But Emma Bovary might come if you but ardently desired. And the fascinating Anna Karenina. Or Becky Sharp with her sly graces. Perhaps some of Dostoievsky's enigmatic, bewildering girls should be included in the list, for they brim over with magnetism, very often a malicious magnetism, and their glances are eloquent with suffering, haunt like the eyes one sees in a gallery of old masters. I do not speak of Sonia, but of the passionate Natasia Philipovna in The Idiot, or Aglaya Epanchin, in the same powerful novel, or Paulina in The Gambler. However, we cannot allow ourselves the luxury of so many favourites, even if they are only made of paper and ink. I confess I am an admirer of Emma Bovary. To the gifted young critics of to-day the work, and its sharply etched characters, has become a mere stalking horse for a new-fangled philosophy of Jules Gaultier, called Bovarysme, but for me it will always be the portrait of that unhappy girl with the pallid complexion, velvety dark eyes, luxuriant hair, and languid charm. Anna Karenina is more aristocratic; above all, she knew what happiness meant; its wing only brushed the cheek of Emma. Her death is more lamentable than Anna's--one can well sympathise with Flaubert's mental and physical condition after he had written that appalling chapter describing the poisoning of Emma. No wonder he thought he tasted arsenic, and couldn't sleep. Balzac, Dickens, and Thackeray were thus affected by their own creations, yet Flaubert is to this day called "impersonal," "cold," because he never made concessions to sentimentalism, never told tales out of his workshop for gaping indifferents. As for Becky Sharp, that kittenish person seldom arouses in me much curiosity. I agree with George Moore that Thackeray, in the interests of mid-Victorian morality, suppressed many of her characteristics, telling us too little of her amatory temperament. Possibly, Mr. Moore may err, Becky may have had no "temperament," notwithstanding her ability to twist men around her expressive digits. That she was disagreeable when she set herself out to be I do not doubt; in fact, she is the protagonist of a whole generation of disagreeable heroines in English fiction. Bernard Shaw did not overlook her pertness and malevolence, though all his girls are disagreeable, even--pardon the paradox--his agreeable ones. But they are as portraiture far too "papery," to borrow a word from painters' jargon, for my purpose. They are not alive, they only are mouthpieces for the author's rather old-time ideas.