THE MIND OF WOMAN 247 



being organized into larger systems of Power. Genius 

 expressed in its highest form through the medium 

 of art is always the capacity in the artist to render 

 contagious through the emotion of the ideal the 

 power of subduing the immediate world and all its 

 existing interests, to the larger meaning which is 

 conceived to lie in the universal. The highest type 

 of genius in the race has ever been, for this reason, 

 that of the great religious teachers. The tendency 

 in living Western art at present is a tendency 

 through which the function of the artist is again 

 approaching that of the great religious teacher. 



The controlling meaning which stands out in this 

 progressive tendency in Western art amounts to this. 

 We are watching in art, under a great number of 

 phases, what I have described as the conscious and 

 infinitely laborious effort of the male mind to reach 

 by slow and painful stages, and by a different road, 

 a position which the mind of woman has already 

 attained in the evolutionary process. In the 

 position which it now occupies, the mind of woman 

 is greatly in advance of the mind of the male of the 

 race, in the development in it of those qualities 

 upon which Power in civilization will rest to an 

 increasing degree in the future. 



This clue to the upward transition in art is the 

 clue to progress in all its phases The advance 



