They merely
provoke you. They seem to you inert, flabby, weakly envious,
foolishly obstinate, impiously mutinous, and many other things.
You are made angrily contemptuous by their failure to get on; why
don't they bestir themselves, push and bustle, welcome kicks so
long as halfpence follow, make place in the world's eye--in
short, take a leaf from the book of Mr Jasper Milvain?
But try to imagine a personality wholly unfitted for the rough
and tumble of the world's labour-market. From the familiar point
of view these men were worthless; view them in possible relation
to a humane order of Society, and they are admirable citizens.
Nothing is easier than to condemn a type of character which is
unequal to the coarse demands of life as it suits the average
man. These two were richly endowed with the kindly and the
imaginative virtues; if fate threw them amid incongruous
circumstances, is their endowment of less value? You scorn their
passivity; but it was their nature and their merit to be passive.
Gifted with independent means, each of them would have taken
quite a different aspect in your eyes.
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