s that
character, not incident, is my _metier_. And you can _draw_
character, _paint_ character, but you can't very well blat about it,
can you?

I am afraid Balzac's job is too big for anybody nowadays. The worst
of writing men nowadays is their horrible ignorance of how people
live, of ordinary human possibilities.

A----. is always pitching into me for my insane ideas about "cheap
stuff." He says I'm on the wrong tack and I'll be a failure if I
don't do what the public wants. I said I didn't care a blue curse
what the public wanted, nor did I worry much if I never made a big
name. All I want is to do some fine and honourable work, to do it as
well as I possibly could, and there my responsibility ended.... To
hell with writing, I want _to feel_ and _see_!

I am laying in a gallon of ink and a couple of cwt. of paper, to the
amusement of the others, who imagine I am a merchant of some sort
who has to transact business at sea because Scotland yard are alter
him!

His kit for every voyage, besides the gallon of ink and the
hundredweight of foolscap, always included a score of books, ranging
from Livy or Chaucer to Gorky and histories of Italian art. Happening to
be in New York at the time of the first exhibition in this country of
"futurist" pictures, he entered eagerly into the current discussion in
the newspaper correspondence columns. He wrote for a leading London
journal an article on "The Conditions of Labour at Sea." He finds time
to contribute to the _Atlantic Monthly_ pieces of styptic prose that
make zigzags on the sphygmograph of the editor. His letters written
weekly to the artist friend he once lived with in Chelsea show a
humorous and ironical mind ranging over all topics that concern
cultivated men. I fancy he could out-argue many a university professor
on Russian fiction, or Michelangelo, or steam turbines.

When one says that McFee found little intellectually in common with his
engineering colleagues, that is not to say that he was a prig. He was
interested in everything that they were, but in a great deal more, too.
And after obtaining his extra chief's certificate from the London Board
of Trade, with a grade of ninety-eight per cent., he was not inclined to
rest on his gauges.

In 1912 he took a walking trip from Glasgow to London, to gather local
colour for a book he had long meditated; then he took ship for the
United States,