The trouble with the preparatory attitude is there's no end to it. There is so much to learn in this world that it won't do to wait. If you wait to fit yourself before acting, you never will act. You will somehow lose the habit of acting. Study too conscientiously the one hundred best books on swimming, and of course you'll learn a great deal about it, but you never will swim.
This was Grandfather's type. If he had been kicked out alone into the world and found every one fighting him, and if he had had to fight back, and fight hard, from his boyhood, it would have taught him the one thing he needed—more force for his powers.
As it was, he remained in the Admiralty. Studying life.
The Preparatory Attitude
Grandfather was thirty-seven years old when Great-grandfather died. He (Grandfather) had been writing for the magazines for quite a long time,—he was only twenty-six when the Quarterly Review editors began to speak highly of him.
He now bought the London Athenaeum, which, though just born, was dying. Under Grandfather's editorship it became an important authority. It was known all over the world soon. But Grandfather wasn't. He never signed one of his articles, not even pseudonymously. And during the sixteen years in which he had control of the paper, this remarkable man withdrew altogether from general society, in order, he said, to avoid making literary acquaintances which might either prove annoying to him, or be supposed to compromise the integrity of his journal.
That rings hollow, that reason. He doubtless thought it true; but it wasn't. He withdrew from society, probably, because he liked withdrawing. With the gifts of a great man he didn't have a great man's robustness. Some kink in him held him back, and kept him from jousting and tournaments. He should have been psychoanalyzed. It may have been such a small kink.
I doubt if he ever would have married, but it happened quite young. He was under nineteen, and the pretty girl he married still younger. Maybe she married him. They had one son, soon after their marriage; but no other children.
I wonder if Grandfather was a case of suppressed personality. It wasn't a weak personality. It would not stay suppressed. But it didn't come out boldly and naturally, and live a full life. Not as full a life as its own wisdom and strength made appropriate. He achieved several things, and they weren't unimportant or small, yet he constantly slighted his life-work; in fact, hardly spoke of it. Modern psychologists do not call this attitude modesty, like our nice naïve fathers. No, they say it comes oftenest from the sexual errors of boyhood. For instance, repression. Or shame at misguided indulgence.