WILLIAM CHAMBERS.
THE death of Dr. William Chambers, which occurred at Edinburgh last Sunday, brought to a close a life which was not only long and useful, but rich in biographical interest of a kind which seems to be becoming rarer every year. The Dick Whittington of legend, who in boyhood could find no resting-place more luxurious than a milestone, but who in manhood reclined in the Lord Mayor's chair of state, died long ago, and has not many present-day successors. Even the traditional hero of later times, the possessor of the solitary half-crown which, by a careful practice of the self-regarding virtues, grows into a million of money, is heard of more frequently in popular lectures than in real life ; and the so-called successful man of our day finishes his career near the top of the ladder partly because he had the good-fortune to begin it some distance from the bottom. Apart, therefore, from other and better reasons, the life of William Chambers is interesting because it vitalises the old traditions, and justifies to the imagination such wise words as certain of the proverbs of Solomon and the maxims of Benjamin Franklin, which have of late been rather generally discredited in practice, even by people who respect them in theory, and find them admirable for purposes of hortative quotation.
Few people who have left their mark upon the world have been more heavily handicapped at starting than the boy William 'Chambers. His father, a good, intelligent, fairly-cultivated, but thoroughly shiftless man, was a hindrance, rather than a help, to his sons, and did little for them beyond entangling them in a law-suit, which in their early days of struggle robbed them of money that they could ill afford. William and his brother Robert had not even the advantage of a decent education. Such schooling as the former had, terminated when he was thirteen years of age, and in his fascinating autobiographical reminiscences he calculates that altogether it cost, " books included, somewhere about £6." Of the first of his schools an account is given which is more amusing than satisfactory. It was " kept by a poor old widow, Kirsty Cranston, who, according to her own account, was qualified to carry forward her pupils so far as reading the Bible; but to this proficiency there was the reasonable exception of leaving out difficult words, such as 4 Maher-shalal-hash-baz.' These, she told the children, might be made a pass-over,' and accordingly it was the rule of the establishment to let them alone." The educational limitations of the other schools were less startling, and probably William Chambers got a full return for his father's money; bat, at the best, six pounds' worth of education can hardly be considered an adequate intellectual equipment. Both the brothers had, however, been born with a passion for culture ; and though the means for gratifying it were terribly scarce, every means was made the most of, so that when William Chambers, at the age of nineteen, conceived the bold idea of beginning business as a bookseller, it is probable that his acquirements were equal, if not superior, to those of most youths in his own Tank of life. He was, as far as money was concerned, better off than the favourite heroes of self-help treatises, for his capital consisted not of one half-crown, but of two; and this sum—his wages for the last week of his apprenticeship—was devoted to the purchase of wood, with which the young tradesman himself 'constructed all the shop-furniture he required. A stock of goods, small, indeed, but not contemptible, had been secured by one of those accidents to which even the Boomers of happy chances sometimes owe so much. A bookseller's sale was to be held at an Edinburgh hotel, and the agent in charge, to whom young Chambers had been recommended, engaged him as an assistant, and was evidently favourably impressed by the way is which he went about his business. "On the day succeeding the bibliopolic festival," wrote William Chambers, more than fifty years afterwards, " I attended to assist in packing np, in the course of which I was questioned regarding my plans. I stated to the friendly inquirer that I was about to begin business, but that I had no money; if I had, I
should take the opportunity of buying a few of his specimens, for I thought I could sell them to advantage. Well,' he replied, I like that frankness ; you seem' an honest lad, and have been useful to me; so do not let the want of money trouble you ; select, if you please, ten pounds' worth of my samples, and I will let you have the usual credit.' " It is interesting to recall this beginning of a career the middle and end of which are known to all the world. The kindly agent's samples were sold and paid for, and the little business grew from week to week. Robert Chambers was taken into partnership; printing was added to bookselling, and publishing to printing ; and on February 4th, 1832, appeared the first number of Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, to be followed rapidly by the " Information for the People," the " Educational Course," the "Miscellany of Useful and Entertaining Tracts," the "Encyclopaedia, a Dictionary of Universal Knowledge for the People," the " Cyclopedia of English Literature," the " Book of Days," and other hardly less important works, which have made the name of William and Robert Chambers familiar in every place where the English language is spoken and English books are read. The undertakings of the two brothers were followed, not only by success of the real and best kind, but by that special result to which the name of success is more generally given ; wealth was well-earned and well-distributed ; and Paisley and Edinburgh have substantial memorials of the liberality of the man to whom the former gave life and the latter the means of living.
It is not, however, by his benefactions that William Chambers will be longest and most warmly remembered. It is not, we think, even as a pioneer in the movement for providing cheap and wholesome literature that he has the greatest claim upon our regard. Others, Charles Knight, for example, did almost as much as he in bringing books and periodicals within the reach of the humbler class ; but it was William Chambers who, in the fullest sense of the word, popularised literature, by making it not only accessible, but attractive. To the cheapness which was such a boon to the studious artizan or junior clerk, he added the literary charm which attracted the artizan or clerk who was not studious, and by whom reading was regarded less as recreation than as a form of labour, differing from other labour only in being entirely unremunerative. It would be grossly unjust to speak in even a mildly depreciatory tone of such works as the publications of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge ; but it is afact which cannot be ignored, that their general solidity and weight—we do not saj, heaviness—were better calculated to satisfy than to excite intellectual hunger. The Brothers Chambers seem to have felt instinctively that the classes to whom they specially appealed needed something more than a supply of literature,—an intellectual stimulus to avail themselves of the supply ; and that the wide utility of the former was dependent upon the existence of the latter. We do not mean that attractiveness was pursued as an aim in itself ; had it been so pursued, William Chambers and his brother would, like others, have fallen into such popular literary vices as sentimentality or sensationalism, from which their work has been conspicuously free; but it was achieved in pursuit of another end—the propagation of a wide love for wholesome and elevating literature—and while this end was kept steadily in view, it was impossible to miss the indispensable means.
The literary work of William Chambers, of his brother Robert, and of such collaborators as caught their tone, was characterised by what may be best described as sublimated common-sense. In his delightful and suggestive book, "Companions of My Solitude," Sir Arthur Helps makes Ellesmere speak of commonsense as the distinguishing quality of Gretchen; and he goes on to say—we quote from memory only—that the commonsense of the vulgar is hard and materialistic, but that Gretchen's was the common-sense of an imaginative person, with a keen sense of the ridiculous. This is a just and helpful distinction. What Ellesmere called the common-sense of the vulgar is, indeed, too common, and its effects in literature are as baneful as those of the pseudo-culture which is its latest rival. The higher common-sense, compact of imagination and humour and a general sanity of the intellect which is more easily recognised than defined, is as beneficent an influence in literature as it is in life; and it is to be found nowhere more free from alloy than in the pages written by William Chambers. The potency of its action in the mind of the man in whom it is either a native gift or an acquired accomplishment, is illustrated by the one fact that it preserved him alike from the narrowness of the sectarian
partisan, and the supercilious indifference to great interests of the person who makes it his boast that he " sits apart, holding no form of creed, but contemplating all." He was a safe thinker, not because he thought timidly, but because his thought always turned in the direction of practice, and was thereby saved from the extravagances of the mere doctrinaire. His matter and his manner were alike characterised by the lucidity which Mr. Matthew Arnold has so feelingly commended to us ; by an utter absence of the " note of provincialism ;" by freedom -from affectation, eccentricity, or spasm ; and by the natural grace which cannot be acquired, because it is the outcome of a well-poised and harmonious nature. That William Chambers -died before his baronetcy was gazetted has naturally provided matter for mention, but it hardly provides matter for regret. He will be ranked with worthier peers than municipal magnates who have had the luck to entertain Royalty.
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