Leonardo's engineering and anatomical drawings a perpetual feast;
and of the former he spoke even with emotion. Nothing indeed
annoyed Fleeming more than the attempt to separate the fine arts
from the arts of handicraft; any definition or theory that failed
to bring these two together, according to him, had missed the
point; and the essence of the pleasure received lay in seeing
things well done. Other qualities must be added; he was the last
to deny that; but this, of perfect craft, was at the bottom of all.
And on the other hand, a nail ill-driven, a joint ill-fitted, a
tracing clumsily done, anything to which a man had set his hand and
not set it aptly, moved him to shame and anger. With such a
character, he would feel but little drudgery at Fairbairn's. There
would be something daily to be done, slovenliness to be avoided,
and a higher mark of skill to be attained; he would chip and file,
as he had practiced scales, impatient of his own imperfection, but
resolute to learn.

And there was another spring of delight. For he was now moving
daily among those strange creations of man's brain, to some so
abhorrent, to him of an interest so inexhaustible: in which iron,
water, and fire are made to serve as slaves, now with a tread more
powerful than an elephant's, and now with a touch more precise and
dainty than a pianist's. The taste for machinery was one that I
could never share with him, and he had a certain bitter pity for my
weakness. Once when I had proved, for the hundredth time, the
depth of this defect, he looked at me askance. 'And the best of
the joke,' said he, 'is that he thinks himself quite a poet.' For
to him the struggle of the engineer against brute forces and with
inert allies, was nobly poetic. Habit never dulled in him the
sense of the greatness of the aims and obstacles of his profession.