Daniel Macmillan

IT is worth something to have definite testimony to personal worth, when the influence of the person has been recognized by those who never even heard his name. For nearly a generation students and lovers of good books have taken a strong interest in the publishing house of Macmillan & Co., because they have perceived that it had something more than business energy behind its enterprises. It is only now, by the publication of Mr. Hughes’s life ¹ of the founder of the house, that the public is admitted to a more intimate acquaintance with the personal power which determined largely the character of the publishing firm.

Mr. Macmillan was of Scotch parentage and training, and was bound out as apprentice to a bookseller and bookbinder when eleven years old ; was a bookseller’s clerk successively in Glasgow, Cambridge, and London; and returned to Cambridge to open a shop of his own in 1843, where he remained until his death in 1857, having expanded his business of selling books into a prosperous one of publishing. He was only forty-four years old at the time of his death, and the round of business had scarcely permitted any extraordinary adventure or fortune ; nor were his connections with the literature of the day such as to furnish his biographer with any considerable material from which to make a gossipy contribution to literary history.

The worth of the book is first in its plain account of a courageous man, who struggled all his life against an insidious disease which finally destroyed him; then in the side light which it throws on that strong movement in English political, social, and theological thought, which found exponents in Arnold, the Hares, Maurice, and Kingsley ; and finally in its illustration of the power which a high conscience has of transforming a trade into a profession.

Mr. Macmillan was a shrewd, prudent man of business, and even when dealing with authors whom he almost reverenced displayed a cautious, watchful temper; he did not mean that either he or they should suffer pecuniarily by the engagements entered upon. He built up his business by patient industry, aided somewhat by the opportune loans of men who had confidence in his integrity, but struggling against difficulties which were more serious, probably, in England than they are in America. It was not this success, however, which made his life worth telling: it was the fidelity to a high ideal; the deliberate resolution to treat books not simply as objects of merchandise, but as persons having souls of their own, capable of doing infinite good or infinite hurt. This made him a bookseller who read his books, and could advise his customers. It enabled him, when planted in a university town, to affect the lives of the students, who came to know that in the Trinity Street bookstore there was a man who could talk about his books as if they were his friends, not his wares; it enabled him afterwards to become the medium of communication to the world of the minds of men who regarded their own books as something more than sources of income or bases of reputation.

The man made the business, and transfused his own strong personality into the work which he directed. In the more highly organized conditions of publishing to which business seems tending, this individual personal power may disappear from actual view, but it never can disappear from life, and the illustration which this book gives can be repeated again and again. The record made by Mr. Hughes will do something to make the repetition possible.