them; or, what is worst of all, reduced to strive, by scarce modest coquetry and debasing artifice, to gain that position and consideration by marriage, which to celibacy is denied.  Fathers, cannot you alter these things?...  You would wish to be proud of your daughters, and not to blush for them, then seek for them an interest and an occupation which shall raise them above the flirt, the manoeuvrer, the mischief-making talebearer.  Keep your girl’s minds narrow and degraded—­they will still be a plague and a care, sometimes a disgrace to you:  give them scope and work—­they will be your gayest companions in health; your tenderest nurses in sickness; your most faithful prop in old age.”

That is the argument from fathers, and it comes from Caroline Helstone, not from Shirley.  And the fact that Caroline married Robert Moore, and Shirley fell in love when her hour came (and with Louis Moore, too!) does not diminish the force or the sincerity or the truth of the tirade.

Shirley may not be a great novel; but it is a great prophetic book.  Shirley’s vision of the woman kneeling on the hills serves for more than Emily Bronte’s vision of Hertha and Demeter, of Eve, the Earth-mother, “the mighty and mystical parent”; it is Charlotte Bronte’s vindication of Eve, her vision of woman as she is to be.  She faced the world once for all with her vision:  “I see her,” she said, “and I will tell you what she is like.”

Mrs. Oliphant did not see the woman kneeling on the hills.  Neither George Eliot nor Mrs. Gaskell saw her.  They could not possibly have told the world what she was like.  It is part of Charlotte Bronte’s superior greatness that she saw.

* * * * *

You do not see that woman in Villette.  She has passed with the splendour of Charlotte’s vision of the world.  The world in Villette is narrowed to a Pensionnat de Demoiselles, and centred in the heart of one woman.  And never, not even in Jane Eyre, and certainly not in Shirley, did Charlotte Bronte achieve such mastery of reality, and with it such mastery of herself. Villette is the final triumph of her genius over the elements that warred in her.  It shows the movement of her genius, which was always by impulse and recoil.  In The Professor she abjured, in the interests of reality, the “imagination” of her youth.  In Jane Eyre she was urged forward by the released impetus of the forces she repressed.  In Shirley they are still struggling with her sense of the sober and the sane reality; the book is torn to fragments in the struggle, and in the end imagination riots.