Books and Habits | Page 7

many things to be explained.
Why should not only the novel writers but all the poets make love the

principal subject of their work? I never knew, because I never thought,
how much English literature was saturated with the subject of love until
I attempted to make selections of poetry and prose for class
use--naturally endeavouring to select such pages or poems as related to
other subjects than passion. Instead of finding a good deal of what I
was looking for, I could find scarcely anything. The great prose writers,
outside of the essay or history, are nearly all famous as tellers of love
stories. And it is almost impossible to select half a dozen stanzas of
classic verse from Tennyson or Rossetti or Browning or Shelley or
Byron, which do not contain anything about kissing, embracing, or
longing for some imaginary or real beloved. Wordsworth, indeed, is
something of an exception; and Coleridge is most famous for a poem
which contains nothing at all about love. But exceptions do not affect
the general rule that love is the theme of English poetry, as it is also of
French, Italian, Spanish, or German poetry. It is the dominant motive.
So with the English novelists. There have been here also a few
exceptions--such as the late Robert Louis Stevenson, most of whose
novels contain little about women; they are chiefly novels or romances
of adventure. But the exceptions are very few. At the present time there
are produced almost every year in England about a thousand new
novels, and all of these or nearly all are love stories. To write a novel
without a woman in it would be a dangerous undertaking; in
ninety-nine cases out of a hundred the book would not sell.
Of course all this means that the English people throughout the world,
as readers, are chiefly interested in the subject under discussion. When
you find a whole race interested more in one thing than in anything else,
you may be sure that it is so because the subject is of paramount
importance in the life of the average person. You must try to imagine
then, a society in which every man must choose his wife, and every
woman must choose her husband, independent of all outside help, and
not only choose but obtain if possible. The great principle of Western
society is that competition rules here as it rules in everything else. The
best man--that is to say, the strongest and cleverest--is likely to get the
best woman, in the sense of the most beautiful person. The weak, the
feeble, the poor, and the ugly have little chance of being able to marry

at all. Tens of thousands of men and women can not possibly marry. I
am speaking of the upper and middle classes. The working people, the
peasants, the labourers, these marry young; but the competition there is
just the same--just as difficult, and only a little rougher. So it may be
said that every man has a struggle of some kind in order to marry, and
that there is a kind of fight or contest for the possession of every
woman worth having. Taking this view of Western society not only in
England but throughout all Europe, you will easily be able to see why
the Western public have reason to be more interested in literature which
treats of love than in any other kind of literature.
But although the conditions that I have been describing are about the
same in all Western countries, the tone of the literature which deals
with love is not at all the same. There are very great differences. In
prose they are much more serious than in poetry; because in all
countries a man is allowed, by public opinion, more freedom in verse
than in prose. Now these differences in the way of treating the subject
in different countries really indicate national differences of character.
Northern love stories and Northern poetry about love are very serious;
and these authors are kept within fixed limits. Certain subjects are
generally forbidden. For example, the English public wants novels
about love, but the love must be the love of a girl who is to become
somebody's wife. The rule in the English novel is to describe the pains,
fears, and struggles of the period before marriage--the contest in the
world for the right of marriage. A man must not write a novel about
any other point of love. Of course there are plenty of authors who have
broken this rule but the rule still exists. A man may represent a contest
between two women, one good and one bad, but if the bad woman is
allowed to conquer in the story, the public will growl. This English
fashion has existed since the eighteenth