FullReads

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, where he lived for over a year writing hard. Neither Aliens nor Casuals of the Sea, which he had been at work on for years, met with the favour of New York publishers. He carried his manuscripts around the town until weary of that amusement; and when the United Fruit Company asked him to do some engineering work for them he was not loath to get back into the old harness. And then came the war.

Alas, it is too much to hope that the Cunard Company will ever officer a vessel as I have suggested at the outset of these remarks. But I made my proposal not wholly at random, for in Conrad, Kipling, and McFee, all three, there is something of the same artistic creed. In those two magnificent prefaces–to A Personal Record and to The Nigger of the Narcissus–Conrad has set down, in words that should be memorable to every trafficker in ink, his conception of the duty of the man of letters. They can never be quoted too often:

“All ambitions are lawful except those which climb upward on the miseries or credulities of mankind…. The sight of human affairs deserves admiration and pity. And he is not insensible who pays them the undemonstrative tribute of a sigh which is not a sob, and of a smile which is not a grin.”

That is the kind of tribute that Mr. McPee has paid to the Gooderich family in Casuals of the Sea. Somewhere in that book he has uttered the immortal remark that “The world belongs to the Enthusiast who keeps cool.” I think there is much of himself in that aphorism, and that the cool enthusiast, the benevolent marbleheart, has many fine things in store for us.

And there is one other sentence in Casuals of the Sea that lingers with me, and gives a just trace of the author’s mind. It is worth remembering, and I leave it with you:

“She considered a trouble was a trouble and to be treated as such, instead of snatching the knotted cord from the hand of God and dealing murderous blows.”