Books and Habits | Page 6

of anger. The one feeling does not exclude the
other. What in the higher classes may be a religion, in the lower classes

may be only a superstition, and strange contradictions exist, side by
side, in all forms of superstition. Certainly the Western working man or
peasant does not think about his wife or his neighbour's wife in the
reverential way that the man of the superior class does. But you will
find, if you talk to them, that something of the reverential idea is there;
it is there at least during their best moments.
Now there is a certain exaggeration in what I have said. But that is only
because of the somewhat narrow way in which I have tried to express a
truth. I am anxious to give you the idea that throughout the West there
exists, though with a difference according to class and culture, a
sentiment about women quite as reverential as a sentiment of religion.
This is true; and not to understand it, is not to understand Western
literature.
How did it come into existence? Through many causes, some of which
are so old that we can not know anything about them. This feeling did
not belong to the Greek and Roman civilization but it belonged to the
life of the old Northern races who have since spread over the world,
planting their ideas everywhere. In the oldest Scandinavian literature
you will find that women were thought of and treated by the men of the
North very much as they are thought of and treated by Englishmen of
to-day. You will find what their power was in the old sagas, such as the
Njal-Saga, or "The Story of Burnt Njal." But we must go much further
than the written literature to get a full knowledge of the origin of such a
sentiment. The idea seems to have existed that woman was semi-divine,
because she was the mother, the creator of man. And we know that she
was credited among the Norsemen with supernatural powers. But upon
this Northern foundation there was built up a highly complex fabric of
romantic and artistic sentiment. The Christian worship of the Virgin
Mary harmonized with the Northern belief. The sentiment of chivalry
reinforced it. Then came the artistic resurrection of the Renaissance,
and the new reverence for the beauty of the old Greek gods, and the
Greek traditions of female divinities; these also coloured and lightened
the old feeling about womankind. Think also of the effect with which
literature, poetry and the arts have since been cultivating and
developing the sentiment. Consider how the great mass of Western

poetry is love poetry, and the greater part of Western fiction love
stories.
Of course the foregoing is only the vaguest suggestion of a truth.
Really my object is not to trouble you at all about the evolutional
history of the sentiment, but only to ask you to think what this
sentiment means in literature. I am not asking you to sympathize with it,
but if you could sympathize with it you would understand a thousand
things in Western books which otherwise must remain dim and strange.
I am not expecting that you can sympathize with it. But it is absolutely
necessary that you should understand its relation to language and
literature. Therefore I have to tell you that you should try to think of it
as a kind of religion, a secular, social, artistic religion, not to be
confounded with any national religion. It is a kind of race feeling or
race creed. It has not originated in any sensuous idea, but in some very
ancient superstitious idea. Nearly all forms of the highest sentiment and
the highest faith and the highest art have had their beginnings in
equally humble soil.
CHAPTER II
ON LOVE IN ENGLISH POETRY
I often imagine that the longer he studies English literature the more the
Japanese student must be astonished at the extraordinary predominance
given to the passion of love both in fiction and in poetry. Indeed, by
this time I have begun to feel a little astonished at it myself. Of course,
before I came to this country it seemed to me quite natural that love
should be the chief subject of literature; because I did not know
anything about any other kind of society except Western society. But
to-day it really seems to me a little strange. If it seems strange to me,
how much more ought it to seem strange to you! Of course, the simple
explanation of the fact is that marriage is the most important act of
man's life in Europe or America, and that everything depends upon it. It
is quite different on this side of the world. But the simple explanation
of the difference is not enough. There are