This rough outline can only be rounded off here with some description of

the Second and Third Orders, though they were founded later and at

separate times. The former was an order for women and owed its

existence, of course, to the beautiful friendship of St. Francis and

St. Clare. There is no story about which even the most sympathetic

critics of another creed have been more bewildered and misleading. For

there is no story that more clearly turns on that simple test which I

have taken as crucial throughout this criticism. I mean that what is the

matter with these critics is that they will not believe that a heavenly

love can be as real as an earthly love. The moment it is treated as

real, like an earthly love, their whole riddle is easily resolved. A

girl of seventeen, named Clare and belonging to one of the noble

families of Assisi, was filled with an enthusiasm for the conventual

life; and Francis helped her to escape from her home and to take up the

conventual life. If we like to put it so, he helped her to elope into

the cloister, defying her parents as he had defied his father. Indeed

the scene had many of the elements of a regular romantic elopement; for

she escaped through a hole in the wall, fled through a wood and was

received at midnight by the light of torches. Even Mrs. Oliphant, in her

fine and delicate study of St. Francis, calls it "an incident which we

can hardly record with satisfaction."

Now about that incident I will here only say this. If it had really been

a romantic elopement and the girl had become a bride instead of a nun,

practically the whole modern world would have made her a heroine. If the

action of the Friar towards Clare had been the action of the Friar

towards Juliet, everybody would be sympathising with her exactly as they

sympathise with Juliet. It is not conclusive to say that Clare was only

seventeen. Juliet was only fourteen. Girls married and boys fought in

battles at such early ages in medieval times; and a girl of seventeen in

the thirteenth century was certainly old enough to know her own mind.

There cannot be the shadow of a doubt, for any sane person considering

subsequent events, that St. Clare did know her own mind. But the point

for the moment is that modern romanticism entirely encourages such

defiance of parents when it is done in the name of romantic love. For it

knows that romantic love is a reality, but it does not know that divine

love is a reality. There may have been something to be said for the

parents of Clare; there may have been something to be said for Peter

Bernardone. So there may have been a great deal to be said for the

Montagues or the Capulets; but the modern world does not want it said;

and does not say it. The fact is that as soon as we assume for a moment

as a hypothesis, what St. Francis and St. Clare assumed all the time as

an absolute, that there is a direct divine relation more glorious than

any romance, the story of St. Clare's elopement is simply a romance with

a happy ending; and St. Francis is the St. George or knight-errant who

gave it a happy ending. And seeing that some millions of men and women

have lived and died treating this relation as a reality, a man is not

much of a philosopher if he cannot even treat it as a hypothesis.

For the rest, we may at least assume that no friend of what is called

the emancipation of women will regret the revolt of St. Clare. She did

most truly, in the modern jargon, live her own life, the life that she

herself wanted to lead, as distinct from the life into which parental

commands and conventional arrangements would have forced her. She became

the foundress of a great feminine movement which still profoundly

affects the world; and her place is with the powerful women of history.

It is not clear that she would have been so great or so useful if she

had made a runaway match, or even stopped at home and made a _mariage de

convenance_. So much any sensible man may well say considering the

matter merely from the outside; and I have no intention of attempting to

consider it from the inside. If a man may well doubt whether he is

worthy to write a word about St. Francis, he will certainly want words

better than his own to speak of the friendship of St. Francis and

St. Clare. I have often remarked that the mysteries of this story are

best expressed symbolically in certain silent attitudes and actions. And

I know no better symbol than that found by the felicity of popular

legend, which says that one night the people of Assisi thought the trees

and the holy house were on fire, and rushed up to extinguish the

conflagration. But they found all quiet within, where St. Francis broke

bread with St. Clare at one of their rare meetings, and talked of the

love of God. It would be hard to find a more imaginative image, for some

sort of utterly pure and disembodied passion, than that red halo round

the unconscious figures on the hill; a flame feeding on nothing and

setting the very air on fire.

But if the Second Order was the memorial of such an unearthly love, the

Third Order was as solid a memorial of a very solid sympathy with

earthly loves and earthly lives. The whole of this feature in Catholic

life, the lay orders in touch with clerical orders, is very little

understood in Protestant countries and very little allowed for in

Protestant history. The vision which has been so faintly suggested in

these pages has never been confined to monks or even to friars. It has

been an inspiration to innumerable crowds of ordinary married men and

women; living lives like our own, only entirely different. That morning

glory which St. Francis spread over earth and sky has lingered as a

secret sunshine under a multitude of roofs and in a multitude of rooms.

In societies like ours nothing is known of such a Franciscan following.

Nothing is known of such obscure followers; and if possible less is

known of the well-known followers. If we imagine passing us in the

street a pageant of the Third Order of St. Francis, the famous figures

would surprise us more than the strange ones. For us it would be like

the unmasking of some mighty secret society. There rides St. Louis, the

great king, lord of the higher justice whose scales hang crooked in

favour of the poor. There is Dante crowned with laurel, the poet who in

his life of passions sang the praises of the Lady Poverty, whose grey

garment is lined with purple and all glorious within. All sorts of great

names from the most recent and rationalistic centuries would stand

revealed; the great Galvani, for instance, the father of all

electricity, the magician who has made so many modern systems of stars

and sounds. So various a following would alone be enough to prove that

St. Francis had no lack of sympathy with normal men, if the whole of his

own life did not prove it.

But in fact his life did prove it, and that possibly in a more subtle

sense. There is, I fancy, some truth in the hint of one of his modern

biographers, that even his natural passions were singularly normal and

even noble, in the sense of turning towards things not unlawful in

themselves but only unlawful for him. Nobody ever lived of whom we could

less fitly use the word "regret" than Francis of Assisi. Though there

was much that was romantic, there was nothing in the least sentimental

about his mood. It was not melancholy enough for that. He was of far too

swift and rushing a temper to be troubled with doubts and

reconsiderations about the race he ran; though he had any amount of

self-reproach about not running faster. But it is true, one suspects,

that when he wrestled with the devil, as every man must to be worth

calling a man, the whispers referred mostly to those healthy instincts

that he would have approved for others; they bore no resemblance to that

ghastly painted paganism which sent its demoniac courtesans to plague

St. Anthony in the desert. If St. Francis had only pleased himself, it

would have been with simpler pleasures. He was moved to love rather than

lust, and by nothing wilder than wedding-bells. It is suggested in that

strange story of how he defied the devil by making images in the snow,

and crying out that these sufficed him for a wife and family. It is

suggested in the saying he used when disclaiming any security from sin,

"I may yet have children"; almost as if it was of the children rather

than the woman that he dreamed. And this, if it be true, gives a final

touch to the truth about his character. There was so much about him of

the spirit of the morning, so much that was curiously young and clean,

that even what was bad in him was good. As it was said of others that

the light in their body was darkness, so it may be said of this luminous

spirit that the very shadows in his soul were of light. Evil itself

could not come to him save in the form of a forbidden good; and he could

only be tempted by a sacrament.

_Chapter VIII_

_The Mirror of Christ_

No man who has been given the freedom of the Faith is likely to fall

into those hole-and-corner extravagances in which later degenerate

Franciscans, or rather Fraticelli, sought to concentrate entirely on

St. Francis as a second Christ, the creator of a new gospel. In fact any

such notion makes nonsense of every motive in the man's life; for no man

would reverently magnify what he was meant to rival, or only profess to

follow what he existed to supplant. On the contrary, as will appear

later, this little study would rather specially insist that it was

really the papal sagacity that saved the great Franciscan movement for

the whole world and the universal Church, and prevented it from petering

out as that sort of stale and second-rate sect that is called a new

religion. Everything that is written here must be understood not only as

distinct from but diametrically opposed to the idolatry of the

Fraticelli. The difference between Christ and St. Francis was the

difference between the Creator and the creature; and certainly no

creature was ever so conscious of that colossal contrast as St. Francis

himself. But subject to this understanding, it is perfectly true and it

is vitally important that Christ was the pattern on which St. Francis

sought to fashion himself; and that at many points their human and

historical lives were even curiously coincident; and above all, that

compared to most of us at least St. Francis is a most sublime

approximation to his Master, and, even in being an intermediary and a

reflection, is a splendid and yet a merciful Mirror of Christ. And this

truth suggests another, which I think has hardly been noticed; but which

happens to be a highly forcible argument for the authority of Christ

being continuous in the Catholic Church.

Cardinal Newman wrote in his liveliest controversial work a sentence

that might be a model of what we mean by saying that his creed tends to

lucidity and logical courage. In speaking of the ease with which truth

may be made to look like its own shadow or sham, he said, "And if

Antichrist is like Christ, Christ I suppose is like Antichrist." Mere

religious sentiment might well be shocked at the end of the sentence;

but nobody could object to it except the logician who said that Cæsar

and Pompey were very much alike, especially Pompey. It may give a much

milder shock if I say here, what most of us have forgotten, that if

St. Francis was like Christ, Christ was to that extent like St. Francis.

And my present point is that it is really very enlightening to realise

that Christ was like St. Francis. What I mean is this; that if men find

certain riddles and hard sayings in the story of Galilee, and if they

find the answers to those riddles in the story of Assisi, it really does

show that a secret has been handed down in one religious tradition and

no other. It shows that the casket that was locked in Palestine can be

unlocked in Umbria; for the Church is the keeper of the keys.

Now in truth while it has always seemed natural to explain St. Francis

in the light of Christ, it has not occurred to many people to explain

Christ in the light of St. Francis. Perhaps the word "light" is not here

the proper metaphor; but the same truth is admitted in the accepted

metaphor of the mirror. St. Francis is the mirror of Christ rather as

the moon is the mirror of the sun. The moon is much smaller than the

sun, but it is also much nearer to us; and being less vivid it is more

visible. Exactly in the same sense St. Francis is nearer to us, and

being a mere man like ourselves is in that sense more imaginable. Being

necessarily less of a mystery, he does not, for us, so much open his

mouth in mysteries. Yet as a matter of fact, many minor things that seem

mysteries in the mouth of Christ would seem merely characteristic

paradoxes in the mouth of St. Francis. It seems natural to re-read the

more remote incidents with the help of the more recent ones. It is a

truism to say that Christ lived before Christianity; and it follows that

as an historical figure He is a figure in heathen history. I mean that

the medium in which He moved was not the medium of Christendom but of

the old pagan empire; and from that alone, not to mention the distance

of time, it follows that His circumstances are more alien to us than

those of an Italian monk such as we might meet even to-day. I suppose

the most authoritative commentary can hardly be certain of the current

or conventional weight of all His words or phrases; of which of them

would then have seemed a common allusion and which a strange fancy. This

archaic setting has left many of the sayings standing like hieroglyphics

and subject to many and peculiar individual interpretations. Yet it is

true of almost any of them that if we simply translate them into the

Umbrian dialect of the first Franciscans, they would seem like any other

part of the Franciscan story; doubtless in one sense fantastic, but

quite familiar. All sorts of critical controversies have revolved round

the passage which bids men consider the lilies of the field and copy

them in taking no thought for the morrow. The sceptic has alternated

between telling us to be true Christians and do it, and explaining that

it is impossible to do. When he is a communist as well as an atheist, he

is generally doubtful whether to blame us for preaching what is

impracticable or for not instantly putting it into practice. I am not

going to discuss here the point of ethics and economics; I merely remark

that even those who are puzzled at the saying of Christ would hardly

pause in accepting it as a saying of St. Francis. Nobody would be

surprised to find that he had said, "I beseech you, little brothers,

that you be as wise as Brother Daisy and Brother Dandelion; for never do

they lie awake thinking of to-morrow, yet they have gold crowns like

kings and emperors or like Charlemagne in all his glory." Even more

bitterness and bewilderment has arisen about the command to turn the

other cheek and to give the coat to the robber who has taken the cloak.

It is widely held to imply the wickedness of war among nations; about

which, in itself, not a word seems to have been said. Taken thus

literally and universally, it much more clearly implies the wickedness

of all law and government. Yet there are many prosperous peacemakers who

are much more shocked at the idea of using the brute force of soldiers

against a powerful foreigner than they are at using the brute force of

policemen against a poor fellow-citizen. Here again I am content to

point out that the paradox becomes perfectly human and probable if

addressed by Francis to Franciscans. Nobody would be surprised to read

that Brother Juniper did then run after the thief that had stolen his

hood, beseeching him to take his gown also; for so St. Francis had

commanded him. Nobody would be surprised if St. Francis told a young

noble, about to be admitted to his company, that so far from pursuing a

brigand to recover his shoes, he ought to pursue him to make him a

present of his stockings. We may like or not the atmosphere these things

imply; but we know what atmosphere they do imply. We recognise a certain

note as natural and clear as the note of a bird; the note of

St. Francis. There is in it something of gentle mockery of the very idea

of possessions; something of a hope of disarming the enemy by

generosity; something of a humorous sense of bewildering the worldly

with the unexpected; something of the joy of carrying an enthusiastic

conviction to a logical extreme. But anyhow we have no difficulty in

recognising it, if we have read any of the literature of the Little

Brothers and the movement that began in Assisi. It seems reasonable to

infer that if it was this spirit that made such strange things possible

in Umbria, it was the same spirit that made them possible in Palestine.

If we hear the same unmistakable note and sense the same indescribable

savour in two things at such a distance from each other, it seems

natural to suppose that the case that is more remote from our experience

was like the case that is closer to our experience. As the thing is

explicable on the assumption that Francis was speaking to Franciscans,

it is not an irrational explanation to suggest that Christ also was

speaking to some dedicated band that had much the same function as

Franciscans. In other words, it seems only natural to hold, as the

Catholic Church has held, that these counsels of perfection were part of

a particular vocation to astonish and awaken the world. But in any case

it is important to note that when we do find these particular features,

with their seemingly fantastic fitness, reappearing after more than a

thousand years, we find them produced by the same religious system which

claims continuity and authority from the scenes in which they first

appeared. Any number of philosophies will repeat the platitudes of

Christianity. But it is the ancient Church that can again startle the

world with the paradoxes of Christianity. _Ubi Petrus ibi Franciscus._

But if we understand that it was truly under the inspiration of his

divine Master that St. Francis did these merely quaint or eccentric acts

of charity, we must understand that it was under the same inspiration

that he did acts of self-denial and austerity. It is clear that these

more or less playful parables of the love of men were conceived after a

close study of the Sermon on the Mount. But it is evident that he made

an even closer study of the silent sermon on that other mountain; the

mountain that was called Golgotha. Here again he was speaking the strict

historical truth, when he said that in fasting or suffering humiliation

he was but trying to do something of what Christ did; and here again it

seems probable that as the same truth appears at the two ends of a chain

of tradition, the tradition has preserved the truth. But the import of

this fact at the moment affects the next phase in the personal history

of the man himself.

For as it becomes clearer that his great communal scheme is an

accomplished fact and past the peril of an early collapse, as it becomes

evident that there already is such a thing as an Order of the Friars

Minor, this more individual and intense ambition of St. Francis emerges

more and more. So soon as he certainly has followers, he does not

compare himself with his followers, towards whom he might appear as a

master; he compares himself more and more with his Master, towards whom

he appears only as a servant. This, it may be said in passing, is one of

the moral and even practical conveniences of the ascetical privilege.

Every other sort of superiority may be superciliousness. But the saint

is never supercilious, for he is always by hypothesis in the presence of

a superior. The objection to an aristocracy is that it is a priesthood

without a god. But in any case the service to which St. Francis had

committed himself was one which, about this time, he conceived more and

more in terms of sacrifice and crucifixion. He was full of the sentiment

that he had not suffered enough to be worthy even to be a distant

follower of his suffering God. And this passage in his history may

really be roughly summarised as the Search for Martyrdom.

This was the ultimate idea in the remarkable business of his expedition

among the Saracens in Syria. There were indeed other elements in his

conception, which are worthy of more intelligent understanding than they

have often received. His idea, of course, was to bring the Crusades in a

double sense to their end; that is, to reach their conclusion and to

achieve their purpose. Only he wished to do it by conversion and not by

conquest; that is, by intellectual and not material means. The modern

mind is hard to please; and it generally calls the way of Godfrey

ferocious and the way of Francis fanatical. That is, it calls any moral

method unpractical, when it has just called any practical method

immoral. But the idea of St. Francis was far from being a fanatical or

necessarily even an unpractical idea; though perhaps he saw the problem

as rather too simple, lacking the learning of his great inheritor

Raymond Lully, who understood more but has been quite as little

understood. The way he approached the matter was indeed highly personal

and peculiar; but that was true of almost everything he did. It was in

one way a simple idea, as most of his ideas were simple ideas. But it

was not a silly idea; there was a great deal to be said for it and it

might have succeeded. It was, of course, simply the idea that it is

better to create Christians than to destroy Moslems. If Islam had been

converted, the world would have been immeasurably more united and happy;

for one thing, three quarters of the wars of modern history would never

have taken place. It was not absurd to suppose that this might be

effected, without military force, by missionaries who were also martyrs.

The Church had conquered Europe in that way and may yet conquer Asia or

Africa in that way. But when all this is allowed for, there is still

another sense in which St. Francis was not thinking of Martyrdom as a

means to an end, but almost as an end in itself; in the sense that to

him the supreme end was to come closer to the example of Christ. Through

all his plunging and restless days ran the refrain: I have not suffered

enough; I have not sacrificed enough; I am not yet worthy even of the

shadow of the crown of thorns. He wandered about the valleys of the

world looking for the hill that has the outline of a skull.

A little while before his final departure for the East a vast and

triumphant assembly of the whole order had been held near the

Portiuncula; and called The Assembly of the Straw Huts, from the manner

in which that mighty army encamped in the field. Tradition says that it

was on this occasion that St. Francis met St. Dominic for the first and

last time. It also says, what is probable enough, that the practical

spirit of the Spaniard was almost appalled at the devout

irresponsibility of the Italian, who had assembled such a crowd without

organising a commissariat. Dominic the Spaniard was, like nearly every

Spaniard, a man with the mind of a soldier. His charity took the

practical form of provision and preparation. But, apart from the

disputes about faith which such incidents open, he probably did not

understand in this case the power of mere popularity produced by mere

personality. In all his leaps in the dark, Francis had an extraordinary

faculty of falling on his feet. The whole countryside came down like a

landslide to provide food and drink for this sort of pious picnic.

Peasants brought waggons of wine and game; great nobles walked about

doing the work of footmen. It was a very real victory for the Franciscan

spirit of a reckless faith not only in God but in man. Of course there

is much doubt and dispute about the whole story and the whole relation

of Francis and Dominic; and the story of the Assembly of the Straw Huts

is told from the Franciscan side. But the alleged meeting is worth

mentioning, precisely because it was immediately before St. Francis set

forth on his bloodless crusade that he is said to have met St. Dominic,

who has been so much criticised for lending himself to a more bloody

one. There is no space in this little book to explain how St. Francis,

as much as St. Dominic, would ultimately have defended the defence of

Christian unity by arms. Indeed it would need a large book instead of a

little book to develop that point alone from its first principles. For

the modern mind is merely a blank about the philosophy of toleration;

and the average agnostic of recent times has really had no notion of

what he meant by religious liberty and equality. He took his own ethics

as self-evident and enforced them; such as decency or the error of the

Adamite heresy. Then he was horribly shocked if he heard of anybody

else, Moslem or Christian, taking _his_ ethics as self-evident and

enforcing _them_; such as reverence or the error of the Atheist heresy.

And then he wound up by taking all this lop-sided illogical deadlock, of

the unconscious meeting the unfamiliar, and called it the liberality of

his own mind. Medieval men thought that if a social system was founded

on a certain idea it must fight for that idea, whether it was as simple

as Islam or as carefully balanced as Catholicism. Modern men really

think the same thing, as is clear when communists attack their ideas of

property. Only they do not think it so clearly, because they have not

really thought out their idea of property. But while it is probable that

St. Francis would have reluctantly agreed with St. Dominic that war for

the truth was right in the last resort, it is certain that St. Dominic

did enthusiastically agree with St. Francis that it was far better to

prevail by persuasion and enlightenment if it were possible. St. Dominic

devoted himself much more to persuading than to persecuting; but there

was a difference in the methods simply because there was a difference in

the men. About everything St. Francis did there was something that was

in a good sense childish, and even in a good sense wilful. He threw

himself into things abruptly, as if they had just occurred to him. He

made a dash for his Mediterranean enterprise with something of the air

of a schoolboy running away to sea.

In the first act of that attempt he characteristically distinguished

himself by becoming the Patron Saint of Stowaways. He never thought of

waiting for introductions or bargains or any of the considerable backing

that he already had from rich and responsible people. He simply saw a

boat and threw himself into it, as he threw himself into everything

else. It has all that air of running a race which makes his whole life

read like an escapade or even literally an escape. He lay like lumber

among the cargo, with one companion whom he had swept with him in his

rush; but the voyage was apparently unfortunate and erratic and ended in

an enforced return to Italy. Apparently it was after this first false

start that the great re-union took place at the Portiuncula, and between

this and the final Syrian journey there was also an attempt to meet the

Moslem menace by preaching to the Moors in Spain. In Spain indeed

several of the first Franciscans had already succeeded gloriously in

being martyred. But the great Francis still went about stretching out

his arms for such torments and desiring that agony in vain. No one would

have said more readily than he that he was probably less like Christ

than those others who had already found their Calvary; but the thing

remained with him like a secret; the strangest of the sorrows of man.

His later voyage was more successful, so far as arriving at the scene of

operations was concerned. He arrived at the headquarters of the Crusade

which was in front of the besieged city of Damietta, and went on in his

rapid and solitary fashion to seek the headquarters of the Saracens. He

succeeded in obtaining an interview with the Sultan; and it was at that

interview that he evidently offered, and as some say proceeded, to fling

himself into the fire as a divine ordeal, defying the Moslem religious

teachers to do the same. It is quite certain that he would have done so

at a moment's notice. Indeed throwing himself into the fire was hardly

more desperate, in any case, than throwing himself among the weapons and

tools of torture of a horde of fanatical Mahomedans and asking them to

renounce Mahomet. It is said further that the Mahomedan muftis showed

some coldness towards the proposed competition, and that one of them

quietly withdrew while it was under discussion; which would also appear

credible. But for whatever reason Francis evidently returned as freely

as he came. There may be something in the story of the individual

impression produced on the Sultan, which the narrator represents as a

sort of secret conversion. There may be something in the suggestion that

the holy man was unconsciously protected among half-barbarous orientals

by the halo of sanctity that is supposed in such places to surround an

idiot. There is probably as much or more in the more generous

explanation of that graceful though capricious courtesy and compassion

which mingled with wilder things in the stately Soldans of the type and

tradition of Saladin. Finally, there is perhaps something in the

suggestion that the tale of St. Francis might be told as a sort of

ironic tragedy and comedy called The Man Who Could Not Get Killed. Men

liked him too much for himself to let him die for his faith; and the man

was received instead of the message. But all these are only converging

guesses at a great effort that is hard to judge, because it broke off

short like the beginnings of a great bridge that might have united East

and West, and remains one of the great might-have-beens of history.

Meanwhile the great movement in Italy was making giant strides. Backed

now by papal authority as well as popular enthusiasm, and creating a

kind of comradeship among all classes, it had started a riot of

reconstruction on all sides of religious and social life; and especially

began to express itself in that enthusiasm for building which is the

mark of all the resurrections of Western Europe. There had notably been

established at Bologna a magnificent mission house of the Friars Minor;

and a vast body of them and their sympathisers surrounded it with a

chorus of acclamation. Their unanimity had a strange interruption. One

man alone in that crowd was seen to turn and suddenly denounce the

building as if it had been a Babylonian temple; demanding indignantly

since when the Lady Poverty had thus been insulted with the luxury of

palaces. It was Francis, a wild figure, returned from his Eastern

Crusade; and it was the first and last time that he spoke in wrath to

his children.

A word must be said later about this serious division of sentiment and

policy, about which many Franciscans, and to some extent Francis

himself, parted company with the more moderate policy which ultimately

prevailed. At this point we need only note it as another shadow fallen

upon his spirit after his disappointment in the desert; and as in some

sense the prelude to the next phase of his career, which is the most

isolated and the most mysterious. It is true that everything about this

episode seems to be covered with some cloud of dispute, even including

its date; some writers putting it much earlier in the narrative than

this. But whether or no it was chronologically it was certainly

logically the culmination of the story, and may best be indicated here.

I say indicated for it must be a matter of little more than indication;

the thing being a mystery both in the higher moral and the more trivial

historical sense. Anyhow the conditions of the affair seem to have been

these. Francis and a young companion, in the course of their common

wandering, came past a great castle all lighted up with the festivities

attending a son of the house receiving the honour of knighthood. This

aristocratic mansion, which took its name from Monte Feltro, they

entered in their beautiful and casual fashion and began to give their

own sort of good news. There were some at least who listened to the

saint "as if he had been an angel of God"; among them a gentleman named

Orlando of Chiusi, who had great lands in Tuscany, and who proceeded to

do St. Francis a singular and somewhat picturesque act of courtesy. He

gave him a mountain; a thing somewhat unique among the gifts of the

world. Presumably the Franciscan rule which forbade a man to accept

money had made no detailed provision about accepting mountains. Nor

indeed did St. Francis accept it save as he accepted everything, as a

temporary convenience rather than a personal possession; but he turned

it into a sort of refuge for the eremitical rather than the monastic

life; he retired there when he wished for a life of prayer and fasting

which he did not ask even his closest friends to follow. This was

Alverno of the Apennines, and upon its peak there rests for ever a dark

cloud that has a rim or halo of glory.

What it was exactly that happened there may never be known. The matter

has been, I believe, a subject of dispute among the most devout students

of the saintly life as well as between such students and others of the

more secular sort. It may be that St. Francis never spoke to a soul on

the subject; it would be highly characteristic, and it is certain in any

case that he said very little; I think he is only alleged to have spoken

of it to one man. Subject however to such truly sacred doubts, I will

confess that to me personally this one solitary and indirect report that

has come down to us reads very like the report of something real; of

some of those things that are more real than what we call daily

realities. Even something as it were double and bewildering about the

image seems to carry the impression of an experience shaking the senses;

as does the passage in Revelations about the supernatural creatures full

of eyes. It would seem that St. Francis beheld the heavens above him

occupied by a vast winged being like a seraph spread out like a cross.

There seems some mystery about whether the winged figure was itself

crucified or in the posture of crucifixion, or whether it merely

enclosed in its frame of wings some colossal crucifix. But it seems

clear that there was some question of the former impression; for

St. Bonaventura distinctly says that St. Francis doubted how a seraph

could be crucified, since those awful and ancient principalities were

without the infirmity of the Passion. St. Bonaventura suggests that the

seeming contradiction may have meant that St. Francis was to be

crucified as a spirit since he could not be crucified as a man; but

whatever the meaning of the vision, the general idea of it is very vivid

and overwhelming. St. Francis saw above him, filling the whole heavens,

some vast immemorial unthinkable power, ancient like the Ancient of

Days, whose calm men had conceived under the forms of winged bulls or

monstrous cherubim, and all that winged wonder was in pain like a

wounded bird. This seraphic suffering, it is said, pierced his soul with

a sword of grief and pity; it may be inferred that some sort of mounting

agony accompanied the ecstasy. Finally after some fashion the apocalypse

faded from the sky and the agony within subsided; and silence and the

natural air filled the morning twilight and settled slowly in the purple

chasms and cleft abysses of the Apennines.

The head of the solitary sank, amid all that relaxation and quiet in

which time can drift by with the sense of something ended and complete;

and as he stared downwards, he saw the marks of nails in his own hands.

_Chapter IX_

_Miracles and Death_

The tremendous story of the Stigmata of St. Francis, which was the end

of the last chapter, was in some sense the end of his life. In a logical

sense, it would have been the end even if it had happened at the

beginning. But truer traditions refer it to a later date and suggest

that his remaining days on the earth had something about them of the

fingering of a shadow. Whether St. Bonaventura was right in his hint

that St. Francis saw in that seraphic vision something almost like a

vast mirror of his own soul, that could at least suffer like an angel

though not like a god, or whether it expressed under an imagery more

primitive and colossal than common Christian art the primary paradox of

the death of God, it is evident from its traditional consequences that

it was meant for a crown and for a seal. It seems to have been after

seeing this vision that he began to go blind.

But the incident has another and much less important place in this rough

and limited outline. It is the natural occasion for considering briefly

and collectively all the facts or fables of another aspect of the life

of St. Francis; an aspect which is, I will not say more disputable, but

certainly more disputed. I mean all that mass of testimony and tradition

that concerns his miraculous powers and supernatural experiences, with

which it would have been easy to stud and bejewel every page of the

story; only that certain circumstances necessary to the conditions of

this narration make it better to gather, somewhat hastily, all such

jewels into a heap.

I have here adopted this course in order to make allowance for a

prejudice. It is indeed to a great extent a prejudice of the past; a

prejudice that is plainly disappearing in days of greater enlightenment,

and especially of a greater range of scientific experiment and

knowledge. But it is a prejudice that is still tenacious in many of an

older generation and still traditional in many of the younger. I mean,

of course, what used to be called the belief "that miracles do not

happen," as I think Matthew Arnold expressed it, in expressing the

standpoint of so many of our Victorian uncles and great-uncles. In other

words it was the remains of that sceptical simplification by which some

of the philosophers of the early eighteenth century had popularised the

impression (for a very short time) that we had discovered the

regulations of the cosmos like the works of a clock, of so very simple a

clock that it was possible to distinguish almost at a glance what could

or could not have happened in human experience. It should be remembered

that these real sceptics, of the golden age of scepticism, were quite as

scornful of the first fancies of science as of the lingering legends of

religion. Voltaire, when he was told that a fossil fish had been found

on the peaks of the Alps, laughed openly at the tale and said that some

fasting monk or hermit had dropped his fish-bones there; possibly in

order to effect another monkish fraud. Everybody knows by this time that

science has had its revenge on scepticism. The border between the

credible and the incredible has not only become once more as vague as in

any barbaric twilight; but the credible is obviously increasing and the

incredible shrinking. A man in Voltaire's time did not know what miracle

he would next have to throw up. A man in our time does not know what

miracle he will next have to swallow.

But long before these things had happened, in those days of my boyhood

when I first saw the figure of St. Francis far away in the distance and

drawing me even at that distance, in those Victorian days which did

seriously separate the virtues from the miracles of the saints—even in

those days I could not help feeling vaguely puzzled about how this

method could be applied to history. Even then I did not quite

understand, and even now I do not quite understand, on what principle

one is to pick and choose in the chronicles of the past which seem to be

all of a piece. All our knowledge of certain historical periods, and

notably of the whole medieval period, rests on certain connected

chronicles written by people who are some of them nameless and all of

them dead, who cannot in any case be cross-examined and cannot in some

cases be corroborated. I have never been quite clear about the nature of

the right by which historians accepted masses of detail from them as

definitely true, and suddenly denied their truthfulness when one detail

was preternatural. I do not complain of their being sceptics; I am

puzzled about why the sceptics are not more sceptical. I can understand

their saying that these details would never have been included in a

chronicle except by lunatics or liars; but in that case the only

inference is that the chronicle was written by liars or lunatics. They

will write for instance: "Monkish fanaticism found it easy to spread the

report that miracles were already being worked at the tomb of Thomas

Becket." Why should they not say equally well, "Monkish fanaticism found

it easy to spread the slander that four knights from King Henry's court

had assassinated Thomas Becket in the cathedral"? They would write

something like this: "The credulity of the age readily believed that

Joan of Arc had been inspired to point out the Dauphin although he was

in disguise." Why should they not write on the same principle: "The

credulity of the age was such as to suppose that an obscure peasant girl

could get an audience at the court of the Dauphin"? And so, in the

present case, when they tell us there is a wild story that St. Francis

flung himself into the fire and emerged scathless, upon what precise

principle are they forbidden to tell us of a wild story that St. Francis

flung himself into the camp of the ferocious Moslems and returned safe?

I only ask for information; for I do not see the rationale of the thing

myself. I will undertake to say there was not a word written of

St. Francis by any contemporary who was himself incapable of believing

and telling a miraculous story. Perhaps it is all monkish fables and

there never was any St. Francis or any St. Thomas Becket or any Joan of

Arc. This is undoubtedly a _reductio ad absurdum_; but it is a _reductio

ad absurdum_ of the view which thought all miracles absurd.

And in abstract logic this method of selection would lead to the wildest

absurdities. An intrinsically incredible story could only mean that the

authority was unworthy of credit. It could not mean that other parts of

his story must be received with complete credulity. If somebody said he

had met a man in yellow trousers, who proceeded to jump down his own

throat, we should not exactly take our Bible oath or be burned at the

stake for the statement that he wore yellow trousers. If somebody

claimed to have gone up in a blue balloon and found that the moon was

made of green cheese, we should not exactly take an affidavit that the

balloon was blue any more than that the moon was green. And the really

logical conclusion from throwing doubts on all tales like the miracles

of St. Francis was to throw doubts on the existence of men like

St. Francis. And there really was a modern moment, a sort of high-water

mark of insane scepticism, when this sort of thing was really said or

done. People used to go about saying that there was no such person as

St. Patrick; which is every bit as much of a human and historical howler

as saying there was no such person as St. Francis. There was a time, for

instance, when the madness of mythological explanation had dissolved a

large part of solid history under the universal and luxuriant warmth and

radiance of the Sun-Myth. I believe that that particular sun has already

set, but there have been any number of moons and meteors to take its

place.

St. Francis, of course, would make a magnificent Sun-Myth. How could

anybody miss the chance of being a Sun-Myth when he is actually best

known by a song called The Canticle of the Sun? It is needless to point

out that the fire in Syria was the dawn in the East and the bleeding

wounds in Tuscany the sunset in the West. I could expound this theory at

considerable length; only, as so often happens to such fine theorists,

another and more promising theory occurs to me. I cannot think how

everybody, including myself, can have overlooked the fact that the whole

tale of St. Francis is of Totemistic origin. It is unquestionably a tale

that simply swarms with totems. The Franciscan woods are as full of them

as any Red Indian fable. Francis is made to call himself an ass, because

in the original mythos Francis was merely the name given to the real

four-footed donkey, afterwards vaguely evolved into a half-human god or

hero. And that, no doubt, is why I used to feel that the Brother Wolf

and Sister Bird of St. Francis were somehow like the Brer Fox and Sis

Cow of Uncle Remus. Some say there is an innocent stage of infancy in

which we do really believe that a cow talked or a fox made a tar baby.

Anyhow there is an innocent period of intellectual growth in which we do

sometimes really believe that St. Patrick was a Sun-Myth or St. Francis

a Totem. But for the most of us both those phases of paradise are past.

As I shall suggest in a moment, there is one sense in which we can for

practical purposes distinguish between probable and improbable things in

such a story. It is not so much a question of cosmic criticism about the

nature of the event as of literary criticism about the nature of the

story. Some stories are told much more seriously than others. But apart

from this, I shall not attempt here any definite differentiation between

them. I shall not do so for a practical reason affecting the utility of

the proceeding; I mean the fact that in a practical sense the whole of

this matter is again in the melting pot, from which many things may

emerge moulded into what rationalism would have called monsters. The

fixed points of faith and philosophy do indeed remain always the same.

Whether a man believes that fire in one case could fail to burn, depends

on why he thinks it generally does burn. If it burns nine sticks out of

ten because it is its nature or doom to do so, then it will burn the

tenth stick as well. If it burns nine sticks because it is the will of

God that it should, then it might be the will of God that the tenth

should be unburned. Nobody can get behind that fundamental difference

about the reason of things; and it is as rational for a theist to

believe in miracles as for an atheist to disbelieve in them. In other

words there is only one intelligent reason why a man does not believe in

miracles and that is that he does believe in materialism. But these

fixed points of faith and philosophy are things for a theoretical work

and have no particular place here. And in the matter of history and

biography, which have their place here, nothing is fixed at all. The

world is in a welter of the possible and impossible, and nobody knows

what will be the next scientific hypothesis to support some ancient

superstition. Three quarters of the miracles attributed to St. Francis

would already be explained by psychologists, not indeed as a Catholic

explains them, but as a materialist must necessarily refuse to explain

them. There is one whole department of the miracles of St. Francis; the

miracles of healing. What is the good of a superior sceptic throwing

them away as unthinkable, at the moment when faith-healing is already a

big booming Yankee business like Barnum's Show? There is another whole

department analogous to the tales of Christ "perceiving men's thoughts."

What is the use of censoring them and blacking them out because they are

marked "miracles," when thought-reading is already a parlour game like

musical chairs? There is another whole department, to be studied

separately if such scientific study were possible, of the well-attested

wonders worked from his relics and fragmentary possessions. What is the

use of dismissing all that as inconceivable, when even these common

psychical parlour tricks turn perpetually upon touching some familiar

object or holding in the hand some personal possession? I do not

believe, of course, that these tricks are of the same type as the good

works of the saint; save perhaps in the sense of _Diabolus simius Dei_.

But it is not a question of what I believe and why, but of what the

sceptic disbelieves and why. And the moral for the practical biographer

and historian is that he must wait till things settle down a little

more, before he claims to disbelieve anything.

This being so he can choose between two courses; and not without some

hesitation, I have here chosen between them. The best and boldest course

would be to tell the whole story in a straightforward way, miracles and

all, as the original historians told it. And to this sane and simple

course the new historians will probably have to return. But it must be

remembered that this book is avowedly only an introduction to

St. Francis or the study of St. Francis. Those who need an introduction

are in their nature strangers. With them the object is to get them to

listen to St. Francis at all; and in doing so it is perfectly legitimate

so to arrange the order of the facts that the familiar come before the

unfamiliar and those they can at once understand before those they have

a difficulty in understanding. I should only be too thankful if this

thin and scratchy sketch contains a line or two that attracts men to

study St. Francis for themselves; and if they do study him for

themselves, they will soon find that the supernatural part of the story

seems quite as natural as the rest. But it was necessary that my outline

should be a merely human one, since I was only presenting his claim on

all humanity, including sceptical humanity. I therefore adopted the

alternative course, of showing first that nobody but a born fool could

fail to realise that Francis of Assisi was a very real historical human

being; and then summarising briefly in this chapter the superhuman

powers that were certainly a part of that history and humanity. It only

remains to say a few words about some distinctions that may reasonably

be observed in the matter by any man of any views; that he may not

confuse the point and climax of the saint's life with the fancies or

rumours that were really only the fringes of his reputation.

There is so immense a mass of legends and anecdotes about St. Francis of

Assisi, and there are so many admirable compilations that cover nearly

all of them, that I have been compelled within these narrow limits to

pursue a somewhat narrow policy; that of following one line of

explanation and only mentioning one anecdote here or there because it

illustrates that explanation. If this is true about all the legends and

stories, it is especially true about the miraculous legends and the

supernatural stories. If we were to take some stories as they stand, we

should receive a rather bewildered impression that the biography

contains more supernatural events than natural ones. Now it is clean

against Catholic tradition, co-incident in so many points with common

sense, to suppose that this is really the proportion of these things in

practical human life. Moreover, even considered as supernatural or

preternatural stories, they obviously fall into certain different

classes, not so much by our experience of miracles as by our experience

of stories. Some of them have the character of fairy stories, in their

form even more than their incident. They are obviously tales told by the

fire to peasants or the children of peasants, under conditions in which

nobody thinks he is propounding a religious doctrine to be received or

rejected, but only rounding off a story in the most symmetrical way,

according to that sort of decorative scheme or pattern that runs through

all fairy stories. Others are obviously in their form most emphatically

evidence; that is they are testimony that is truth or lies; and it will

be very hard for any judge of human nature to think they are lies.

It is admitted that the story of the Stigmata is not a legend but can

only be a lie. I mean that it is certainly not a late legendary

accretion added afterwards to the fame of St. Francis; but is something

that started almost immediately with his earliest biographers. It is

practically necessary to suggest that it was a conspiracy; indeed there

has been some disposition to put the fraud upon the unfortunate Elias,

whom so many parties have been disposed to treat as a useful universal

villain. It has been said, indeed, that these early biographers,

St. Bonaventura and Celano and the Three Companions, though they declare

that St. Francis received the mystical wounds, do not say that they

themselves saw those wounds. I do not think this argument conclusive;

because it only arises out of the very nature of the narrative. The

Three Companions are not in any case making an affidavit; and therefore

none of the admitted parts of their story are in the form of an

affidavit. They are writing a chronicle of a comparatively impersonal

and very objective description. They do not say, "I saw St. Francis's

wounds"; they say, "St. Francis received wounds." But neither do they

say, "I saw St. Francis go into the Portiuncula"; they say, "St. Francis

went into the Portiuncula." But I still cannot understand why they

should be trusted as eye-witnesses about the one fact and not trusted as

eye-witnesses about the other. It is all of a piece; it would be a most

abrupt and abnormal interruption in their way of telling the story if

they suddenly began to curse and to swear, and give their names and

addresses, and take their oath that they themselves saw and verified the

physical facts in question. It seems to me, therefore, that this

particular discussion goes back to the general question I have already

mentioned; the question of why these chronicles should be credited at

all, if they are credited with abounding in the incredible. But that

again will probably be found to revert, in the last resort, to the mere

fact that some men cannot believe in miracles because they are

materialists. That is logical enough; but they are bound to deny the

preternatural as much in the testimony of a modern scientific professor

as in that of a medieval monkish chronicler. And there are plenty of

professors for them to contradict by this time.

But whatever may be thought of such supernaturalism in the comparatively

material and popular sense of supernatural acts, we shall miss the whole

point of St. Francis, especially of St. Francis after Alverno, if we do

not realise that he was living a supernatural life. And there is more

and more of such supernaturalism in his life as he approaches towards

his death. This element of the supernatural did not separate him from

the natural; for it was the whole point of his position that it united

him more perfectly to the natural. It did not make him dismal or

dehumanised; for it was the whole meaning of his message that such

mysticism makes a man cheerful and humane. But it was the whole point of

his position, and it was the whole meaning of his message, that the

power that did it was a supernatural power. If this simple distinction

were not apparent from the whole of his life, it would be difficult for

anyone to miss it in reading the account of his death.

In a sense he may be said to have wandered as a dying man, just as he

had wandered as a living one. As it became more and more apparent that

his health was failing, he seems to have been carried from place to

place like a pageant of sickness or almost like a pageant of mortality.

He went to Rieti, to Nursia, perhaps to Naples, certainly to Cortona by

the lake of Perugia. But there is something profoundly pathetic, and

full of great problems, in the fact that at last, as it would seem, his

flame of life leapt up and his heart rejoiced when they saw afar off on

the Assisian hill the solemn pillars of the Portiuncula. He who had

become a vagabond for the sake of a vision, he who had denied himself

all sense of place and possession, he whose whole gospel and glory it

was to be homeless, received like a Parthian shot from nature, the sting

of the sense of home. He also had his _maladie du clocher_, his sickness

of the spire; though his spire was higher than ours. "Never," he cried

with the sudden energy of strong spirits in death, "never give up this

place. If you would go anywhere or make any pilgrimage, return always to

your home; for this is the holy house of God." And the procession passed

under the arches of his home; and he laid down on his bed and his

brethren gathered round him for the last long vigil. It seems to me no

moment for entering into the subsequent disputes about which successors

he blessed or in what form and with what significance. In that one

mighty moment he blessed us all.

After he had taken farewell of some of his nearest and especially some

of his oldest friends, he was lifted at his own request off his own rude

bed and laid on the bare ground; as some say clad only in a hair-shirt,

as he had first gone forth into the wintry woods from the presence of

his father. It was the final assertion of his great fixed idea; of

praise and thanks springing to their most towering height out of

nakedness and nothing. As he lay there we may be certain that his seared

and blinded eyes saw nothing but their object and their origin. We may

be sure that the soul, in its last inconceivable isolation, was face to

face with nothing less than God Incarnate and Christ Crucified. But for

the men standing around him there must have been other thoughts mingling

with these; and many memories must have gathered like ghosts in the

twilight, as that day wore on and that great darkness descended in which

we all lost a friend.

For what lay dying there was not Dominic of the Dogs of God, a leader in

logical and controversial wars that could be reduced to a plan and

handed on like a plan; a master of a machine of democratic discipline by

which others could organise themselves. What was passing from the world

was a person; a poet; an outlook on life like a light that was never

after on sea or land; a thing not to be replaced or repeated while the

earth endures. It has been said that there was only one Christian, who

died on the cross; it is truer to say in this sense that there was only

one Franciscan, whose name was Francis. Huge and happy as was the

popular work he left behind him, there was something that he could not

leave behind, any more than a landscape painter can leave his eyes in

his will. It was an artist in life who was here called to be an artist

in death; and he had a better right than Nero, his anti-type, to say

_Qualis artifex pereo_. For Nero's life was full of posing for the

occasion like that of an actor; while the Umbrian's had a natural and

continuous grace like that of an athlete. But St. Francis had better

things to say and better things to think about, and his thoughts were

caught upwards where we cannot follow them, in divine and dizzy heights

to which death alone can lift us up.

Round about him stood the brethren in their brown habits, those that had

loved him even if they afterwards disputed with each other. There was

Bernard his first friend and Angelo who had served as his secretary and

Elias his successor, whom tradition tried to turn into a sort of Judas,

but who seems to have been little worse than an official in the wrong

place. His tragedy was that he had a Franciscan habit without a

Franciscan heart, or at any rate with a very un-Franciscan head. But

though he made a bad Franciscan, he might have made a decent Dominican.

Anyhow, there is no reason to doubt that he loved Francis, for ruffians

and savages did that. Anyhow he stood among the rest as the hours passed

and the shadows lengthened in the house of the Portiuncula; and nobody

need think so ill of him as to suppose that his thoughts were then in

the tumultuous future, in the ambitions and controversies of his later

years.

A man might fancy that the birds must have known when it happened; and

made some motion in the evening sky. As they had once, according to the

tale, scattered to the four winds of heaven in the pattern of a cross at

his signal of dispersion, they might now have written in such dotted

lines a more awful augury across the sky. Hidden in the woods perhaps

were little cowering creatures never again to be so much noticed and

understood; and it has been said that animals are sometimes conscious of

things to which man their spiritual superior is for the moment blind. We

do not know whether any shiver passed through all the thieves and the

outcasts and the outlaws, to tell them what had happened to him who

never knew the nature of scorn. But at least in the passages and porches

of the Portiuncula there was a sudden stillness, where all the brown

figures stood like bronze statues; for the stopping of the great heart

that had not broken till it held the world.

_Chapter X_

_The Testament of St. Francis_

In one sense doubtless it is a sad irony that St. Francis, who all his

life had desired all men to agree, should have died amid increasing

disagreements. But we must not exaggerate this discord, as some have

done, so as to turn it into a mere defeat of all his ideals. There are

some who represent his work as having been merely ruined by the

wickedness of the world, or what they always assume to be the even

greater wickedness of the Church.

This little book is an essay on St. Francis and not on the Franciscan

Order, still less on the Catholic Church or the Papacy or the policy

pursued towards the extreme Franciscans or the Fraticelli. It is

therefore only necessary to note in a very few words what was the

general nature of the controversy that raged after the great saint's

death, and to some extent troubled the last days of his life. The

dominant detail was the interpretation of the vow of poverty, or the

refusal of all possessions. Nobody so far as I know ever proposed to

interfere with the vow of the individual friar that he would have no

individual possessions. Nobody, that is, proposed to interfere with his

negation of private property. But some Franciscans, invoking the

authority of Francis on their side, went further than this and further I

think than anybody else has ever gone. They proposed to abolish not only

private property but property. That is, they refused to be corporately

responsible for anything at all; for any buildings or stores or tools;

they refused to own them collectively even when they used them

collectively. It is perfectly true that many, especially among the first

supporters of this view, were men of a splendid and selfless spirit,

wholly devoted to the great saint's ideal. It is also perfectly true

that the Pope and the authorities of the Church did not think this

conception was a workable arrangement, and went so far in modifying it

as to set aside certain clauses in the great saint's will. But it is not

at all easy to see that it _was_ a workable arrangement or even an

arrangement at all; for it was really a refusal to arrange anything.

Everybody knew of course that Franciscans were communists; but this was

not so much being a communist as being an anarchist. Surely upon any

argument somebody or something must be answerable for what happened to

or in or concerning a number of historic edifices and ordinary goods and

chattels. Many idealists of a socialistic sort, notably of the school of

Mr. Shaw or Mr. Wells, have treated this dispute as if it were merely a

case of the tyranny of wealthy and wicked pontiffs crushing the true

Christianity of Christian Socialists. But in truth this extreme ideal

was in a sense the very reverse of Socialist, or even social. Precisely

the thing which these enthusiasts refused was that social ownership on

which Socialism is built; what they primarily refused to do was what

Socialists primarily exist to do; to own legally in their corporate

capacity. Nor is it true that the tone of the Popes towards the

enthusiasts was merely harsh and hostile. The Pope maintained for a long

time a compromise which he had specially designed to meet their own

conscientious objections; a compromise by which the Papacy itself held

the property in a kind of trust for the owners who refused to touch it.

The truth is that this incident shows two things which are common enough

in Catholic history, but very little understood by the journalistic

history of industrial civilisation. It shows that the Saints were

sometimes great men when the Popes were small men. But it also shows

that great men are sometimes wrong when small men are right. And it will

be found, after all, very difficult for any candid and clear-headed

outsider to deny that the Pope was right, when he insisted that the

world was not made only for Franciscans.

For that was what was behind the quarrel. At the back of this particular

practical question there was something much larger and more momentous,

the stir and wind of which we can feel as we read the controversy. We

might go so far as to put the ultimate truth thus. St. Francis was so

great and original a man that he had something in him of what makes the

founder of a religion. Many of his followers were more or less ready, in

their hearts, to treat him as the founder of a religion. They were

willing to let the Franciscan spirit escape from Christendom as the

Christian spirit had escaped from Israel. They were willing to let it

eclipse Christendom as the Christian spirit had eclipsed Israel.

Francis, the fire that ran through the roads of Italy, was to be the

beginning of a conflagration in which the old Christian civilisation was

to be consumed. That was the point the Pope had to settle; whether

Christendom should absorb Francis or Francis Christendom. And he decided

rightly, apart from the duties of his place; for the Church could

include all that was good in the Franciscans and the Franciscans could

not include all that was good in the Church.

There is one consideration which, though sufficiently clear in the whole

story, has not perhaps been sufficiently noted, especially by those who

cannot see the case for a certain Catholic common sense larger even than

Franciscan enthusiasm. Yet it arises out of the very merits of the man

whom they so rightly admire. Francis of Assisi, as has been said again

and again, was a poet; that is, he was a person who could express his

personality. Now it is everywhere the mark of this sort of man that his

very limitations make him larger. He is what he is, not only by what he

has, but in some degree by what he has not. But the limits that make the

lines of such a personal portrait cannot be made the limits of all

humanity. St. Francis is a very strong example of this quality in the

man of genius, that in him even what is negative is positive, because it

is part of a character. An excellent example of what I mean may be found

in his attitude towards learning and scholarship. He ignored and in some

degree discouraged books and book-learning; and from his own point of

view and that of his own work in the world he was absolutely right. The

whole point of his message was to be so simple that the village idiot

could understand it. The whole point of his point of view was that it

looked out freshly upon a fresh world, that might have been made that

morning. Save for the great primal things, the Creation and the Story of

Eden, the first Christmas and the first Easter, the world had no

history. But is it desired or desirable that the whole Catholic Church

should have no history?

It is perhaps the chief suggestion of this book that St. Francis walked

the world like the Pardon of God. I mean that his appearance marked the

moment when men could be reconciled not only to God but to nature and,

most difficult of all, to themselves. For it marked the moment when all

the stale paganism that had poisoned the ancient world was at last

worked out of the social system. He opened the gates of the Dark Ages as

of a prison of purgatory, where men had cleansed themselves as hermits

in the desert or heroes in the barbarian wars. It was in fact his whole

function to tell men to start afresh and, in that sense, to tell them to

forget. If they were to turn over a new leaf and begin a fresh page with

the first large letters of the alphabet, simply drawn and brilliantly

coloured in the early medieval manner, it was clearly a part of that

particular childlike cheerfulness that they should paste down the old

page that was all black and bloody with horrid things. For instance, I

have already noted that there is not a trace in the poetry of this first

Italian poet of all that pagan mythology which lingered long after

paganism. The first Italian poet seems the only man in the world who has

never even heard of Virgil. This was exactly right for the special sense

in which he is the first Italian poet. It is quite right that he should

call a nightingale a nightingale, and not have its song spoilt or

saddened by the terrible tales of Itylus or Procne. In short, it is

really quite right and quite desirable that St. Francis should never

have heard of Virgil. But do we really desire that Dante should never

have heard of Virgil? Do we really desire that Dante should never have

read any pagan mythology? It has been truly said that the use that Dante

makes of such fables is altogether part of a deeper orthodoxy; that his

huge heathen fragments, his gigantic figures of Minos or of Charon, only

give a hint of some enormous natural religion behind all history and

from the first foreshadowing the Faith. It is well to have the Sybil as

well as David in the Dies Irae. That St. Francis would have burned all

the leaves of all the books of the Sybil, in exchange for one fresh leaf

from the nearest tree, is perfectly true; and perfectly proper to

St. Francis. But it is good to have the Dies Irae as well as the

Canticle of the Sun.

By this thesis, in short, the coming of St. Francis was like the birth

of a child in a dark house, lifting its doom; a child that grows up

unconscious of the tragedy and triumphs over it by his innocence. In him

it is necessarily not only innocence but ignorance. It is the essence of

the story that _he_ should pluck at the green grass without knowing it

grows over a murdered man or climb the apple-tree without knowing it was

the gibbet of a suicide. It was such an amnesty and reconciliation that

the freshness of the Franciscan spirit brought to all the world. But it

does not follow that it ought to impose its ignorance on all the world.

And I think it would have tried to impose it on all the world. For some

Franciscans it would have seemed right that Franciscan poetry should

expel Benedictine prose. For the symbolic child it was quite rational.

It was right enough that for such a child the world should be a large

new nursery with blank white-washed walls, on which he could draw his

own pictures in chalk in the childish fashion, crude in outline and gay

in colour; the beginnings of all our art. It was right enough that to

him such a nursery should seem the most magnificent mansion of the

imagination of man. But in the Church of God are many mansions.

Every heresy has been an effort to narrow the Church. If the Franciscan

movement had turned into a new religion, it would after all have been a

narrow religion. In so far as it did turn here and there into a heresy,

it was a narrow heresy. It did what heresy always does; it set the mood

against the mind. The mood was indeed originally the good and glorious

mood of the great St. Francis, but it was not the whole mind of God or

even of man. And it is a fact that the mood itself degenerated, as the

mood turned into a monomania. A sect that came to be called the

Fraticelli declared themselves the true sons of St. Francis and broke

away from the compromises of Rome in favour of what they would have

called the complete programme of Assisi. In a very little while these

loose Franciscans began to look as ferocious as Flagellants. They

launched new and violent vetoes; they denounced marriage; that is, they

denounced mankind. In the name of the most human of saints they declared

war upon humanity. They did not perish particularly through being

persecuted; many of them were eventually persuaded; and the

unpersuadable rump of them that remained remained without producing

anything in the least calculated to remind anybody of the real

St. Francis. What was the matter with these people was that they were

mystics; mystics and nothing else but mystics; mystics and not

Catholics; mystics and not Christians; mystics and not men. They rotted

away because, in the most exact sense, they would not listen to reason.

And St. Francis, however wild and romantic his gyrations might appear to

many, always hung on to reason by one invisible and indestructible hair.

The great saint was sane; and with the very sound of the word sanity, as

at a deeper chord struck upon a harp, we come back to something that was

indeed deeper than everything about him that seemed an almost elvish

eccentricity. He was not a mere eccentric because he was always turning

towards the centre and heart of the maze; he took the queerest and most

zigzag short cuts through the wood, but he was always going home. He was

not only far too humble to be an heresiarch, but he was far too human to

desire to be an extremist, in the sense of an exile at the ends of the

earth. The sense of humour which salts all the stories of his escapades

alone prevented him from ever hardening into the solemnity of sectarian

self-righteousness. He was by nature ready to admit that he was wrong;

and if his followers had on some practical points to admit that he was

wrong, they only admitted that he was wrong in order to prove that he

was right. For it is they, his real followers, who have really proved

that he was right and even in transcending some of his negations have

triumphantly extended and interpreted his truth. The Franciscan order

did not fossilise or break off short like something of which the true

purpose has been frustrated by official tyranny or internal treason. It

was this, the central and orthodox trunk of it, that afterwards bore

fruit for the world. It counted among its sons Bonaventura the great

mystic and Bernardino the popular preacher, who filled Italy with the

very beatific buffooneries of a Jongleur de Dieu. It counted Raymond

Lully with his strange learning and his large and daring plans for the

conversion of the world; a man intensely individual exactly as

St. Francis was intensely individual. It counted Roger Bacon, the first

naturalist whose experiments with light and water had all the luminous

quaintness that belongs to the beginnings of natural history; and whom

even the most material scientists have hailed as a father of science. It

is not merely true that these were great men who did great work for the

world; it is also true that they were a certain kind of men keeping the

spirit and savour of a certain kind of man, that we can recognise in

them a taste and tang of audacity and simplicity, and know them for the

sons of St. Francis.

For that is the full and final spirit in which we should turn to

St. Francis; in the spirit of thanks for what he has done. He was above

all things a great giver; and he cared chiefly for the best kind of

giving which is called thanksgiving. If another great man wrote a

grammar of assent, he may well be said to have written a grammar of

acceptance; a grammar of gratitude. He understood down to its very

depths the theory of thanks; and its depths are a bottomless abyss. He

knew that the praise of God stands on its strongest ground when it

stands on nothing. He knew that we can best measure the towering miracle

of the mere fact of existence if we realise that but for some strange

mercy we should not even exist. And something of that larger truth is

repeated in a lesser form in our own relations with so mighty a maker of

history. He also is a giver of things we could not have even thought of

for ourselves; he also is too great for anything but gratitude. From him

came a whole awakening of the world and a dawn in which all shapes and

colours could be seen anew. The mighty men of genius who made the

Christian civilisation that we know appear in history almost as his

servants and imitators. Before Dante was, he had given poetry to Italy;

before St. Louis ruled, he had risen as the tribune of the poor; and

before Giotto had painted the pictures, he had enacted the scenes. That

great painter who began the whole human inspiration of European painting

had himself gone to St. Francis to be inspired. It is said that when

St. Francis staged in his own simple fashion a Nativity Play of

Bethlehem, with kings and angels in the stiff and gay medieval garments

and the golden wigs that stood for haloes, a miracle was wrought full of

the Franciscan glory. The Holy Child was a wooden doll or bambino, and

it was said that he embraced it and that the image came to life in his

arms. He assuredly was not thinking of lesser things; but we may at

least say that one thing came to life in his arms; and that was the

thing that we call the drama. Save for his intense individual love of

song, he did not perhaps himself embody this spirit in any of these

arts. He was the spirit that was embodied. He was the spiritual essence

and substance that walked the world, before anyone had seen these things

in visible forms derived from it: a wandering fire as if from nowhere,

at which men more material could light both torches and tapers. He was

the soul of medieval civilisation before it even found a body. Another

and quite different stream of spiritual inspiration derives largely from

him; all that reforming energy of medieval and modern times that goes to

the burden of _Deus est Deus Pauperum_. His abstract ardour for human

beings was in a multitude of just medieval laws against the pride and

cruelty of riches; it is to-day behind much that is loosely called

Christian Socialist and can more correctly be called Catholic Democrat.

Neither on the artistic nor the social side would anybody pretend that

these things would not have existed without him; yet it is strictly true

to say that we cannot now imagine them without him; since he has lived

and changed the world.

And something of that sense of impotence which was more than half his

power will descend on anyone who knows what that inspiration has been in

history, and can only record it in a series of straggling and meagre

sentences. He will know something of what St. Francis meant by the great

and good debt that cannot be paid. He will feel at once the desire to

have done infinitely more and the futility of having done anything. He

will know what it is to stand under such a deluge of a dead man's

marvels, and have nothing in return to establish against it; to have

nothing to set up under the overhanging, overwhelming arches of such a

temple of time and eternity, but this brief candle burnt out so quickly

before his shrine.

HODDER AND STOUGHTON'S

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ST. FRANCIS OF ASSISI. By GILBERT K. CHESTERTON.

VICTORIAN POETRY. By JOHN DRINKWATER.

EVERYDAY BIOLOGY. By J. ARTHUR THOMSON.

THE POETRY OF ARCHITECTURE. By FRANK RUTTER.

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End of Project Gutenberg's St. Francis of Assisi, by G. K. Chesterton