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In 1880 George Bernard Shaw sent Macmillan's his first novel (Immaturity). The firm's official reader was impressed but dumbfounded. "I ask myself what it is all about," he muttered. Shaw's second novel (The Irrational Knot) was rejected as a work "of the most disagreeable kind." No. 3 (Cashel Byron's Profession) filled the reader with "disgust." No. 4 (An Unsocial Socialist) led Macmillan's to beg for something "of a more substantial kind." Trumpeted Shaw: "Your demand . . . takes my breath away. Your reader, I fear, thought the book not serious—perhaps because it was not dull. If so, he was an Englishman. . . . You must admit that when one deals with two large questions in a novel, and throws in an epitome of modern German socialism as set forth by Marx as a makeweight, it is rather startling to be met with an implied accusation of triviality."*
Grandsons and Names. Today, as they have for 47 years, the directors of the House of Macmillan meet in the firm's St. Martin's Street offices. In the chairman's room stands the huge round table built for Alexander in 1860 and pitted with the graven initials of the literary great who attended his parties. Only one Macmillan male descendant remains as an active director—Daniel Macmillan, Founder Daniel's Eton-educated grandson. To the earlier directors' unrivaled string of 19th-Century names—including Pater, Tennyson, John Morley, Meredith, Kipling, Yeats, "A.E." (G. W. Russell), Gladstone, Rossetti, Henry James—the latter-day successors have added such authors as Wells, Chesterton, Edith Wharton, Rebecca West, John Masefield, Sean O'Casey, Edith & Osbert Sitwell, J. M. Keynes, G. D. H. Cole. Not to mention Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
*Scotsmen have founded an unusually high percentage of Britain's publishing houses, including A. & C. Black, Blackie, Blackwod, Chambers, Collins, Constable, Murray, Nelson.
*Last year Centenary-Historian Morgan showed Shaw these letters and reports. Cracked Shaw: "I really hated those. . .novels."