s" was published, but at
that time it was not easy to find any one who had read them. They were
_Letters from an Ocean Tramp_ (1908) and _Aliens_ (1914); the latter has
been rewritten since then and issued in a revised edition. It is a very
singular experiment in the art of narrative, and a rich commentary on
human folly by a man who has made it his hobby to think things out for
himself. And the new version is headlighted by a preface which may well
take its place among the most interesting literary confessions of this
generation, where Mr. McFee shows himself as that happiest of men, the
artist who also has other and more urgent concerns than the whittling of
a paragraph:--

Of art I never grow weary, but she calls me over the world. I
suspect the sedentary art worker. Most of all I suspect the
sedentary writer. I divide authors into two classes--genuine
artists, and educated men who wish to earn enough to let them live
like country gentlemen. With the latter I have no concern. But the
artist knows when his time has come. In the same way I turned with
irresistible longing to the sea, whereon I had been wont to earn my
living. It is a good life and I love it. I love the men and their
ships. I find in them a never-ending panorama which illustrates my
theme, the problem of human folly.

Mr. McFee, you see, has some excuse for being a good writer because he
has never had to write for a living. He has been writing for the fun of
it ever since he was an apprentice in a big engineering shop in London
twenty years ago. His profession deals with exacting and beautiful
machinery, and he could no more do hack writing than hack engineering.
And unlike the other English realists of his generation who have
cultivated a cheap flippancy, McFee finds no exhilaration in easy sneers
at middle-class morality. He has a dirk up his sleeve for Gentility (how
delightfully he flays it in _Aliens_) but he loves the middle classes
for just what they are: the great fly-wheel of the world. His attitude
toward his creations is that of a "benevolent marbleheart" (his own
phrase). He has seen some of the seams of life, and like McAndrew he has
hammered his own philosophy. It is a manly, just, and gentle creed, but
not a soft one. Since the war began he has been on sea service, first on
a beef-ship and transport in the Mediterranean, now as sub-lieutenant in
the British Navy. When the war is over, and if he fee