The after-history of ‘The Roadmender’ is worthy of note. Messrs
Duckworth published it on February 28th, 1902, in the now familiar green
covers. Six times in that year it was reprinted; ever since, impression
has followed impression until now, when, in the last month of 1912, its
thirty-first appears. It had no adventitious aids when it was sent out
into the crowded, jostling world of books, where so many good things are
lost, crushed by mere numbers. No ‘log-rolling,’ no powerful trumpeter
of its merits, made a way for it. Why, then, did it make one for itself
that has widened and gone farther through eleven years, and seems as
though it would grow wider and go farther still for many a year to come?
Journalists have learnt to call this little book a ‘classic’; they use
it to condemn or praise a new man’s style; it has become for critics a
standard in its class. But the more or less professional literary
judgement is of small importance and easy to account for. The question
that is of real value for us who read this book, without even the
desire, much less the skill, to frame a literary judgement on it, is why
it is our own book, why, as I heard the traveller of a great publisher
say, ‘it is everybody’s book.’ You may see workmen reading it in
omnibuses and trams, hear of queens commanding it, find it ready for you
in all the shops for selling books that are new, waste your time if you
look for copies in those dusty treasure-houses where they sell them only
second-hand. ‘Everybody’ buys it; nobody throws it away. There is a
hard-headed prince of commerce, I am told—there may be many another, for
anything I know—who keeps a pile of those little green volumes of
mingled poetry and religion, that he may give one to any friend who has
unaccountably passed it by. In the States it is served out to
millionaires on Japanese vellum or fine hand-made paper, with heaven
knows what outside glory. Certain reviewers, at first—before they had
learnt caution or, may be, taken pains—said that ‘this kind of thing’
had been done before. Many of them have told us that it has been all too
abundantly done since. Yet the history of ‘The Roadmender’ is unique
among histories of what people mean by ‘this kind of thing.’ We have to
account for that uncontested fact.
For my part I allow myself to think that the reviewer’s diagnosis is
wrong. ‘The Roadmender’ is not that kind of thing; it stands by itself,
it is a thing of personal and individual life. That is one reason why it
calls forth so living a welcome when we handle it, it seems to _breathe_
in our hands. We learn to love it as something that accepts us and
responds to us; understands us and finds out our needs in a way of its
own.
Here we touch the bottom of the problem, I believe. Nothing, in fact, is
heartily welcomed anywhere unless either a real or an artificial need
exists for it and, either openly or secretly, demands it.
I think we may say at once that ‘The Roadmender’ does not meet
artificial needs, such as those created by idleness of body or,
especially, of soul, or by the faults and follies of a civilization that
has hardly yet begun to grow up. For myself—and I believe I represent a
large consensus—I say unhesitatingly that it meets real needs rooted
deeply in every one of us, so deeply that very many of us live and die
without discovering that they are there. It is addressed, in its
profound simplicity, to what is common to man, what is discovered in all
men who are truly men, by those who have learnt to read secrets of the
heart.
We do not know ourselves; we have no suspicion, very many of us, that we
are not only in need of beauty, let us say, but are craving for it,
starved for want of it, going hungry and empty while we try to satisfy
ourselves with a thousand worthless mockeries of the real. It is the
same with goodness: we are satiated but not satisfied with its
substitutes, with imitations and travesties, or rank blasphemies and
denials; our appetite is tricked and we are deceived. Even when we have
the good will not the bad, goodness, above all holiness (especially the
Christian sort), has no charm, we think; it is a mawkish affair, or a
fearful and greedy hypocrisy, as Nietzsche tells us. But when we meet
it—meet the real thing, noble as well as sweet—then we discover a new
region of ourselves and find it empty. We too are able, nay, despite our
baser selves, willing and desiring, to worship reality, to follow after
goodness, beauty, and truth—the modes and manners of the almighty Love
that searches out our secrets. Yet, until some magic touch releases us
from the enchantment of our slavery to lower things and from a far too
low esteem of our own spiritual capacity, we do not know it.
So, when the magic touch comes we are a little stirred; weakly perhaps,
but yet with true response, we thrill in answer to it. We may go to
sleep again, but nothing can ever be as though we had not felt that
touch; we may be the worse for it, as they are who shut their eyes to
light, or we may be the better through all the lives and worlds to come.
‘The Roadmender’ has given and will give this touch—rousing the real
self of men and women everywhere; or coming to them with the
outstretched and friendly hand of one who can speak as like to like and
by heart to heart.
This, I think, is why it lives.