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