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STEVEN MARCUS
self-indulgence, long pursued, tends ultimately, if carried far
enough, to early death or self-destruction.
2
The child is father of the man- and with a vengeance. With this
passage we come upon the prevailing tone of this book; it
is
a
characteristic Victorian tone. It is resonant of danger, doom, and
disaster (to strike a Faulknerian note), and tells us of a world hedged
in with difficulty and pain, a world of harsh efforts and iron con–
sequences. In such a world reality is conceived of as identical with
pain, and negative conscience is the ruling principle. It is a vision of
life which is in every way the exact opposite of the vision of life in
pornography, and is therefore its counterpart as well. And we can
anticipate by saying that the closer such an account comes to being
consciously held as official doctrine, the more inevitably will the
extrusion from it of an under-world or under-life of pornography
occur.
Acton has some suggestions to make about the prevention and
cure of sexual activities in children. His first recommendation is that
parents closely "watch their children," and this admonition is repeated
so often that one begins to feel that were it taken seriously every
middle-class Victorian home would have turned into a small Elsinore
-and parents would have become, in Claudius's words, "lawful
espials," terrorists of secret observation.
As
for the rest, Acton's sug–
gestions are harmless enough; there is, we ought to recall, nothing
of the quack about him. Boys should undergo a regimen of "gym–
nastic exercises regularly employed and carried to an extent just short
of fatigue"-a nice distinction. He co'Unsels the regular use of the
sponge-bath, though showering and swimming are not without their
dangers: it must not be forgotten, he says, "that the habit of remain–
ing long in the water may be as great a source of evil as anything."
Life at school presents such insuperable problems that Acton largely
contents himself with generally supporting Dr. Arnold's reforms:
without a substantial raising of the moral tone in schools, which
can only be achieved through marshalling "public opinion" on the
2. For a different, and more enlightened, handling of this subject by a con–
temporary French physician, see Raymond De Saussure,
"J.
B. Felix Descuret,"
The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child,
II, New York (1947),417-424. At the
same time, however, compare Bertram D. Lewin, "Child Psychiatry in the
1830's--Three Little Homicidal Monomaniacs,"
The Psychoanalytic Study of
the Child,
III/IV, New York (1949), 489-493.
