es in an
opulence of detail.

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,