ACTON'S WISDOM
in building up the growing frame, in storing up external
im–
pressions, and educating the brain to receive them. During a
well-regulated childhood, and in the case of ordinary tempera–
ments, there is no temptation to infringe this primary law of
nature. The sexes, it is true, in most English homes, are allowed
unrestricted companionship. Experience shows, however, that
this intimacy
is
in the main unattended with evil results.... At
any rate, in healthy subjects, and especially in children brought
up in the pure air, and amid the simple amusements of the
country, perfect freedom from, and indeed total ignorance of,
any sexual affection is, as it should always be, the rule. The first
and only feeling exhibited between the sexes
in
the young
sh~uld
be that pure fraternal and sisterly affection. . . . Thus
it happens that with most healthy and well-brought up children,
no sexual notion or feeling has ever entered their heads, even
in the way of speculation. I believe that such children's curiosity
is seldom excited on these subjects except where they have been
purposely suggested.
213
In short, the normal functions are non-functional. We need not
linger over the fact that this passage is untrue; the quality of thinking
present in it
is
of equal interest. In the first place, doubt is built
into its very syntax. The conditional and the indicative are used
almost interchangeably or as equivalents, and one of the effects of
this is to suggest that "normality" is a precarious, wished-for, and
achieved state as much as it is the state which in the common way of
things
is
"normally" found. That is to say, the overt statement of this
passage is expressed in terms which reveal a countering direction of
thought or impulse. Secondly, "the simple amusements of the country"
obviously exclude the sight of horses, cows, sheep, pigs, rabbits, and
chickens. In order for this sentence to have passed unremarked, a
good deal of collective amnesia must have taken place, and a good
deal of folk-knowledge and traditional rural lore been repressed or
denied. And the tenor of the entire passage makes it possible for us
to guess at the audience to which this work
is
directed.
It
is precisely
not an audience which has had an extensive living experience of
rural life. Nor can it be an audience which has had-or which
remembered~xtensive
experience of urban poverty, since childhood
knowledge and experience of sex seems to have been both universal
