"DANIEL MACMILLAN."*
MR. HuonEs has given us in the Memoir of Daniel Macmillan a book of very great interest in two ways. For one thing, it is a good example of a kind of life which will always have an attraction for young men, and which, as usually written—it may almost be said as usually lived—is the worst possible reading for them. It is so hard to begin with nothing, and yet to prosper and become famous, that those who are as yet only trying the first part of the prescription naturally want the encouragement which comes from the experience of those who have gone right through with it. There is no want of bio- graphies in which this experience may be found. The successful merchant who begins with sweeping out his master's shop has been the theme of much reverential narration. If such books were avowedly meant to teach the secret of success in business, and nothing more, they would be inoffensive ; it is when they aim at telling the reader how to kill two birds with one stone—" how to make the best of both worlds" is, we believe, the exact phrase, but anyhow, the meaning is how to save your soul and fill your pockets at one and the same time- M,ntoi-cDaual Macmil 'an. By Thomas Eubes, Q.C. London : Maomfilan. and O. 1581
that they become so distasteful. They have, no doubt, a use of their own, for they supply uhuudauce of illustrations of the less obvious meanings of the text, "flow hardly shall they thatfhave riches enter into the kingdom of Heaven ;" but it is not the use that their writers intended them to have. The Memoir of Daniel Macmillan is just what the books of which we have been speaking ought to be and so seldom are. It is the life of a man who began in great poverty ; of a man who could say, "Hunger and middling food is not so damaging, either to the health or the morals, in the country as it is in the whirl aud activity and fever of large towns. This is a point I can speak of; for I have experienced both, and. though my health has been perma- nently damaged by that experience, yeti am right glad I know what it is ;" of a man whose first wages were is. fid. a week, and who, when he came to England, thought him self fortunate to get a shop- man's place at Cambridge, with a salary of i20e. year ; and yet of a, man who, though he was only forty-four when he died, had lived to found a great publishing house, and had done this in spite of eonstant ill-health. Here, then, are all the materials for the kind of biography that loves to deal with the self-made man. Bat together with these, there is something far rarer and. more valuable. There are men of whom one would be sorry to say that their religion is not genuine, because they will some- times make real and painful sacrifices in obedience to it. But at the same time, one cannot but feel that their business is the very last place into which their religion enters. They are eo impressed with the sacredness of sacred things, that what they seem most anxious about is not to mix them up with profane things. They would say that their religion is not degraded by ,contact with the world ; but somehow, what one is more struck by is that their world is not raised by contact with religion. There was no separation of tine kind in Daniel Macmillan's life, He was the same man through it all, as eager to serve God in the publisher's shop as anywhere else. Those who remember what a reputation for heterodoxy meant in University circles, and. how easily it was earned, early ia the fifties, will not need to be told how much a Cambridge publisher risked. in identifying himself with Frederick Maurice. It is true Daniel Macmillan was indebted to Archdeacon Hare and. his brother for money help on first starting in Cambridge. But that was ten years before the publication of the Theological Essays, and the dismissal of their author from hie Professorship at King's College. There had been time enough in the interval for Daniel Macredlan to leans wordly wisdom, and to get up those phrases about tlio mischief of extreme views which come in so conveniently when the desertion of a friend or of a principle has to be presented as Prompted. by a more intelligent regard for the very truths which he is blindly striving to preach. To publish Maurice's books seemed to Macmillan the highest service that he could do to his fellows ; but the same desire to identify himself with the progress of the ideas which be thought valuable to mankind. colours all his intercourse with authors. Time has not, in all cases, con- firmed. the opinion which he lied. formed of the books which bore his nEune on the title-page; but there can be no question as to the genuineness of the estimate, or as to the singleness of eye with which that estimate was formed..
Theother interest of Mr. Hughes's book is that it deals with men and events not as yet far enough off to have been much written about. Daniel Macmillan's life at Cambridge covered the years from 1843 to 1857, and. the last seven of these belong especially to this intermediate period. Other lives will by-and- Lye be written which will describe the period in more detail; the correspondence of Frederick Manriee, in particular, will have
extraessfeeee
'y interest and value. But for these we are still
waiting, and unless very great reserve is exercised, may have to wait for some time longer. In the order of ideas, books like Mr- Hughes's ought to come after the books we have in view. But in order of time, the chic-lights naturally come in advance of the Principal light. Any way, whether the order of its appearance is, or is not, the ideally right one, we are very glad to get the life of Daniel Macmillan when it is offered us. It will be a renewing, of youth to many middle-aged readers to bear of w",a.sanall book called The &tines Tragedv, by a Mr. Kingsley, nleh gives a most living picture of the Middle Ages ; of George Brinkley " who has been selected. to write on Tennyson forth° volume of Cambridge Essays ;" of the unpopular opinions put out by mr. Tennyson in Maud, which deceived the critics into "pretending that the execution is inferior to anything he has ever done l" of Macmillan's own surprise that his special hero Should be called "dreamy," when " one knows that each a man
as John Stuart Mill says that Mr. Maurice is the ablest and. subtlest logician in Europe ;" of his seeing Maurice immediately after hie dismissal from King's College,—" Ho is dismissed and. at once. He is not even allowed. to lecture to-day. As he expected this from the first, he is not greatly surprised. I think he does feel the mode in which it has been donee that is, the suddenly being forbidden by the Principal to lecture even to the historical students I asked him about the future.
His answer was, sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.' " Daniel Macmillan's early death was a real loss to literature, The hints of \Oise he hoped to see done, which appear here and there in his letters, show that he had a very remarkable insight into the needs of readers. In a publisher, this gift has a double value. There is first the suggestion, because many writers can work out a plan when the merest indication of it has once been given them; and next the opportunity of working out which, in many cases, only a publisher can give. To this day, for example, there is room for two books which Daniel Macmillan had
in Ids mind two-and-twenty years ago. The subjects were to be the Logic of Induction and Political Economy, and the writers were to give first the settled results in each science, and then " a seminary of what is isneefiled, and the arguments on each side." Indeed, there are few subjects to which this treatment might not be profitably, if only it were honestly, applied. Naturally, each writer is most interested in what 18 unsettled;. cud. in labouring to prove that it ought in future to be regarded as settled, he is constantly tempted to treat it as already settled. The consequence is, that what is really settled comes to be treated. as still unsettled, merely for want of a clear understanding at the outset as to what points people are really agreed. Macmillan'e native shrewdness did. not desert him, even when be had to go counter to the man whom lie most venerated. ''I would strongly advise Maurice," he writes to his brother, "not to publish any more books than those already projected. I knew from something he said, that he would like to say something about the war [WS was written in 18551 but
took no notice of it. He has quite enough on his hands
already Scold F. for disturbing Mr. Maurice about new schemes. If I were rich I would certainly make an effort to get his books into wide circulatiou, by issuing thorn in penny numbers. That I should. like to do." There is here a distinc- tion, which conetautly needs to be kept in mind, between the work of the great writer and. the work of those whom the great writer influences. It is for them, not for him, to take Isis teach- ing down from the mountain into the plain of contemporary controversy, He "has enough on his heeds already." How much insight, again, into the difference -between accepts ing a man's teaching and rejecting the opposite there is in this passage,—" Of course there are clever young men who find great fun in the nonsense that is written by Mr. Maurice's critics. Certainly, they are often very droll and very pompoue,—enotig,h to meke less frivolous men laugh loud and long. But these young men do not read Mr. Maurice's books. All frivolous persons either give him or their frivolity up." But Daniel Macmillan would not have founded. a great pubs lishing house by forty-four if ha had not brought his abilities to bear with equal energy upon the Blettllost details of trade. When he writes to engage an assistant, he tells him all the details of the work he will have to do. He must come to the shop punctually at seven ; dust, and arrange things ; take care that the boys do their work thoroughly, and. do not stay too long on their errands; see the day's orders executed, the day's letters answered, the day's books posted, in the day. All this was the more important because the partners attended to the shop themselves,—an arrangement which enabled Daniel Macmillan to form that large acquaintance with Cambridge men which he rightly held to be his most useful function as a bookseller. " When the Ilacmillans first esta- blished their shop in the heart of the University," writes one of their earliest customers, " we undergraduates t tees felt anew ewwitsl pi iii men hardly older than ourselves, there was opened of interest. They were the first booksellers whom I had over known to have a literary insight below the binding of their books." Passages like these make the reader understand. what Mr. Hughes means, when he says of Daniel Macmillan,—"Noman who ever sold books for a livelihood was more conscious of a vocation, more impressed with the dignity of his craft and of its value to humanity, more anxious that it should suffer no shame or diminution through him."
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