In odd perverse antipathies;
In falling out with that or this,
And finding somewhat still amiss.
LIMP PEOPLE.
Vice is bad and malignant wickedness is worse, but beyond either in evil results to mankind is weakness; which indeed is the pabulum by which vice is fed and the agent by which malignity works. If every one in this world had a backbone, there would not be so much misery nor guilt as there is now; for we must give each individual of the 'cruel strong' a large following of weaker victims; and it would be easy to demonstrate that the progress of nations has always been in proportion to the number of stiff backbones among them. Yet unfortunately limp people abound, to the detriment of society and to their own certain sorrow; molluscs, predestined to be the food of the stronger, with no power of self-defence nor of self-support, but having to be protected against outside dangers if they are to be preserved at all;—and perhaps when you have done all that you can do, not safe even then, and most likely not worth the trouble taken about them. Open the gates for but a moment, and they are swept up by the first passer-by. Let them loose from your own sustaining hand, and they fall abroad in a mass of flabby helplessness, unable to work, to resist, to retain—mere heaps of moral protoplasm, pitiable as well as contemptible; perhaps pitiable because so contemptible. See one of these poor creatures left a widow, if a woman—turned out of his office, if a man—and then judge of the value of a backbone by the miserable consequences of its absence. The widow is simply lost in the wilderness of her domestic solitude, as much so as would be a child if set in the midst of a pathless moor with no one to guide him to the safe highway. She may have money and she may have relations, but she is as poor as if she had nothing better than parish relief; and unless some one will take her up and manage everything for her conscientiously, she is as lonely as if she were an exile in a strange land. She has been so long used to lean on the stronger arm of her husband, that she cannot stand upright now that her support has been taken from her. Her servants make her their prey; her children tyrannize over her and ignore her authority; her boys go to the bad; her girls get fast and loud; all her own meek little ideas of modesty and virtue are rudely thrust to the wall; and she is obliged to submit to a family disorder which she neither likes nor encourages, but which she has not the strength to oppose nor the wisdom to direct. She may be the incarnation of all saintly qualities in her own person, but by mere want of strength she is the occasion by which a very pandemonium is possible; and the worst house of a community is sure to be that of a quiet, gentle, molluscous little widow, without one single vicious proclivity but without the power to repress or even to rebuke vice in others.
A molluscous man too, suddenly ejected from his long-accustomed groove, where, like a toad embedded in the rock, he had made his niche exactly fitting to his own shape, presents just as wretched a picture of helplessness and unshiftiness. In vain his friends suggest this or that independent endeavour; he shakes his head, and says he can't—it won't do. What he wants is a place where he is not obliged to depend on himself; where he has to do a fixed amount of work for a fixed amount of salary; and where his fibreless plasticity may find a mould ready formed, into which it may run without the necessity of forging shapes for itself. Many a man of respectable intellectual powers has gone down into ruin, and died miserably, because of this limpness which made it impossible for him to break new ground or to work at anything whatsoever with the stimulus of hope only. He must be bolstered up by certainty, supported by the walls of his groove, else he can do nothing; and if he cannot get into this friendly groove, he lets himself drift into destruction.
In no manner are limp people to be depended on; their very central quality being fluidity, which is a bad thing to rest on. Take them in their family quarrels—and they are always quarrelling among themselves—you think they must have broken with each other for ever; that surely they can never forget or forgive all the insolent expressions, the hard words, the full-flavoured epithets which they have flung at one another; but the next time you meet them they are quite good friends again, and going on in the old fluid way as if no fiery storms had lately troubled the domestic horizon. Perhaps they have induced you to take sides; if so, you may look out, for you are certain to be thrown over and to have the enmity of both parties instead of only one. They are much given to this kind of thing, and fond of making pellets for you to shoot; when, after the shot, they disclaim and disown you. They speak against each other furiously, tell you all the family secrets and make them worse and greater than they really are. If you are credulous for your own part you take them literally; and if highly moral, you probably act on their accusations in a spirit of rhadamanthine justice, and the absolute need of rewarding sin according to its sinfulness. Beware; their accusations are baseless as the wind, and acting on them will lead to your certain discomfiture. The only safe way with limp people is never to believe what they say; or, if you are forced to believe, never to translate your faith into deeds nor even words; never to commit yourself to partizanship in any form whatever. They do not intend it, in all probability, but by very force of their weakness limp people are almost invariably untruthful and treacherous. By the force too, of this same weakness, they are incapable of anything like true friendship, and in fact make the most dangerous friends to be found. They are so plastic that they take the shape of every hand which holds them; and if you do not know them well, you may be deceived by their softness of touch, and think them sympathetic because they are fluid. They leave you full of promises to hold all you have told them sacred, and before an hour is out they have repeated to your greatest enemy every word you have said. They had not the faintest intention of doing so when they left you, but they 'slop about,' as the Americans say; and sloppy folk cannot hold secrets. The traitors of life are the limp, much more than the wicked—people who let things be wormed out of them rather than intentionally betray them. They repent likely enough; Judas hanged himself; but of what good is their repentance when the mischief is done? Not all the tears in the world can put out the fire when once lighted, and to hang oneself because one has betrayed another will make no difference save in the number of victims which one's own weakness has created.
Limp men are invariably under petticoat government, and it all depends on chance and the run of circumstance whose petticoat is dominant. The mother's, for a long period; then the sisters'. If the wife's, there is sure to be war in the camp belonging to the invertebrate commander; for such a man creates infinitely more jealousy among his womankind than the most discursive and the most unjust. He is a power, not to act, but to be used; and the woman who can hold him with the firmest grasp has necessarily the largest share of good things belonging. She can close or draw his purse-strings at pleasure. She can use his name and mask herself behind his authority at pleasure. He is the undying Jorkins who is never without a Spenlow to set him well up in front; and we can scarcely wonder that the various female Spenlows who shoot with his bow and manipulate his circumstances are jealous of each other to a frantic pitch—regarding his limpness, as they do, as so much raw material from which they can spin out their own strength.