FRANCIS

Asceticism is a thing which in its very nature, we tend in these days to

misunderstand. Asceticism, in the religious sense, is the repudiation of

the great mass of human joys because of the supreme joyfulness of the

one joy, the religious joy. But asceticism is not in the least confined

to religious asceticism: there is scientific asceticism which asserts

that truth is alone satisfying: there is æsthetic asceticism which

asserts that art is alone satisfying: there is amatory asceticism which

asserts that love is alone satisfying. There is even epicurean

asceticism, which asserts that beer and skittles are alone satisfying.

Wherever the manner of praising anything involves the statement that the

speaker could live with that thing alone, there lies the germ and

essence of asceticism. When William Morris, for example, says that 'love

is enough,' it is obvious that he asserts in those words that art,

science, politics, ambition, money, houses, carriages, concerts, gloves,

walking-sticks, door-knockers, railway-stations, cathedrals and any

other things one may choose to tabulate are unnecessary. When Omar

Khayyam says:

'A book of verse beneath the bough

A loaf of bread, a jug of wine and thou

Sitting beside me in the wilderness

O wilderness were Paradise enow.'

It is clear that he speaks fully as much ascetically as he does

æsthetically. He makes a list of things and says that he wants no more.

The same thing was done by a mediæval monk. Examples might, of course,

be multiplied a hundred-fold. One of the most genuinely poetical of our

younger poets says, as the one thing certain, that

'From quiet home and first beginning

Out to the undiscovered ends--

There's nothing worth the wear of winning

But laughter and the love of friends.'

Here we have a perfect example of the main important fact, that all true

joy expresses itself in terms of asceticism.

But if in any case it should happen that a class or a generation lose

the sense of the peculiar kind of joy which is being celebrated, they

immediately begin to call the enjoyers of that joy gloomy and

self-destroying. The most formidable liberal philosophers have called

the monks melancholy because they denied themselves the pleasures of

liberty and marriage. They might as well call the trippers on a Bank

Holiday melancholy because they deny themselves, as a rule, the

pleasures of silence and meditation. A simpler and stronger example is,

however, to hand. If ever it should happen that the system of English

athletics should vanish from the public schools and the universities, if

science should supply some new and non-competitive manner of perfecting

the physique, if public ethics swung round to an attitude of absolute

contempt and indifference towards the feeling called sport, then it is

easy to see what would happen. Future historians would simply state

that in the dark days of Queen Victoria young men at Oxford and

Cambridge were subjected to a horrible sort of religious torture. They

were forbidden, by fantastic monastic rules, to indulge in wine or

tobacco during certain arbitrarily fixed periods of time, before certain

brutal fights and festivals. Bigots insisted on their rising at

unearthly hours and running violently around fields for no object. Many

men ruined their health in these dens of superstition, many died there.

All this is perfectly true and irrefutable. Athleticism in England is an

asceticism, as much as the monastic rules. Men have over-strained

themselves and killed themselves through English athleticism. There is

one difference and one only: we do feel the love of sport; we do not

feel the love of religious offices. We see only the price in the one

case and only the purchase in the other.

The only question that remains is what was the joy of the old Christian

ascetics of which their ascetism was merely the purchasing price. The

mere possibility of the query is an extraordinary example of the way in

which we miss the main points of human history. We are looking at

humanity too close, and see only the details and not the vast and

dominant features. We look at the rise of Christianity, and conceive it

as a rise of self-abnegation and almost of pessimism. It does not occur

to us that the mere assertion that this raging and confounding universe

is governed by justice and mercy is a piece of staggering optimism fit

to set all men capering. The detail over which these monks went mad with

joy was the universe itself; the only thing really worthy of enjoyment.

The white daylight shone over all the world, the endless forests stood

up in their order. The lightning awoke and the tree fell and the sea

gathered into mountains and the ship went down, and all these

disconnected and meaningless and terrible objects were all part of one

dark and fearful conspiracy of goodness, one merciless scheme of mercy.

That this scheme of Nature was not accurate or well founded is perfectly

tenable, but surely it is not tenable that it was not optimistic. We

insist, however, upon treating this matter tail foremost. We insist that

the ascetics were pessimists because they gave up threescore years and

ten for an eternity of happiness. We forget that the bare proposition

of an eternity of happiness is by its very nature ten thousand times

more optimistic than ten thousand pagan saturnalias.

Mr Adderley's life of Francis of Assisi does not, of course, bring this

out; nor does it fully bring out the character of Francis. It has rather

the tone of a devotional book. A devotional book is an excellent thing,

but we do not look in it for the portrait of a man, for the same reason

that we do not look in a love-sonnet for the portrait of a woman,

because men in such conditions of mind not only apply all virtues to

their idol, but all virtues in equal quantities. There is no outline,

because the artist cannot bear to put in a black line. This blaze of

benediction, this conflict between lights, has its place in poetry, not

in biography. The successful examples of it may be found, for instance,

in the more idealistic odes of Spenser. The design is sometimes almost

indecipherable, for the poet draws in silver upon white.

It is natural, of course, that Mr Adderley should see Francis primarily

as the founder of the Franciscan Order. We suspect this was only one,

perhaps a minor one, of the things that he was; we suspect that one of

the minor things that Christ did was to found Christianity. But the vast

practical work of Francis is assuredly not to be ignored, for this

amazingly unworldly and almost maddeningly simple--minded infant was one

of the most consistently successful men that ever fought with this

bitter world. It is the custom to say that the secret of such men is

their profound belief in themselves, and this is true, but not all the

truth. Workhouses and lunatic asylums are thronged with men who believe

in themselves. Of Francis it is far truer to say that the secret of his

success was his profound belief in other people, and it is the lack of

this that has commonly been the curse of these obscure Napoleons.

Francis always assumed that everyone must be just as anxious about their

common relative, the water-rat, as he was. He planned a visit to the

Emperor to draw his attention to the needs of 'his little sisters the

larks.' He used to talk to any thieves and robbers he met about their

misfortune in being unable to give rein to their desire for holiness. It

was an innocent habit, and doubtless the robbers often 'got round him,'

as the phrase goes. Quite as often, however, they discovered that he had

'got round' them, and discovered the other side, the side of secret

nobility.

Conceiving of St Francis as primarily the founder of the Franciscan

Order, Mr Adderley opens his narrative with an admirable sketch of the

history of Monasticism in Europe, which is certainly the best thing in

the book. He distinguishes clearly and fairly between the Manichæan

ideal that underlies so much of Eastern Monasticism and the ideal of

self-discipline which never wholly vanished from the Christian form. But

he does not throw any light on what must be for the outsider the

absorbing problem of this Catholic asceticism, for the excellent reason

that not being an outsider he does not find it a problem at all.

To most people, however, there is a fascinating inconsistency in the

position of St Francis. He expressed in loftier and bolder language than

any earthly thinker the conception that laughter is as divine as tears.

He called his monks the mountebanks of God. He never forgot to take

pleasure in a bird as it flashed past him, or a drop of water as it fell

from his finger: he was, perhaps, the happiest of the sons of men. Yet

this man undoubtedly founded his whole polity on the negation of what we

think the most imperious necessities; in his three vows of poverty,

chastity, and obedience, he denied to himself and those he loved most,

property, love, and liberty. Why was it that the most large-hearted and

poetic spirits in that age found their most congenial atmosphere in

these awful renunciations? Why did he who loved where all men were

blind, seek to blind himself where all men loved? Why was he a monk, and

not a troubadour? These questions are far too large to be answered fully

here, but in any life of Francis they ought at least to have been asked;

we have a suspicion that if they were answered we should suddenly find

that much of the enigma of this sullen time of ours was answered also.

So it was with the monks. The two great parties in human affairs are

only the party which sees life black against white, and the party which

sees it white against black, the party which macerates and blackens

itself with sacrifice because the background is full of the blaze of an

universal mercy, and the party which crowns itself with flowers and

lights itself with bridal torches because it stands against a black

curtain of incalculable night. The revellers are old, and the monks are

young. It was the monks who were the spendthrifts of happiness, and we

who are its misers.

Doubtless, as is apparent from Mr Adderley's book, the clear and

tranquil life of the Three Vows had a fine and delicate effect on the

genius of Francis. He was primarily a poet. The perfection of his

literary instinct is shown in his naming the fire 'brother,' and the

water 'sister,' in the quaint demagogic dexterity of the appeal in the

sermon to the fishes 'that they alone were saved in the Flood.' In the

amazingly minute and graphic dramatisation of the life, disappointments

and excuses of any shrub or beast that he happened to be addressing,

his genius has a curious resemblance to that of Burns. But if he avoided

the weakness of Burns' verses to animals, the occasional morbidity,

bombast and moralisation on himself, the credit is surely due to a

cleaner and more transparent life.

The general attitude of St Francis, like that of his Master, embodied a

kind of terrible common-sense. The famous remark of the Caterpillar in

'Alice in Wonderland'--'Why not?' impresses us as his general motto. He

could not see why he should not be on good terms with all things. The

pomp of war and ambition, the great empire of the Middle Ages and all

its fellows begin to look tawdry and top-heavy, under the rationality of

that innocent stare. His questions were blasting and devastating, like

the questions of a child. He would not have been afraid even of the

nightmares of cosmogony, for he had no fear in him. To him the world was

small, not because he had any views as to its size, but for the reason

that gossiping ladies find it small, because so many relatives were to

be found in it. If you had taken him to the loneliest star that the

madness of an astronomer can conceive, he would have only beheld in it

the features of a new friend.