Memoir of Daniel Macmillan

Front matter

MEMOIE

OF

DANIEL MACMILLAN

Preface

needs some quality of a finer and higher kind than usual in the man himself, or something peculiar in his surroundings, or dramatic in his life, to make the world he has left desirous of hearing more of him than that he lies safely in such a cemetery or churchyard, and has left so many thousand pounds behind him.

In the present instance, however, the fact stands, that after a quarter of a century, those who knew Daniel Macmillan best are not contented with what they know, and do desire something more. Now this desire cannot be accounted for by his surroundings, which were just like those of thousands of other Scotchmen of the same class ; nor by anything dramatic in his life, which was singularly free from incident. So we must fall back on the qualities of the man himself to account for it. And here we shall not have far to seek. Whoever glances at these pages cannot fail, I think, to admit that there was something in this man's personal qualities and character, apart from his great business ability, which takes him out of the ordinary category — a touch, in fact, of the rare quality which we call heroism.

No man who ever sold books for a livelihood was more conscious of a vocation ; more impressed

PREFACE.

with the dignity of his craft, and of its value to humanity ; more anxious that it should suffer no shame or diminution through him. And his ideal did not abide in talk, a fair image to be brought out and worshipped when the shop was not full of customers. He strove faithfully to realise it amid difficulties which would have daunted any but a strong and brave man. The chief of these was life-long illness of the most trying kind. The disease of which he died a quarter of a century later struck him before he was twenty, and he was never a really sound man from that day. Of all men I have known personally he was the one who lived most constantly and consciously eye to eye with death. He became aware when a young man that, at any time, in a few hours, some carelessness — a chill, wet feet, an incautious meal — might prove fatal to him ; and yet through it all, with blisters, setons, caustic always going, he was as full of interest up to the last in the books he was publishing and dealing in as the authors and buyers themselves, and retained to the last a joyousness and playfulness in his intercourse with his family and friends, which made it almost impossible to realise upon how frail a thread his life hung.

PKEFACE.

That his character made a strong impression on

those who came across him, the large collections

of his letters which are still in existence prove.

Even in these all-preserving days, clergymen,

lawyers, authors, and men of science, are not

ordinarily in the habit of keeping anything but

the receipts and business communications of their

bookseller or publisher. In the case of Daniel

Macmillan the practice has been all the other way.

The difficulty has been, out of superabundant

material, to make a selection which would let

the writer tell his own story and paint his own

portrait. If it does not prove one of sterling

interest to readers the fault must lie with the

editing.

One other reason has weighed much with me in undertaking this task. Daniel Macmillan was before all things a devout Christian, one whose faith informed and coloured his whole life, and who was not ashamed of letting this be plainly known. This of itself is perhaps not yet so rare even in these days as to excite any special interest, but it does, I think, become so when we compare the narrow religious atmosphere in which he was reared with the Catholic freedom and breadth of that into which he rose. Examples are common

PREFACE. xi enough of those who, bred like him in the strait Calvinism of the Scotch Church, have shaken off the whole system of theology grafted on the central truth which gives all its strength and vitality to that system — the constant faith in a living God, to whom man may turn at any moment, and from whose presence and government he can never escape. But, in shaking off the system, they have for the most part thrown away the central truth, and in rejecting the idea of a despotic and self-willed ruler, predestinating the majority of mankind to endless misery, have never risen to that of a righteous and loving Father, educating His children for perfect communion with Him and with each other. Of that central truth Daniel Macmillan never lost his hold, and upon it his whole life was grounded. As he was also a man of wide reading and marked intellectual power — deeply versed and interested in the revolution which was then already begun, and which is testing to their foundations all creeds and ecclesiastical systems — the witness he bears to a faith in which his own intellect and heart could rest and rejoice, and that the old faith of Christendom, taken in its plainest and most obvious sense, may well bring some strength and xii PKEFACE.

comfort to those who are still engaged in the conflict in which he proved himself a conqueror, and bending under some of the burthens he had to carry. At all events it is one more instance, in a time which has sore need of such if ever time had, of how a belief of the old Pauline kind may still lay hold of a man of strong character, and of naturally questioning intellect, and, when it has laid hold, can bear him up triumphantly through a life of poverty and trouble, of constant

bodily pain and mental anxiety.

T. H.