218
STEVEN MARCUS
noted
is
that the same kind of mental process is going on in both.
And that what in the novel made and still makes sense should in
such a case as Acton's seem as good as insane
is
something of an
indigestible paradox, no matter how we regard it.
Incontinence in all forms
is
harmful, but the "most vicious" form
it can take is that of masturbation. Here is Acton's description of a
boy who habitually masturbates.
The frame is stunted and weak, the muscles undeveloped,
the eye is sunken and heavy, the complexion
is
sallow, pasty,
or covered with spots of acne, the hands are damp and cold,
and the skin moist. The boy shuns the society of others, creeps
about alone, joins with repugnance in the amusements of his
schoolfellows. He cannot look anyone in the face, and becomes
careless in dress and uncleaI)ly in person. His intellect has be–
come sluggish and enfeebled, and if his evil habits are persisted
in, he may end in becoming a drivelling idiot or a peevish
valetudinarian. Such boys are to be seen in all stages of de–
generation, but what we have described is but the result
towards which
they
all
are tending.
This passage teaches us that masturbation was unquestionably at
the bottom of all Uriah Heep's troubles. But it teaches us other things
as well. In the first place this description is a commonplace- scores
of others from the period exactly like
it
might be cited. It occupied,
therefore, the status of official belief, and this leads us to question
both the relation between belief and experience or behavior, and the
influence that belief can exercise on them. We can reasonably assume
that masturbation was practiced among adolescents to about the same
extent then as
it
is
now-that is to say, it was as good as universal
(Acton himself admits this). And we know too that most adolescents
did not correspond to Acton's description of the masturbator, and that
the largest part of them grew up to be what for want of a better
word we must call normal males. Clearly then either an assertion of
common-sense founded upon experience must have occurred, or, what
is more likely, the process of isolation was enlisted as a defense--the
same process, say, which permits persons of genuine religious belief
to transgress without excessive discomfort, and which permits us to
hold contradictory feelings in the mind without an overwhelming
sense of their contradiction. On the other hand, this description,
