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Tennyson and Nature. Daniel Macmillan died, and prospering Alexander moved to "The Elms" in London's Upper Tooting. Writers, clergymen and artists flocked to his house. One of these visitors was the great clerical dignitary, Master of the Temple Alfred Ainger. The Master's evening readings of Shakespeare were famously good and deservedly famous because he himself became so excited that he would suddenly break forth, "Pucklike, into a shadowy dance, swift, graceful, unreal." Another favorite of Alexander's, in fact his idol, was Alfred Lord Tennyson, who did nothing more spectacular than to walk and smoke with his publisher the meanwhile booming aloud his new poem.
It was not long before Alexander began to look afield. The Macmillans set up branch offices in Canada, Australia, India, New York (today the independently managed U.S. house alone has a yearly turnover of ten million dollars). Soon Macmillan's educational series served the world; its school "readers" appeared in Afrikaans, Swahili, Arabic, Anglo-Chinese and various Indian dialects. Massive works such as Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians appeared, as well as such famed series as the English Men of Letters and Great English Churchmen. Two magazines were founded, Macmillan's and Nature, and to this day Nature is Britain's most honored scientific periodical.
Hardy and Shaw. Like every publishing house, Macmillan made some crashing mistakes. Unlike most, it could afford them. One of its experts dismissed the writings of Henry James as "honest scribble work and no more." After characterizing the early works of William Butler Yeats as "sheer nonsense," Macmillan's really went overboard and insisted that his works had no more enduring value than "Maeterlinck's . . . Ibsen's . . . or Rossetti's."
When in 1868 an unknown writer named Thomas Hardy submitted his first novel (The Poor Man and the Lady), it drew one of the "gigantic, honest letters" for which Alexander was noted. "Is it conceivable," the publisher protested, "that any man, however base . . . would do as you make the Hon. Guy Allancourt do? Is it within the range of likelihood that any gentleman would pursue his wife at midnight and strike her?" But the publisher was not unaware of Hardy's possibilities: "You see," he concluded, "I am writing to you as to a writer who seems to me of, at least potentially, considerable mark. . . . If this is your first book I think you ought to go on. May I ask if it is, and—you are not a lady, so perhaps you will forgive the question—are you young?" Replied modest young Hardy faintly: "Would you mind suggesting the sort of story you think I could do best?"