As the mollusc has to become the prey of some one, the question simply resolves itself into whose? the new wife's or the old sisters'? Who shall govern, sitting on his shoulders? and to whom shall he be assigned captive? He generally inclines to his wife, if she is younger than he and has a backbone of her own; and you may see a limp man of this kind, with a fringe of old-rooted female epiphytes, gradually drop one after another of the ancient stock, till at last his wife and her relations take up all the space and are the only ones he supports. His own kith and kin go bare while he clothes her and hers in purple and fine linen; and the fatted calves in his stalls are liberally slain for the prodigals on her side of the house, while the dutiful sons on his own get nothing better than the husks.
Another characteristic of limp people is their curious ingratitude. Give them nine-tenths of your substance, and they will turn against you if you refuse them the remaining tenth. Lend them all the money you can spare, and lend in utter hopelessness of any future day of reckoning, but refrain once for your own imperative needs, and they will leave your house open-mouthed at your stinginess. To be grateful implies some kind of retentive faculty; and this is just what the limp have not. Another characteristic of a different kind is the rashness with which they throw themselves into circumstances which they afterwards find they cannot bear. They never know how to calculate their forces, and spend the latter half of their life in regretting what they had spent the former half in endeavouring to attain, or to get rid of, as it might chance. If they marry A. they wish they had taken B. instead; as house-mistresses they turn away their servants at short notice after long complaint, and then beg them to remain if by any means they can bribe them to stay. They know nothing of that clear incisive action which sets men and women at ease with themselves, and enables them to bear consequences, be they good or ill, with dignity and resignation.
A limp backboneless creature always falls foul of conditions, whatever they may be; thinking the right side better than the left, and the left so much nicer than the right, according to its own place of standing for the moment; and what heads plan and hands execute, lips are never weary of bemoaning. In fact the limp, like fretful babies, do not know what they want, being unconscious that the whole mischief lies in their having a vertebral column of gristle instead of one of bone. They spread themselves abroad and take the world into their confidence—weep in public and rave in private—and cry aloud to the priest and the Levite passing by on the other side (maybe heavily laden for their own share) to come over and help them, poor sprawling molluscs, when no man but themselves can set them upright.
The confidences of the limp are told through a trumpet to all four corners of the sky, and are as easy to get at, with the very gentlest pressure, as the juice of an over-ripe grape. And no lessons of experience will ever teach them reticence, or caution in their choice of confidants.
Not difficult to press into the service of any cause whatever, they are the very curse of all causes which they assume to serve. They collapse at the first touch of persecution, of misunderstanding, of harsh judgment, and fall abroad in hopeless panic at the mere tread of the coming foe. Always convinced by the last speaker, facile to catch and impossible to hold, they are the prizes, the decoy ducks, for which contending parties fight, perpetually oscillating between the maintenance of old abuses and the advocacy of dangerous reforms; but the side to which they have pledged themselves on Monday they forsake on Tuesday under the plea of reconversion. Neither can they carry out any design of their own, if their friends take it in hand to over-persuade them.
If a man of this stamp has painted a picture he can be induced to change the whole key, the central circumstance and the principal figure, at the suggestion of a confident critic who is only a pupil in the art of which he is, at least technically, a master. If he is preaching or lecturing, he thinks more of the people he is addressing than of what he has to say; and, though impelled at times to use the scalping-knife, hopes he doesn't wound. Vehement advocates at times, these men's enthusiasm is merely temporary, and burns itself out by its own energy of expression; and how fierce soever their aspect when they ruffle their feathers and make believe to fight, one vigorous peck from their opponent proves their anatomy as that of a creature without vertebræ, pulpy, gristly, gelatinous, and limp. All things have their uses and good issues; but what portion of the general good the limp are designed to subserve is one of those mysteries not to be revealed in time nor space.
THE ART OF RETICENCE.
Among other classifications we may divide the world into those who live by impulse and the undirected flow of circumstance, and those who map out their lives according to art and a definite design. These last however, are rare; few people having capacity enough to construct any persistent plan of life or to carry it through if even begun—it being so much easier to follow nature than to work by rule and square, and to drift with the stream than to build up even a beaver's dam. Now, in the matter of reticence;—How few people understand this as an art, and how almost entirely it is by the mere chance of temperament whether a person is confidential or reticent—with his heart on his sleeve or not to be got at by a pickaxe—irritatingly silent or contemptibly loquacious. Sometimes indeed we do find one who, like Talleyrand, has mastered the art of an eloquent reticence from alpha to omega, and knows how to conceal everything without showing that he conceals anything; but we find such a person very seldom, and we do not always understand his value when we have him.