was only boyish and unformed when we first meet him,
6-2
84 CHARLOTTE MARY YONGE
and had just the qualities and gifts suited to provoke his father, than whom Miss Yonge never drew a more perfect picture of a perfectly upright, excellent, narrow-minded and prejudiced British nobleman.
Certainly there is one point which strikes a reader of these earlier novels of society of Miss Yonge. A great deal more was expected in the way of sense and powers of judgment from the young man and woman of, say, seventeen or eighteen in those early nineteenth-century days than seems to be demanded now. Our boys and girls are decidedly younger than they used to be, and we are not sure that this is a change altogether for the worse. Certainly no modern father would be so hard on his son's exces- sively harmless vagaries as was Lord Ormesfield on Louis. There is a good deal of humour in both Louis and in his great-aunt, Mrs. Frost.
Miss Yonge went to Dublin in 1857 to be brides- maid to her cousin, Miss Colborne, now Lady Mont- gomery Moore. She writes to Miss Barnett :
( ROYAL HOSPITAL, DUBLIN,
e September 28, 1857.
' The place we are in is a sight in itself — an old house of the Knight Hospitallers, which the great Ormond converted into an Irish Chelsea [Hospital], making the Commander of the Forces the Master. It is built round a quadrangle, with a cloister, a chapel, and great hall, all in Louis XIV. style . . . this house occupying one side, with the hall and chapel, the house of the Chaplain, and some of the staff, and the old pensioners. ... It is very military church-going . . . sitting in a hideous
A VISIT TO IRELAND 85
gallery looking down on them [the Lancers]. The pensioners are chiefly R.C., so that there is a very small show of them at church. ... It was a beautiful scene in the great oaken hall, with Lord Seaton's grand figure walking up and down ... all that he ever was in activity, and alertness, and memory.
'The Church matters are wonderfully lax, as might be expected, the Irish Church hardly pro- fessing to believe in the Church. . . . Kneeling appears to be unknown. I have seen no provision for it except in the gallery here and in a beautiful church built by Mr. Sidney Herbert, to which we went yesterday afternoon.
'Lord Seaton was so kind as to give us ... a field-day in Phoenix Park. Only think of being regaled with four regiments of infantry, three of cavalry, and a proportion of artillery, and on a sunshiny day of Irish winds, with the beauteous park for the scene and the Wicklow Hills as back- ground. . . . We had no visible enemy, but we suffered a repulse in spite of a brilliant charge of the Lancers and Scots Greys, but it was all to get us home to luncheon.'
CHAPTER VI
LIFE AT ELDERFIELD — 'THE YOUNG STEPMOTHER' —
'THE TRIAL,' AND OTHER BOOKS
(1858—1866)
ANOTHER change came into Miss Yonge's life in 1858. Her brother, Julian Yonge, married, and delighted as Charlotte was to have a sister, and, in time, nephews and nieces, Mrs. Yonge and Charlotte wisely deter- mined to move from Otterbourne House and take up their abode at a cottage very near their old home — Elderfield Cottage, as it then was. In this long, low house with a pleasant garden, both mother and daughter lived for the rest of their respective lives.
In a perfectly charming letter to Miss Barnett, Miss Yonge describes her brother's wedding — how pretty the bride was, how joyous she herself felt : 'I am sure I felt all the time as if I were being married to her just as much as Julian.'
No sister could have been found more loyal and true and unselfish than was Charlotte Yonge. She was childlike in her gladness ; she was one of those people whose best and noblest qualities are seen best in their relations with their nearest and dearest.
In this letter there is an amusing quotation from a review, which says :
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LIFE AT ELDERFIELD 87
'Miss Sewell upheld baptismal regeneration in Amy Herbert, and mild stupidity in Ursula, and Miss Yonge has turned from the contemplation of the corporal works of mercy to that of the virtues of a hereditary aristocracy' (we suppose in Dynevor Terrace).
Elderfield is almost on the road between Win- chester and Southampton, but this was no draw- back, quite the contrary, in those thrice-blessed years before motor-cars destroyed country life and gardens, and peace and quiet for simple people whose chief desire is to stay in pleasant places when they get to them. Mercifully, Miss Yonge never saw the change which motors have produced, and Otterbourne was in her time the quiet, peaceful little hamlet it had always been, with fields and dells where daffodils and cowslips grew. She had an intense pleasure in common everyday sights, to which her books bear witness ; she loved botany, and the little book reprinted from the Magazine for the Young testified to her knowledge. Then she had the great pleasure of her school-children. Every day she went up to the school and gave a lesson in Scripture to boys or girls, and on other subjects at times.
Writing from Puslinch in September, 1859, she speaks of her home in that place :
' It is nine years since I had been here. . . . All is much the same, and the ways of the house, sounds and sights, walks and church-going, are all unaltered. And there is all the exceeding pleasure of the old terms, the playful half teasing and
* CHARLOTTE MARY YONGE
scolding, and being set down for nonsense, and, oh, above all, Uncle Yonge — having more of the father to me than any one could have, though very, very different — but to him Papa looked up, and of him I used to be more afraid than anyone ; and this makes it the most pleasant thing to be with him, and get the kind, merry words that are more to " William's daughter " than to anything else, not at all to the authoress, for it [her fame ?] is rather a joke here. He has some elements of Humfrey* in him, chiefly the kindly common sense, and the sense of duty which is indeed a good heritage. But it is the first time I ever saw his grey head here without the other silver head that used to be inseparable from it. I have often been here without Mamma, but never without Papa, and you know how to him Devon was like a school- boy's home, and we used to be so very happy together. . . .
1 1 have left all work behind, and feel as if I were living my own life instead of that of my people, and being the old original Charlotte instead of Miss Yonge.'
And on her return home she writes :
' That visit was on the whole so delicious, and leaves such a sunny impression on my mind, that it is strange to remember the spots of yearning recollection and the great pang of going away. Not that I was not glad to get back . . . but when one looked back to the last time of parting in the full hope of being together the next year, and remem-
* The Squire in Hopes and Fears.
LIFE AT ELDERFIELD 89
bered that nine such years passed before the next visit, and that it was with two such gaps, one's heart could not but sink. But it was a happy time and a reassuring one, for I set out with a sense that "winds had rent my sheltering bowers," knowing that my uncle had had a good deal of illness . . . but when I got there it was so like old times, and Uncle Yonge so bright and well and exactly like his old self, that it was quite a happy surprise, and, whatever happens, the recollection of that visit will have been a gain.'
Miss Yonge went sometimes to London, and she was beginning to form friendships with a younger generation of girls, of whom the most distinguished was Miss Christabel Coleridge, her future biographer, herself the author, in later years, of many delightful stories.
Sir John Taylor Coleridge's elder daughter, Mary, was one of Charlotte Yonge's most intimate friends (all the letters to her from Miss Yonge have been destroyed), and it occurred to Miss Coleridge that a number of clever and eager girls were growing up who needed some intellectual stimulus. It was agreed to form a sort of society, and that * Cousin Charlotte ' should be the head. She chose the name ' Mother Goose to her Goslings.' Four questions were set every month, and the best set of answers travelled round ; and there was also a manuscript magazine, The Barnacle. Miss Coleridge's account of this is delightful to those who realize what they would have given to be among those Goslings. Not only Miss Coleridge, but Miss Peard and Miss Florence
90 CHAELOTTE MARY YONGE
Wilford, who both became writers of stories, were among the Goslings, and many another whose name became known in other connections. In time the society became merged in * Arachne and her Spiders ' in the Monthly Packet
Miss Coleridge tells us of a meeting of the Goslings and Mother Goose in Sir John Duke Coleridge's house in 1862. Miss Yonge at that time must have been strikingly handsome with her dark sparkling eyes and beautiful white hair. The portrait of her in the Life, from a photograph by Bassano, shows a face at once .strong and sweet, with a good deal of resemblance to her father's.
Hopes and Fears came out in 1860. We think Miss Yonge must have grown fond of the family of Ful- morts, who are the heroes and heroines of what one might call the subsidiary plot of the story. The Fulmorts reappear more than once. There are really two stories in this novel, which cross and intercross, and there is an evident moral intended — the evils of idolatry in affection. The heroine who is supposed to illustrate this story is so sweet and lovable a creature in her youth that it is difficult to conceive her growing into the rather tiresome spinster she undoubtedly became. The naughty girl of the tale, Lucilla, is an illustration of the change which has come over our manners. One of Lucy's worst offences is a tour in company with a cousin — a girl verging on the thirties — in Ireland. The impropriety of what would nowadays be a perfectly commonplace journey is much insisted on. Lucy loses her lover, Robert Fulmort, and he devotes himself and his fortune to the building of church, schools, clergy-house, and
« THE YOUNG STEPMOTHER ' 91
choir-school in a slum which the distillery owned by his father and elder brother had not improved. Perhaps the newly-built S. Barnabas', Pimlico, sug- gested this idea ; or All Saints', Margaret Street : for there were springing up in London at that time those wonderful churches which did so much, and are doing so much, to spread the Faith whole and undefiled. S. Barnabas', Pimlico ; All Saints', Mar- garet Street ; S. Peter's, London Docks ; S. Alban's, Holborn; Christ Church, Albany Street; S. Mary Magdalene, Munster Square — all these were com- paratively new in these early sixties, and more than once we find them mentioned in the Monthly Packet, or allusions to them in Miss Yonge's stories. The great Sisterhoods were in their very early beginnings, and we shall see how the idea of the Religious Life was welcomed by her. Accounts of their work, and allusions to them, are found in the same way.
To return to Hopes and Fears, which is perhaps the least attractive of those stories of modern life which we should group in a second class. To the first belong The Heir of Redclyffe, Heartsease, and The Daisy Chain. In the second we should put Dynevor Terrace, Hopes and Fears, The Young Stepmother, and The Clever Woman of the Family. The Young Step- mother is to our thinking a far better story than Hopes and Fears. No less a person than Tennyson read it with pleasure, and the Guizot family liked it much.
Tennyson is described by Mr. Palgrave as reading in bed one of Miss Yonge's deservedly popular tales, wherein a leading element is the deferred Confirma- tion of a grown-up person. ' On Tennyson read till
92 CHARLOTTE MARY YONGE
I heard him cry with satisfaction, "I see land!
Mr. is just going to be confirmed," after which
darkness and slumber.'
The Confirmation was not really one of the chief events of the story, but evidently Miss Yonge thought it might provoke comment. She writes to Miss Barnett : ' Tell me what people say to Mr. Kendal's Confirmation. I want to know how it strikes the world.'
Albinia Kendal, the stepmother, is one of the most absolutely delightful women of all Miss Yonge's heroines, and although her stepchildren are each in his or her different way most horrid little speci- mens, they are very cleverly drawn and developed. The Crimean War comes into this story, and the description of the death of Gilbert, Albinia's only stepson, is as pathetic and vivid a bit of writing as Miss Yonge ever produced.
Albinia's own child, Maurice, is as natural and naughty as could be wished, and there are pleasant sketches of slighter characters, and some rather good and satirical descriptions of the humours of a country town.
Another charming story reprinted from the Maga- zine for the Young appeared in book form in 1861 — The Stokesley Secret. The family described therein, the Merrifields, reappears very often, and Hal, the very naughty boy of the story, comes to a bad end, as is set forth in a later book, where he is made almost to marry the scapegrace girl of The Pillars of the House. She just escapes this fate.
The Merrifields are excellently described, and come out as photographic representations of the
'THE TRIAL; AND OTHER BOOKS 93
generally worthy and nearly always dull English county family. It is really quite sad that the Merrifields were allowed to fall off as they grew old. Those of them who are respectable — and there is only one who is not — become so dull, so limited and Philistine, that we wish Miss Yonge had left them where they were at the end of The Stokesley Secret.
Miss Yonge's letters are full of allusion to the books she was reading ; in one she writes :
'We have just finished Dr. Livingstone, noble man that he is ; all that one can wish is that he knew what the Church meant. The grand simplicity of his courage and endurance is most magnificent. I am sure England has not come to degeneracy yet.'
The Trial ran through the Monthly Packet of 1863 and 1864, and came out in book form at once. The manuscript relating to Leonard Ward's prison life was the last Miss Yonge ever submitted to Mr. Keble, and she tells us how he made her soften the details of the effect on the mind of prison life.
Of this book Mr. Henry Sidgwick says, in a letter to Mr. Roden Noel :
' There is a new story by the authoress of The Heir of Redclyffe which I have read with all my old enthusiasm. I thought it was quite gone off, but I can't get The Trial out of my head. Did you .ever read Madame Bovary, a French novel by Flaubert? It is very powerful, and Miss Yonge reminds me of it by force of contrast. It describes how the terrible ennui of mean French rural
94 CHARLOTTE MARY YONGE
domestic life drags down the soul of an ambitious woman, whereas Miss Yonge makes one feel how full of interest the narrowest sphere of life is.
' I think her religion is charming, and it mellows with age ; the dpre Puseyism wears off.'*
Certainly, Dr. May and * le docteur Bovary ' have not a great deal in common.
One wonders where 'dpre Puseyism' comes out. Perhaps in The Two Guardians, where one guardian of a youthful owner of an estate disputes with his co-trustee as to the possibility of letting a farm to a Dissenter ; or perhaps in the earliest of all the stories, where we saw that attendance at a Mechanics' In- stitute was esteemed a gross impropriety.
The Trial brings before us most of our old friends of The Daisy Chain. Dr. May is as admirable as ever, mellowed of course, but just as charming and headlong, and the little jars between him and Tom, and their gradual drawing together, are very clever bits of character study.
The tragedy is well conceived, and Leonard is very living ; we are most thankful he is allowed to go on his way in peace and become a missionary in the South Sea Islands, and is not sent home again in a later book. He is just mentioned in The Pillars of the House, and he does appear for a moment in her last book. It is in The Trial, we think, Miss Yonge first mentions Sisters of Mercy ; two come to the rescue of Stoneborough during a scarlet fever epidemic. They were brought by Dr. May's dear friend, Dr. Spencer, another admirably described physician,
* Life of Henry Sidgwick, p. 109.
'THE TRIAL; AND OTHER BOOKS 95
quite distinct from, and absolutely unlike, Dr. May, just a little bit ahead of him in Church views and scientific knowledge alike.
Some of the readers of the story seem to have been very odd people. Miss Yonge writes :
'I find most people grumble at Leonard's not being hung ' [most of us would never have forgiven her if she had allowed him to be executed], ' but I mean to make much more of him.'
Ethel is our Ethel, only at twenty -nine she seems very much the middle-aged spinster, which she would not be now. There is a very pretty, delicately-told romance concerning Ethel : Leonard Ward has an adoration for her, absolutely of the chivalrous kind. What she teaches him in the many readings and discussions which she, her young brother Aubrey, and Leonard shared in the course of a long summer holiday which they spent together, was his stay during the awful time of his trial and three years' imprisonment.
It is to her that he owes his missionary aspirations, which are strangely fulfilled when he comes out, his innocence established and all his life before him, for he was only eighteen when his life seemed to be wrecked. The boys and Ethel have read Marmion together in that holiday, and on his return to freedom Ethel could not help repeating the long- treasured lines : ' And, Leonard,
' " . . . grieve not for thy woes,
Disgrace and trouble ; For He who honour best bestows Shall give thee double." '
96 CHARLOTTE MARY YONGE
' " I've never ceased to be glad you read Marmion with me," he hastily said, as they turned into church on hearing a clattering of choristers behind him.
'Clara might have had such sensations when she bound the spurs on her knight's heels ; yet even she could hardly have had so pure, unselfish, and exquisite a joy as Ethel's, in receiving the pupil who had been in a far different school from hers.
' The grey dawn through the bloom, the depths of shadow in the twilight church, softening and rendering all more solemn and mysterious, were more in accordance than bright and beamy sun- shine with her subdued, grave thankfulness ; and there was something suitable in the fewness of the congregation that had gathered in the Lady Chapel — so few that there was no room for shy- ness either in or for him who was again taking his place there, with steady, composed demeanour, its stillness concealing so much.
'Ethel had reckoned on the verse, "That He might hear the mournings of such as are in captivity, and deliver the children appointed unto death." But she had not reckoned on its falling on her ears in the deep, full-toned, melodious bass that came in, giving body to the young notes of the choristers — a voice so altered and mellowed since she last had heard it, that it made her look across in doubt, and recognize, in the uplifted face, that here indeed the freed captive was at home and lifted above himself.
' When the clause, in the Litany, for all prisoners
'THE TRIAL; AND OTHER BOOKS 97
and captives brought to her the thrill that she had only to look up to see the fulfilment of many and many a prayer for one captive, for once she did not hear the response, only saw the bent head, as though there were thoughts that went too deep to find voice."
Miss Yonge writes to a daughter of Dean Butler :
1 A sort of notion of locating a story at Market Stoneborough had made us look up the Mays and find out what they are doing now.
* Blanche and Hector are just married, and Aubrey, having proved too delicate for Eton, is Ethel's faithful pupil still, and Flora's house is very well managed, but so stupid, and Mary is married to a clergyman.
'I have changed the cart accident into Dickie tumbling off the Minster tower on the roof, when he slid down on a skylight and stuck, till Leonard got him down and stopped the bleeding from a terrible cut in the leg.'
Later on, when Leonard's plans are matured, and they are speaking of Dickie, Norman May's boy, whose life Leonard has saved, Ethel says :
' " Ah, papa is always telling him that they can't get on in New Zealand for want of a small arch- deacon, and that, I really think, abashes him more than anything else."
' " He is not forward — he is only sensible," said Leonard, on whose heart Dickie had far too fast a hold for even this slight disparagement not to be rebutted. " I had forgotten what a child could be
7
98 CHARLOTTE MARY YONGE
till I was with him ; I felt like a stock or a stone among you all."
'Ethel smiled. "I was nearly giving you Marmion, in remembrance of old times on the night of the Christmas-tree," she said ; " but I did not feel as if the ' giving double ' for all your care and trouble had begun."
'"The heart to feel it so was not come," said Leonard. "Now, since I have grasped this hope of making known to others the way to that grace that held me up " — he paused with excess of feel- ing— ' all has been joy, even in the recollection of the darkest days. Mr. Wilmot's words come back now, that it may all have been training for my Master's work. Even the manual labour may have been my preparation." His eyes brightened, and he was, indeed, more like the eager, hopeful youth she remembered than she had ever hoped to see him; but this brightness was the flash of steel, tried, strengthened, and refined in the fire — a brightness that might well be trusted.
' " One knew it must be so," was all she could say.
'"Yes, yes," he said eagerly. "You sent me words of greeting that held up my faith; and, above all, when we read those books at Coombe, you put the key of comfort in my hand, and I never quite lost it. Miss May," he added, as Dr. May's latchkey was heard in the front door, " if ever I come to any good, I owe it to you."
' And that was the result of the boy's romance.'
The Trial, which many of us love with a good deal of the love we gave to the Heir and to The Daisy
< THE TRIAL; AND OTHER BOOKS 99
Chain, brings out how ideal, how beautiful, are the relations between Dr. May and Ethel. Nowhere in fiction is that relation of widowed father and the special home daughter more winningly described. We know Dr. May must be with his wife and Mar- garet now, and we can only hope Ethelred has joined them, for we cannot picture her without her father.
The Clever Woman of the Family came out in 1865 as a book ; it did not run through the Packet. This is, in our judgment, almost Miss Yonge's cleverest book ; not the most charming by any means, but dis- tinctly able and amusing. She betrays more humour in this than in any other book. The poor clever woman, Rachel, is not at all clever in reality, in some ways extraordinarily stupid, and Miss Yonge has been quite merciless in showing up all her follies and her abrupt, disagreeable manner. Side by side is the charming, the really gifted woman Ermine ; in fact, the book is not an attack on clever women or writing women, or women who do anything at all worth doing, but on presumption, overmuch talk, and silly contempt for authority. The story is not at all an attempt to prove that women were never to venture out of the beaten tracks.
Lady Temple, the youthful widow and mother of seven unruly children, at the mature age of twenty- five was supposed to be absolutely helpless, and her cousin Rachel determines to be her good angel and manage her boys for her. The boys are perfectly docile and obedient with their mother, and hopelessly naughty with Rachel ; then the Clever Woman falls in with one Mauleverer, who leads her to believe he has been prevented by intellectual scruples from
7—2
100 CHARLOTTE MARY YONGE
taking Orders. The way in which Rachel flies to conclusions, and the way Mauleverer leads her on, are most cleverly shown up. Rachel, who is an heiress, is much harassed hy the evils of lace-making, and is led into setting up a home for some orphans in an adjacent town, where, instead of lace-making, they are taught wood-engraving ; they are put under the charge of a widow whom Mauleverer introduces to Rachel, and in due time produce two woodcuts.
' They were entitled " The Free Maids that weave their Thread with Bones," and one called " The Ideal" represented a latticed cottage window, with roses, honeysuckles, cat, beehives, and all con- ventional rural delights, around a pretty maiden singing at her lace pillow ; while the other, yclept " The Real," showed a den of thin, wizened, half- starved girls, cramped over their cushions in a lace school. The design was Mr. Mauleverer's, the execution the children's ; and, neatly mounted on cards, the performance did them great credit.'
When Rachel shows the woodcuts to some friends, a certain Captain Keith throws doubt on their being woodcuts at all, and promises, if he cannot prove his words, to subscribe to the enterprise. A few days later he succeeds.
Lady Temple, who is supposed to be so timid and helpless, makes a raid on the home, and finds that the children, whom she contrives to see alone, are starved and beaten and made to work at lace- making ' more than ever we did at home, day and night ; and if we don't she takes the stick.'
'THE TRIAL,' AND OTHER BOOKS 101
Lady Temple carries off the two children ; one is sickening with diphtheria, which she communi- cates to the Temple boys and to Rachel.
Mauleverer and the widow are both tried at the assizes, but poor Rachel, as a friend remarks, ' has managed so sweetly that they might just as well try her as him for obtaining money on false pretences ; and the man seems to have been wonderfully sharp in avoiding committing himself.'
The widow, who turns out to be no widow at all, and whose child is Mauleverer's, is sentenced to three years' imprisonment, but Mauleverer has to be ac- quitted. Fortunately, he has been recognized as one Maddox, who has committed frauds, the story of which is another part of this history, so he does not escape ; and Rachel, after suffering intensely in body and mind, marries, to the unbounded astonishment of everyone, Captain Keith, whom in early days she had taken to task for lack of a belief in heroism, and to whom she had narrated his own exploit at the siege of Delhi, as it had been told her without any name being given. She adds that the hero was killed. She does not discover her mistake for a long time.
There is much more in the book which is most delightful : the story of the faithful love of Colonel Keith and the real Clever Woman, Ermine Williams. There is another of Miss Yonge's worldly women, Bessie Keith, Captain Keith's sister. She is much more convincing than most of these unworthy per- sons, and much more deserving of blame ; in fact, she is very ably described. For absolute cleverness, for variety of character and clever talk, the book stands out among all Miss Yonge's tales, and is far ahead of
102 CHARLOTTE MARY YONGE
any, except perhaps the stories we have named as belonging to the first class.
There is an allusion to it in one of her letters to Miss Barnett :
' I have been entreated to send Dr. May to cure
her [Ermine, the lame heroine], but I think that
would be past even his capacities !
'There is no heart-breaking about him [the
Colonel] ; with Rachel, she had made up her mind
to immolate her affections at the shrine of her
asylum before she found out that she was in no
danger. Now I believe in her.'
JOHN KEBLE.
After the painting by G. Richmond.
To face page 103.
CHAPTER VII
MR. KEBLE'S DEATH — THE HISTORICAL TALES- BISHOP PATTESON
(1866—1874)
IN the early spring of 1866 Mr. Keble died, and his wife followed him in forty days.
To Miss Yonge this must have been one of the great sorrows of her life, but in all she says of it there is the note of thankfulness.
* It was the one bright, beautiful day of a cold, wet spring, and the celandines spread and glis- tened like stars round the grave where we laid him, and bade him our last " God be with you " with the 23rd Psalm, and went home, hoping that he would not blame us for irreverence for thinking of him in words applied to the first saint who bore his name : " He was a burning and a shining light, and ye were willing for a season to rejoice in his
light.-'
It is hardly possible to dwell too much on what the blank in her life must have been. Her mother's health also began to fail, and these must have been sad years. Mrs. Yonge died in 1868, and Charlotte was alone ; the widowhood of the unmarried woman,
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104 CHARLOTTE MARY YONGE
of which she speaks in Hopes and Fears, came on her, but she was brave and unselfish, and began her work again.
To this period belong her three chief historical stories — The Dove in the Eagle's Nest, The Chaplet of Pearls, The Caged Lion. The first of these is on a very high level indeed, and the Chaplet hardly less so. The story of the burgher maiden, Christina Sorel, carried off by her father, who was in the pay of a lawless German Baron, to tend the sickly little daughter of the Baron, is a lovely idyll. Christina has been brought up by her uncle, a wealthy citizen and skilled carver of Ulm, and she is refined and cultivated to an uncommon degree. She appears among the rough inhabitants of the castle as some- thing beyond their ken, and she manages to bring the poor little sickly maiden to grasp the meaning of the simple truths Christina taught her.
Christina fancied that when the snow melted, Ermentrude's soul would pass away. And so it came to pass. The young Baron is prevailed on to fetch a priest, for, as the elder Baron has been excommuni- cated, a priest is seldom seen in the castle.
* On the white masses of vapour that floated on the opposite side of the mountain was traced a gigantic shadowy outline of a hermit, with head bent eagerly forward and arm outstretched.
'The monk crossed himself. Eberhard stood still for a moment, and then said hoarsely : " The Blessed Friedmuiid ! He is come for her"; then strode on towards the postern gate, followed by Brother Norbert, a good deal reassured.'
THE HISTORICAL TALES 105
But Christina is loved by the young Baron, and in time he wins her to be his wife. He is supposed to have been killed in a skirmish, and Christina is left with twin boys and the Baron's fierce old mother, who dies in a few years. The story of the upbring- ing of the boys, of their visit to Ulm, of the hero of romance, Maximilian, and, finally, of the death of Friedel, the younger twin, in a skirmish, is perfect. Friedel comes to give water to the foe of their house- hold, Schlangenwald, and the Count tells him that his father is a Turkish slave, and shoots Friedel. Ebbo, the elder boy, is left, and suddenly his father returns. He had been really taken prisoner by the hereditary foe, and sold to the Turks. After many adventures he had been ransomed, and returned to find his one surviving son a gallant knight, in the service and obedience of the Emperor, no longer the marauding Baron he himself had been. He refuses to resume his former state, asking only for a quiet corner in which to 'save his soul.' * It was plain that Sir Eberhard had learnt more Christianity in the hold of his Moorish pirate-ship than ever in the Holy Roman Empire ' — long ago he had vowed never to return to a life of violence — and the story ends with an epilogue, showing us Ebbo in his later life. Miss Yonge could not resist making him embrace, to some extent, the reformed doctrine, and thereby fall into disgrace with Charles Y. It is a beautiful book, to which this short account does no justice. The story of the twin brothers and their love, and of Friedel's death, is of all her stories the most touched with poetic grace. When the foe of their house has fallen and Friedel is mortally wounded, Ebbo only
106 CHARLOTTE MARY YONGE
severely hurt, the brothers must needs be sepa- rated.
* This sentence brought the first cloud of grief or dread to Friedel's brow, but only for a moment. He looked at his brother, who had again fainted at the first touch of his wounded limb, and said : "It is well. Tell the dear Ebbo that I cannot help it if, after all, I go to the praying and leave him the fighting. Dear, dear Ebbo ! One day to- gether again and for ever ! I leave thee for thine own sake." With much effort he signed the cross again on his brother's brow, and kissed it long and fervently. Then, as all stood round, reluctant to effect this severance, or disturb one on whom death was visibly fast approaching, he struggled up on his elbow, and held out the other hand, saying : "Take me now, Heinz, ere Ebbo revive to be grieved. The last sacrifice," he further whispered, whilst almost giving himself to Heinz and Moritz to be carried to his own bed in the turret chamber.
* There, even as they laid him down, began what seemed to be the mortal agony, and, though he was scarcely sensible, his mother felt that her prime call was to him, while his brother was in other hands. Perhaps it was well for her. Surgical practice was rough, and wounds made by firearms were thought to have imbibed a poison that made treatment to be supposed efficacious in proportion to the pain inflicted. When Ebbo was recalled by the torture to see no white reflection of his own face on the pillow beside him, and to feel in vain for the grasp of the cold, damp hand, a delirious frenzy
THE HISTORICAL TALES 107
seized him, and his struggles were frustrating the doctor's attempts, when a low, soft, sweet song stole through the open door.
* " Friedel!" he murmured, and held his breath to listen. All through the declining day did the gentle sound continue — now of grand chants or hymns caught from the cathedral choir, now of songs of chivalry or saintly legend so often sung over the evening fire, the one flowing into the other in the wandering of failing powers, but never failing in the tender sweetness that had dis- tinguished Friedel through life. And whenever that voice was heard, let them do to him what they would, Ebbo was still absorbed in intense listening so as not to lose a note, and lulled almost out of sense of suffering by that swan-like music. If his attendants made such noise as to break in on it, or if it ceased for a moment, the anguish returned, but was charmed away by the weakest, faintest resumption of the song. Probably Friedel knew not, with any earthly sense, what he was doing, but to the very last he was serving his twin brother as none other could have aided him in his need.
1 The September sun had set, twilight was coming on, the doctor had worked his stern will, and Ebbo, quivering in every fibre, lay spent on his pillow, when his mother glided in and took her seat near him, though where she hoped he would not notice her presence. But he raised his eye- lids, and said, " He is not singing now."
4 "Singing indeed, but where we cannot hear him," she answered. "'Whiter than the snow,
108 CHARLOTTE MARY YONGE
clearer than the ice-cave, more solemn than the choir. They will come at last.' That was what he said, even as he entered there." And the low dove- like tone and tender calm face continued upon Ebbo the spell that the chant had left. He dozed as though still lulled by its echo.'
This is one story which surely need never grow old-fashioned.
The Chaplet of Pearls is hardly less excellent. In it we are given a romantic story which is laid in the period of the St. Bartholomew massacre. The present writer well remembers Dr. Bright, the eminent Professor of Ecclesiastical History in the University of Oxford, pointing out the great lite- rary merit of the account of the dying hours of Charles IX. We will quote it :
1 The surgeon said, " You have seen a sad sight, Monsieur le Baron : I need not bid you to be discreet."
' " There are some things that go too deep for speech," sighed the almost English Berenger ; then, after a pause, " Is there no hope for him ? Is he indeed dying?"
' " Without a miracle, he cannot live a month. He is as truly slain by the St. Bartholomew as ever its martyrs were," said Pare, moved out of his usual cautious reserve towards one who had seen so much and felt so truly. " I tell you, sir, that his mother hath as truly slain her sons, as if she had sent Rene there to them with his drugs. According as they have consciences and hearts, so they pine and perish under her rule."
THE HISTOKICAL TALES 109
* Berenger shuddered, and almost sobbed. " And hath he no better hope, no comforter?" he asked.
'"None save good old Flipote. As you heard, the Queen-mother will not suffer his own Church to speak to him in her true voice. No confessor but one chosen by the Cardinal of Lorraine may come near him, and with him all is mere ceremony. But if at the last he opens his ear and heart to take in the true hope of salvation, it will be from the voice of poor old Philippine."
' And so it was ! It was Philippine who heard him in the night sobbing over the piteous words, "My God, what horrors, what blood!" and, as she took from him his tear-drenched handkerchief, spoke to him of the Blood that speaketh better things than the blood of Abel ; and it was she who, in his final agony, heard and treasured these last words, " If the Lord Jesus will indeed receive me into the company of the blest !" Surely, never was repentance deeper than that of Charles IX., and these, his parting words, were such as to inspire the trust that it was not remorse.'
Miss Yonge in this book grasped the spirit to some extent, at any rate, of this period. We do recognize Charles IX. and Catherine de' Medici and the great Henry, and the portrait of the old Huguenot minister, who proved such a father in need to the hapless heroine. The description of the Court of the Duchesse de Quinet, with all its Huguenot stiffness and real goodness, is very good indeed.
The Caged Lion, a story of James I. of Scotland, introduces us to Henry V. of England, and gives us
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a vivid picture of the King and of his brother Bed- ford, of the illness of Henry, of the Flemish Court. There is a saintly heroine, and another weak hero, Malcolm, who grows to he a saint. It is an inter- esting story, and sheds light on several not very familiar bits of history. Malcolm after James I.'s murder goes to Jerusalem. He returns to die, and is tended on his death-bed by his first and only love, Esclairmonde, now a holy nun.
' " Sister," he said, " the morn that I had offered my ring, I was feeble and faint ; and when I knelt on before the altar in continued prayer — I know not whether I slept or whether it were a vision, but it was to me as though I were again on the river, and again the hymn of Bernard of Morlaix was sung around and above me by the voice I never thought to hear again. I looked up, and behold it was I that was in the boat — my King was there no more. Nay, he stood on the shore, and his eyes beamed on me ; while the ghastly wounds that I once strove in anguish to staunch shone out like a ruby cross on his breast— the hands, that were so sorely gashed, were to me as though marked by the impress of the Sacred Wounds. He spake not; but by his side stood King Henry, beautiful and spirit-like, and smiled on me, and seemed as though he pointed to the wounds as he said, * Blessed is the King who died by his people's hand, for withstanding his people's sin ! Blessed is every faint image of the true King !'
' " Then methought they held out their arms to me, and I would have come to them on their shore
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of rest, but the river bore me away — and I looked up, to find I was as yet only in the earthly Jeru- salem ; but I watch for them every hour, to call me once and for ever." '
These are the three most important historical stories. Perhaps the critic will say Miss Yonge has idealized everything too much, but nevertheless there is a true ring about them. We do seem to see the places and people she describes, and, daring as it will seem to be to make such a statement, The Chaplet of Pearls is not an unworthy companion to Mr. Benson's By What Authority ? and might recall what that delightful book ignores, the St. Bartholo- mew and the general state of religion in France.
To The Chaplet of Pearls Miss Yonge wrote in later years a sequel which first appeared in the Monthly Packet — Stray Pearls. It is not nearly so interesting as the Chaplet, but has capital descriptions of the Fronde, of French society at that period, and of the misery of the French peasant.
A final sequel, The Release, which dealt with the French Revolution, was not nearly so good, and does not seem to us to have caught the spirit of the time. It was one of Miss Yonge's last and least able books.
Miss Yonge worked a good deal at history. She was always writing the 'Cameos 'for the Packet, and some years before this she had written one of her most delightful little books, which should not be allowed to pass into the heap of forgotten things, A Book of Golden Deeds. She says :
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'It is rather intended as a treasury for young people, where they may find minuter particulars than their abridged histories usually afford of the soul-stirring deeds that give life and glory to the record of events, and where, also, other like actions, out of their ordinary course of reading, may be placed before them, in the trust that example may inspire the spirit of heroism and self-devotion. For surely it must be a wholesome contemplation to look on actions the very essence of which is such entire absorption in others that self is not so much renounced as forgotten ; the object of which is not to win promotion, wealth, or success, but simple duty, mercy, and loving-kindness. These are the actions wrought, " hoping for nothing again," but which must surely have their reward.
' At some risk of prolixity, enough of the sur- rounding events have in general been given to make the situation comprehensible, even without knowledge of the general history. This has been done in the hope that these extracts may serve as a mother's storehouse for reading aloud to her boys, or that they may be found useful for short readings to the intelligent, though uneducated, classes.'
We cannot even among the store of new books with lovely illustrations find a better book than this, and there is so much in it which is quite unfamiliar.
Another excellent book is the one called A Book of Worthies. In it she tells the story of thirteen great champions, beginning with Joshua and ending with Julius Caesar.
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'In old times,' she says in her preface, 'when brave men had little time to read, and fewer books, they still kept clusters of glorious examples gathered from all times to light them on the way to deeds of virtue.
'Such were the Seven Champions of Christen- dom ; the Dozipairs, or Twelve Peers of France ; the Seven Wise Masters ; and, above all, the Nine Worthies. These nine were, three from Israel, namely, Joshua, David, and Judas Maccabeus ; three from Heathenesse, to wit, Hector, Alexander, and Julius Caesar ; and three from Christendom, Arthur, Charlemagne, and Godfrey de Bouillon.'
Miss Yonge points out that our judgment of what constitutes worthies may differ a little from the old compiler of the first nine, but ' he has selected the noblest instances he knew of great, good, and true men and " happy warriors," and, so far as we may, we follow his guidance in our choice.'
The History of Christian Names is a book which strikes one with awe. It is full of information, and represents an extraordinary amount of work. Yery likely it abounds in errors, for philology has had many new lights shed on it since her day; but it also abounds in curious, out-of-the-way facts. Here is one :
'It is a more curious fact . . . that Hannibal has always been a favourite [name] with the peasantry of Cornwall. From the first dawn of parish registers Hannyball is of constant occur- rence, much too early even in that intelligent county to be a mere gleaning from books ; and the
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West Country surname of Honeyball must surely be from the same source. A few other Eastern names, though none as frequent or as clearly traced as the present, have remained in use in this remote county, and ought to be allowed due weight in favour of the supposed influence of the Phoe- nician traders over the races that supplied them with tin and lead.'
Or take this account of Richard (the name) :
' Richard, or Richardet, was one of the Quatre Fils d'Agmon, who, according to one version, was the person who gave the fatal blow with the chess-board instead of Renaud. * He is not a very interesting personage, being rather the attendant knight than the prime hero ; the rescued, not the rescuer ; but under his Italian name of Ricciar- detto he has a whole poem to himself written by a secretary of the Propaganda. ... It was not to this Paladin that its name owed its frequency, but to Richard, or stern King, an Anglo-Saxon monarch of Kent, who left his throne to become a monk of Lucca, and was there said to have wrought miracles/
These quotations will give some notion of the wealth of stories contained in the two volumes of The History of Christian Names.
Miss Yonge wrote a great number of short stories, and one, New Ground, deals with the adventures of
* Renaud was the hero of an old French romance called Les Quatre Fils Aimon. He was insulted while playing at chess, and replied by dashing out his enemy's brains with the board.
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a clergyman and his family in Kaffirland somewhere in the sixties. There are very clever sketches of character in this tiny book. There is the quiet, devoted girl, ready to go or stay, as seems best, and who goes, and lays down her life for the work's sake ; and there is a sentimental girl, full of talk, and aspirations, and eagerness, who breaks down utterly, while a rather dull sister, who hates leaving home, develops into one of the best of workers. We wonder if this story is still sometimes read at Mission working-parties. It certainly would be very wholesome reading, especially the account of the breakdown of the girl who wanted to teach natives, and who grumbled that it did not seem worth while to have come out just to do housemaid's work and teach tiresome white children not half so nice as she could find in the village school at home . . . and as for the natives . . . ' it is a mere delusion to think that their coming all greasy and horrid into our huts to paw everything and say " wow " is teaching them to be Christians. Not that I am complaining,' etc.
Foreign Mission work was very much in Miss Yonge's mind at that time, for in 1871 appeared Pioneers and Founders, a book of studies of the lives of some missionaries. Before this she had written The Pupils of St. John the Divine. Neither of these books should be forgotten, for there is really no successor to either, and the ignorance of Church- people about the successors of the Apostles and about the Mission work of the Church is often most profound. These books were leading up to her chief contribution to Mission literature, the Life of John Coleridge Patteson.
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116 CHARLOTTE MARY YONGE
This is a fascinating biography. Many of us well remember the two large volumes, which was the first form in which it appeared, and realize how they made us, for the first time, know something of the reality of the Divine call to the Church, something of the extraordinary romance and beauty of true self-devotion.
' It was embalming a saint of the Church,' she said ; and truly no more true and loyal son of the Church has ever gone forth to the Mission work than Bishop Patteson.
Indeed, those who read the book will say she has been allowed to do what she hoped —
' to succeed in my earnest hope and endeavour to bring the statue out of the block, and, as it were, to carve the figure of the saint for his niche among those who have given themselves soul and body to God's work.'
Miss Yonge opens her book with a particularly fresh and interesting account of Mr. Justice Patte- son, the Bishop's father, and of the habits and customs of legal circles in the early years of the nineteenth century. Both Mr. Justice Patteson and his wife, who was the sister of Sir John Taylor Cole- ridge, were very remarkable people.
Coleridge Patteson's boyhood, especially the Eton period, is delightfully described. Excepting one or two of the great biographies, we can hardly call to mind any life which deals so pleasantly with the story of the man's boyhood. Miss Yonge knew her Eton and her Oxford, and as, fortunately, Patteson's letters had been kept, the picture is very complete.
BISHOP PATTESON 117
It is wonderful to read of the purpose of self -dedi- cation, kindled apparently by two sermons — one preached by Archdeacon (afterwards Bishop) Wilber- force, and one by the recently-consecrated Bishop Selwyn. That purpose was never forgotten, and the boy's tutor, Mr. Edward Coleridge, was full of interest in missions. And Miss Yonge tells us how Bishop Selwyn, who was a friend of the Patteson family, half seriously, half playfully, asked : ' Lady Patteson, will you give me Coley?' The boy con- fided to his mother that he wished to go with the Bishop, and his mother replied that if he kept that wish she would consent.
His mother's death in 1842 made a very deep im- pression on Coleridge Patteson, and, as his biographer says, * everything sank deeply.' He certainly was most fortunate in his father, whose letter to him on his failure to attain a place in the Select at the examination for the Newcastle Scholarship shows an ideal relationship between father and son. Sir John Taylor Coleridge said of Judge Patteson that he was a man of singularly strong common sense, and this letter shows it. He is so reasonable about his disappointment. The whole picture of Eton life is very interesting, including a description of Windsor Fair. Then came days at Balliol, and mention of various friends whose names became well known in after-years. Edwin Palmer, after- wards Archdeacon of Oxford, and his brother-in-law, Mr. James Riddell, so early lost to Oxford and to Balliol, were of these.
Patteson was an enthusiastic cricketer, and Miss Yonge tells a story of a Professional coming to him
118 CHARLOTTE MARY YONGE
in Melbourne years after he had left Oxford, and begging him to give him a meeting at 5 a.m., and let the Professional bowl him a few balls !
The account of Patteson's Oxford life is as good as that of Eton. There is a sketch of 'Coley as an Undergraduate ' by Principal Shairp, which speaks of Patteson as
'the representative of the very best kind of Etonian . . . those pleasant manners and that perfect ease in dealing with men and the world which are the inheritance of Eton, without the least tincture of worldliness.'
It is difficult not to linger over these charming pages describing Patteson as a layman; amongst other matters, the story of his father's resignation of his post as Judge on account of deafness, and the high-minded and simple way in which his resignation was carried out. Miss Yonge might well say that the Judge * had done that which is, perhaps, the best thing that it is permitted to man to do here below — namely, " served God in his generation." '
Patteson was elected a Fellow of Merton in 1852,* and devoted some time to the study of Hebrew and Arabic in Dresden. We wish Miss Yonge had told us who was the famous theologian to whom Mr. Arthur Coleridge, who was Patteson's companion, refers in a letter. It is wonderful to read of Patte- son's taste for, and acquirements in, the study of languages, of philology, and to see how very soon he relinquished all intellectual delights.
In 1853 he was ordained to the curacy at Alfington,
* He retained his Fellowship until his death.
BISHOP PATTESON. From a sketch kindly lent by the Melanesian Mission.
To face page 118.
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a hamlet of Ottery St. Mary, where a church had been built by Sir John Taylor Coleridge.
These chapters which tell us of Patteson's dia- conate— his early ministry— are still very well worth reading. He pours himself out to his father about all his difficulties and perplexities. He had a pecu- liarly happy time, and his sister writes : * The im- pression he has made is really extraordinary.'
And then comes the story of the sacrifice. And, again, this should never be forgotten, for it gives the picture of an ideal parental surrender. Bishop Selwyn came to stay at the Judge's house, Feniton Court, in 1854, and after a talk with him Coley went to his sister and told her that the Bishop knew of his wish.
' " You ought to put it to my father, that he may decide it," she answered. " He is so great a man that he ought not to be deprived of the crown of Sacrifice if he be willing to make it." '
'The crown of Sacrifice.' How few of us could speak in this way about the giving up of a brother !
' So Coley repaired to his father and confessed his long-cherished wish, and how it had come forth to the Bishop. Sir John was manifestly startled, but at once said : " You have done quite right to speak to me, and not to wait. It is my first im- pulse to say No, but that would be very selfish."
1 Coley explained that he was " driven to speak"; he declared himself not dissatisfied with his present position, nor, he hoped, impatient. If his staying at home were decided upon, he would cheerfully
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work on there without disappointment or imagin- ing his wishes thwarted. He would leave the deci- sion entirely in the hands of his father and the Bishop.
* Luncheon hrought the whole family together, and Sir John, making room for his younger daughter beside him, said : " Fan, did you know this about Coley ?"
* She answered that she had some idea, but no more could pass till the meal was ended, when her father went into another room, and she followed him. The great grief broke out in the exclama- tion, " I can't let him go " ; but even as the words were uttered they were caught back, as it were, with " God forbid I should stop him !"
' The subject could not be pursued, for the Bishop was public property among the friends and neigh- bours, and the rest of the day was bestowed upon them. He preached on the Sunday at Alfington, where the people thronged to hear him, little thinking of the consequences of his visit.
' Not till afterwards were the Bishop and the father alone together, when Sir John brought the subject forward. The Bishop has since said that what struck him most was the calm balancing of arguments, like a true Christian Judge. Sir John spoke of the great comfort he had in this son, cut off as he was by his infirmity from so much of society, and enjoying the young man's coming in to talk about his work. He dwelt on all with entire absence of excitement, and added : " But there, what right have I to stand in his way? How do I know that I may live another year?"
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'And as the conversation ended, "Mind!" he said, " I give him wholly, not with any thought of seeing him again. I will not have him thinking he must come home again to see me."
' That resolution was the cause of much peace of mind to both father and son.
' After family prayers that Sunday night, when all the rest had gone upstairs, the Bishop detained the young man, and told him the result of the conversation, then added : " Now, my dear Coley, having ascertained your own state of mind, and having spoken at length to your father and your family, I can no longer hesitate, as far as you recognize any power to call on my part, to invite you most distinctly to the work."
' The reply was full acceptance.
4 Then, taking his hand, the Bishop said : " God bless you, my dear Coley ! It is a great comfort to me to have you for a friend and companion."
* Such was the outward and such the inward vocation to the deacon now within a month of the priesthood. Was it not an evident call from Him by whom the whole Church is governed and sanc- tified ? And surely the noble old man, who forced himself not to withhold " his son, his firstborn son," received his crown from Him who said : " With blessing I will bless thee." '
We have lingered over these early pages of the biography, for, as we have said, they are so wonder- fully fresh, and give so delightful a description of Patteson's youth and of his family ; the story of his work is full of interest, and he still pours himself
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out to his beloved father, who lived to hear of him as admitted to the order of Bishops. The Judge died in 1861. Some time before his death he knew that his days were numbered, and his letters to his son and to Bishop Selwyn are just the letters we should have expected — brave and pious, and full of faith and joyful hope.
* His works do f ollow him,' writes Miss Yoiige, and she goes on : * We turn to that work of his son's in which assuredly he had his part, since one word of his would have turned aside the course that had brought such blessing on both, had he not accepted the summons, even as Zebedee, when he was left by the lake-side, while his sons became fishers of men.'
Miss Yonge writes to Miss F. Patteson :
'July 7, 1861.
'MY DEAR FANNY,
' I thought it might be more comfortable to you not to hear from me till the great stress of letters was over at first, and so that I would wait to write till I could send the precious letters [Bishop Patteson's].* We took our turn the last, and so read them upon Friday, the very day one would have chosen above all others for it, the girding to the battle in that calm and self -devoted spirit seemed to chime in so perfectly with the resting from the labours. One in spirit as they always were, how much closer they may be to-
* Bishop Patteson had been consecrated on St. Matthias's Day, 1861.
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gether now ! And now your Sunday is passing fast away, and that return to daily life is coming that seems hardest of all when the external calm is over, and one seems no longer lifted into that higher and more real region, but beginning to find what the world is without the arm one has leant on so long.
'It is strange how the recurrence of scene or place brings this back as fresh as ever when one thinks one is used to it : the pang of not looking for the white head [of her father] in the stalls of the Cathedral was one of the first, and it was almost as overcoming to see the field-paths where we used to walk between churches on Sunday . . . and the not having him to meet me at the end of a journey ; only that brought the thought, Would that face meet me in the real home when the journey is over? It is the first vexation and worry, the first loss, that is, after all, what com- forts one most — when it is what would have been doubly felt for them, and one knows they are shielded and only gain by it.
'After your last note to me, I was sure your first feelings must be of the relief that the hard and long way to the grave was over, and rest had so gently begun, and this must be the abiding sense, even though the sore, sore missing must come, till the grief turns with time to solemn pleasure.
'After all, but for those beautiful letters, it is such a separation as that from your brother, and with no anxiety and suspense. Those letters do go home to one's heart ; as Mrs. Keble said, one can hardly part from them ; there is something in the
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depth and simplicity of your brother's that ought to do one great good, and fills one with more reverence than I can say.
* His own feelings seem to me to absorb all the rest, and to be much the most precious part ; but there certainly ought to be a description of the outward things put forth, and this could, I should think, be easily compiled from his and Mrs. Abraham's letters. I have done as you told me, and have put the bound Daisy Chain into Mrs. Biss' case [for New Zealand]. . . .
'You will be feeling the whole sorrow freshly both in thinking of the arrival of the letters in N. Zealand, and in watching for the answers ; but I have hoped from the first that the tidings of the first alarm and then of the end would not be far apart, and that there would be no dreary watching for mails coming in. And, oh, what a comfort the talk to Mrs. Selwyn will be! Mrs. Keble wrote to her, but she could not come then, but hopes to manage it.'
One longs to quote Bishop Patteson's admirable letter to his tutor — on p. 341, vol. i. — Mr. Edward Coleridge, but those who already know Bishop Patteson's Life will remember it, and those who do not had better read it at once. Some sentences we must quote. He is speaking of his longing for men and what sort of men he needs — men of industry, men of religious common sense — and he says :
' Then, again, unless a man can dispense with what we ordinarily call comfort or luxuries to a
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great extent, and knock about anywhere in Mela- nesian huts, he can hardly do much work in this mission. The climate is so warm that, to my mind, it quite supplies the place of the houses, clothing, and food of old days, yet a man cannot accommodate himself to it all at once. I don't say that it came naturally to me five years ago, as it does now, when I feel at home anywhere, and cease to think it odd to do things which, I suppose, you would think very extraordinary indeed.
' But most of all— for this makes all easy — men are wanted who really do desire in their hearts to live for God and the world to come, and who have really sought to sit very loosely to this world. The enjoyment, and the happiness, and the peace all come, and that abundantly ; but there is a condition, and the first rub is a hard one, and lasts a good while.
* Naturally buoyant spirits, the gift of a merry heart, are a great help ; for oftentimes a man may have to spend months without any white man within hundreds of miles, and it is very depressing to live alone in the midst of heathenism. But there must be many, many fellows pulling up to Surley to-night who may be well able to pull together with one on the Pacific — young fellows whose enthusiasm is not mere excitement of animal spirits, and whose pluck and courage are given them to stand the roughnesses (such as they are) of a missionary life. For, dear Uncle, if you ever talk to any old pupil of yours about the work, don't let him suppose that it is consistent with ease and absence of anxiety and work. When on
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shore at Kohimarama, we live very cosily, as I think. Some might say we have no society, very simple fare, etc. ; I don't think any man would really find it so. But in the islands, I don't wish to conceal from anyone that, measured by the rule of the English gentleman's household, there is a great difference. Why should it, however, be measured by this standard ? I can truly say that we have hitherto always had what is necessary for health, and what does one need more ? though I like more as much as anyone.'
Is this not just what we want to say to Etonians and other English boys nowadays ?
There is one point in Bishop Patteson's career which is very remarkable. He left England in 1854, and he laid down his life in 1871. Never once did he return to his home and the sisters and brother he loved so well. Of course, since then voyages even to New Zealand and Melanesia are much less formid- able affairs than they were in his time, but, still, it was very wonderful that he never gave himself the exceeding joy of going home.
Bishop Patteson's correspondents were exceedingly interesting people, and Miss Yonge's selection of letters is marked with great judgment. There are letters to Mr. Keble and Dr. Moberly, as well as to his own large circle of relations, including Miss Yonge herself.
They reveal the character of the writer, and make us understand why he was so much loved. He had considerable mental powers, as we have seen, but far beyond all these were his extraordinary unselfish-
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ness and powers of loving and hunger for souls. The Eton and Oxford man, the English gentleman, was indeed the follower of the ' Pastor Pastorum,' and few people can, we think, read his letters about his ' boys ' without a pang of shame that Christian brotherhood has been realized as yet so little by Christians.
The story of his death is well known, and need not be repeated. Miss Yonge's simple narrative is worthy of the subject. May her book inspire not a few Etonians and Oxford men and Englishmen to follow in the steps of one of whom one of his own converts wrote : * He did not despise anyone, nor reject any- one with scorn. Whether it were a white or a black person, he thought them all as one, and he loved them all alike.' As his biographer says, ' He loved them all alike.' ' That was the secret of John Cole- ridge Patteson's history and his labours. Need more be said of him ? Surely the simple islander's sum- mary of his character is the honour he would prefer ?'
CHAPTER VIII
'THE PILLARS OF THE HOUSE,' AND OTHER FAMILY CHRONICLES— CHANGES
(1873)
WHILE Miss Yonge was writing Bishop Patteson's Life, she was also busy with another long family chronicle, in some ways resembling The Daisy Chain.
The Pillars of the House began in the Monthly Packet in 1869, and ended in 1872. It was published in 1873. The Pillars of the House is linked in the present writer's mind with Bishop Patteson's Life, for a story was told to her by Miss Annie Moberly of Miss Yonge coming in to a meal after a morning's writing, and saying : ' I have had a dreadful day ; I have killed the Bishop and Felix ' — Felix being the hero of the Pillars.
By those of us who read it as it came out month after month, it is regarded with an affection which is, perhaps, inexplicable to those who only know it in two fat volumes with unpleasing illustrations — inexplicable, at least, to all who do not possess that peculiar cast of mind which