s not in the shape of incense burning or of temple
offerings; nor does it matter that the prayers are of a different kind
from those pronounced in churches. There is sacrifice and worship. And no
saying is more common, no truth better known, than that the man who hopes
to succeed in life must be able to please the women. Every young man who
goes into any kind of society knows this. It is one of the first lessons
that he has to learn. Well, am I very wrong in saying that the attitude of
men towards women in the West is much like the attitude of men towards
gods?

But you may answer at once,--How comes it, if women are thus reverenced as
you say, that men of the lower classes beat and ill-treat their wives in
those countries? I must reply, for the same reason that Italian and
Spanish sailors will beat and abuse the images of the saints and virgins
to whom they pray, when their prayer is not granted. It is quite possible
to worship an image sincerely and to seek vengeance upon it in a moment of
anger. The one feeling does not exclude the other. What in the higher
classes may be a religion, in the lower classes may be only a
superstition, and strange contradictions exist, side by side, in all forms
of superstition. Certainly the Western working man or peasant does not
think about his wife or his neighbour's wife in the reverential way that
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.