Experience may have partly accounted for Ginevra.  It could hardly have accounted for the little de Hamel, and he is perfect as far as he goes.

It is because of this increasing mastery, this new power in handling unsympathetic types, because, in short, of its all round excellence, that Villette must count as Charlotte Bronte’s masterpiece.  It is marvellous that within such limits she should have attained such comparative catholicity of vision.  It is not the vast vision of Shirley, prophetic and inspired, and a little ineffectual.  It is the lucid, sober, unobstructed gaze of a more accomplished artist, the artist whose craving for “reality” is satisfied; the artist who is gradually extending the limits of his art.  When Charlotte Bronte wrote Jane Eyre she could not appreciate Jane Austen; she wondered why George Henry Lewes liked her so much.  She objected to Jane Austen because there was no passion in her, and therefore no poetry and no reality.  When she wrote Shirley she had seen that passion was not everything; there were other things, very high realities, that were not passion.  By the time she wrote Villette she saw, not only that there are other things, but that passion is the rarest thing on earth.  It does not enter into the life of ordinary people like Dr. John, and Madame Beck, and Ginevra Fanshawe.

In accordance with this tendency to level up, her style in Villette attains a more even and a more certain excellence.  Her flights are few; so are her lapses.  Her fearful tendency to rhetoric is almost gone.  Gone too are the purple patches; but there is everywhere delicate colour under a vivid light.  But there are countless passages which show the perfection to which she could bring her old imaginative style.  Take the scene where Lucy, under the influence of opium, goes into Villette en fete.

“The drug wrought.  I know not whether Madame had over-charged or under-charged the dose; its result was not that she intended.  Instead of stupor, came excitement.  I became alive to new thought—­to reverie peculiar in colouring.  A gathering call ran among the faculties, their bugles sang, their trumpets rang an untimely summons....

“I took a route well known, and went up towards the palatial and royal Haute-Ville; thence the music I heard certainly floated; it was hushed now, but it might rewaken.  I went on:  neither band nor bell-music came to meet me; another sound replaced it, a sound like a strong tide, a great flow, deepening as I proceeded.  Light broke, movement gathered, chimes pealed—­to what was I coming?  Entering on the level of a Grande Place, I found myself, with the suddenness of magic, plunged amidst a gay, living, joyous crowd.

“Villette is one blaze, one broad illumination; the whole world seems abroad; moonlight and heaven are banished:  the town by her own flambeaux, beholds her own splendour—­gay dresses, grand equipage, fine horses and gallant riders, throng the bright streets.  I see even scores of masks.  It is a strange scene, stranger than dreams.”