With the Celtic story of Tristram, as Gaston Paris remarks, it finally appears in the Christian European world of poetry as the chief point in human life, the great motive force of conduct.
Romantic love failed, however, to penetrate the masses in Europe.
In the sixteenth century, or whenever it was that the ballad of "Glasgerion" was written, we see it is assumed that a churl's relation to his mistress is confined to the mere act of sexual intercourse; he fails to kiss her on arriving or departing; it is only the knight, the man of upper class, who would think of offering that tender civility.

And at the present day in, for instance, the region between East Friesland and the Alps, Bloch states (_Sexualleben unserer Zeit_, p.

29), following E.H.

Meyer, that the word "love" is unknown among the masses, and only its coarse counterpart recognized.
On the other side of the world, in Japan, sexual love seems to be in as great disrepute as it was in ancient Greece; thus Miss Tsuda, a Japanese head-mistress, and herself a Christian, remarks (as quoted by Mrs.Eraser in _World's Work and Play_, Dec., 1906): "That word 'love' has been hitherto a word unknown among our girls, in the foreign sense.

Duty, submission, kindness--these were the sentiments which a girl was expected to bring to the husband who had been chosen for her--and many happy, harmonious marriages were the result.