ACTON'S
WISDOM
225
over, the mental consequences are also the same. "Experience every
day convinces me," he writes, "that much of the languor of mind,
confusion of ideas, and inability to control the thoughts of which
married men complain, arises from the sexual excesses they commit.
This occurs not unfrequently from their marrying late in life, and still
more often from their marrying a second time after having been
widowers for some years." We may observe that the state of being
a husband was already well on its way to becoming the condition of
permanent crisis that it is today. The causes are naturally thought to
be different-they are in fact reversed-but the state of emotions is
remarkably similar.
In the passage I have just quoted, Acton uses the word "sperma–
torrhoea," a catch-all term which he defines as "a state of enervation
produced, at least primarily, by the loss of semen." Along with
tuberculosis, it appears to have been one of the virtually universal
afflictions of the time; and it is allied to the various forms of im–
potence, which Acton deals with at some length. (One of the purp()ses
of his work was to warn his readers against the innumerable quacks
who offered to cure impotence by means of nostrums, potions, and
magical drugs or machines.) Spermatorrhoea is itself a piece of magic,
since it can be both cause and effect of almost anything. It can be
the result of sexual excess, but then it can just as well be the result
of intellectual excess, mental exertions having apparently the same
consequences as sexual athletics. At this point the Victorian doctrine
of work, achievement, and accomplishment in the world turns around
on itself, and the man who has created himself throughout a life-time
of unremitting concentration may find his · success blighted by the
very efforts that assured it. "The quality of the semen, and the
exhaustion of the system which secretes it," Acton observes, "must
have a great influence on the progeny. May not the fact observed
by all ages, that the children of great men are not usually equal
to their sires, depend among other causes, upon deterioration of the
impregnating fluid in the parent from the great mental demand
upon him at the time impregnation took place?" In one respect, at
least, self-help and self-abuse seem indistinguishable. At the same
time, such a passage expresses a comprehensive Victorian attitude–
that life is difficult, necessitous, and laced with tragic contradiction.
