which requires no justification as it allows of no appeal.

But indeed the whole conception of Eros the boy, familiar as it sounds
to us from the long continued convention of literature, is, if we
think of its origin or meaning, quite alien from our own habit of life
and thought. Even in the middle ages it cohered but ill with the
literary view of the relations between men and women in poetry and
romance; hardly, except where it is raised into a higher sphere by the
associations of religion, as in the friezes of Donatello, is it quite
natural, and now, apart from what remains of these same associations,
the natural basis of the conception is wholly obsolete. Since the
fashion of squires and pages, inherited from the feudal system, ceased
with the decay of the Renaissance, there has been nothing in modern
life which even remotely suggests it. We still--such is the strength
of tradition in art--speak of Love under the old types, and represent
him under the image of a winged boy; but the whole condition of
society in which this type grew up has disappeared and left the
symbolism all but meaningless to the ordinary mind. In Greece it was
otherwise. Side by side with the unchanging passions and affections of
all mankind there was then a feeling, half conventional, and yet none
the less of vital importance to thought and conduct, which elevated
the mere physical charm of human youth into an object of almost divine
worship. Beauty was the special gift of the gods, perhaps their
choicest one; and not only so, but it was a passport to their favour.
Common life in the open air, and above all the importance of the
gymnasia, developed great perfection of bodily form and kept it
constantly before all men's eyes. Art lavished all it knew on the
reproduction of the forms of youthful beauty. Apart from the real
feeling, the worship of this beauty became an overpowering fashion. To
all this there must be added a fact of no less importance in