Love, being an emotion to which every sound-minded being may be subject, there would be no objection to represent it in the most intense manner on the stage so long as we understand under the name of love that strong degree of affection which sometimes people of the opposite sex may conceive for each other apart from sexual emotions. What makes Nordau’s reasoning plausible is that he does not admit that this kind of love exists. He distinguishes only two degrees, or two categories, of love, comradeship or friendship on the one hand, and the animal instinct on the other. But no one who has gone through life with open eyes can possibly deny the reality of what we here, for want of a better expression, would call pure love. Everywhere we meet with manifestations of it. Even young children, who might have no idea of sexual emotion, often love each other with a genuine passion which sometimes lasts through life. Adults may be so absorbed in love for each other as to prefer death to separation, and yet never experience any sexual emotion in each other’s company. Men and women lovers who have been separated have wasted away from sheer love of each other, and yet been remarkably chaste in character. In the English-speaking countries, where the relations between the sexes are free and natural, we find any number of proofs of the reality of pure love. Those cases alone which have ended tragically, and therefore come before the public, more than suffice to prove it. Even in countries like France, for example, where the sexual instincts are apt to become morbid from the one-sided education of the young, it is not difficult to find examples of pure love. It is even to be found where least expected, as, for instance, between a licentious man and a fallen woman. It is true that when pure love runs its usual course it gets, so to say, inflamed by animal passion, but this is generally the case only as a result of the demonstrations by which pure love tries to manifest itself. It may also be true that there exists a mysterious, that is to say a so far unexplained, connection between the purest love and sexual instinct even in loving couples to whom sexuality may be an abomination. But all this does not disprove that, speaking from a practical and ethical point of view, there is such an emotion as pure love, and that this emotion is a powerful motor in the human drama. If it then be a fact that this yearning to love and to be loved with a pure love exists, and ought to exist, in rational human beings, and that in running its natural course it will manifest itself in demonstrations extremely likely to rouse animal passions, the question arises how far a love scene on the stage may display those demonstrations which, while they are the only possible means of expressing pure love, at the same time suggest sexual emotions.