246 THE SCIENCE OF POWER 



to the mind of woman that he brings all his ideals, 

 to prove them and to claim support for them. 

 Almost without exception, it is woman who inspires 

 the strongest deeds, the deepest passions, the highest 

 idealisms of men throughout the imaginative litera- 

 ture of our time. 



This fact, which is the most distinctive feature 

 of the idealism of the modern West in literature, 

 stands out alike in poetry, in the drama, and in 

 the modern novel. Since the rise of the novel in 

 the sixteenth century, the idealization of Woman 

 is the feature which has grown and deepened in 

 this medium down to the present day. It has 

 made of the novel the predominant form of Western 

 literature. The standard, moreover, which this 

 fact of the idealization of woman has set up in art 

 has become so fundamental that, as I have shown, 

 it has become a canon of art in the modern novel, 

 that man cannot be represented as the higher 

 idealist and woman as the lower cause which has 

 dragged him down, without a sense of artistic 

 disaster and a feeling of failure and outrage being 

 created in the mind of the reader. 



The highest expressions of living art in the West 

 are, in short, coming more and more to have a very 

 close relation to the great movements of opinion 

 touched with emotion out of which the world is 



