The two men who have the credit, apparently, of having first perceived

something of what was happening in the world of the soul were a solid

and wealthy citizen named Bernard of Quintavalle and a canon from a

neighbouring church named Peter. It is the more to their credit because

Francis, if one may put it so, was by this time wallowing in poverty and

association with lepers and ragged mendicants; and these two were men

with much to give up; the one of comforts in the world and the other of

ambition in the Church. Bernard the rich burgher did quite literally and

finally sell all he had and give to the poor. Peter did even more; for

he descended from a chair of spiritual authority, probably when he was

already a man of mature years and therefore of fixed mental habits, to

follow an extravagant young eccentric whom most people probably regarded

as a maniac. What it was of which they had caught a glimpse, of which

Francis had seen the glory, may be suggested later so far as it can be

suggested at all. At this stage we need profess to see no more than all

Assisi saw, and that something not altogether unworthy of comment. The

citizens of Assisi only saw the camel go in triumph through the eye of

the needle and God doing impossible things because to him all things

were possible; only a priest who rent his robes like the Publican and

not like the Pharisee and a rich man who went away joyful, for he had no

possessions.

These three strange figures are said to have built themselves a sort of

hut or den adjoining the leper hospital. There they talked to each

other, in the intervals of drudgery and danger (for it needed ten times

more courage to look after a leper than to fight for the crown of

Sicily), in the terms of their new life, almost like children talking a

secret language. Of these individual elements on their first friendship

we can say little with certainty; but it is certain that they remained

friends to the end. Bernard of Quintavalle occupies in the story

something of the position of Sir Bedivere, "first made and latest left

of Arthur's knights," for he reappears again at the right hand of the

saint on his death-bed and receives some sort of special blessing. But

all those things belong to another historical world and were quite

remote from the ragged and fantastic trio in their tumble-down hut. They

were not monks except perhaps in the most literal and archaic sense

which was identical with hermits. They were, so to speak, three

solitaries living together socially, but not as a society. The whole

thing seems to have been intensely individual, as seen from the outside

doubtless individual to the point of insanity. The stir of something

that had in it the promise of a movement or a mission can first be felt

as I have said in the affair of the appeal to the New Testament.

It was a sort of _sors virgiliana_ applied to the Bible; a practice not

unknown among Protestants though open to their criticism, one would

think, as being rather a superstition of pagans. Anyhow it seems almost

the opposite of searching the Scriptures to open them at random; but

St. Francis certainly opened them at random. According to one story, he

merely made the sign of the cross over the volume of the Gospel and

opened it at three places reading three texts. The first was the tale of

the rich young man whose refusal to sell all his goods was the occasion

of the great paradox about the camel and the needle. The second was the

commandment to the disciples to take nothing with them on their journey,

neither scrip nor staff nor any money. The third was that saying,

literally to be called crucial, that the follower of Christ must also

carry his cross. There is a somewhat similar story of Francis finding

one of these texts, almost as accidentally, merely in listening to what

happened to be the Gospel of the day. But from the former version at

least it would seem that the incident occurred very early indeed in his

new life, perhaps soon after his breach with his father; for it was

after this oracle, apparently, that Bernard the first disciple rushed

forth and scattered all his goods among the poor. If this be so, it

would seem that nothing followed it for the moment except the individual

ascetical life with the hut for a hermitage. It must of course have been

a rather public sort of hermitage, but it was none the less in a very

real sense withdrawn from the world. St. Simeon Stylites on the top of

his pillar was in one sense an exceedingly public character; but there

was something a little singular in his situation for all that. It may be

presumed that most people thought the situation of Francis singular,

that some even thought it too singular. There was inevitably indeed in

any Catholic society something ultimate and even subconscious that was

at least capable of comprehending it better than a pagan or puritan

society could comprehend it. But we must not at this stage, I think,

exaggerate this potential public sympathy. As has already been

suggested, the Church and all its institutions had already the air of

being old and settled and sensible things, the monastic institutions

among the rest. Common sense was commoner in the Middle Ages, I think,

than in our own rather jumpy journalistic age; but men like Francis are

not common in any age, nor are they to be fully understood merely by the

exercise of common sense. The thirteenth century was certainly a

progressive period; perhaps the only really progressive period in human

history. But it can truly be called progressive precisely because its

progress was very orderly. It is really and truly an example of an epoch

of reforms without revolutions. But the reforms were not only

progressive but very practical; and they were very much to the advantage

of highly practical institutions; the towns and the trading guilds and

the manual crafts. Now the solid men of town and guild in the time of

Francis of Assisi were probably very solid indeed. They were much more

economically equal, they were much more justly governed in their own

economic environment, than the moderns who struggle madly between

starvation and the monopolist prizes of capitalism; but it is likely

enough that the majority of such citizens were as hard-headed as

peasants. Certainly the behaviour of the venerable Peter Bernardone does

not indicate a delicate sympathy with the fine and almost fanciful

subtleties of the Franciscan spirit. And we cannot measure the beauty

and originality of this strange spiritual adventure, unless we have the

humour and human sympathy to put into plain words how it would have

looked to such an unsympathetic person at the time when it happened. In

the next chapter I shall make an attempt, inevitably inadequate, to

indicate the inside of this story of the building of the three churches

and the little hut. In this chapter I have but outlined it from the

outside. And in concluding that chapter I ask the reader to remember and

realise what that story really looked like, when thus seen from the

outside. Given a critic of rather coarse common sense, with no feeling

about the incident except annoyance, and how would the story seem to

stand?

A young fool or rascal is caught robbing his father and selling goods

which he ought to guard; and the only explanation he will offer is that

a loud voice from nowhere spoke in his ear and told him to mend the

cracks and holes in a particular wall. He then declares himself

naturally independent of all powers corresponding to the police or the

magistrates, and takes refuge with an amiable bishop who is forced to

remonstrate with him and tell him he is wrong. He then proceeds to take

off his clothes in public and practically throw them at his father;

announcing at the same time that his father is not his father at all. He

then runs about the town asking everybody he meets to give him fragments

of buildings or building materials, apparently with reference to his old

monomania about mending the wall. It may be an excellent thing that

cracks should be filled up, but preferably not by somebody who is

himself cracked; and architectural restoration like other things is not

best performed by builders who, as we should say, have a tile loose.

Finally the wretched youth relapses into rags and squalor and

practically crawls away into the gutter. That is the spectacle that

Francis must have presented to a very large number of his neighbours and

friends.

How he lived at all must have seemed to them dubious; but presumably he

already begged for bread as he had begged for building materials. But he

was always very careful to beg for the blackest or worst bread he could

get, for the stalest crusts or something rather less luxurious than the

crumbs which the dogs eat, and which fall from the rich man's table.

Thus he probably fared worse than an ordinary beggar; for the beggar

would eat the best he could get and the saint ate the worst he could

get. In plain fact he was ready to live on refuse; and it was probably

something much uglier as an experience than the refined simplicity which

vegetarians and water-drinkers would call the simple life. As he dealt

with the question of food, so he apparently dealt with the question of

clothing. He dealt with it, that is, upon the same principle of taking

what he could get, and not even the best of what he could get. According

to one story he changed clothes with a beggar; and he would doubtless

have been content to change them with a scarecrow. In another version he

got hold of the rough brown tunic of a peasant, but presumably only

because the peasant gave him his very oldest brown tunic, which was

probably very old indeed. Most peasants have few changes of clothing to

give away; and some peasants are not specially inclined to give them

away until it is absolutely necessary. It is said that in place of the

girdle which he had flung off (perhaps with the more symbolic scorn

because it probably carried the purse or wallet by the fashion of the

period) he picked up a rope more or less at random, because it was lying

near, and tied it round his waist. He undoubtedly meant it as a shabby

expedient; rather as the very destitute tramp will sometimes tie his

clothes together with a piece of string. He meant to strike the note of

collecting his clothes anyhow, like rags from a succession of dust-bins.

Ten years later that make-shift costume was the uniform of five thousand

men; and a hundred years later, in that, for a pontifical panoply, they

laid great Dante in the grave.

_Chapter V_

_Le Jongleur de Dieu_

Many signs and symbols might be used to give a hint of what really

happened in the mind of the young poet of Assisi. Indeed they are at

once too numerous for selection and yet too slight for satisfaction. But

one of them may be adumbrated in this small and apparently accidental

fact: that when he and his secular companions carried their pageant of

poetry through the town, they called themselves Troubadours. But when he

and his spiritual companions came out to do their spiritual work in the

world, they were called by their leader the Jongleurs de Dieu.

Nothing has been said here at any length of the great culture of the

Troubadours as it appeared in Provence or Languedoc, great as was their

influence in history and their influence on St. Francis. Something more

may be said of them when we come to summarise his relation to history;

it is enough to note here in a few sentences the facts about them that

were relevant to him, and especially the particular point now in

question, which was the most relevant of all. Everybody knows who the

Troubadours were; everybody knows that very early in the Middle Ages, in

the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, there arose a civilisation

in Southern France which threatened to rival or eclipse the rising

tradition of Paris. Its chief product was a school of poetry, or rather

more especially a school of poets. They were primarily love-poets,

though they were often also satirists and critics of things in general.

Their picturesque posture in history is largely due to the fact that

they sang their own poems and often played their own accompaniments, on

the light musical instruments of the period; they were minstrels as well

as men of letters. Allied to their love-poetry were other institutions

of a decorative and fanciful kind concerned with the same theme. There

was what was called the "Gay Science," the attempt to reduce to a sort

of system the fine shades of flirtation and philandering. There were the

things called Courts of Love, in which the same delicate subjects were

dealt with with legal pomp and pedantry. There is one point in this part

of the business that must be remembered in relation to St. Francis.

There were manifest moral dangers in all this superb sentimentalism; but

it is a mistake to suppose that its only danger of exaggeration was in

the direction of sensualism. There was a strain in the southern romance

that was actually an excess of spirituality; just as the pessimist

heresy it produced was in one sense an excess of spirituality. The love

was not always animal; sometimes it was so airy as to be almost

allegorical. The reader realises that the lady is the most beautiful

being that can possibly exist, only he has occasional doubts as to

whether she does exist. Dante owed something to the Troubadours; and the

critical debates about his ideal woman are an excellent example of these

doubts. We know that Beatrice was not his wife, but we should in any

case be equally sure that she was not his mistress; and some critics

have even suggested that she was nothing at all, so to speak, except his

muse. This idea of Beatrice as an allegorical figure is, I believe,

unsound; it would seem unsound to any man who has read the _Vita Nuova_

and has been in love. But the very fact that it is possible to suggest

it illustrates something abstract and scholastic in these medieval

passions. But though they were abstract passions they were very

passionate passions. These men could feel almost like lovers, even about

allegories and abstractions. It is necessary to remember this in order

to realise that St. Francis was talking the true language of a

troubadour when he said that he also had a most glorious and gracious

lady and that her name was Poverty.

But the particular point to be noted here is not concerned so much with

the word Troubadour as with the word Jongleur. It is especially

concerned with the transition from one to the other; and for this it is

necessary to grasp another detail about the poets of the Gay Science. A

jongleur was not the same thing as a troubadour, even if the same man

were both a troubadour and a jongleur. More often, I believe, they were

separate men as well as separate trades. In many cases apparently the

two men would walk the world together like companions in arms, or rather

companions in arts. The jongleur was properly a joculator or jester;

sometimes he was what we should call a juggler. This is the point, I

imagine, of the tale about Taillefer the Jongleur at the battle of

Hastings, who sang of the death of Roland while he tossed up his sword

and caught it, as a juggler catches balls. Sometimes he may have been

even a tumbler; like that acrobat in the beautiful legend who was called

"The Tumbler of Our Lady," because he turned head over heels and stood

on his head before the image of the Blessed Virgin, for which he was

nobly thanked and comforted by her and the whole company of heaven. In

the ordinary way, we may imagine, the troubadour would exalt the company

with earnest and solemn strains of love and then the jongleur would do

his turn as a sort of comic relief. A glorious medieval romance remains

to be written about two such companions wandering through the world. At

any rate, if there is one place in which the true Franciscan spirit can

be found outside the true Franciscan story, it is in that tale of the

Tumbler of Our Lady. And when St. Francis called his followers the

Jongleurs de Dieu, he meant something very like the Tumblers of Our Lord.

Somewhere in that transition from the ambition of the Troubadour to the

antics of the Tumbler is hidden, as under a parable, the truth of

St. Francis. Of the two minstrels or entertainers, the jester was

presumably the servant or at least the secondary figure. St. Francis

really meant what he said when he said he had found the secret of life

in being the servant and the secondary figure. There was to be found

ultimately in such service a freedom almost amounting to frivolity. It

was comparable to the condition of the jongleur because it almost

amounted to frivolity. The jester could be free when the knight was

rigid; and it was possible to be a jester in the service which is

perfect freedom. This parallel of the two poets or minstrels is perhaps

the best preliminary and external statement of the Franciscan change of

heart, being conceived under an image with which the imagination of the

modern world has a certain sympathy. There was, of course, a great deal

more than this involved; and we must endeavour however insufficiently to

penetrate past the image to the idea. It is so far like the tumblers

that it is really to many people a topsy-turvy idea.

Francis, at the time or somewhere about the time when he disappeared

into the prison or the dark cavern, underwent a reversal of a certain

psychological kind; which was really like the reversal of a complete

somersault, in that by coming full circle it came back, or apparently

came back, to the same normal posture. It is necessary to use the

grotesque simile of an acrobatic antic, because there is hardly any

other figure that will make the fact clear. But in the inward sense it

was a profound spiritual revolution. The man who went into the cave was

not the man who came out again; in that sense he was almost as different

as if he were dead, as if he were a ghost or a blessed spirit. And the

effects of this on his attitude towards the actual world were really as

extravagant as any parallel can make them. He looked at the world as

differently from other men as if he had come out of that dark hole

walking on his hands.

If we apply this parable of Our Lady's Tumbler to the case, we shall

come very near to the point of it. Now it really is a fact that any

scene such as a landscape can sometimes be more clearly and freshly seen

if it is seen upside down. There have been landscape-painters who

adopted the most startling and pantomimic postures in order to look at

it for a moment in that fashion. Thus that inverted vision, so much more

bright and quaint and arresting, does bear a certain resemblance to the

world which a mystic like St. Francis sees every day. But herein is the

essential part of the parable. Our Lady's Tumbler did not stand on his

head _in order_ to see flowers and trees as a clearer or quainter

vision. He did not do so; and it would never have occurred to him to do

so. Our Lady's Tumbler stood on his head to please Our Lady. If

St. Francis had done the same thing, as he was quite capable of doing,

it would originally have been from the same motive; a motive of a purely

supernatural thought. It would be _after_ this that his enthusiasm would

extend itself and give a sort of halo to the edges of all earthly

things. This is why it is not true to represent St. Francis as a mere

romantic forerunner of the Renaissance and a revival of natural

pleasures for their own sake. The whole point of him was that the secret

of recovering the natural pleasures lay in regarding them in the light

of a supernatural pleasure. In other words, he repeated in his own

person that historic process noted in the introductory chapter; the

vigil of asceticism which ends in the vision of a natural world made

new. But in the personal case there was even more than this; there were

elements that make the parallel of the Jongleur or Tumbler even more

appropriate than this.

It may be suspected that in that black cell or cave Francis passed the

blackest hours of his life. By nature he was the sort of man who has

that vanity which is the opposite of pride; that vanity which is very

near to humility. He never despised his fellow creatures and therefore

he never despised the opinion of his fellow creatures; including the

admiration of his fellow creatures. All that part of his human nature

had suffered the heaviest and most crushing blows. It is possible that

after his humiliating return from his frustrated military campaign he

was called a coward. It is certain that after his quarrel with his

father about the bales of cloth he was called a thief. And even those

who had sympathised most with him, the priest whose church he had

restored, the bishop whose blessing he had received, had evidently

treated him with an almost humorous amiability which left only too clear

the ultimate conclusion of the matter. He had made a fool of himself.

Any man who has been young, who has ridden horses or thought himself

ready for a fight, who has fancied himself as a troubadour and accepted

the conventions of comradeship, will appreciate the ponderous and

crushing weight of that simple phrase. The conversion of St. Francis,

like the conversion of St. Paul, involved his being in some sense flung

suddenly from a horse; but in a sense it was an even worse fall; for it

was a war-horse. Anyhow, there was not a rag of him left that was not

ridiculous. Everybody knew that at the best he had made a fool of

himself. It was a solid objective fact, like the stones in the road,

that he had made a fool of himself. He saw himself as an object, very

small and distinct like a fly walking on a clear window pane; and it was

unmistakably a fool. And as he stared at the word "fool" written in

luminous letters before him, the word itself began to shine and change.

We used to be told in the nursery that if a man were to bore a hole

through the centre of the earth and climb continually down and down,

there would come a moment at the centre when he would seem to be

climbing up and up. I do not know whether this is true. The reason I do

not know whether it is true is that I never happened to bore a hole

through the centre of the earth, still less to crawl through it. If I do

not know what this reversal or inversion feels like, it is because I

have never been there. And this also is an allegory. It is certain that

the writer, it is even possible that the reader, is an ordinary person

who has never been there. We cannot follow St. Francis to that final

spiritual overturn in which complete humiliation becomes complete

holiness or happiness, because we have never been there. I for one do

not profess to follow it any further than that first breaking down of

the romantic barricades of boyish vanity, which I have suggested in the

last paragraph. And even that paragraph, of course, is merely

conjectural, an individual guess at what he may have felt; but he may

have felt something quite different. But whatever else it was, it was so

far analogous to the story of the man making a tunnel through the earth

that it did mean a man going down and down until at some mysterious

moment he begins to go up and up. We have never gone up like that

because we have never gone down like that; we are obviously incapable of

saying that it does not happen; and the more candidly and calmly we read

human history, and especially the history of the wisest men, the more we

shall come to the conclusion that it does happen. Of the intrinsic

internal essence of the experience I make no pretence of writing at all.

But the external effect of it, for the purpose of this narrative, may be

expressed by saying that when Francis came forth from his cave of

vision, he was wearing the same word "fool" as a feather in his cap; as

a crest or even a crown. He would go on being a fool; he would become

more and more of a fool; he would be the court fool of the King of

Paradise.

This state can only be represented in symbol; but the symbol of

inversion is true in another way. If a man saw the world upside down,

with all the trees and towers hanging head downwards as in a pool, one

effect would be to emphasise the idea of _dependence_. There is a Latin

and literal connection; for the very word dependence only means hanging.

It would make vivid the Scriptural text which says that God has hanged

the world upon nothing. If St. Francis had seen, in one of his strange

dreams, the town of Assisi upside down, it need not have differed in a

single detail from itself except in being entirely the other way round.

But the point is this: that whereas to the normal eye the large masonry

of its walls or the massive foundations of its watchtowers and its high

citadel would make it seem safer and more permanent, the moment it was

turned over the very same weight would make it seem more helpless and

more in peril. It is but a symbol; but it happens to fit the

psychological fact. St. Francis might love his little town as much as

before, or more than before; but the nature of the love would be altered

even in being increased. He might see and love every tile on the steep

roofs or every bird on the battlements; but he would see them all in a

new and divine light of eternal danger and dependence. Instead of being

merely proud of his strong city because it could not be moved, he would

be thankful to God Almighty that it had not been dropped; he would be

thankful to God for not dropping the whole cosmos like a vast crystal to

be shattered into falling stars. Perhaps St. Peter saw the world so,

when he was crucified head-downwards.

It is commonly in a somewhat cynical sense that men have said, "Blessed

is he that expecteth nothing, for he shall not be disappointed." It was

in a wholly happy and enthusiastic sense that St. Francis said, "Blessed

is he who expecteth nothing, for he shall enjoy everything." It was by

this deliberate idea of starting from zero, from the dark nothingness of

his own deserts, that he did come to enjoy even earthly things as few

people have enjoyed them; and they are in themselves the best working

example of the idea. For there is no way in which a man can earn a star

or deserve a sunset. But there is more than this involved, and more

indeed than is easily to be expressed in words. It is not only true that

the less a man thinks of himself, the more he thinks of his good luck

and of all the gifts of God. It is also true that he sees more of the

things themselves when he sees more of their origin; for their origin is

a part of them and indeed the most important part of them. Thus they

become more extraordinary by being explained. He has more wonder at them

but less fear of them; for a thing is really wonderful when it is

significant and not when it is insignificant; and a monster, shapeless

or dumb or merely destructive, may be larger than the mountains, but is

still in a literal sense insignificant. For a mystic like St. Francis

the monsters had a meaning; that is, they had delivered their message.

They spoke no longer in an unknown tongue. That is the meaning of all

those stories, whether legendary or historical, in which he appears as a

magician speaking the language of beasts and birds. The mystic will have

nothing to do with mere mystery; mere mystery is generally a mystery of

iniquity.

The transition from the good man to the saint is a sort of revolution;

by which one for whom all things illustrate and illuminate God becomes

one for whom God illustrates and illuminates all things. It is rather

like the reversal whereby a lover might say at first sight that a lady

looked like a flower, and say afterwards that all flowers reminded him

of his lady. A saint and a poet standing by the same flower might seem

to say the same thing; but indeed though they would both be telling the

truth, they would be telling different truths. For one the joy of life

is a cause of faith, for the other rather a result of faith. But one

effect of the difference is that the sense of a divine dependence, which

for the artist is like the brilliant levin-blaze, for the saint is like

the broad daylight. Being in some mystical sense on the other side of

things, he sees things go forth from the divine as children going forth

from a familiar and accepted home, instead of meeting them as they come

out, as most of us do, upon the roads of the world. And it is the

paradox that by this privilege he is more familiar, more free and

fraternal, more carelessly hospitable than we. For us the elements are

like heralds who tell us with trumpet and tabard that we are drawing

near the city of a great king; but he hails them with an old familiarity

that is almost an old frivolity. He calls them his Brother Fire and his

Sister Water.

So arises out of this almost nihilistic abyss the noble thing that is

called Praise; which no one will ever understand while he identifies it

with nature-worship or pantheistic optimism. When we say that a poet

praises the whole creation, we commonly mean only that he praises the

whole cosmos. But this sort of poet does really praise creation, in the

sense of the act of creation. He praises the passage or transition from

nonentity to entity; there falls here also the shadow of that archetypal

image of the bridge, which has given to the priest his archaic and

mysterious name. The mystic who passes through the moment when there is

nothing but God does in some sense behold the beginningless beginnings

in which there was really nothing else. He not only appreciates

everything but the nothing of which everything was made. In a fashion he

endures and answers even the earthquake irony of the Book of Job; in

some sense he is there when the foundations of the world are laid, with

the morning stars singing together and the sons of God shouting for joy.

That is but a distant adumbration of the reason why the Franciscan,

ragged, penniless, homeless and apparently hopeless, did indeed come

forth singing such songs as might come from the stars of morning; and

shouting, a son of God.

This sense of the great gratitude and the sublime dependence was not a

phrase or even a sentiment; it is the whole point that this was the very

rock of reality. It was not a fancy but a fact; rather it is true that

beside it all facts are fancies. That we all depend in every detail, at

every instant, as a Christian would say upon God, as even an agnostic

would say upon existence and the nature of things, is not an illusion of

imagination; on the contrary, it is the fundamental fact which we cover

up, as with curtains, with the illusion of ordinary life. That ordinary

life is an admirable thing in itself, just as imagination is an

admirable thing in itself. But it is much more the ordinary life that is

made of imagination than the contemplative life. He who has seen the

whole world hanging on a hair of the mercy of God has seen the truth; we

might almost say the cold truth. He who has seen the vision of his city

upside down has seen it the right way up.

Rossetti makes the remark somewhere, bitterly but with great truth, that

the worst moment for the atheist is when he is really thankful and has

nobody to thank. The converse of this proposition is also true; and it

is certain that this gratitude produced, in such men as we are here

considering, the most purely joyful moments that have been known to man.

The great painter boasted that he mixed all his colours with brains, and

the great saint may be said to mix all his thoughts with thanks. All

goods look better when they look like gifts. In this sense it is certain

that the mystical method establishes a very healthy external relation to

everything else. But it must always be remembered that everything else

has for ever fallen into a second place, in comparison with this simple

fact of dependence on the divine reality. In so far as ordinary social

relations have in them something that seems solid and self-supporting,

some sense of being at once buttressed and cushioned; in so far as they

establish sanity in the sense of security and security in the sense of

self-sufficiency, the man who has seen the world hanging on a hair does

have some difficulty in taking them so seriously as that. In so far as

even the secular authorities and hierarchies, even the most natural

superiorities and the most necessary subordinations, tend at once to put

a man in his place, and to make him sure of his position, the man who

has seen the human hierarchy upside down will always have something of a

smile for its superiorities. In this sense the direct vision of divine

reality does disturb solemnities that are sane enough in themselves. The

mystic may have added a cubit to his stature; but he generally loses

something of his status. He can no longer take himself for granted,

merely because he can verify his own existence in a parish register or a

family Bible. Such a man may have something of the appearance of the

lunatic who has lost his name while preserving his nature; who

straightway forgets what manner of man he was. "Hitherto I have called

Pietro Bernardone father; but now I am the servant of God."

All these profound matters must be suggested in short and imperfect

phrases; and the shortest statement of one aspect of this illumination

is to say that it is the discovery of an infinite debt. It may seem a

paradox to say that a man may be transported with joy to discover that

he is in debt. But this is only because in commercial cases the creditor

does not generally share the transports of joy; especially when the debt

is by hypothesis infinite and therefore unrecoverable. But here again

the parallel of a natural love-story of the nobler sort disposes of the

difficulty in a flash. There the infinite creditor does share the joy of

the infinite debtor; for indeed they are both debtors and both

creditors. In other words debt and dependence do become pleasures in the

presence of unspoilt love; the word is used too loosely and luxuriously

in popular simplifications like the present; but here the word is really

the key. It is the key of all the problems of Franciscan morality which

puzzle the merely modern mind; but above all it is the key of

asceticism. It is the highest and holiest of the paradoxes that the man

who really knows he cannot pay his debt will be for ever paying it. He

will be for ever giving back what he cannot give back, and cannot be

expected to give back. He will be always throwing things away into a

bottomless pit of unfathomable thanks. Men who think they are too modern

to understand this are in fact too mean to understand it; we are most of

us too mean to practise it. We are not generous enough to be ascetics;

one might almost say not genial enough to be ascetics. A man must have

magnanimity of surrender, of which he commonly only catches a glimpse in

first love, like a glimpse of our lost Eden. But whether he sees it or

not, the truth is in that riddle; that the whole world has, or is, only

one good thing; and it is a bad debt.

If ever that rarer sort of romantic love, which was the truth that

sustained the Troubadours, falls out of fashion and is treated as

fiction, we may see some such misunderstanding as that of the modern

world about asceticism. For it seems conceivable that some barbarians

might try to destroy chivalry in love, as the barbarians ruling in

Berlin destroyed chivalry in war. If that were ever so, we should have

the same sort of unintelligent sneers and unimaginative questions. Men

will ask what selfish sort of woman it must have been who ruthlessly

exacted tribute in the form of flowers, or what an avaricious creature

she can have been to demand solid gold in the form of a ring; just as

they ask what cruel kind of God can have demanded sacrifice and

self-denial. They will have lost the clue to all that lovers have meant

by love; and will not understand that it was because the thing was not

demanded that it was done. But whether or no any such lesser things will

throw a light on the greater, it is utterly useless to study a great

thing like the Franciscan movement while remaining in the modern mood

that murmurs against gloomy asceticism. The whole point about

St. Francis of Assisi is that he certainly was ascetical and he

certainly was not gloomy. As soon as ever he had been unhorsed by the

glorious humiliation of his vision of dependence on the divine love, he

flung himself into fasting and vigil exactly as he had flung himself

furiously into battle. He had wheeled his charger clean round, but there

was no halt or check in the thundering impetuosity of his charge. There

was nothing negative about it; it was not a regimen or a stoical

simplicity of life. It was not self-denial merely in the sense of

self-control. It was as positive as a passion; it had all the air of

being as positive as a pleasure. He devoured fasting as a man devours

food. He plunged after poverty as men have dug madly for gold. And it is

precisely the positive and passionate quality of this part of his

personality that is a challenge to the modern mind in the whole problem

of the pursuit of pleasure. There undeniably is the historical fact; and

there attached to it is another moral fact almost as undeniable. It is

certain that he held on this heroic or unnatural course from the moment

when he went forth in his hair-shirt into the winter woods to the moment

when he desired even in his death agony to lie bare upon the bare

ground, to prove that he had and that he was nothing. And we can say,

with almost as deep a certainty, that the stars which passed above that

gaunt and wasted corpse stark upon the rocky floor had for once, in all

their shining cycles round the world of labouring humanity, looked down

upon a happy man.

_Chapter VI_

_The Little Poor Man_

From that cavern, that was a furnace of glowing gratitude and humility,

there came forth one of the strongest and strangest and most original

personalities that human history has known. He was, among other things,

emphatically what we call a character; almost as we speak of a character

in a good novel or play. He was not only a humanist but a humorist; a

humorist especially in the old English sense of a man always in his

humour, going his own way and doing what nobody else would have done.

The anecdotes about him have a certain biographical quality of which the

most familiar example is Dr. Johnson; which belongs in another way to

William Blake or to Charles Lamb. The atmosphere can only be defined by

a sort of antithesis; the act is always unexpected and never

inappropriate. Before the thing is said or done it cannot even be

conjectured; but after it is said or done it is felt to be merely

characteristic. It is surprisingly and yet inevitably individual. This

quality of abrupt fitness and bewildering consistency belongs to

St. Francis in a way that marks him out from most men of his time. Men

are learning more and more of the solid social virtues of medieval

civilisation; but those impressions are still social rather than

individual. The medieval world was far ahead of the modern world in its

sense of the things in which all men are at one: death and the daylight

of reason and the common conscience that holds communities together. Its

generalisations were saner and sounder than the mad materialistic

theories of to-day; nobody would have tolerated a Schopenhauer scorning

life or a Nietzsche living only for scorn. But the modern world is more

subtle in its sense of the things in which men are not at one; in the

temperamental varieties and differentiations that make up the personal

problems of life. All men who can think themselves now realise that the

great schoolmen had a type of thought that was wonderfully clear; but it

was as it were deliberately colourless. All are now agreed that the

greatest art of the age was the art of public buildings; the popular and

communal art of architecture. But it was not an age for the art of

portrait-painting. Yet the friends of St. Francis have really contrived

to leave behind a portrait; something almost resembling a devout and

affectionate caricature. There are lines and colours in it that are

personal almost to the extent of being perverse, if one can use the word

perversity of an inversion that was also a conversion. Even among the

saints he has the air of a sort of eccentric, if one may use the word of

one whose eccentricity consisted in always turning towards the centre.

Before resuming the narrative of his first adventures, and the building

of the great brotherhood which was the beginning of so merciful a

revolution, I think it well to complete this imperfect personal portrait

here; and having attempted in the last chapter a tentative description

of the process, to add in this chapter a few touches to describe the

result. I mean by the result the real man as he was after his first

formative experiences; the man whom men met walking about on the Italian

roads in his brown tunic tied with a rope. For that man, saving the

grace of God, is the explanation of all that followed; men acted quite

differently according to whether they had met him or not. If we see

afterwards a vast tumult, an appeal to the Pope, mobs of men in brown

habits besieging the seats of authority, Papal pronouncements, heretical

sessions, trial and triumphant survival, the world full of a new

movement, the friar a household word in every corner of Europe, and if we

ask _why_ all this happened, we can only approximate to any answer to

our own question if we can, in some faint and indirect imaginative

fashion, hear one human voice or see one human face under a hood. There

is no answer except that Francis Bernardone had happened; and we must

try in some sense to see what we should have seen if he had happened to

us. In other words, after some groping suggestions about his life from

the inside, we must again consider it from the outside; as if he were a

stranger coming up the road towards us, along the hills of Umbria,

between the olives or the vines.

Francis of Assisi was slight in figure with that sort of slightness

which, combined with so much vivacity, gives the impression of

smallness. He was probably taller than he looked; middle-sized, his

biographers say; he was certainly very active and, considering what he

went through, must have been tolerably tough. He was of the brownish

Southern colouring, with a dark beard thin and pointed such as appears

in pictures under the hoods of elves; and his eyes glowed with the fire

that fretted him night and day. There is something about the description

of all he said and did which suggests that, even more than most

Italians, he turned naturally to a passionate pantomime of gestures. If

this was so it is equally certain that with him, even more than with

most Italians, the gestures were all gestures of politeness or

hospitality. And both these facts, the vivacity and the courtesy, are

the outward signs of something that mark him out very distinctively from

many who might appear to be more of his kind than they really are. It is

truly said that Francis of Assisi was one of the founders of the

medieval drama, and therefore of the modern drama. He was the very

reverse of a theatrical person in the selfish sense; but for all that he

was pre-eminently a dramatic person. This side of him can best be

suggested by taking what is commonly regarded as a reposeful quality;

what is commonly described as a love of nature. We are compelled to use

the term; and it is entirely the wrong term.

St. Francis was not a lover of nature. Properly understood, a lover of

nature was precisely what he was not. The phrase implies accepting the

material universe as a vague environment, a sort of sentimental

pantheism. In the romantic period of literature, in the age of Byron and

Scott, it was easy enough to imagine that a hermit in the ruins of a

chapel (preferably by moonlight) might find peace and a mild pleasure in

the harmony of solemn forests and silent stars, while he pondered over

some scroll or illuminated volume, about the liturgical nature of which

the author was a little vague. In short, the hermit might love nature as

a background. Now for St. Francis nothing was ever in the background. We

might say that his mind had no background, except perhaps that divine

darkness out of which the divine love had called up every coloured

creature one by one. He saw everything as dramatic, distinct from its

setting, not all of a piece like a picture but in action like a play. A

bird went by him like an arrow; something with a story and a purpose,

though it was a purpose of life and not a purpose of death. A bush could

stop him like a brigand; and indeed he was as ready to welcome the

brigand as the bush.

In a word, we talk about a man who cannot see the wood for the trees.

St. Francis was a man who did not want to see the wood for the trees. He

wanted to see each tree as a separate and almost a sacred thing, being a

child of God and therefore a brother or sister of man. But he did not

want to stand against a piece of stage scenery used merely as a

background, and inscribed in a general fashion: "Scene; a wood." In this

sense we might say that he was too dramatic for the drama. The scenery

would have come to life in his comedies; the walls would really have

spoken like Snout the Tinker and the trees would really have come

walking to Dunsinane. Everything would have been in the foreground; and

in that sense in the footlights. Everything would be in every sense a

character. This is the quality in which, as a poet, he is the very

opposite of a pantheist. He did not call nature his mother; he called a

particular donkey his brother or a particular sparrow his sister. If he

had called a pelican his aunt or an elephant his uncle, as he might

possibly have done, he would still have meant that they were particular

creatures assigned by their Creator to particular places; not mere

expressions of the evolutionary energy of things. That is where his

mysticism is so close to the common sense of the child. A child has no

difficulty about understanding that God made the dog and the cat; though

he is well aware that the making of dogs and cats out of nothing is a

mysterious process beyond his own imagination. But no child would

understand what you meant if you mixed up the dog and the cat and

everything else into one monster with a myriad legs and called it

nature. The child would resolutely refuse to make head or tail of any

such animal. St. Francis was a mystic, but he believed in mysticism and

not in mystification. As a mystic he was the mortal enemy of all those

mystics who melt away the edges of things and dissolve an entity into

its environment. He was a mystic of the daylight and the darkness; but

not a mystic of the twilight. He was the very contrary of that sort of

oriental visionary who is only a mystic because he is too much of a

sceptic to be a materialist. St. Francis was emphatically a realist,

using the word realist in its much more real medieval sense. In this

matter he really was akin to the best spirit of his age, which had just

won its victory over the nominalism of the twelfth century. In this

indeed there was something symbolic in the contemporary art and

decoration of his period; as in the art of heraldry. The Franciscan

birds and beasts were really rather like heraldic birds and beasts; not

in the sense of being fabulous animals but in the sense of being treated

as if they were facts, clear and positive and unaffected by the

illusions of atmosphere and perspective. In that sense he did see a bird

sable on a field azure or a sheep argent on a field vert. But the

heraldry of humility was richer than the heraldry of pride; for it saw

all these things that God had given as something more precious and

unique than the blazonry that princes and peers had only given to

themselves. Indeed out of the depths of that surrender it rose higher

than the highest titles of the feudal age; than the laurel of Cæsar or

the Iron Crown of Lombardy. It is an example of extremes that meet, that

the Little Poor Man, who had stripped himself of everything and named

himself as nothing, took the same title that has been the wild vaunt of

the vanity of the gorgeous Asiatic autocrat, and called himself the

Brother of the Sun and Moon.

This quality, of something outstanding and even startling in things as

St. Francis saw them, is here important as illustrating a character in

his own life. As he saw all things dramatically, so he himself was

always dramatic. We have to assume throughout, needless to say, that he

was a poet and can only be understood as a poet. But he had one poetic

privilege denied to most poets. In that respect indeed he might be

called the one happy poet among all the unhappy poets of the world. He

was a poet whose whole life was a poem. He was not so much a minstrel

merely singing his own songs as a dramatist capable of acting the whole

of his own play. The things he said were more imaginative than the

things he wrote. The things he did were more imaginative than the things

he said. His whole course through life was a series of scenes in which

he had a sort of perpetual luck in bringing things to a beautiful

crisis. To talk about the art of living has come to sound rather

artificial than artistic. But St. Francis did in a definite sense make

the very act of living an art, though it was an unpremeditated art. Many

of his acts will seem grotesque and puzzling to a rationalistic taste.

But they were always acts and not explanations; and they always meant

what he meant them to mean. The amazing vividness with which he stamped

himself on the memory and imagination of mankind is very largely due to

the fact that he was seen again and again under such dramatic

conditions. From the moment when he rent his robes and flung them at his

father's feet to the moment when he stretched himself in death on the

bare earth in the pattern of the cross, his life was made up of these

unconscious attitudes and unhesitating gestures. It would be easy to

fill page after page with examples; but I will here pursue the method

found convenient everywhere in this short sketch, and take one typical

example, dwelling on it with a little more detail than would be possible

in a catalogue, in the hope of making the meaning more clear. The

example taken here occurred in the last days of his life, but it refers

back in a rather curious fashion to the first; and rounds off the

remarkable unity of that romance of religion.

The phrase about his brotherhood with the sun and moon, and with the

water and the fire, occurs of course in his famous poem called the

Canticle of the Creatures or the Canticle of the Sun. He sang it

wandering in the meadows in the sunnier season of his own career, when

he was pouring upwards into the sky all the passions of a poet. It is a

supremely characteristic work, and much of St. Francis could be

reconstructed from that work alone. Though in some ways the thing is as

simple and straightforward as a ballad, there is a delicate instinct of

differentiation in it. Notice, for instance, the sense of sex in

inanimate things, which goes far beyond the arbitrary genders of a

grammar. It was not for nothing that he called fire his brother, fierce

and gay and strong, and water his sister, pure and clear and inviolate.

Remember that St. Francis was neither encumbered nor assisted by all

that Greek and Roman polytheism turned into allegory, which has been to

European poetry often an inspiration, too often a convention. Whether he

gained or lost by his contempt of learning, it never occurred to him to

connect Neptune and the nymphs with the water or Vulcan and the Cyclops

with the flame. This point exactly illustrates what has already been

suggested; that, so far from being a revival of paganism, the Franciscan

renascence was a sort of fresh start and first awakening after a

forgetfulness of paganism. Certainly it is responsible for a certain

freshness in the thing itself. Anyhow St. Francis was, as it were, the

founder of a new folk-lore; but he could distinguish his mermaids from

his mermen and his witches from his wizards. In short, he had to make

his own mythology; but he knew at a glance the goddesses from the gods.

This fanciful instinct for the sexes is not the only example of an

imaginative instinct of the kind. There is just the same quaint felicity

in the fact that he singles out the sun with a slightly more courtly

title besides that of brother; a phrase that one king might use of

another, corresponding to "Monsieur notre frère." It is like a faint

half ironic shadow of the shining primacy that it had held in the pagan

heavens. A bishop is said to have complained of a Nonconformist saying

Paul instead of Saint Paul; and to have added "He might at least have

called him Mr. Paul." So St. Francis is free of all obligation to cry

out in praise or terror on the Lord God Apollo, but in his new nursery

heavens, he salutes him as Mr. Sun. Those are the things in which he has

a sort of inspired infancy, only to be paralleled in nursery tales.

Something of the same hazy but healthy awe makes the story of Brer Fox

and Brer Rabbit refer respectfully to Mr. Man.

This poem, full of the mirth of youth and the memories of childhood,

runs through his whole life like a refrain, and scraps of it turn up

continually in the ordinary habit of his talk. Perhaps the last

appearance of its special language was in an incident that has always

seemed to me intensely impressive, and is at any rate very illustrative

of the great manner and gesture of which I speak. Impressions of that

kind are a matter of imagination and in that sense of taste. It is idle

to argue about them; for it is the whole point of them that they have

passed beyond words; and even when they use words, seem to be completed

by some ritual movement like a blessing or a blow. So, in a supreme

example, there is something far past all exposition, something like the

sweeping movement and mighty shadow of a hand, darkening even the

darkness of Gethsemane; "Sleep on now, and take your rest...." Yet there

are people who have started to paraphrase and expand the story of the

Passion.

St. Francis was a dying man. We might say he was an old man, at the time

this typical incident occurred; but in fact he was only prematurely old;

for he was not fifty when he died, worn out with his fighting and

fasting life. But when he came down from the awful asceticism and more

awful revelation of Alverno, he was a broken man. As will be apparent

when these events are touched on in their turn, it was not only sickness

and bodily decay that may well have darkened his life; he had been

recently disappointed in his main mission to end the Crusades by the

conversion of Islam; he had been still more disappointed by the signs of

compromise and a more political or practical spirit in his own order; he

had spent his last energies in protest. At this point he was told that

he was going blind. If the faintest hint has been given here of what

St. Francis felt about the glory and pageantry of earth and sky, about

the heraldic shape and colour and symbolism of birds and beasts and

flowers, some notion may be formed of what it meant to him to go blind.

Yet the remedy might well have seemed worse than the disease. The

remedy, admittedly an uncertain remedy, was to cauterise the eye, and

that without any anæsthetic. In other words it was to burn his living

eyeballs with a red-hot iron. Many of the tortures of martyrdom, which

he envied in martyrology and sought vainly in Syria, can have been no

worse. When they took the brand from the furnace, he rose as with an

urbane gesture and spoke as to an invisible presence: "Brother Fire, God

made you beautiful and strong and useful; I pray you be courteous with

me."

If there be any such thing as the art of life, it seems to me that such

a moment was one of its masterpieces. Not to many poets has it been

given to remember their own poetry at such a moment, still less to live

one of their own poems. Even William Blake would have been disconcerted

if, while he was re-reading the noble lines "Tiger, tiger, burning

bright," a real large live Bengal tiger had put his head in at the

window of the cottage in Felpham, evidently with every intention of

biting his head off. He might have wavered before politely saluting it,

above all by calmly completing the recitation of the poem to the

quadruped to whom it was dedicated. Shelley, when he wished to be a

cloud or a leaf carried before the wind, might have been mildly

surprised to find himself turning slowly head over heels in mid air a

thousand feet above the sea. Even Keats, knowing that his hold on life

was a frail one, might have been disturbed to discover that the true,

the blushful Hippocrene of which he had just partaken freely had indeed

contained a drug, which really ensured that he should cease upon the

midnight with no pain. For Francis there was no drug; and for Francis

there was plenty of pain. But his first thought was one of his first

fancies from the songs of his youth. He remembered the time when a flame

was a flower, only the most glorious and gaily coloured of the flowers

in the garden of God; and when that shining thing returned to him in the

shape of an instrument of torture, he hailed it from afar like an old

friend, calling it by the nickname which might most truly be called its

Christian name.

That is only one incident out of a life of such incidents; and I have

selected it partly because it shows what is meant here by that shadow of

gesture there is in all his words, the dramatic gesture of the south;

and partly because its special reference to courtesy covers the next

fact to be noted. The popular instinct of St. Francis, and his perpetual

preoccupation with the idea of brotherhood, will be entirely

misunderstood if it is understood in the sense of what is often called

camaraderie; the back-slapping sort of brotherhood. Frequently from the

enemies and too frequently from the friends of the democratic ideal,

there has come a notion that this note is necessary to that ideal. It is

assumed that equality means all men being equally uncivil, whereas it

obviously ought to mean all men being equally civil. Such people have

forgotten the very meaning and derivation of the word civility, if they

do not see that to be uncivil is to be uncivic. But anyhow that was not

the equality which Francis of Assisi encouraged; but an equality of the

opposite kind; it was a camaraderie actually founded on courtesy.

Even in that fairy borderland of his mere fancies about flowers and

animals and even inanimate things, he retained this permanent posture of

a sort of deference. A friend of mine said that somebody was the sort of

man who apologises to the cat. St. Francis really would have apologised

to the cat. When he was about to preach in a wood full of the chatter of

birds, he said, with a gentle gesture "Little sisters, if you have now

had your say, it is time that I also should be heard." And all the birds

were silent; as I for one can very easily believe. In deference to my

special design of making matters intelligible to average modernity, I

have treated separately the subject of the miraculous powers that

St. Francis most certainly possessed. But even apart from any miraculous

powers, men of that magnetic sort, with that intense interest in

animals, often have an extraordinary power over them. St. Francis's

power was always exercised with this elaborate politeness. Much of it

was doubtless a sort of symbolic joke, a pious pantomime intended to

convey the vital distinction in his divine mission, that he not only

loved but reverenced God in all his creatures. In this sense he had the

air not only of apologising to the cat or to the birds, but of

apologising to a chair for sitting on it or to a table for sitting down

at it. Anyone who had followed him through life merely to laugh at him,

as a sort of lovable lunatic, might easily have had an impression as of

a lunatic who bowed to every post or took off his hat to every tree.

This was all a part of his instinct for imaginative gesture. He taught

the world a large part of its lesson by a sort of divine dumb alphabet.

But if there was this ceremonial element even in lighter or lesser

matters, its significance became far more serious in the serious work of

his life, which was an appeal to humanity, or rather to human beings.

I have said that St. Francis deliberately did not see the wood for the

trees. It is even more true that he deliberately did not see the mob for

the men. What distinguishes this very genuine democrat from any mere

demagogue is that he never either deceived or was deceived by the

illusion of mass-suggestion. Whatever his taste in monsters, he never

saw before him a many-headed beast. He only saw the image of God

multiplied but never monotonous. To him a man was always a man and did

not disappear in a dense crowd any more than in a desert. He honoured

all men; that is, he not only loved but respected them all. What gave

him his extraordinary personal power was this; that from the Pope to the

beggar, from the sultan of Syria in his pavilion to the ragged robbers

crawling out of the wood, there was never a man who looked into those

brown burning eyes without being certain that Francis Bernardone was

really interested in _him_; in his own inner individual life from the

cradle to the grave; that he himself was being valued and taken

seriously, and not merely added to the spoils of some social policy or

the names in some clerical document. Now for this particular moral and

religious idea there is no external expression except courtesy.

Exhortation does not express it, for it is not mere abstract enthusiasm;

beneficence does not express it, for it is not mere pity. It can only be

conveyed by a certain grand manner which may be called good manners. We

may say if we like that St. Francis, in the bare and barren simplicity

of his life, had clung to one rag of luxury; the manners of a court. But

whereas in a court there is one king and a hundred courtiers, in this

story there was one courtier, moving among a hundred kings. For he

treated the whole mob of men as a mob of kings. And this was really and

truly the only attitude that will appeal to that part of man to which he

wished to appeal. It cannot be done by giving gold or even bread; for it

is a proverb that any reveller may fling largesse in mere scorn. It

cannot even be done by giving time and attention; for any number of

philanthropists and benevolent bureaucrats do such work with a scorn far

more cold and horrible in their hearts. No plans or proposals or

efficient rearrangements will give back to a broken man his self-respect

and sense of speaking with an equal. One gesture will do it.

With that gesture Francis of Assisi moved among men; and it was soon

found to have something in it of magic and to act, in a double sense,

like a charm. But it must always be conceived as a completely natural

gesture; for indeed it was almost a gesture of apology. He must be

imagined as moving thus swiftly through the world with a sort of

impetuous politeness; almost like the movement of a man who stumbles on

one knee half in haste and half in obeisance. The eager face under the

brown hood was that of a man always going somewhere, as if he followed

as well as watched the flight of the birds. And this sense of motion is

indeed the meaning of the whole revolution that he made; for the work

that has now to be described was of the nature of an earthquake or a

volcano, an explosion that drove outwards with dynamic energy the forces

stored up by ten centuries in the monastic fortress or arsenal and

scattered all its riches recklessly to the ends of the earth. In a

better sense than the antithesis commonly conveys, it is true to say

that what St. Benedict had stored St. Francis scattered; but in the

world of spiritual things what had been stored into the barns like grain

was scattered over the world as seed. The servants of God who had been a

besieged garrison became a marching army; the ways of the world were

filled as with thunder with the trampling of their feet and far ahead of

that ever swelling host went a man singing; as simply he had sung that

morning in the winter woods, where he walked alone.

_Chapter VII_

_The Three Orders_

There is undoubtedly a sense in which two is company and three is none;

there is also another sense in which three is company and four is none,

as is proved by the procession of historic and fictitious figures moving

three deep, the famous trios like the Three Musketeers or the Three

Soldiers of Kipling. But there is yet another and a different sense in

which four is company and three is none; if we use the word company in

the vaguer sense of a crowd or a mass. With the fourth man enters the

shadow of a mob; the group is no longer one of three individuals only

conceived individually. That shadow of the fourth man fell across the

little hermitage of the Portiuncula when a man named Egidio, apparently

a poor workman, was invited by St. Francis to enter. He mingled without

difficulty with the merchant and the canon who had already become the

companions of Francis; but with his coming an invisible line was

crossed; for it must have been felt by this time that the growth of that

small group had become potentially infinite, or at least that its

outline had become permanently indefinite. It may have been in the time

of that transition that Francis had another of his dreams full of

voices; but now the voices were a clamour of the tongues of all nations,

Frenchmen and Italians and English and Spanish and Germans, telling of

the glory of God each in his own tongue; a new Pentecost and a happier

Babel.

Before describing the first steps he took to regularise the growing

group, it is well to have a rough grasp of what he conceived that group

to be. He did not call his followers monks; and it is not clear, at this

time at least, that he even thought of them as monks. He called them by

a name which is generally rendered in English as the Friars Minor; but

we shall be much closer to the atmosphere of his own mind if we render

it almost literally as The Little Brothers. Presumably he was already

resolved, indeed, that they should take the three vows of poverty,

chastity and obedience which had always been the mark of a monk. But it

would seem that he was not so much afraid of the idea of a monk as of

the idea of an abbot. He was afraid that the great spiritual

magistracies which had given even to their holiest possessors at least a

sort of impersonal and corporate pride, would import an element of

pomposity that would spoil his extremely and almost extravagantly simple

version of the life of humility. But the supreme difference between his

discipline and the discipline of the old monastic system was concerned,

of course, with the idea that the monks were to become migratory and

almost nomadic instead of stationary. They were to mingle with the

world; and to this the more old-fashioned monk would naturally reply by

asking how they were to mingle with the world without becoming entangled

with the world. It was a much more real question than a loose

religiosity is likely to realise; but St. Francis had his answer to it,

of his own individual sort; and the interest of the problem is in that

highly individual answer.

The good Bishop of Assisi expressed a sort of horror at the hard life

which the Little Brothers lived at the Portiuncula, without comforts,

without possessions, eating anything they could get and sleeping anyhow

on the ground. St. Francis answered him with that curious and almost

stunning shrewdness which the unworldly can sometimes wield like a club

of stone. He said, "If we had any possessions, we should need weapons

and laws to defend them." That sentence is the clue to the whole policy

that he pursued. It rested upon a real piece of logic; and about that he

was never anything but logical. He was ready to own himself wrong about

anything else; but he was quite certain he was right about this

particular rule. He was only once seen angry; and that was when there

was talk of an exception to the rule.

His argument was this: that the dedicated man might go anywhere among

any kind of men, even the worst kind of men, so long as there was

nothing by which they could hold him. If he had any ties or needs like

ordinary men, he would become like ordinary men. St. Francis was the

last man in the world to think any the worse of ordinary men for being

ordinary. They had more affection and admiration from him than they are

ever likely to have again. But for his own particular purpose of

stirring up the world to a new spiritual enthusiasm, he saw with a

logical clarity that was quite reverse of fanatical or sentimental, that

friars must not become like ordinary men; that the salt must not lose

its savour even to turn into human nature's daily food. And the

difference between a friar and an ordinary man was really that a friar

was freer than an ordinary man. It was necessary that he should be free

from the cloister; but it was even more important that he should be free

from the world. It is perfectly sound common sense to say that there is

a sense in which the ordinary man cannot be free from the world; or

rather ought not to be free from the world. The feudal world in

particular was one labyrinthine system of dependence; but it was not

only the feudal world that went to make up the medieval world nor the

medieval world that went to make up the whole world; and the whole world

is full of this fact. Family life as much as feudal life is in its

nature a system of dependence. Modern trade unions as much as medieval

guilds are interdependent among themselves even in order to be

independent of others. In medieval as in modern life, even where these

limitations do exist for the sake of liberty, they have in them a

considerable element of luck. They are partly the result of

circumstances; sometimes the almost unavoidable result of circumstances.

So the twelfth century had been the age of vows; and there was something

of relative freedom in that feudal gesture of the vow; for no man asks

vows from slaves any more than from spades. Still, in practice, a man

rode to war in support of the ancient house of the Column or behind the

Great Dog of the Stairway largely because he had been born in a certain

city or countryside. But no man need obey little Francis in the old

brown coat unless he chose. Even in his relations with his chosen leader

he was in one sense relatively free, compared with the world around him.

He was obedient but not dependent. And he was as free as the wind, he

was almost wildly free, in his relation to that world around him. The

world around him was, as has been noted, a network of feudal and family

and other forms of dependence. The whole idea of St. Francis was that

the Little Brothers should be like little fishes who could go freely in

and out of that net. They could do so precisely because they were small

fishes and in that sense even slippery fishes. There was nothing that

the world could hold them by; for the world catches us mostly by the

fringes of our garments, the futile externals of our lives. One of the

Franciscans says later, "A monk should own nothing but his harp";

meaning, I suppose, that he should value nothing but his song, the song

with which it was his business as a minstrel to serenade every castle

and cottage, the song of the joy of the Creator in his creation and the

beauty of the brotherhood of men. In imagining the life of this sort of

visionary vagabond, we may already get a glimpse also of the practical

side of that asceticism which puzzles those who think themselves

practical. A man had to be thin to pass always through the bars and out

of the cage; he had to travel light in order to ride so fast and so far.

It was the whole calculation, so to speak, of that innocent cunning,

that the world was to be outflanked and outwitted by him, and be

embarrassed about what to do with him. You could not threaten to starve

a man who was ever striving to fast. You could not ruin him and reduce

him to beggary, for he was already a beggar. There was a very lukewarm

satisfaction even in beating him with a stick, when he only indulged in

little leaps and cries of joy because indignity was his only dignity.

You could not put his head in a halter without the risk of putting it in

a halo.

But one distinction between the old monks and the new friars counted

especially in the matter of practicality and especially of promptitude.

The old fraternities with their fixed habitations and enclosed existence

had the limitations of ordinary householders. However simply they lived

there must be a certain number of cells or a certain number of beds or

at least a certain cubic space for a certain number of brothers; their

numbers therefore depended on their land and building material. But

since a man could become a Franciscan by merely promising to take his

chance of eating berries in a lane or begging a crust from a kitchen, of

sleeping under a hedge or sitting patiently on a doorstep, there was no

economic reason why there should not be any number of such eccentric

enthusiasts within any short period of time. It must also be remembered

that the whole of this rapid development was full of a certain kind of

democratic optimism that really was part of the personal character of

St. Francis. His very asceticism was in one sense the height of

optimism. He demanded a great deal of human nature not because he

despised it but rather because he trusted it. He was expecting a very

great deal from the extraordinary men who followed him; but he was also

expecting a good deal from the ordinary men to whom he sent them. He

asked the laity for food as confidently as he asked the fraternity for

fasting. But he counted on the hospitality of humanity because he really

did regard every house as the house of a friend. He really did love and

honour ordinary men and ordinary things; indeed we may say that he only

sent out the extraordinary men to encourage men to be ordinary.

This paradox may be more exactly stated or explained when we come to

deal with the very interesting matter of the Third Order, which was

designed to assist ordinary men to be ordinary with an extraordinary

exultation. The point at issue at present is the audacity and simplicity

of the Franciscan plan for quartering its spiritual soldiery upon the

population; not by force but by persuasion, and even by the persuasion

of impotence. It was an act of confidence and therefore a compliment. It

was completely successful. It was an example of something that clung

about St. Francis always; a kind of tact that looked like luck because

it was as simple and direct as a thunderbolt. There are many examples in

his private relations of this sort of tactless tact; this surprise

effected by striking at the heart of the matter. It is said that a young

friar was suffering from a sort of sulks between morbidity and humility,

common enough in youth and hero-worship, in which he had got it into his

head that his hero hated or despised him. We can imagine how tactfully

social diplomatists would steer clear of scenes and excitements, how

cautiously psychologists would watch and handle such delicate cases.

Francis suddenly walked up to the young man, who was of course secretive

and silent as the grave, and said, "Be not troubled in your thoughts for

you are dear to me, and even among the number of those who are most

dear. You know that you are worthy of my friendship and society;

therefore come to me, in confidence, whensoever you will, and from

friendship learn faith." Exactly as he spoke to that morbid boy he spoke

to all mankind. He always went to the point; he always seemed at once

more right and more simple than the person he was speaking to. He seemed

at once to be laying open his guard and yet lunging at the heart.

Something in this attitude disarmed the world as it has never been

disarmed again. He was better than other men; he was a benefactor of

other men; and yet he was not hated. The world came into church by a

newer and nearer door; and by friendship it learnt faith.

It was while the little knot of people at the Portiuncula was still

small enough to gather in a small room that St. Francis resolved on his

first important and even sensational stroke. It is said that there were

only twelve Franciscans in the whole world when he decided to march, as

it were, on Rome and found a Franciscan order. It would seem that this

appeal to remote headquarters was not generally regarded as necessary;

possibly something could have been done in a secondary way under the

Bishop of Assisi and the local clergy. It would seem even more probable

that people thought it somewhat unnecessary to trouble the supreme

tribunal of Christendom about what a dozen chance men chose to call

themselves. But Francis was obstinate and as it were blind on this

point; and his brilliant blindness is exceedingly characteristic of him.

A man satisfied with small things, or even in love with small things, he

yet never felt quite as we do about the disproportion between small

things and large. He never saw things to scale in our sense, but with a

dizzy disproportion which makes the mind reel. Sometimes it seems merely

out of drawing like a gaily coloured medieval map; and then again it

seems to have escaped from everything like a short cut in the fourth

dimension. He is said to have made a journey to interview the Emperor,

throned among his armies under the eagle of the Holy Roman Empire, to

intercede for the lives of certain little birds. He was quite capable of

facing fifty emperors to intercede for one bird. He started out with two

companions to convert the Mahomedan world. He started out with eleven

companions to ask the Pope to make a new monastic world.

Innocent III., the great Pope, according to Bonaventura, was walking on

the terrace of St. John Lateran, doubtless revolving the great political

questions which troubled his reign, when there appeared abruptly before

him a person in peasant costume whom he took to be some sort of

shepherd. He appears to have got rid of the shepherd with all convenient

speed; possibly he formed the opinion that the shepherd was mad. Anyhow

he thought no more about it until, says the great Franciscan biographer,

he dreamed that night a strange dream. He fancied that he saw the whole

huge ancient temple of St. John Lateran, on whose high terraces he had

walked so securely, leaning horribly and crooked against the sky as if

all its domes and turrets were stooping before an earthquake. Then he

looked again and saw that a human figure was holding it up like a living

caryatid; and the figure was that of the ragged shepherd or peasant from

whom he had turned away on the terrace. Whether this be a fact or a

figure it is a very true figure of the abrupt simplicity with which

Francis won the attention and the favour of Rome. His first friend seems

to have been the Cardinal Giovanni di San Paolo who pleaded for the

Franciscan idea before a conclave of Cardinals summoned for the purpose.

It is interesting to note that the doubts thrown upon it seem to have

been chiefly doubts about whether the rule was not too hard for

humanity, for the Catholic Church is always on the watch against

excessive asceticism and its evils. Probably they meant, especially when

they said it was unduly hard, that it was unduly dangerous. For a

certain element that can only be called danger is what marks the

innovation as compared with older institutions of the kind. In one sense

indeed the friar was almost the opposite of the monk. The value of the

old monasticism had been that there was not only an ethical but an

economic repose. Out of that repose had come the works for which the

world will never be sufficiently grateful, the preservation of the

classics, the beginning of the Gothic, the schemes of science and

philosophies, the illuminated manuscripts and the coloured glass. The

whole point of a monk was that his economic affairs were settled for

good; he knew where he would get his supper, though it was a very plain

supper. But the whole point of a friar was that he did not know where he

would get his supper. There was always a possibility that he might get

no supper. There was an element of what would be called romance, as of

the gipsy or adventurer. But there was also an element of potential

tragedy, as of the tramp or the casual labourer. So the Cardinals of the

thirteenth century were filled with compassion, seeing a few men

entering of their own free will that estate to which the poor of the

twentieth century are daily driven by cold coercion and moved on by the

police.

Cardinal San Paolo seems to have argued more or less in this manner: it

may be a hard life, but after all it is the life apparently described as

ideal in the Gospel; make what compromises you think wise or humane

about that ideal; but do not commit yourselves to saying that men shall

_not_ fulfil that ideal if they can. We shall see the importance of this

argument when we come to the whole of that higher aspect of the life of

St. Francis which may be called the Imitation of Christ. The upshot of

the discussion was that the Pope gave his verbal approval to the project

and promised a more definite endorsement, if the movement should grow to

more considerable proportions. It is probable that Innocent, who was

himself a man of no ordinary mentality, had very little doubt that it

would do so; anyhow he was not left long in doubt before it did do so.

The next passage in the history of the order is simply the story of more

and more people flocking to its standard; and as has already been

remarked, once it had begun to grow, it could in its nature grow much

more quickly than any ordinary society requiring ordinary funds and

public buildings. Even the return of the twelve pioneers from their

papal audience seems to have been a sort of triumphal procession. In one

place in particular, it is said, the whole population of a town, men,

women and children, turned out, leaving their work and wealth and homes

exactly as they stood and begging to be taken into the army of God on

the spot. According to the story, it was on this occasion that

St. Francis first foreshadowed his idea of the Third Order which enabled

men to share in the movement without leaving the homes and habits of

normal humanity. For the moment it is most important to regard this

story as one example of the riot of conversion with which he was already

filling all the roads of Italy. It was a world of wandering; friars

perpetually coming and going in all the highways and byways, seeking to

ensure that any man who met one of them by chance should have a

spiritual adventure. The First Order of St. Francis had entered history.