WOMAN THE PSYCHIC CENTRE 217 



one of the most fundamental canons of modern 

 Western Art, that it cannot be violated without a 

 sense of failure being created. Wherever man is 

 represented in Art as the higher idealist and woman 

 as the lower cause which has dragged him down the 

 result is artistic disaster. We feel that the ideal 

 has been lowered and that we have returned to the 

 depressing atmosphere of a more primitive stage 

 of human evolution. However great the ability 

 or the genius of the creator it cannot save us from 

 this effect. As in Robert Henick's The Healer, or 

 as in George Gissing's New Grub Street, the result is 

 invariably the same. A sense of failure and outrage 

 is present in the mind of the reader. 



It has to be kept in view in considering this 

 significant transition in the standards of Art that 

 in the present epoch of the world woman's mind is 

 the greatest mystery of the time. In the stunting 

 and restraining conditions of the era out of which it 

 has emerged it has been driven in upon itself at 

 every point to such an extent that the world knows 

 scarcely anything about it, save in those expressions 

 of it which arise directly out of woman's relations 

 to the opposite sex. 



The most notable and probably unforeseen effect 

 on many Western minds of Pierre Loti's Desen- 

 chantees, which produced so remarkable an im- 



