“Ludibria rerum humanarum cunctis in negotiis.”
TACITUS.
I
So _eccomi_ back in Assisi, after heaven knows how many years, and here
is the same bland Franciscan—or his brother—to show me the same tiny
monastery garden with the same rusty rose-bushes and tell me the same
story of how its native thorns and briars turned into thornless roses
with blood-specked leaves after St. Francis had rolled in them to subdue
the flesh, and the same anecdote of the neophyte who refused to plant
cabbages with their roots upward and was rejected by the saint as
insufficiently simple and obedient, and I ask the same question as to
the botanic results of planting cabbages topsy-turvy and receive the
same beaming reassurance that they waxed to prize dimensions, while a
blight fell on those whose roots had, with worldly-wise presumption,
been planted in earth. And I am shown the same little hut which the
saint occupied, with the same unnatural ecclesiastic vaulting and the
same unnatural oratory above it, and I go again into the same
Lilliputian church (twenty-two feet by thirteen) beloved of St. Francis,
with its rude plaster and its wooden benches and its plain brass lamps,
and receive the same shock at the thought of its asphyxiation beneath
the giant grandeur of S. Maria of the Angels, that spreads over it like
a golden eagle brooding a street sparrow. And from the door of this dear
little Portiuncula I glean the same glad tidings that Pope Gregory XIII
at the instance of the most illustrious Cardinal Sforza has conceded to
every faithful Christian who will say (or pay for) a mass at its altar,
the grace of liberating a soul from Purgatory. And I am given the same
illuminated leaflet about St. Francis, with the same specimen of
ensanguined rose-leaf—precisely like that which grows in my own
garden—and I pay the same lira on the same spot where St. Francis, who
called coins “flies,” had some of these pests, innocently offered by a
worshipper, thrown out upon asses’ dung. The only change since my last
visit is that a fig-tree has been planted “by request” in remembrance of
the old tree in which Sister Grasshopper sang with the saint for eighty
days.
And this “by request” is a vivid reminder that the Franciscan legend is
flourishing more and more, like the topsy-turvy cabbage, and that shoals
of pleasure-pilgrims, richly clad, come by carriage or motor to maunder
over “the little poor man of Assisi,” to gloat upon the cord of his
tunic, stored up in a cupboard, and to gain an appetite for lunch by
rhapsodising over the cell in which he fasted. Yes, the lover of poverty
and of the brute creation has brought a good deal of money to the little
hill-town, and no small sum of labour and lashings to its horses, and it
is not surprising that the region round the poor little abandoned church
of S. Maria in Portiuncula has grown up in the last quarter of a century
into a big suburb, with eating- and lodging-houses, or that the
successors of the saint who in his horror of property tried to tear down
the chapter-house built for him, and who left even his cell because
somebody referred to it as St. Francis’s, have within the last ten years
been able to enrich their vast basilica with three elaborate carven
doors and an iron railing, not to mention the horrible modern fresco
with six angels like ballet-girls hovering without the chapel where St.
Francis died.
As I leave this musty S. Maria of the Angels and mount on this divine
spring day towards the sunny hill-top where Assisi proper sits
rock-hewn, with its towers, domes, and castles, and see beneath me the
wonderful rolling Apennines, and the windings of white roads and silver
streams, and around me the grey-green of olives and the bridal white of
cherry-trees, and above me the cloud-galleons sailing in the great
spaces of sky, a remark of the bland brother comes back to me with added
significance. “We do not know where St. Francis’s heart is,” he said,
grudgingly conceding that the rival church on high possessed his body.
The fancy takes me, as I toil up to this tomb, that St. Francis’s heart
refused to be buried in a church, is here out of doors, at one with the
spring and the sunshine.
And even more symbolic sounds to me the bland brother’s boast that the
colossal church built over the poor little Portiuncula is on the model
of St. Peter’s. Canonisation is a process that normally lasts centuries;
our King Alfred’s is not yet complete. But twenty months after his death
Francesco Bernardone was hustled into formal saintship. The Pope crushed
him by a loving embrace, and over his beloved doll’s house of a church
was erected a copy of St. Peter’s! And far above, on the rival ridge of
Assisi, as if to give a culminating irony to the symbolism, and as if
one great church built over his body did not suffice to keep him down, a
second church of S. Francesco has been built on the top of the first,
and beneath these two churches, each supplied with its frescoed
falsifications by the school of Giotto, the little brother of the poor
who demanded only to lie among the criminals on the “Infernal Hill” was
safely buried.
And yet not so safely but that his spirit has begun to penetrate through
all the layers of stone and legend. Perhaps it has escaped through that
portal of the upper church which, incautiously thrown open to illumine
the painted miracles, tempers the austere gloom and the drone of
ceaseless psalm-saying from below with a revealed greensward and a
piping of birds. But one cannot imagine that his spirit has gone to
occupy that large red throne between two yellow armchairs which the
fresco depicts as the vision of his appointed seat in heaven, or that
fiery chariot with which to bedazzle the brethren left behind. These
twenty-eight wall frescoes, like the four triangular allegories on the
ceiling below, hold little of the true St. Francis (notwithstanding that
they are all drawn from Franciscan literature), and the least spiritual
and the most mythical portions of the legend, the demons flying over
Arezzo, or St. Francis hovering in the air while praying, figure on
equal terms with his real activities, while the picture of his offering
the Soldan the ordeal of fire is an imaginative amplification even of
the literature. Setting aside all the fatuous monastic miracles, and the
more tedious anecdotes of the Franciscan legend—and it must be
remembered that the earliest dated manuscript of the _Fioretti_ comes a
hundred and sixty-four years after the death of St. Francis—we are yet
able to extricate from it a kernel of personality sufficient to account
for its genesis and growth, and it is this St. Francis who has at length
burst through the three churches devoted to keeping him down and made
his appeal to the modern mind. Yet the modern mind might easily misread
itself into the mediæval mystic.
Despite his marriage to Lady Poverty, St. Francis was far from a
conscious rebel against the glories of the Vatican. He was too
humble-minded to be anything but a meek acceptant of the established
Church and the ruling ritual. But there was in his literal translation
into life of the Sermon on the Mount, the germ of a dangerous schism—a
germ which duly developed into a sect of “Spirituals” for whom the
Gospel of Assisi was the Eternal Evangel destined to supersede the
Christianity of the Vatican—and it is not an accident that his
followers, despite their popularisation of the idea of Papal
infallibility, gravitated more to the Ghibelline cause than to the
Guelph, and were, later on, formally condemned as heretics by John XXII.
This unstatesmanlike Pope was not only ignorant that persecution is the
seed of the sect, but he undermined the doctrine of his own Papal
infallibility by thus reversing the bull of Nicholas III confirming
their order. He alleged that Nicholas had framed it without his
Cardinals, but the more logical Minorite Brothers contended that the
contradiction of his predecessors proved him no true Pope, but a
usurper. John and his successors retorted with the Holy Inquisition, and
the Franciscans were burnt in stacks or tortured to death in dungeons;
“martyrs,” says Döllinger, “to the doctrine of Papal infallibility and
the rule of poverty.” And such is the comedy of Catholicism.
One wonders sometimes what St. Francis would have made of himself, had
Christianity never come his way. His own genius would never have created
the melancholy dogmas of the mediæval Church. There is neither Christ
nor Atonement in his Canticle to the Sun—his most characteristic
utterance. The Christianity he absorbed from his environment makes but a
hybrid composite with his essential personality. There is thus no real
unity in his spiritual being, no real reconciliation between his theory
of utter abnegation and unworthiness, and his cheerful mystic oneness
with the material universe and all its creatures. That everything God
has created is laudable except one’s self, and that all matter is
sacramental except one’s own body, is scarcely a congruous creed. And he
followed his Christianity for the most part with a prosaic literality
that showed that here he was but a passive receiver, as in his pharisaic
prohibition against the brethren’s practice of soaking pulse the evening
before it was eaten, on the ground that this meant taking thought for
the morrow. _Not_ to soak it, is precisely taking thought, since it is
concentrating attention on a triviality. But in his tender mystic
universalism on the other hand he was a master, a creator. “Our Brother
the Sun,” “Our Sister the Moon,” “Our Sister, Water,” “Our little
Brothers and Sisters, the Birds,” “Our Sister, the Death of the
Body”—these are the mintings of an original genius, not that tame
subservience to texts which limited his wardrobe because of certain
words in St. Matthew. And the originality of this genius consists,
curiously enough, in the spontaneous reproduction of Hindu optimism and
universality in a Western. How Hindu this thought is appears vividly
from the story in the “Speculum Perfections,” that when St. Francis’s
drawers caught fire about the knee, he would not put it out nor harm his
brother Fire. From this point of view Hell would only be brother Fire
enjoying himself. Yet we find St. Francis engaged all his life in
thwarting the fraternal appetite. St. Francis would have been a greater
man, had he been less of a Christian.
His distinctively Christian sayings are indeed comparatively poor. One
scans the record almost in vain for any flash of the irony or sublimity
of Jesus. The profoundest remark of the _Fioretti_—“everything, good or
bad, that a man does, he does to himself”—belongs to brother Giles who,
one is not surprised to find, left a book of _Verba Aurea_. Occasionally
a superb transcendence of ritual as in St. Francis’s remark that so far
from not eating meat when Christ’s nativity fell on a Friday, “the very
walls should eat flesh on such a day, or if they cannot should at any
rate be greased outside,” recalls the flouter of Pharisaism, and we
catch the voice of an authentic master in his exposition of a passage of
Ezekiel to a peace-loving doctor of divinity perturbed about the text:
“If thou proclaim not to the wicked man his wickedness, I will require
his soul at thy hand.” It was by the brightness of his own life and the
perfume of his fame, said St. Francis, that the servant of God
proclaimed their wickedness to the wicked. That was not precisely the
method of Jesus, and herein St. Francis is more Christian than Christ.
Nevertheless, if one had not his Hindu utterances to supplement his
Christian, there would be little to distinguish the skinny black-eyed
little strolling preacher from the numberless narrow-browed ascetics of
the Church except his childishly dramatic delivery, his success in
founding an Order and his redeeming weakness for talking bad French. It
is that strange animism of his which gives him his hold upon us, which,
not content with reading a soul into the bird, the fish, the grasshopper
and the wolf, extends with half-savage, half-childish personalisation to
fire and water, and even to wood and stone, nay to the very letters of
the alphabet, so that he will not erase a letter even when he has set it
down in error. Behind this divination of life in all things must have
lain an exquisite sensibility, and it was thus his unfortunate fate to
be supremely alive to beauty—even in woman—yet to be driven by his
creed to the worship of sorrow, abnegation and self-inflicted pain,
though even from these his subtle nervous system could snatch a rare
moment of ecstasy, for so delicately was he strung that the mere words
“the love of God” set up a sweet vibration like a plectrum striking a
lute. How indeed should the gay knight, whom his comrades elected “King
of the fools,” change his sensitive skin, merely because he turned to be
“God’s fool?” If he now found his joy in the ecstasy of mystic communion
and absolute abnegation, the joy was still at his core, and however he
might afflict his body, with a sub-conscious sense of setting a model to
his weaker brethren, it was impossible for him to subdue his
sun-worship, or not to delight in the ripple of water, and the grace of
birds and flowers and women. And herein he differs from the Buddha with
whose life-story and tenderness for all creation he has so much in
common, but to whom this world is merely a mistake to be endured till
the nullity of Nirvana is attained. Even the pseudo-Christian theory of
this vale of tears is not so pessimistic as Buddhism, for the lachrymose
vale is merely the prelude to a mountain of bliss, and Schopenhauer’s
attempt to pair Christianity with Buddhism overlooked that the Buddhist
saint lives to die and the Christian dies to live. Kuenen showed much
deeper insight when he pointed out that Buddha does not value purity and
renunciation as virtue—he is “beyond good and evil”—but as the best
means of escape from life. But for St. Francis the world is not a vale
of tears. Indeed the conception of a world of sorrow is contradicted by
the sorrowful lives of the saints. For abnegation is pointless if there
is no happiness to be surrendered. The pathos of the life of St. Francis
lies precisely in his exquisite capacity for terrestrial happiness, and
in his daily crucifixion of every natural desire at the bidding of a
vicious theory of virtue, to which a natural want means something
created by God in order to be thwarted, and which makes a vice of every
necessity. Fortunately he had from his Hindu side the saving grace of
joyousness, and could rebuke the saturnine visage of professional
sanctity and even—towards the end—his own barbarity to that brotherly
ass, his body.
His disciples, whose affinities with him were so imperfect that his most
devoted biographer is the author of the “Dies Iræ,” attempt indeed to
harmonise the two halves of his personality by the mediation of texts.
If he loves even the humble worm, it is because “he had read that word
concerning the Saviour: ‘I am a worm and no man,’” and if he treads
reverently on the stone, it is not from some mystic sense of a
stone-life or some sacramental sense of a divine immanence, but “for
love of Him who is called the Rock.” That his delight in water should be
traced to its baptismal uses, and his prohibition against cutting down
the whole of a tree to a reverence for the material of the cross, was,
of course, inevitable. Nor is it impossible that St. Francis
occasionally glossed himself over to himself, and it is quite probable
that his special tenderness for the hooded lark was due to its
quasi-monkish cowl, and that his comparative coldness to the ant reposed
upon its providing for the morrow. For it was his tragedy to be torn
between a blithe personal revelation of the divine and a stereotyped
tradition of sorrow, to constrict his spiritual genius to a
cut-and-dried scheme of salvation, and to be crucified on a second-hand
cross. The stigmata which are the best proof of his hyperæsthesia are
likewise the best evidence of his spiritual plagiarism and his
comparative failure. For to be crucified is not to be Christ. Jesus did
not set out to be crucified, but to do his and his Father’s work.
Crucifixion came in the day’s work, but was its interruption, not its
fulfilment. The true imitation of Christ is to do one’s work though men
crucify one. But deliberately to seek crucifixion—even crucifixion of
one’s natural desires—is to imitate the accident, not the essence. A
still greater perversion is it to brood upon the crude insignia of the
Passion till auto-hypnotism works miracles in the flesh.
The followers of St. Francis pushed the plagiarism so far as to
adumbrate a parallel legend, with a descent into Purgatory and a John of
the Chapel who fell away and hanged himself, and by the latter end of
the fourteenth century the parallel was made precise and perfect in the
_Liber Conformitatum_ of Bartolommeo of Pisa. But the copy is only
superficially true to the original. There is nothing in the story of the
great Galilæan to justify the perpetual self-torture of St. Francis in
his morbid quest of perfect humility and sinlessness. On the contrary,
Jesus speaks with so god-like an assurance of righteousness that it has
become one of the chief arguments for his divinity, as it is the chief
stumbling-block to the efficacy of his example. For if God was made not
man but superman, we can no more emulate this superman’s goodness than
his power of creating loaves and fishes in a crisis. Only if Jesus were
not God is his example valuable. But man or superman, he did not sap his
energies by brooding on his own vileness. Buddhism, with all the apathy
that its pessimism engenders, is healthier here, since (according to the
Mahâviyûhassutta) the _Muni_, the Master of renunciation, never blames
himself.
I sympathise cordially with the perplexities of Brother Masseo, who,
according to the “Analecta Franciscana,” lost his naturally cheerful
countenance under the difficulty of believing himself viler than the
vicious loafer; and who, when this peak of humility was by grace
attained, found himself in fresh despondency before the new Alp that
rose on the horizon. “I am sad because I cannot get to the point of
feeling that if any one cut off my hands or feet or plucked my eyes out,
though I had served him to the best of my power, still I could love him
as much as I did before, and be equally pleased to hear him well spoken
of.” Poor Masseo! Why should this worthy brother, a man, according to
the _Fioretti_, of great eloquence and belonging to the inner circle of
St. Francis, waste his time and spoil his valuable cheerfulness over
such hypothetic absurdities? The humour of the last clause is worthy of
Gilbert.
It is in face of such a _heautontimorumenos_ as poor Brother Masseo that
I revolt against all this strained ethics, this gymnast virtue demanding
years of training to force the soul into some unnatural posture which it
can only sustain at best for a few seconds. I could weep over all this
wasted goodness when I think of the wrongs crying out for justice, the
voice of lamentation that rises daily from the wan places of the world.
How much there is for Hercules to labour at without standing on his head
and balancing the seven deadly virtues on his toes! The beauty of
holiness is often put on the same level as the holiness of beauty, as a
self-sufficient ideal. But even as false ideals of beauty may impose
themselves, so may false ideals of holiness. The static sanctity of a
Stylites has long been relegated to those false ideals, and even a St.
Francis cannot be accepted as a model for to-day, though a few satiated
souls may yearn after abnegation as the last luxury of the spirit. There
is much barren æsthetic admiration wasted upon religious maxims which it
is admitted would overturn society if acted upon; and it is
questionable, therefore, whether there is any real beauty in these, any
more than in jewelled watches that will not go. Even when a rare saint
acts upon them, they seem to produce spiritual sickliness rather than
spiritual health. There is, perhaps, a finer beauty of holiness in the
life of a wise and good man of the world with a sense of humour, than in
the life of an ecstatic and underfed saint, whose very notion of the
Fatherhood of God lacks the reality and fulness that come from
paternity.
There are few things in literature more touchingly simple than those
adventures in search of holiness, that picaresque novel of the spirit,
known as “The Little Flowers of St. Francis.” These gentle souls, who
wander without food or knapsack, under the tutelage of the seraphic
saint, through the enchanting valleys and hills of unspoiled
thirteenth-century Italy, and adventuring in even more glamorous regions
hold strange parleyings with the Soldan of Babylon, have upon them a
morning light of innocence and that perfume of holiness which can never
fail to justify the Master’s exposition of Ezekiel. If anything could
add to the sweetness of the idyll, it is the spiritual loves of St.
Francis and St. Clara. And yet our adoration of St. Francis must not
blind us to the questionable aspects of the chronicle. “I may yet have
sons and daughters,” he replied deprecatingly to one who proclaimed him
blessed and holy. What a caricature of true ethics! Even the poverty for
which he was “so greedy” is impossible if everybody is greedy for it,
and the abnegation he practised he could not have preached. Otherwise
when he tossed his own tunic to a shivering beggar, he should have
inspired the beggar to toss it back to his now shivering self, and so
_ad infinitum_. That game of tunic-tennis with nothing ever scored but
“love” would have been true Franciscanism, but also its _reductio ad
absurdum_. I do not wonder that Goethe smiled at the “Heiliger” of
Assisi, for neglecting to visit whose shrine he was nearly arrested as a
smuggler.
Yes, the bland brother does well to babble of the cabbage planted with
its leaves in the ground. For he has blundered into the very essence of
the Master’s teaching: this topsy-turvydom, these roots in the air, are
the secret of St. Francis’s success. There is a tendency to blame our
paradoxists, to deride their inversions as mechanical. But St. Francis
is an inversion incarnate, a paradox in flesh and blood. While with
other men Property is a sacred concept, a fetish guarded by a mesh of
laws, he refuses to own anything and even disposes with blasphemous
levity of other people’s property. Theft he daringly defines as not to
give something to anybody who has greater need of it than oneself. He
hated Property, not as the Socialist hates it who covets its
communalisation, but as something in itself evil. These practical
inversions of his have the same excuse as those of the literary
paradoxist. Nothing less than this violent antithesis will suffice to
shake men’s notions from the _rigor mortis_ that overtakes even true
ideas, or to offset the exaggeration which gradually falsifies them. One
false extreme must be met by another, if the happy mean is to be struck.
Pray do not imagine I would endorse Aristotle’s doctrine of the mean, or
the popular platitude that truth always lies midway between two extreme
views. On the contrary, truth is often the most violent and extreme of
all possible propositions and right action the most violent and extreme
of all possible forms of conduct. But the system of St. Francis needed
as much contradiction from the world of common sense as the world of
common sense needed from it. In so far as it was Christian, it was an
imitation of early Christianity, minus the time-limit which justified
its model. But the right course of action when the world is about to
come to an end will not necessarily be the right course if the world is
indefinitely to be continued in our next. In such a world the system of
St. Francis is an impossibility, if only because it would bring the
world to an end by lack of population. And if it really succeeded, it
would bring itself to an end even before the world, for in the absence
of owners there would be none to receive alms from, none to bake that
bread which St. Francis naïvely regarded as coming by grace as simply as
water. This absolute avoidance of money resembles, indeed, nothing so
much as banking, which is possible only if the bulk of the investors do
not ask for their money at the same time. It is on the certainty of his
failure that the success of a saint reposes. His disciples will never be
more than a miserable minority and so he will seem recuperative and not
destructive to society. The exaggeration of his holiness will mitigate
the materialism of the average man. Dives will not give up his dinner
but he will drop a crumb for Lazarus and another for the saint, and
perhaps eat only salmon and trout on Fridays. It is this reflection that
he incarnates for the race an ideal of perfection, imperfect though it
be in its impossibility, that reconciles me to the saint, as the
reflection that the Church Fathers were engaged in fashioning that ideal
reconciles me to their meticulous morality, in a world so given over to
slaughter, sensuality and every abomination of injustice that their fine
shades and their notion of an impassable infinity between right and the
smallest wrong appear ludicrously disproportionate and academic.
The saint on this theory is a scapegoat, a victim on the altar of human
selfishness; he does, suffers, or gives up, too much because most other
persons do, suffer, or give up, too little. He is sacrificed to the
balance of things, or as St. Paul put it, he is the leaven to the lump.
Yet things would overbalance were he too successful, and too much leaven
would spoil the lump.
If there is within St. Francis an unresolved discord between Hinduism
and Christianity, still more jarring is the outer discord between Nature
and Christianity which he tried so heroically to harmonise. Don Quixote
tilting at windmills is a practical figure beside St. Francis trying to
Christianise bird and beast. The consciously grotesque pathos of
Cervantes is surpassed by the unconsciously grotesque pathos of the
chronicles of St. Francis. The struggle for existence in Nature—the
angler’s hook and the birdcatcher’s snare—can hardly be glossed over by
sermons to the birds and the fishes. Doubtless St. Francis had—as some
sinners have to-day—a strange power of fascination over the lower
creatures, but the butcher was not eliminated because St. Francis
occasionally bought off a lamb or a turtle-dove. We know too little of
the psychology of wild beasts to deny that he tamed the Wolf of
Agobio—though it is permissible to doubt the civil contract with
Brother Wolf which in Sassetta’s fanciful picture is even drawn up by a
notary; nor is the stone record of the miracle you may read to-day on
the façade of that little church in Gubbio which was set up three
centuries later, nor even the skull of Brother Wolf himself,
found—according to a lady writer on Gubbio—“precisely on the spot
pointed out by tradition as the burial-place of the beast,” and “now in
the possession of a gentleman at Scheggia,” as convincing a testimony as
she imagines “to the indubitable truth of the tradition, and to the
superhuman power of love towards every living creature.” Love has no
such power to turn lions and wolves into civil contractors or
vegetarians. There is a battle of beneficent and sinister forces in the
universe, which Persian speculation has always recognised frankly, but
which Hebraic and Hindu systems, by their higher synthesis of Love or
Good, unconsciously whittle away into a sham fight, or at best a
tournament; a play of God with His own forces. ’Tis Docetism writ
larger. But whether the fight be sham or real, the universe is not run
on a Franciscan system, and it is this which makes the pathos and the
grotesquerie of the saint’s attempts to equate the macrocosm with his
autocosm. Yes, St. Francis is as nobly mad as Don Quixote. Nay, towards
the end, where the cavalier of Christ, broken by disease in the prime of
his years—disease of the spleen, disease of the liver, disease of the
stomach, disease of the eyes—macerated by senseless privations, a mere
substratum for poultices and fomentations and cauterisations, scarcely
even washing himself for fear of ostentating the stigmata, still sings
songs of praise so blithely as to scandalise his companions’ sense of
death-bed decency, we touch a more Quixotic pathos than anything in
Cervantes.
And these legends of his pious influence over the cicala and the swallow
and the wolf, this tench that plays around his boat, this pheasant that
haunts his cell, this falcon that wakes him for matins during his fast
in the mountain, these birds that fly off in four companies like a cross
after devoutly digesting his sermon, all make for the comity of
creation, especially in Italy, where animals have no souls, only bodies
that may be ill-used: indeed, St. Francis—with his disciple St. Antony
of Padua—contributes to Christianity that missing note of respect for
the animal creation which Hinduism expresses “in the great word
_Tat-twam-asi_ (This is thyself!).” And here at least modern thought is
with St. Francis and his Hindu universalism. The evolution theory is
usually considered a depressing doctrine, yet it has its stimulating
aspects. For though we may doubt if St. Francis converted the wolf, we
cannot doubt that Nature Christianised it, or at least some creature as
low and savage. For from some gibbering ferocious brute there did, in
the process of the suns, emerge a seraphic, selfless being with love for
all creation. The wolf, in fact, became St. Francis; a more notable
conversion than any in the missionary books.
But what did St. Francis become? Here the record is not so stimulating;
here begins degeneration, devolution. Before he died he was an idol and
the nominal centre of vast organisations, lay as well as monastic,
female as well as male, and in this success lay his defeat. _Lachrymæ
rerum_ inhere even more in success than in failure. The portrait of St.
Francis by Ribera which may be seen at Florence—a melancholy monk with
his eyes turned up, holding a skull—was no sadder caricature of the
blithe little man who swept out dirty churches with a broom than these
gigantic and infinitely quarrelsome organisations were of his teaching.
A great man may either influence humanity by his solitary work or he may
found an institution. The institution (if adequately financed) will
live, but with himself squeezed out of it—for worship at a safe height.
The squeezing out of St. Francis from Franciscanism began even before
his death—the Papacy pressing from without and his own vicars from
within. That very sensible fear of Brother William of
Nottingham—evidently a practical Briton—that superfluities would grow
up in the Order as insensibly as hairs in the beard, was more than
verified. The dangerous rule of Absolute Poverty was relaxed, scholastic
learning was reinstalled in its armchair, a network of rules replaced
the rule of the spirit, and the little brotherhood that had lain on
straw and tattered mattresses in the Portiuncula swelled and split into
Conventualists and Observants, the majority established in magnificent
monasteries. St. Francis lamented the degeneration of the brethren,
though he characteristically refused to punish it. And when he was quite
squeezed to death there began a fight for his body—holy body-snatching
was a feature of the Middle Ages—and that vile enemy of the soul which
he had battled against all his life took his place as the centre of the
cult. Perugia, holding by force the body of St. Giles, removed from
Assisi the only possible rival of his relics. His very poultice is still
preserved as an object of edification.