The core of society is compact enough, made up as it is of those real doers of the world's work who are clear as to what they want and who pursue a definite object with both meaning and method. But outside this solid nucleus lies a floating population of vague people; nebulous people; people without mental coherence or the power of intellectual growth; people without purpose, without aim, who drift with any current anywhere, making no attempt at conscious steering and having no port to which they desire to steer; people who are emphatically loose in their mental hinges, and who cannot be trusted with any office requiring distinct perception or exact execution; people to whom existence is something to be got through with as little trouble and as much pleasure as may be, but who have not the faintest idea that life contains a principle which each man ought to make clear to himself and work out at any cost, and to which he ought to subordinate and harmonize all his faculties and his efforts. These vague people of nebulous minds compose the larger half of the world, and count for just so much dead weight which impedes, or gives its inert strength to the active agents, as it chances to be handled. They are the majority who vote in committees and all assemblies as they are influenced by the one or two clear-minded leaders who know what they are about, and who drive them like sheep by the mere force of a definite idea and a resolute will.
Yet if there is nothing on which vague people are clear, and if they are not difficult to influence as the majority, there is much on which they are positive as a matter of private conviction. In opposition to the exhortation to be able to give a reason for the faith that is in us, they can give no reason for anything they believe, or fancy they believe. They are sure of the result; but the logical method by which that result has been reached is beyond their power to remember or understand. To argue with them is to spend labour and strength in vain, like trying to make ropes out of sea-sand. Beaten off at every point, they settle down again into the old vapoury, I believe; and it is like fighting with ghosts to attempt to convince them of a better way. They look at you helplessly; assent loosely to your propositions; but when you come to the necessary deduction, they double back in a vague assertion that they do not agree with you—they cannot prove you wrong but they are sure that they are right; and you know then that the collapse is hopeless. If this meant tenacity, it would be so far respectable, even though the conviction were erroneous; but it is the mere unimpressible fluidity of vagueness, the impossibility of giving shape and coherence to a floating fog or a formless haze.
Vague as to the basis of their beliefs, they are vaguer still as to their facts. These indeed are like a ladder of which half the rungs are missing. They never remember a story and they cannot describe what they have seen. Of the first they are sure to lose the point and to entangle the thread; of the last they forget all the details and confound both sequence and position. As to dates, they are as if lost in a wood when you require definite centuries, years, months; but they are great in the chronological generosity of 'about,' which is to them what the Middle Ages and Classic Times are to uncertain historians. It is as much as they can do to remember their own birthday; but they are never sure of their children's; and generally mix up names and ages in a manner that exasperates the young people like a personal insult.
With the best intentions in the world they do infinite mischief. They detail what they think they have heard of their neighbours' sayings and doings; but as they never detail anything exactly, nor twice alike, by the time they have told the story to half a dozen friends they have given currency to half a dozen different chimeras which never existed save in their own woolly imaginations. No repute is safe with them, even though they may be personally good-natured and anxious not to do any one harm; for they are so vague that they are always setting afloat exaggerations which are substantially falsehoods; and if you tell them the most innocent fact of any one you would not injure for worlds—say your daughter or your dearest friend—they are sure to repeat it with additions and distortions, till they have made it into a Frankenstein which no one now can subdue.
Beside this mental haziness, which neither sees nor shapes a fact correctly, vague people are loose and unstable in their habits. They know nothing of punctuality at home nor abroad; and you are never sure that you will not stumble on them at meal-times at what time soever you may call. But worse than this, your own meal-times, or any other times, are never safe from them. They float into your house uncertainly, vaguely, without purpose, with nothing to say and nothing to do, and for no reason that you can discover. And when they come they stay; and you cannot for the life of you find out what they want, nor why they have come at all. They invade you at all times; in your busy hours; on your sacred days; and sit there in a chaotic kind of silence, or with vague talk which tires your brains to bring to a focus. But they are too foggy to understand anything like a delicate hint, and if you want to get rid of them, you must risk a quarrel and effectively shoulder them out. They will be no loss. They are so much driftweed in your life, and you can make no good of them for yourself nor others.
Even when they undertake to help you, they do you more harm than good by the hazy way in which they understand, and the inexactness with which they carry out, your wishes. They volunteer to get you by favour the thing you want and cannot find in the general way of business—say, something of a peculiar shade of olive-green—and they bring you in triumph a brilliant cobalt. They know the very animal you are looking for, they say, with a confidence that impresses you, and they send to your stable a grey horse to match your bay pony; and if you trust to their uncontrolled action in your affairs, you find yourself committed to responsibilities you cannot meet and whereby you are brought to the verge of destruction.
They do all this mischief, not for want of goodwill but for want of definiteness of perception; and are as sorry as you are when they make 'pie' and not a legible sheet. Their desire is good, but a vague desire to help is equal to no help at all; or even worse—it is a positive evil, and throws you wrong by just so much as it attempts to set you straight. They are as unsatisfactory if you try to help them. They are in evil case, and you are philanthropically anxious to assist them. You think that one vigorous push would lift the car of their fortunes out of the rut in which it has stuck; and you go to them with the benevolent design of lending your shoulder as the lever. You question them as to the central fact which they wish changed; for you know that in most cases misfortunes crystallize round one such evil centre, which, being removed, the rest would go well. But your vague friends can tell you nothing. They point out this little superficial inconvenience, that small remediable annoyance, as the utmost they can do in the way of definiteness; but when you want to get to the core, you find nothing but a cloudy complaint of general ill-will, or a universal run of untoward circumstances with which you cannot grapple. To cut off the hydra's heads was difficult enough; but could even Hercules have decapitated the Djinn who rose in a volume of smoke from the fisherman's jar?
It is the same in matters of health. Only medical men know to the full the difficulty of dealing with vague people when it is necessary that these should be precise. They can localize no pain, define no sensations. If the doctor thinks he has caught hold of one leading symptom, it fades away as he tries to examine it; and, probe as he may, he comes to nothing more definite than a pervading sense of discomfort, which he must resolve into its causes as he best can. So with their suspicions; and vague people are often strangely suspicious and distrustful. They tell you in a loose kind of way that such or such a man is a rogue, such or such a woman no better than she should be. You ask them for their data—they have none; you suggest that they are mistaken, or at least that they should hold themselves as mistaken until they can prove the contrary, and you offer your version of the reputations aspersed—your vague friends listen to you amiably, then go back on their charge and say, 'I am sure of it'—which ends the conversation. They rely on their impression as other people rely on known facts; and a foggy belief is to them what a mathematical demonstration is to the exact.
In business matters they are simply maddening. They never have the necessary papers; they do not answer letters; they confuse your questions and reply at random or not at all; and they forget all dates and details. When they go to their lawyer on business they leave certificates and drafts behind them locked up where no one can get at them; or if they send directions and the keys, they tell the servant to look for an oblong blue envelope in the right-hand drawer, when they ought to have said a square white parcel in the left. They give you vague commissions to execute; and you have to find your way in the fog to the best of your ability. They say they want something like something else you have never seen, and they cannot give an address more exact than 'somewhere in Oxford Street.' They think the man's name is Baker, or something like that. Perhaps it is Flower; but the suggestion of ideas ought to be intelligible to you, and is quite near enough for them. They ask you to meet them when they come up to London, but they do not give you either the station or the train. You have to make a guess as near as you can; and when you reproach them, they pay you the compliment of saying you are so clever, it was not necessary for them to explain.
If they have any friends out in Australia or India, they inquire of you, just returned, if you happened to meet them? When you ask, Where were they stationed?—they say they do not know; and when you suggest that Madras and Calcutta are not in the same Presidencies, that India is a large place and Australia not quite like an English county, they look helpless and bewildered, and drift away into the vague geography familiar to them, 'somewhere in India,' 'somewhere in Australia,' and 'I thought you might have met them.' For geography, like history, is one of the branches of the tree of knowledge they have never climbed, and the fruits thereof are as though they were not.