ACTON'S WISDOM
217
side of virtue, little can be done. On one point, however, he
is
insistent; every boy should have a separate bed, for "evil practices
are, I believe, most frequently learnt and practiced in bed." Obviously
Acton does not believe that the auto-erotic can also be an auto-didact.
He then closes this section by printing two letters, one from a clergy–
man, the other from "a member of one of the universities, who was
formerly at a large public school." These letters are so abject in their
ignorance, and express such an agonized consciousness of shame and
difficulty in discussing these topics, yet at the same time are so
serious and earnest in their desire for enlightenment and direction,
that one is forced to withhold hasty judgment on an undertaking like
Acton's. These letters are representative, and what they reveal is a
pitiable alienation on the part of a whole class of men from their
own sexuality. Acton's work must be understood as both an expression
of
this
condition and as one of the early efforts to overcome it.
If
childhood has its sexual dangers and temptations, those that
beset youth "are increased tenfold," and are "infinitely harder to
overcome, infinitely more ruinous if yielded to." Although sexual
desire in youth is a "natural instinct," and has its own "beneficent
purpose ... mature and lawful love," the young man is to be warned
against fulfilling that desire. Indeed, "such indulgence is
fatal.
It
may
be repented of. Some of its consequences may be, more or less, re–
covered from. But, from Solomon's time to ours, it is true that it
leads to a 'house of death.' " There is a kind of exquisite hopelessness
in that "more or less." And what makes this bad situation even worse
is that the youth neither feels nor knows this. "He does not know
that to his immature frame every sexual indulgence is unmitigated
evil. He does not think that to his inexperienced mind and heart
every illicit pleasure is a degradation, to be bitterly regretted hereafter
-a link in a chain that does not need many to be too strong to
break." We find ourselves here in a familiar setting; roughly speaking,
it is the moral world of the Victorian novel.
It
is a world of nemesis,
of unbreakable chains of consequences; it is a scene of incessant
struggle against temptation, and in which the first false step leads
irresistibly to the last. The fact that in the novel this style of thinking
is
largely applied-and often with great subtlety-to general moral
and social behavior
is
not immediately to the point; what is to
be
