There is another test also for love:  Does it express itself naturally and rightly?  This test is much more difficult to apply.  One may believe that all love is essentially the same, but it is certain that all human relationships are not the same, 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 superior nobility of friendship over love,[E] and even to claim a superior humanity for people who are more attracted by members of their own sex.

[Footnote E:  I am using the terms “friendship” and “love” in their ordinarily accepted and narrow sense, as meaning respectively the love of friends and the love of lovers.  This is arbitrary, but I cannot find other words except by using long phrases.]