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