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.