and, therefore, love cannot always be
expressed in the same way; but it is not possible to lay down any exact
rule between the sort of "expression" legitimate to each. Everyone
must have suffered sometimes from a sense of having forced undesired
demonstrations on other people, or having them forced on oneself. One's
suffering in the first instance is intensified by the knowledge of the
extremity of revolt created by the second. There is nothing, I suppose,
more acutely painful than the sense of being compelled to accept
demonstrations of affection to which one cannot in the same way respond.
I believe that this shrinking from expressions which seem unnatural,
is rightly intensified a hundredfold when the sense of wrongness or
"unnaturalness" is due not to the individual but to the relationship
itself.

The love which unites the soul to God, children to their parents, mothers
and fathers to sons and daughters, lovers to one another, friend to friend,
the disciple to his master, is all one. You cannot divide Love. But to each
belongs its right and natural expression, and to parody the love of lovers
between friends revolts the growing sense of humankind. The very horrors
of prostitution create a less shuddering disgust than the debauching of
a young boy by an older man, though with a tragically common injustice
society is more apt to be disgusted by the unfortunate victim, bearing
all the marks of his moral and physical perversion, than by the more
responsible older man who profits by or even creates it.

Yet it is, as I have said, only by the _growing_ sense of humanity that
such things are condemned. They were not always so in every case. On the
contrary it has sometimes been maintained that friendship between men was
so much nobler than the love of men and women that even when it demanded
physical expression it was still the finest of all human relationship. This
idea was, of course, widely held by the Greeks during the noblest epochs
of their history, and Plato, though he does not, as is commonly believed,
justify such expression as good in itself, evidently regards it as
practically inevitable and, therefore, to be condoned. And though from this
indulgent attitude there has been a very general revolt in modern times,
the reaction has not always been very discriminating in its condemnation
or very just in its reprisals. Now--in consequence, no doubt, of this
injustice--there has arisen another attempt to assert the s