The bulk of modern readers, however, are women. This fact, too well known to editors and publishers, is quite inadequately understood from the standpoint of its influence on taste and quality in literary production. For not only do women reveal the trait common to all readers, which consists in a tendency to identify themselves with one of the characters of a novel, or with the portrait of humanity presented in a scientific treatise, but they are also addicted to the practice of confounding that which is pleasant to themselves with that which is true. Thus in the woman reader there is a twofold tendency to tolerate or to applaud cant; for, on the one hand, she views truth hedonistically, and, on the other, she feels deep discomfiture, either when she finds herself unable, through her false idealization of herself and her motives, to identify herself with the anti-cant portrayal of a certain heroine (Stendhal’s Félicie Féline, for instance), or, when she finds her reading of human nature, which is based upon her idealized reading of herself, affronted by a picture of humanity which shatters her rosy view. To the influence of women in this connexion, however, ought in all fairness to be added that of a vast number of men, who, in these days, whether from the same hedonistic view of truth, or prompted by a certain poltroonery and vanity in the face of reality, tend to shrink ever more and more from any understanding of human relations and the passions that govern them, which would distort their comfortable and comforting assumptions concerning both. If, however, they actually form, together with the women, a force sufficiently powerful to govern the taste of the day, especially in the world of literature and in that department of it which treats of human psychology, we may well feel some anxiety concerning the real worth of that literature. If Byron and Stendhal could honestly complain of cant even in their time, what can be our position to-day? * * * * * Frankly acknowledging my indebtedness to the school of writers that can be said to have adopted the rigorous psychological uprightness of our great philosopher Hobbes, I have endeavoured also to strip the “tinsel of sentiment” from one of the most important of human relations, in order, if possible, to build afresh, and to build wholesomely, where too much confusion and too much falsehood have been allowed to flourish in the past. In order, however, to protect myself from a charge to which the asperity and frequent severity of my language is almost sure to expose me, it may be as well for me to state at once that, unlike many that have written on the subject of Woman, I have been animated by no bitterness and by none of those unhappy experiences which often warp judgment and impair the vision. On the contrary, to all my principal relations to women I owe the most pleasant and possibly some of the most valuable experiences of my life.