| <Saturday Review, 23 April 1870, 538-9>
| <LIMP PEOPLE.>
| <Eliza Lynn Linton>
| <etext downloaded from Project Gutenberg with thanks>
| 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 
| <reg orig=”every one”> everyone </reg>
| 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 
| <p> 'cruel strong' </p> 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 
| <reg orig=”no one”> no-one </reg> 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
| <reg orig=”some one”> someone </reg> 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 <p> 'slop about,' </p> 
| 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.
| As the mollusc has to become the prey of <reg orig=”some one”> 
| Someone </reg>, 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.