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, befo