re 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 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 m