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HODDER AND STOUGHTON'S
PEOPLE'S LIBRARY

General Editor: Sidney Dark

HODDER AND STOUGHTON'S
PEOPLE'S LIBRARY

GENERAL EDITOR: SIDNEY DARK

a/6 net each volume

ST. FRANCIS OF ASSISI. By
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON.

VICTORIAN POETRY.
DRINKWATER.

By JOHN

EVER YDA Y BIOLOGY. By J.
ARTHUR THOMSON.

THE POETRY OF ARCHITECTURE.
By FRANK RUTTER.
THE STORY OF THE RENAIS-
:;ANCE. By SIDNEY DARIt.
ATOMS AND ELECTRONS. By
J. W. N. SULLIVAN.
HOW TO READ HISTORY. By W.
WATKIN DAVIES.

OUR DEBT TO GREECE AND
ROME. By E. B. OSBORN.
HOW TO ENJOY THE COUNTRY-
SIDE. By MARCUS WOODWARD.
HOW TO EN JOY LIFE. By SIDNEY
D ^ RK.

HOW TO ENJ0Y THE BIBLE. By
CANON ANTHONY C. DEANE, M.A.
ST. PAUL'S HOUSE, WARWICK SQUARK,E.C.4

ST. FRANCIS OF
ASSISI

BY

G. K. CHESTERTON

H
S

HODDER AND STOUGHTON LTD.
LONDON TORONTO

General Preface

THE object of HODDER AND STOUGHTON'S
PEOPLE'S LIBRARY is to supply in brief form
simply written introductions to the study of
History, Literature, Biography and Science;
in some degree to satisfy that ever-increasing
demand for knowledge which is one of the
happiest characteristics of our time. The
names of the authors of the first volumes of
the Library are sufficient evidence of the fact
that each subject will be dealt with authorita-
tively, while the authority will not be of the
U dry-ac:;-dust" order. Not only is it possible
to have learning without tears, but it is also
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ledge a thrilling and ent
rtaining adventure.
HODDER AND STOUGHTON'S PEOPLE'S LIBRARY
will. it is hoped. supply this adventure.

Printedi" Great Britai". R. C/aJ'
S(I"S, Lftl., P,-inters, Btmcay.

Contents

PAGK

CHAPTER I
THE PROBLE
I OF ST. FRANCIS

7

CHAPTER II
THE WORLD ST. FRANCIS FOUND

18

CHAPTER I I I
FRANCIS THE FIGHTER

4 0

CHAPTER IV
FRANCIS THE BUILDER

58

CHAPTER V
Lit JOXGLEUR DE DIEU .
CHAPTER VI
THE LITTLE POOR MAN .

74

94

CHAPTER VII
THE THREE ORDERS

113

CHAPTER VIII
THE MIRROR OF CHRIST .

133

CHAPTER IX
MIRACLES AND DEATH

153

CHAPTER X
THE TESTAMENT OF ST. FRANCIS

17 2

v

Chapter 1

crhe Problem of St. FranciJ

A SKETCH of St. Francis of Assisi in modem
English may be written in one of three ways.
Between these the writer must make his selection;
and the third way, which is adopted here, is
in some respects the most difficult of all. At
least, it would be the most difficult if the other
two were not impossible.
First, he may deal with this great and most
amazing man as a figure in secular history and
a model of social virtues. He ma y describe
this divine demagogue as being, as he probably
was, the world's one quite sincere democrat.
He may say (what means very little) that St.
Francis was in advance of his age. He may say
(what is quite true) that St. Francis anticipated
all that is most liberal and sympathetic in the
modem mood; the love of nature; the love of
animals; the sense of social com passion; the
sense of the spiritual dangers of prosperity and
even of property. All those things that no bod y
understood before Wordsworth were familiar
to St. Francis. All those things that were
first discovered by Tolstoy had been taken for
granted by St. Francis. He could be presented,
7

8

St. Francis of Assisi

not only as a human but a humanitarian hero;
indeed as the first hero of humanism. He has
been described as a sort of morning star of the
Renaissance. And in comparison with all these
things, his ascetical theology can be ignored or
dismissed as a contemporary accident, which
was fortunately not a fatal accident. His
religion can be regarded as a superstition, but
an inevitable superstition, from which not even
genius could wholly free itself; in the consider-
a tion of which it would be unjust to condemn
St. Francis for his self-denial or unduly chide him
for his chastity. It is quite true that even
from so detached a standpoint his stature
would still appear heroic. There would still
be a great deal to be said about the man who
tried to end the Crusades by talking to the
Saracens or who interceded with the Emperor
for the birds. The writer might describe in a
purely historical spirit the whole of that great
Franciscan inspiration that was felt in the
painting of Giotto, in the poetry of Dante, in
the miracle plays that made possible the modem
drama, and in so many other things that are
already appreciated by the modern culture.
He may try to do it, as others have done, almost
without raising any religious question at all.
In short, he may try to tell the story of a saint
without God; which is like being told to write
the life of Nansen and forbidden to mention
the North Pole.

1"he Problem of St. FranciJ 9
Second, he may go to the opposite extreme,
and decide, as it were, to be defiantly devotional.
He may make the theological enthusiasm as
thoroughly the theme as it was the theme of
the first Franciscans. He may treat religion
as the real thing that it was to the real Francis
of Assisi. He can find an austere joy, so to
speak, in parading the paradoxes of asceticism
and all the holy topsy-turvydom of humility.
He can stamp the whole history with the Stig-
mata, record fasts like fights against a dragon;
till in the vague modern mind St. Francis is as
dark a figure as St. Dominic. In short he can
produce what many in our world will regard as
a sort of photographic negative, the reversal
of all lights and shades; what the foolish will
find as impenetrable as darkness and even many
of the wise will find almost as invisible as if
it were \vritten in silver upon white. Such a
study of St. Francis would be unintelligible to
anyone who does not share his religion, perhaps
only partly intelligible to anyone who does not
share his vocation. According to degrees of
judgment, it will be regarded as something too
bad or too good for the world. The only difficulty
about doing the thing in this way is that it cannot
be done. It would really require a saint to
write the life of a saint. In the present case
the objections to such a course are insuperable.
Third, he may try to do what I have tried
to do here; and, as I have already suggested,

10

St. Francis of Assisi

the course has peculiar problems of its own.
The writer may put himself in the position of
the ordinary modern outsider and enquirer;
as indeed the present writer is still largely and
was once entirely in that position. He may
start from the standpoint of a man who already
admires St. Francis, but only for those things
which such a man finds admirable. In other
words he may assume that the reader is at least
as enlightened as Renan or Matthew Arnold;
but in the light of that enlightenment he may try
to illuminate what Renan and Matthew Arnold
left dark. He may try to use what is under-
stood to explain what is not understood. He
may say to the modern English reader: II Here is
an historical character which is admittedly attrac-
tive to many of us already, by its gaiety, its
romantic imagination, its spiritual courtesy and
camaraderie, but which also contains elements
(evidently equally sincere and emphatic) which
seem to you quite remote and repulsive. But
after all, this man was a man and not half a dozen
men. What seems inconsistency to you did
not seem inconsistency to him. Let us see
whether we can understand, with the help of
the existing understanding, these other things
that seem now to be doubly dark, by their
intrinsic gloom and their ironic contrast." I do
not mean, of course, that I can realJy reach
such a pyschological completeness in this crude
and curt outline. But I mean that this is the

'Ihe Problem of St. Francis I I
on1y controversial condition that I shall here
assume; that I am dealing with the sympathetic
outsider. I shall not assume any more or any less
agreement than this. A materialist may not care
whether the inconsistencies are reconciled or not.
A Catholic may not see any inconsistencies to
reconcile. But I am here addressing the ordinary
modern man, sympathetic but sceptical, and I
can only rather hazily hope that, by approaching
the great saint's story through what is evidently
picturesque and popular about it, I may at least
leave the reader understanding a little more
than he did before of the consistency of a complete
character; that by approaching it in this way,
we may at least get a glimmering of why the
poet who praised his lord the sun, often hid
himself in a dark cavern, of why the saint who
was so gentle with his Brother the \Volf was
so harsh to his Brother the Ass (as he nicknamed
his own body), of why the troubadour who said
that love set his heart on fire separated himself
from women, of why the singer who rejoiced
in the strength and gaiety of the fire deliberately
rolled himself in the snow, of why the very song
which cries with all the passion of a pagan,
" Praised be God for our Sister, 1Iother Earth,
which brings forth varied fruits and grass and
glowing flowers," ends almost \vi th the words
" Praised be God for our Sister, the death of
the body."
Renan and }rlatthew Arnold failed utterly at

IZ

St. Francis of Âssisi

this test. They were content to follow Francis
with their praises until they were stopped by
their prej udices; the stub born prej udices of the
sceptic. The moment Francis began to do some-
thing they did not understand or did not like,
they did not try to understand it, still less to
like it; they simply turned their backs on the
whole business and U walked no more with him."
No man will get any further along a path of
historical enquiry in that fashion. These sceptics
are really driven to drop the whole subject in
despair, to leave the most simple and sincere
of all historical characters as a mass of contra-
dictions, to be praised on the principle of the
curate's egg. Arnold refers to the asceticism of
Alverno almost hurriedly, as if it were an unlucky
but undeniable blot on the beauty of the story;
or rather as if it were a pitiable break-down
and bathos at the end of the story. Now
this is simply to be stone-blind to the whole
point of any story. To represent Mount Alverno
as the mere collapse of Francis is exactly like
representing Mount Calvary as the mere collapse
of Christ. Those mountains are mountains,
whatever else they are, and it is nonsense to say
(like the Red Queen) that they are compara-
tive hollows or negative holes in the ground.
They were quite manifestly meant to be culmin-
ations and landmarks. To treat the Stigmata
as a sort of scandal, to be touched on tenderly
but with pain, is exactly like treating the original

'Ihe Problem of St. Francis 13
five wounds of Jesus Christ as five blots on His
character. You may dislike the idea of asceticism;
you may dislike equally the idea of martyrdom;
for that matter you may have an honest and
natural dislike of the whole conception of sacrifice
symbolised by the cross. But if it is an intelligent
dislike, you will still retain the capacity for
seeing the point of a story; of the story of a
martyr or even the story of a monk. You will
not be able rationally to read the Gospel and
regard the Crucifixion as an afterthought or an
anti-climax or an accident in the life of Christ;
it is obviously the point of the story like the
point of a sword, the sword that pierced the
heart of the Mother of God.
And you will not be able rationally to read
the story of a man presented as a Mirror of
Christ without understanding his final phase
as a Man of Sorrows, and at least artistically
appreciating the appropriateness of his receiving,
in a cloud of mystery and isolation, inflicted
by no human hand, the unhealed everlasting
wounds that heal the world.
The practical reconciliation of the gaiety and
austerity I must leave the story itself to suggest.
But since I have mentioned l\Iatthew Arnold
and Renan and the ra tionalistic admirers of
St. Francis, I will here give the hint of what
it seems to me most advisable for such readers
to keep in mind. These distinguished writers
found things like the Stigmata a stumbling-

14

St. Francis of Assisi

block because to them a religion was a philosophy.
I t was an impersonal thing; and it is only the
most personal passion that provides here an
approximate earthly parallel. A man will not
roll in the sno\v for a stream of tendency by which
all things fulfil the law of their being. He will
not go without food in the name of something,
not ourselves, that makes for righteousness.
He will do things like this, or pretty nearly like
this, under quite a different impulse. He will
do these things when he is in love. The first
fact to realise about S1. Francis is involved
in the first fact with which his story starts;
that when he said from the first that he was a
Troubadour, and said later that he was a Trouba-
dour of a newer and nobler romance, he was
not using a mere metaphor, but understood
himself much better than the scholars understand
him. He was, to the last agonies of asceticism,
a Troubadour. He was a Lover. He was a
lover of God and he was really and truly a lover
of men; possibly a much rarer mystical vocation.
A lover of men is very nearly the opposite of a
philanthropist; indeed the pedantry of the Greek
word carries something like a satire on itself.
A philanthropist may be said to love anthropoids.
But as St. Francis did not love humanity but
men, so he did not love Christianity but Christ.
Say, if you think so, that he was a lunatic loving
an imaginary person; but an imaginary person,
not an imaginary idea. And for the modern

.

'[he Problem of St. Franct's IS
reader the clue to the asceticism and all the rest
can best be found in the stories of lovers when
they seemed to be rather like lunatics. Tell
it as the tale of one of the Troubadours, and the
wild things he would do for his lady, and the
whole of the modem puzzle disappears. In
such a romance there would be no contradiction
between the poet gathering flowers in the sun
and enduring a freezing vigil in the snow, between
his praising all earthly and bodily beauty and
then refusing to eat, between his glorifying gold
and purple and perversely going in rags, between
his showing pathetically a hunger for a happy
life and a thirst for a heroic death. All these
riddles would easily be resolved in the simplicity
of any noble love ; only this was so noble a
love that nine men out of ten have hardly even
heard of it. We shall see later that this parallel
of the earthly lover has a very practical relation
to the problems of his life, as to his relations
with his father and with his friends and their
families. The modem reader will almost always
find that if he could only feel this kind of love
as a reality, he could feel this kind of extrava-
gance as a romance. But I only note it here
as a preliminary point because, though it is
very far from being the final truth in the matter,
it is the best approach to it. The reader cannot
even begin to see the sense of a story that may
well seem to him a very wild one, until he under-
stands that to this great mystic his religion

16

St. Francis of Assisi

was not a thing like a theory but a thing like a
love-affair. And the only purpose of this
prefatory chapter is to eXylain the limits of this
present book; which is only addressed to that
part of the modern world which finds in St.
Francis a certain modern difficulty; which can
admire him yet hardly accept him, or which
can appreciate the saint almost without the
sanctity. And my only claim even to attempt
such a task is that I myself have for so long
been in various stages of such a condition. Many
thousand things that I now partly comprehend
I should have thought utterly incomprehensible,
many things I now hold sacred I should have
scouted as utterly superstitious, many things
that seem to me lucid and enlightened now they
are seen from the inside I should honestly have
called dark and barbarous seen from the outside,
when long ago in those days of boyhood my
fancy first caught fire with the glory of Francis
of Assisi. I too have lived in Arcady; but
even in Arcady I met one walking in a brown
habit who loved the woods better than Pan.
The figure in the brown habit stands above the
hearth in the room where I write, and alone among
many such images, at no stage of my pilgrimage
has he ever seemed to me a stranger. There is
something of harmony between the hearth and
the firelight and my own first pleasure in his
words about his brother fire; for he stands far
enough back in my memory to mingle with all

'Ihe Problem of St. Francis 17
those more domestic dreams of the first days.
Even the fantastic shadows thrown by fire make
a sort Qf shadow pantomime that belongs to
the nursery; yet the shadows were even then
the shadows of his favourite beasts and birds,
as he saw them, grotesque but haloed with the
love of God. His Brother Wolf and Brother
Sheep seemed then almost like the Brer Fox
and Brer Rabbit of a more Christian Uncle
Remus. I have come slowly to see many and
more marvellous aspects of such a man, but
I have never lost that one. His figure stands
on a sort of bridge connecting my boyhood with
my conversion to many other things; for the
romance of his religion had penetra ted even
the rationalism of that vague Victorian time.
In so far as I have had this experience, I may
be able to lead others a little further along that
road; but only a very little further. Nobody
knows better than I do now that it is a road
upon which angels might fear to tread; but
though I am certain of failure I am not altogether
overcome by fear; for he suffered fools gladly.

B

Chapter II

crhe IV orld St. Francis Found

THE modern innovation which has substituted
journalism for history, or for that tradition that
is the gossip of history, has had at least one definite
effect. It has insured that everybody should
only hear the end of every story. Journalists are
in the habit of printing above the very last
chapters of their serial stories (when the hero
and heroine are just about to embrace in the last
chapter, as only an unfathomable perversity
prevented them from doing in the first) the rather
misleading words, U You can begin this story
here." But even this is not a complete parallel;
for the journals do give some sort of a summary
of the story, while they never give anything
remotely resembling a summary of the history.
Newspapers not only deal with news, but they
deal with everything as if it were entirely new.
Tutankamen, for instance, was entirely new. It
is exactly in the same fashion that we read that
Admiral Bangs has been shot, which is the first
intimation we have that he has ever been born.
There is something singularly significant in the
use which journalism makes of its stores of
biography. I t never thinks of publishing the
18

'Ihe IV orld St. Francis Found 19
life until it is publishing the death. As it deals
with individuals it deals with institutions and
ideas. After the Great War our public began
to be told of all sorts of nations being emancipated.
I t had never been told a word about their being
enslaved. \Ve were caned upon to judge of the
justice of the settlements, when we had never
been allowed to hear of the very existence of
the quarrels. People would think it pedantic
to talk about the Serbian epics and they prefer
to speak in plain every-day modern language
about the Yugo-Slavonic international new diplo-
macy; and they are quite excited about some-
thing they call Czecho-Slovakia \vithout appar-
ently having ever heard of Bohemia. Things
that are as old as Europe are regarded as more
recent than the very latest claims pegged out on
the prairies of America, It is very exciting; like
the last act of a play to people who have only
come into the theatre just before the curtain falls.
But it does not conduce exactly to knowing what
it is all about. To those content \vith the
mere fact of a pistol-shot or a passionate embrace,
such a leisurely manner of patronising the drama
may be recommended. To those tormented by
a merely intellectual curiosity about \vho is kissing
or killing whom, and why, it is unsatisfactory.

Iost modern history, especially in England,
suffers from the same imperfection as journalism.
At best it only tells half of the history of Christen-
dom; and that the second half without the first

20

St. Francis of Assisi

half. Men for whom reason begins with the
Revival of Learning, men for whom religion
begins with the Reformation, can never give a
complete account of anything, for they have to
start with institutions whose origin they cannot
explain, or generally even imagine. ] ust as we
hear of the admiral being shot but have never
heard of his being born, so we all heard a great
deal about the dissolution of the monasteries,
but we heard next to nothing about the creation
of the monasteries. N ow this sort of history
would be hopelessly insufficient, even for an
intelligent man who hated the monasteries.
I t is hopelessly insufficient in connection with
institutions that many intelligent men do in a
quite healthy spirit hate. For instance, it is
possible that some of us have occasionally seen
some mention, by our learned leader-writers, of
an obscure institution called the Spanish Inquisi-
tion. Well, it really is an obscure institution,
according to them and the histories they read.
It is obscure because its origin is obscure. Pro-
testant history simply begins with the horrible
thing in possession, as the pantomime begins
with the demon king in the goblin kitchen. It
is likely enough that it was, especially towards
the end, a horrible thing that might be haunted
by demons; but if we say this was so, we have
no notion why it was so. To understand the
Spanish Inquisition it would be necessary to
discover two things that we have never dreamed

'Ihe World St. Francis Found 21

of bothering about; what Spain was and what an
Inquisition was. The former would bring in the
whole great question about the Crusade against
the Moors; and by what heroic chivalry a
European nation freed itself of an alien domination
from Africa. The latter would bring in the whole
business of the other Crusade against the Albigen-
sians, and why men loved and hated that nihilistic
vision from Asia. Unless we understand that there
was in these things originally the rush and romance
of a Crusade, we cannot understand how they
came to deceive men or drag them on towards
evil. The Crusaders doubtless abused their
victory, but there was a victory to abuse. And
where there is victory there is valour in the field
and popularity in the forum. There is some sort
of enthusiasm that encourages excesses or covers
faults. For instance, I for one have maintained
from very early days the responsibility of the
English for their atrocious treatment of the
Irish. But it would be quite unfair to the English
to describe even the devilry of J 98 and leave out
altogether all mention of the war with Napoleon.
It would be unjust to suggest that the English
mind was bent on nothing but the death of
Emmett, when it was more probably full of the
glory of the death of Nelson. Unfortunately
J 9 8 was very far from being the last date of such
dirty work; and only a few years ago our politic-
ians started trying to rule by random robbing
and killing, while gently remonstrating with the

22

St. Francis of A ssisi

Irish for their memory of old unhappy far-off
things and battles long ago. But however badly
we may think of the Black-and-Tan business,
it would be unjust to forget that most of us were
not thinking of Black-and-Tan but of khaki; and
that khaki had just then a noble and national
connotation covering many things. To write
of the war in Ireland and leave out the war
against Prussia, and the English sincerity a bout
it, would be unjust to the English. So to talk
about the torture-engine as if it had been a
hideous toy is unjust to the Spanish. It does not
tell sensibly from the start the story of what the
Spaniard did, and why. We may concede to
our contemporaries that in any case it is not a
story that ends well. We do not insist that
in their version it should begin well. What \ve
complain of is that in their version it does not
begin at all. They are only in at the death;
or even, like Lord Tom Noddy, too late for the
hanging. It is quite true that it was sometimes
more horrible than any hanging; but they only
gather, so to speak, the very ashes of the ashes;
the fag-end of the faggot.
The case of the Inquisition is here taken at
random, for it is one among any number illus-
trating the same thing; and not because it is
especially connected with St. Francis, in whatever
sense it may have been connected with St.
Dominic. I t may well be suggested later indeed
that St. Francis is unintelligible, just as St.

'I he TV orld St. Francis Found 23

Dominic is unintelligible, unless we do understand
something of what the thirteenth century meant
by heresy and a crusade. But for the moment
I use it as a lesser example for a much larger
purpose. It is to point out that to begin the story
of St. Francis with the birth of St. Francis would
be to miss the whole point of the story, or rather
not to tell the story at all. And it is to suggest
that the modern tail-foremost type of journalistic
history perpetually fails us. We learn about
reformers without knowing what they had to
reform, about rebels without a notion of what
they rebelled against, of memorials that are
not connected \vith any memory and restorations
of things that had apparently never existed
before. Even at the expense of this chapter
appearing disproportionate, it is necessary to say
something about the great movements that led
up to the entrance of the founder of the Francis-
cans. I t may seem to mean describing a world,
or even a universe, in order to describe a man.
Y t will inevitably mean that the world or the
universe \vill be described with a few desperate
generalisations in a few abrupt sentences. But
so far from its meaning that we see a very small
figure under so large a sky, it will mean that we
must measure the sky before we can begin to
measure the towering stature of the man.
And this phrase alone brings me to the prelimi-
nary suggestions that seem necessary before even
a slight sketch of the life of St. Francis. It is

24

St. Francis of Assisi

necessary to realise, in however rude and elemen-
tary a fashion, into what sort of a world St.
Francis entered and what has been the history
of that world, at least in so far as it affected him.
It is necessary to have, if only in a few sentences,
a sort of preface in the form of an Outline of
History, if we may borrow the phrase of Mr.
Wells. In the case of
Ir. Wells himself, it is
evident that the distinguished novelist suffered
the same disadvantage as if he had been obliged
to write a novel of which he hated the hero. To
write history and hate Rome, both pagan and
papal, is practically to hate nearly everything
that has happened. It comes very near to hating
humanity on purely humanitarian grounds. To
dislike both the priest and the soldier, both the
laurels of the warrior and the lilies of the saint,
is to suffer a division from the mass of mankind
for which not all the dexterities of the finest
and most flexible of modem intelligences can
compensate. A much wider sympathy is needed
for the historical setting of St. Francis, himself
both a soldier and a sain t. I will therefore
conclude this chapter with a few generalisations
about the world that St. Francis found.
Men will not believe because they will not
broaden their minds. As a matter of individual
belief, I should of course express it by saying
that they are not sufficiently catholic to be
Catholic. But I am not going to discuss here
the doctrinal truths of Christianity, but simply

'['he IV arId St. Francis Found 25
the broad historical fact of Christianity, as it
might appear to a really enlightened and imagina-
tive person even if he were not a Christian.
What I mean at the moment is that the majority
of doubts are made out of details. In the course
of random reading a man comes across a pagan
custom that strikes him as picturesque or a
Christian action that strikes him as cruel; but
he does not enlarge his mind sufficiently to see
the main truth about pagan custom or the
Christian reaction against it. Until we under-
stand, not necessarily in detail, but in their big
bulk and proportion that pagan progress and that
Christian reaction, we cannot really understand
the point of history at which St. Francis appears
or what his great popular mission was all about.
Now everybody knows, I imagine, that the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries were an awaken-
ing of the world. They were a fresh flowering
of culture and the creative arts after a long spell
of much sterner and even more sterile experience
which \ve call the Dark Ages. They may be called
an emancipation; they were certainly an end;
an end of what may at least seem a harsher and
more inhuman time. But what was it that was
ended? From what was it that men were
emancipated? That is where there is a real
collision and point at issue bet\veen the different
philosophies of history. On the merely external
and secular side, it has been truly said that men
a \voke from a sleep; but there had been dreams

26

St. Francis of Assisi

in that sleep of a mystical and sometimes of a
monstrous kind. In that rationalistic routine
into which most modern historians have fallen,
it is considered enough to say that they were
emancipated from mere savage superstition and
advanced towards mere civilised enlightenment.
N ow this is the big blunder that stands as a
stumbling-block at the very beginning of our
story. Anybody who supposes that the Dark
Ages were plain darkness and nothing else, and
that the dawn of the thirteenth century was
plain daylight and nothing else, will not be able
to make head or tail of the human story of St.
Francis of Assisi. The truth is that the joy of
St. Francis and his Jongleurs de Dieu was not
merely an awakening. It was something which
cannot be understood without understanding
their own mystical creed. The end of the Dark
Ages was not merely the end of a sleep. It was
certainly not merely the end of a superstitious
enslavement. It waS the end of something
belonging to a quite definite but quite different
order of ideas.
It was the end of a penance; or, if it be pre-
ferred, a purgation. It marked the moment when a
certain spiritual expiation had been finally worked
out and certain spiritual diseases had been finally
expelled from the system. They had been
expelled by an era of asceticism, which was the
onl y thing that could have expelled them.
Christianity had entered the world to cure the

'The TV orZd St. Francis Found 27
world; and she had cured it in the only way in
which it could be cured.
Viewed merely in an external and experimental
fashion, the whole of the high civilisation of
antiquity had ended in the learning of a certain
lesson; that is, in its conversion to Christianity.
But that lesson was a psychological fact as well
as a theological faith. That pagan civilisation
had indeed been a very high civilisation. It
would not weaken our thesis, it might even
strengthen it, to say that it was the highest that
humanity ever reached. It had discovered its
still unn valled arts of poetry and plastic repre-
sentation; it had discovered its own permanent
political ideals; it had discovered its own clear
system of logic and of language. But above
all, it had discovered its own mistake.
Tha t mistake was too deep to be ideall y
defined; the short-hand of it is to call it the
mistake of nature-worship. It might almost as
truly be called the mistake of being natural;
and it was a very natural mistake. The Greeks,
the great guides and pioneers of pagan antiquity,
started out with the idea of something splendidly
obvious and direct; the idea that if man walked
straight ahead on the high road of reason and
nature, he could come to no harm; especially
if he was, as the Greek was, eminently enlightened
and intelligent. We might be so flippant as to
say that man was simply to follow his nose, so
long as it was a Greek nose. And the case of

28

St. Francis of Assisi

the Greeks themselves is alone enough to illustrate
the strange but certain fatality that attends upon
this fallacy. No sooner did the Greeks them-
selves begin to follow their own noses and their
own notion of being natural, than the queerest
thing in history seems to have happened to them.
It was much too queer to be an easy matter to
discuss. It may be remarked that our more
repulsive realists never give us the benefit of
their realism. Their studies of unsavoury subjects
never take note of the testimony which they bear
to the truths of a traditional morality. But if
we had the taste for such things, we could cite
thousands of such things as part of the case for
Christian morals. And an instance of this is
found in the fact that nobody has written, in
this sense, a real moral history of the Greeks.
Nobody has seen the scale or the strangeness of
the story. The wisest men in the world set out
to be natural; and the most unnatural thing in
the world was the very first thing they did. The
immediate effect of saluting the sun and the
sunny sanity of nature was a perversion spreading
like a pestilence. The greatest and even the
purest philosophers could not apparently avoid
this low sort of lunacy. Why? It would seem
simple enough for the people whose poets had
conceived Helen of Troy, whose sculptors had
carved the \T en us of Milo, to remain healthy on
the point. The truth is that people who worship
health cannot remain healthy. When Man goes

'The TV orId St. Francis Found 29
straigh t he goes crooked. When he foIIows his
nose he manages somehow to put his nose out of
joint, or even to cut off his nose to spite his face;
and that in accordance with something much
deeper in human nature than nature-worshippers
could ever understand. I t was the discovery
of that deeper thing, humanly speaking, that
constituted the conversion to Christianity. There
is a bias in man like the bias in the bowl; and
Christianity was the discovery of how to correct
the bias and therefore hit the mark. There are
many who will smile at the saying; but it is
profoundly true to say that the glad good news
brought by the Gospel was the news of original sin.
Rome rose at the expense of her Greek teachers
largely because she did not entirely consent to
be taught these tricks. She had a much more
decent domestic tradition; but she ultimately
suffered from the same fallacy in her religious
tradition; which was necessarily in no small
degree the heathen tradition of nature-worship.
What was the matter with the \vhole heathen
civilisation was that there was nothing for the
mass of men in the way of mysticism, except
that concerned with the mystery of the nameless
forces of nature, such as sex and growth and
death. In the Roman Empire also, long before
the end, we find nature-worship inevitably pro-
ducing things that are against nature. Cases
like that of Nero have passed into a proverb,
when Sadism sat on a throne brazen in the broad

3 0

St. Francis of Assisi

daylight. But the truth I mean is something
much more subtle and universal than a con-
ventional catalogue of atrocities. What had
happened to the human imagination, as a whole,
was that the whole world was coloured by dan-
gerous and rapidly deteriorating passions; by
natural passions becoming unnatural passions.
Thus the effect of treating sex as only one innocent
natural thing was that every other innocent
natural thing became soaked and sodden with
sex. For sex cannot be admitted to a mere
equality among elementary emotions or exper-
iences like eating and sleeping. The moment
sex ceases to be a servant it becomes a tyrant.
There is something dangerous and dispropor-
tionate in its place in human nature, for whatever
reason; and it does really need a special puri-
fication and dedication. The modern talk about
sex being free like any other sense, about the
body being beautiful like any tree or flower,
is either a description of the Garden of Eden
or a piece of thoroughly bad psychology, of which
the world grew weary two thousand years ago.
This is not to be confused with mere self-
righteous sensationalism about the wickedness
of the pagan world. I t was not so much that
the pagan world was wicked as that it was good
enough to realise that its paganism \-vas becoming
wicked, or rather was on the logical high road
to wickedness. I mean that there was no future
for II natural magic"; to deepen it was only to

'I he IV orld St. Francis F OU1ld 3 I
darken it into black magic. There was no
future for it; because in the past it had only
been innocent because it was young. \Ve might
say it had only been innocent because it was
shallow. Pagans were wiser than paganism;
that is \vhy the pagans became Christians.
Thousands of them had philosophy and family
virtues and military honour to hold them up;
but by this time the purely popular thing called
religion was certainly dragging them down.
When this reaction against the evil is allowed
for, it is true to repeat that it was an evil that
was everywhere. In another and more literal
sense its name was Pan.
It was no metaphor to say that these people
needed a new heaven and a new earth; for they
had really defiled their own earth and even
their own heaven. How could their case be
met by looking at the sky, when erotic legends
were scrawled in stars across it; how could they
learn anything from the love of birds and flowers
after the sort of love stories that were told of
them? It is impossible here to multiply
evidences, and one small example may stand for
the rest. \Ve know what sort of sentimental
associa tions are called up to us by the phrase
II a garden"; and how we think mostly of the
memory of melancholy and innocent romances,
or quite as often of some gracious maiden lady
or kindly old parson pottering under a yew hedge,
perhaps in sight of a village spire. Then, let

3 2

St. Francis of Assisi

anyone who knows a little Latin poetry recall
suddenly what would once have stood in place
of the sun-dial or the fountain, obscene and
monstrous in the sun; and of what sort was
the god of their gardens.
Nothing could purge this obsession but a
religion that was literally unearthly. It was
no good telling such people to have a natural
religion full of stars and flowers; there was not
a flower or even a star that had not been stained.
They had to go into the desert where they
could find no flowers or even into the ca vern
where they could see no stars. Into that desert
and that cavern the highest human intellect
entered for some four centuries; and it was
the very wisest thing it could do. Nothing but
the stark supernatural stood up for its salvation;
if God could not sa ve it , certainly the gods
could not. The Early Church called the gods
of paganism devils; and the Early Church was
perfectly right. Whatever natural religion may
ha ve had to do with their beginnings, nothing
but fiends now inhabited those hollo\v shrines.
Pan was nothing but panic. Venus was nothing
but venereal vice. I do not mean for a moment,
of course, that all the individual pagans were
of this character even to the end; but it was as
individuals that they differed from it. Nothing
distinguishes paganism from Christianity so
clearly as the fact that the individual thing
called philosophy had little or nothing to do with

'Ihe IV orid St. Francis Found 33
the social thing called religion. Anyhow it
was no good to preach natural religion to people
to whom nature had grown as unnatural as any
religion. They knew much better than we do
what was the matter with them and what sort
of demons at once tempted and tormented them;
and they wrote across that great space of history
the text: II This sort goeth not out but by
prayer and fasting."
Now the historic importance of St. Francis and
the transition from the twelfth to the thirteenth
century, lies in the fact that they marked the
end of this expiation. Men at the close of the
Dark Ages may have been rude and unlettered
and unlearned in everything but wars with
heathen tribes, more barbarous than themselves,
but they were clean. They were like children;
the first beginnings of their rude arts have all
the clean pleasure of children. We have to
conceive them in Europe as a whole living under
little local governments, feudal in so far as they
were a survival of fierce wars with the barbarians,
often monastic and carrying a more friendly
and fatherly character, still faintly imperial
in so far as Rome still ruled as a great legend.
But in Italy something had survived more typical
of the finer spirit of antiquity; the republic.
Italy was dotted with little states, largely demo-
cra tic in their ideals, and often filled \vi th
real citizens. But the city no longer lay open
as under the Roman peace, but was pent in
c

34

St. Francis of Assisi

high walls for defence against feudal war and all
the citizens had to be soldiers. One of these
stood in a steep and striking position on the
wooded hills of Umbria; and its name was
Assisi. Out of its deep gate under its high
turrets was to come the message that was the
gospel of the hour, U Your warfare is accomplished,
your iniquity is pardoned." But it was out of
all these fragmentary things of feudalism and
freedom and remains of Roman Law that there
was to rise, at the beginning of the thirteenth
century, vast and almost universal, the mighty
civilisation of the Middle Ages.
It is an exaggeration to attribute it entirely
to the inspiration of anyone man, even the most
original genius of the thirteenth century. Its
elementary ethics of fraternity and fair play
had never been entirely extinct and Christendom
had never been anything less than Christian.
The great truisms about justice and pity can
be found in the rudest monastic records of the
barbaric transition or the stiffest maxims of the
Byzantine decline. And early in the eleventh
and twelfth centuries a larger moral movement
had clearly begun. But what may fairly be
said of it is this, that over all those first move-
men ts there was still something of that ancien t
austerity that came from the long penitential
period. It was the twilight of morning; but
it was still a grey twilight. This may be illus-
tra ted by the mere mention of two or three of

'Ihe IF orld St. Francis Found 35
these reforms before the Franciscan reform.
The monastic institution itself, of course, was
far older than all these things; indeed it was
undoubtedly almost as old as Christianity.
Its counsels of perfection had always taken
the form of vows of chastity and poverty and
obedience. With these unworldly aims it had
long ago civilised a great part of the world.
The monks had taught people to plough and
sow as well as to read and write; indeed they
had taught the people nearly everything that
the people knew. But it may truly be said
that the monks were severely practical, in the
sense that they were not only practical but
also severe; though they were generally severe
with themselves and practical for other people.
All this early monastic movement had long ago
settled down and doubtless often deteriorated;
but when we come to the first medieval move-
ments this sterner character is still apparent.
Three examples may be taken to illustrate the
poin 1.
First, the ancient social mould of slavery
was already beginning to melt. Not only was
the slave turning into the serf, who was practically
free as regards his own farm and family life,
bu t many lords were freeing slaves and serfs
al together. This was done under the pressure
of the priests; but especially it was done in the
spirit of a penance. In one sense, of course,
any Catholic society must have an atmosphere

3 6

St. Francis of Assisi

of penance; but I am speaking of that rather
sterner spirit of penance which had expiated
the excesses of paganism. There was about such
restitutions the atmosphere of the death-bed;
as many of them doubtless were examples of
death-bed repentance. A very honest atheist
with whom I once debated made use of the
expression, If Men have only been kept in slavery
by the fear of hell." As I pointed out to him,
if he had said that men had only been freed
from slavery by the fear of hell, he would at
least have been referring to an unquestionable
historical fact.
Another example was the sweeping reform of
Church discipline by Pope Gregory the Seventh.
I t really was a reform, undertaken from the
highest motives and having the healthiest results;
it conducted a searching inquisition against
simony or the financial corruptions of the clergy;
it insisted on a more serious and self-sacrificing
ideal for the life of a parish priest. But the
very fact that this largely took the form of
making universal the obligation of celibacy
will strike the note of something which, however
noble, would seem to many to be vaguely negative.
The third example is in one sense the strongest
of all. For the third example was a \var; a
heroic war and for many of us a holy war; but
still something having all the stark and terrible
responsibilities of war. There is no space here
to say all that should be said about the true

'Ihe 117 arid St. Francis Found 37
nature of the Crusades. Everybody knows that
in the very darkest hour of the Dark Ages a
sort of heresy had sprung up in Arabia and
become a new religion of a military but nomadic
sort, invoking the name of Mahomet. Intrin-
sically it had a chai'acter found in many heresies
from the Moslem to the Monist. It seemed
to the heretic a sane simplification of religion;
while it seems to the Catholic an insane simplifi-
cation of religion, because it simplifies all to a
single idea and so loses the breadth and balance
of Catholicism. Anyhow its objective character
was that of a military danger to Christendom
and Christendom had struck at the very heart
of it, in seeking to reconquer the Holy Places.
The great Duke Godfrey and the first Christians
who stormed Jerusalem were heroes if there
were ever any in the world; but they were
the heroes of a tragedy.
Now I have taken these two or three examples
of the earlier medieval movements in order to
note about them one general character, which
refers back to the penance that followed paganism.
There is something in all these movements
that is bracing even while it is still bleak, like
a wind blowing between the clefts of the moun-
tains. That wind, austere and pure, of which
the poet speaks, is really the spirit of the time,
for it is the wind of a world that has at last
been purified. To anyone \vho can appreciate
atmospheres there is something clear and clean

3 8

St. Francis of Assisi

about the atmosphere of this crude and often
harsh society. Its very lusts are clean; for
they have no longer any smell of perversion.
Its very cruelties are clean; they are not the
luxurious cruelties of the amphitheatre. They
come either of a very simple horror at blasphemy
or a very simple fury at insult. Gradually
against this grey background bea uty begins
to appear, as something really fresh and delicate
and a bove all surprising. Love returning is
no longer what was once called platonic but
wha t is still called chi valric love. The flowers
and stars ha ve recovered their first innocence.
Fire and water are felt to be worthy to be the
brother and sister of a saint. The purge of
paganism is complete at last.
For water itself has been washed. Fire itself
has been purified as by fire. Water is no longer
that water into which slaves were flung to feed
the fishes. Fire is no longer that fire through
which children were passed to
Ioloch. Flowers
smell no more of the forgotten garlands gathered
in the garden of Priapus; stars stand no more
as signs of the far frigidity of gods as cold as
those cold fires. They are all like things newly
made and awaiting new names, from one who
shall come to name them. Neither the universe
nor the earth have now any longer the old sinister
significance of the world. They await a new
reconciliation with man, but they are already
capable of being reconciled. Man has stripped

'Ihe World St. Francis Found 39

from his soul the last rag of nature-\vorship,
and can return to nature.
While it was yet twilight a figure appeared
silently and suddenly on a little hill above the
city, dark against the fading darkness. For
it was the end of a long and stem night, a night
of vigil, not unvisited by stars. He stood with
his hands lifted, as in so many statues and
pictures, and about him was a burst of birds
singing; and behind him was the break of day.

Chapter III

Francis the Fighter

ACCORDING to one tale, which if not true would
be none the less typical, the very name of St.
Francis was not so much a name as a nickname.
There would be something akin to his familiar
and popular instinct in the notion that he was
nicknamed very much as an ordinary schoolboy
might be called II Frenchy II at schoo1. According
to this version, his name was not Francis at all
but John; and his companions called him II Fran-
cesco II or II The little Frenchman II because of
his passion for the French poetry of the Trouba-
dours. The more probable story is that his
mother had named him John when he was born
in the absence of his father, who shortly returned
from a visit to France, where his commercial
success had filled him wi th so m ueh en th usiasm
for French taste and social usage that he gave his
son the new name signifying the Frank or French-
man In either case the name has a certain
significance, as connecting Francis from the first
with what he himself regarded as the romantic
fairyland of the Troubadours.
The name of the father was Pietro Bernardone
and he was a substantial citizen of the guild
4 0

Francis the Fighter

4 1

of the cloth merchants in the town of Assisi.
It is hard to describe the position of such a man
without some appreciation of the position of such
a guild and even of such a town. I t did not
exactly correspond to anything that is meant
in modem times either by a merchant or a man of
business or a tradesman, or anything that exists
under the conditions of capitalism. Bernardone
may have employed people but he was not an
employer; that is, he did not belong to an employ-
ing class as distinct from an employed class.
The person we definitely hear of his employing
is his son Francis; who, one is tempted to guess,
was about the last person that any man of busi-
ness would employ if it were convenient to employ
anybody else. He was rich, as a peasant may
be rich by the work of his O\vn family; but he
evidently expected his own family to work in a
way almost as plain as a peasant's. He was a
prominent citizen, but he belonged to a social
order which existed to prevent him being too
prominent to be a citizen. It kept all such people
on their own simple level, and no prosperity
connoted that escape from drudgery by which
in modem times the lad might have seemed
to be a lord or a fine gentleman or something
other than the cloth merchant's son. This is
a rule that is proved even in the exception.
Francis was one of those people who are popular
\"ith everybody in any case; and his guileless
swagger as a Troubadour and leader of French

4 2

St. Francis of Assisi

fashions made him a sort of romantic ringleader
among the young men of the town. He threw
money about both in extravagance and bene-
volence, in a way native to a man who never,
all his life, exactly understood what money was.
This moved his mother to mingled exultation
and exasperation and she said, as any tradesman's
wife might say anywhere: II He is more like a
prince than our son." But one of the earliest
glimpses we have of him shows him as simply
selling bales of cloth from a booth in the market;
which his mother mayor may not have believed
to be one of the habits of princes. This first
glimpse of the young man in the market is sym-
bolic in more ways than one. An incident
occurred which is perhaps the shortest and sharpest
summary that could be given of certain curious
things which were a part of his character, long
before it was transfigured by transcendental
faith. While he was selling velvet and fine
embroideries to some solid merchant of the town,
a beggar came imploring alms; evidently in a
somewhat tactless manner. It was a rude and
simple society and there were no laws to punish
a starving man for expressing his need for food,
such as have been established in a more humani-
tarian age; and the lack of any organised police
permitted such persons to pester the weal thy
without any great danger. But there was, I
believe, in many places a local custom of the guild
forbidding outsiders to interrupt a fair bargain;

Franc%'s the Fighter

43

and it is possible that some such thing put the
mendicant more than nonnally in the wrong.
Francis had all his life a great liking for people
who had been put hopelessly in the wrong. On
this occasion he seems to have dealt with the
double interview with rather a divided mind;
certainly with distraction, possibly with irritation.
Perhaps he was all the more uneasy because of
the ahnost fastidious standard of manners that
came to him quite naturally. All are agreed
that politeness flowed from him from the first,
like one of the public fountains in such a sunny
Italian market place. He might have written
among his own poems as his own motto that verse
of Mr. Belloc's poem-
· Of Courtesy, it is much less
Than courage of heart or holiness,
Yet in my walks it seems to me
That the grace of God is in Courtesy.'
Nobody ever doubted that Francis Bernardone
had courage of heart, even of the most ordinary
manly and military sort; and a time was to come
when there was quite as little doubt about the
holiness and the grace of God. But I think that
if there was one thing a bout which he was punc-
tilious, it was punctiliousness, If there was one
thing of which so humble a maD could be said
to be proud, he was proud of good manners.
Only behind his perfectly natural urbanity were
wider and even wilder possibilities, of which we
get the first flash in this trivial incident. Anyhow

44

St. Francis of Assisi

Francis was evidently torn two ways with the
botheration of two talkers, but finished his business
with the merchant somehow; and when he had
finished it, found the beggar was gone. Francis
leapt from his booth, left all the bales of velvet
and embroidery behind him apparently unpro-
tected, and went racing across the market-place
like an arrow from the bow. Still running, he
threaded the labyrinth of the narrow and crooked
streets of the little town, looking for his beggar,
whom he eventually discovered; and loaded
that astonished mendicant with money. Then
he straightened himself, so to speak, and swore
before God that he would never al1 his life refuse
help to a poor man. The sweeping simplicity
of this undertaking is extremely characteristic.
Never was any man so little afraid of his 0\\'11
promises. His life was one riot of rash vows;
of rash vows that turned out right.
The first biographers of Francis, naturally
alive with the great religious revolution that he
wrought, equally naturally looked back to his
first years chiefly for omens and signs of such
a spiritual earthquake. But writing at a greater
distance, we shall not decrease that dramatic
effect, but rather increase it, if we realise that
there was not at this time any external sign of
anything particularly mystical about the young
man. He had not anything of that early sense
of his vocation that has belonged to some of the
saints, Over and above his main ambition to

Francis the Fighter

45

win fame as a French poet, he would seem to
have most often thought of winning fame as a
soldier. He was born kind; he was bra ve in
the normal boyish fashion; but he drew the
line both in kindness and bra very pretty \vell
where most boys would have drawn it ; for instance,
he had the human horror of leprosy of which few
normal people felt any need to be ashamed. He
had the love of gay and bright apparel which
was inherent in the heraldic taste of medieval
times and seems altogether to have been rather
a festive figure. If he did not paint the town red,
he would probably have preferred to paint it
all the colours of the rainbow 1 as in a medieval
picture. But in this story of the young man in
gay garments scampering after the vanishing
beggar in rags there are certain notes of his natural
individuality that must be assumed from first
to last.
For instance, there is the spirit of smftness.
In a sense he continued running for the rest of
his life, as he ran after the beggar. Because
nearly all the errands he ran on were errands of
mercy, there appeared in his portraiture a mere
element of mildness which was true in the truest
sense, but is easily misunderstood. A certain
preci pi tancy \vas the very poise of his soul.
This saint should be represented among the other
sain ts as angels were sometimes represented in
pictures of angels; with flying feet or even \vith
feathers; in the spirit of the text that makes

4 6

St. Francis of Assisi

angels winds and messengers a flaming fire. It
is a curiosity of language that courage actually
means running; and some of our sceptics will no
doubt demonstrate that courage really means
running away. But his courage was running,
in the sense of rushing. With all his gentleness,
there was originally something of impatience in
his impetuosity. The psychological truth about
it illustrates very well the modern muddle
a bout the word H practical." If we mean by
what is practical what is most immediatèly
practicable, we mean merely what is easiest. In
that sense St. Francis was very unpractical,
and his ultimate aims were very unworldly. But
if we mean by practicality a preference for prompt
effort and energy over doubt or delay, he was very
practical indeed. Some might call him a madman,
but he was the very reverse of a dreamer. Nobody
would be likely to call him a man of business;
but he was very emphatically a man of action.
In some of his early experiments he was rather
too much of a man of action; he acted too soon
and was too practical to be prudent. But at every
turn of his extraordinary career we shall find him
flinging himself round corners in the most unex-
pected fashion, as when he flew through the
crooked streets after the beggar.
Another element implied in the story, which
was already partially a natural instinct, before
it became a supernatural ideal, was something

Francis the Fighter

47

that had never perhaps been wholly lost in those
little republics of medieval Italy. It was some-
thing very puzzling to some people; something
clearer as a rule to Southerners than to Northerners,
and I think to Catholics than to Protestants;
the quite natural assumption of the equality of
men. It has nothing necessarily to do with the
Franciscan love for men; on the contrary one
of its merely practical tests is the equality of the
duel. Perhaps a gentleman will never be fully
an egalitarian until he can really quarrel with
his servant. But it was an antecedent condition
of the Franciscan brotherhood; and we feel it
in this early and secular incident. Francis, I
fancy, felt a real doubt about which he must
attend to, the beggar or the merchant; and
having attended to the merchant, he turned to
attend to the beggar; he thought of them as two
men. This is a thing much more difficult to
describe, in a society from which it is absent, but
it was the original basis of the \vhole business;
it was why the popular movement arose in that
sort of place and that sort of man. His imagina-
tive magnanimity afterwards rose like a tower
to starry heights that might well seem dizzy and
even crazy; but it was founded on this high
table-land of human equality.
I have taken this the first among a hundred
tales of the youth of St. Francis, and dwelt on
its significance a little.. because until we have

4 8

St. Francis of Assisi

learned to look for the significance there will
often seem to be little but a sort of light sentiment
in telling the story. St. Francis is not a proper
person to be patronised with merely U pretty "
stories. There are any number of them; but
they are too often used so as to be a sort of senti-
mental sediment of the medieval world, instead
of being, as the saint emphatically is, a challenge
to the modem world. We must take his real
human development somewhat more seriously;
and the next story in which we get a real glimpse
of it is in a very different setting. But in exactly
the same way it opens, as if by accident, certain
abysses of the mind and perhaps of the uncon-
scious mind. Francis still looks more or less
like an ordinary young man; and it is only when
we look at him as an ordinary young man, that
we realise what an extraordinary young man he
must be.
War had broken out between Assisi and Perugia.
It is no\v fashionable to say in a satirical spirit
that such wars did not so much break out as
go on indefinitely between the city-states of
medieval Italy. It will be enough to say here
that if one of these medieval wars had really gone
on without stopping for a century, it might
possibly have come within a remote distance
of killing as many people as we kill in a year,
in one of our great modem scientific wars between
our great modern industrial empires. But the

Francis the Fighter

49

citizens of the medieval republic \vere certainly
under the limitation of only being asked to die
for the things with which they had always lived,
the houses they inhabited, the shrines they
venerated and the rulers and representatives
they knew; and had not the larger vision calling
them to die for the latest rumours about remote
colonies as reported in anonymous newspapers.
And if we infer from our own experience that \var
paralysed civilisation, we must at least admit
that these warring towns turned out a number of
paralytics who go by the names of Dante and
1Iichael Angelo, Ariosto and Titian, Leonardo
and Columbus, not to mention Catherine of Siena
and the subject of this story. While \ve lament
all this local patriotism as a hubbub of the Dark
Ages, it must seem a rather curious fact that
about three quarters of the greatest men \vho
ever lived came out of these little towns and \vere
often engaged in these little \vars. I t remains
to be seen what will ultimately come out of our
large towns; but there has been no sign of any-
thing of this sort since they became large; and
I have sometimes been haunted by a fancy of
my youth, that these things will not come till
there is a city wall round Clapham and the tocsin
is rung at night to arm the citizens of Wimbledon.
Anyhow, the tocsin was rung in Assisi and the
citizens armed, and among them Francis the son
of the cloth merchant, He went out to fight
D

50

St. Fra1lcis of Assisi

with some company of lancers and in some fight
or foray or other he and his little band were taken
prisoners. To me it seems most probable that
there had been some tale of treason or cowardice
about the disaster; for we are told that there
was one of the captives with whom his fellow-
prisoners flatly refused to associate even in prison;
and when this happens in such circumstances, it
is generally because the military blame for the
surrender is thrown on some individual. Any-
how, somebody noted a small but curious thing,
though it might seem rather negative than posi-
tive. Francis, we are told, moved among his
captive companions with all his characteristic
courtesy and even conviviality, It liberal and
hilarious II as somebody said of him, resolved to
keep up their spirits and his own. And \vhen
he came across the mysterious outcast, traitor
or coward or whatever he was called, he simply
treated him exactly like all the rest" neither with
coldness nor compassion, but with the same
unaffected gaiety and good fellowship. But if
there had been present in that prison someone
with a sort of second sight about the truth and
trend of spiritual things, he might ha ve known
he was in the presence of something ne\v and seem-
ingly almost anarchic; a deep tide driving
out to uncharted seas of charity. For in this
sense there was really something wanting in
Francis of Assisi, something to which he was

Francis the Fighter

51

blind that he might see better and more beautiful
things. All those limits in good fellowship and
good form, all those landmarks of social life that
divide the tolerable and the intolerable, all those
social scruples and conventional conditions that
are normal and even noble in ordinary men, all
those things that hold many decent societies
together, could never hold this man at all. He
liked as he liked; he seems to have liked every-
body, but especially those whom everybody
disliked him for liking. Something very vast
and universal was already present in that narrow
dungeon; and such a seer lnigh t have seen in
its darkness that red halo of car?las caritatum
which marks one saint among saints as well as
among men. He might have heard the first
whisper of that wild blessing tha t afterwards
took the form of a blasphemy; II He listens to
those to whom God himself \vill not listen."
But though such a seer might have seen such
a truth, it is exceedingly doubtful if Francis
himself saw it. He had acted out of an unconscious
largeness, or in the fine medieval phrase largesse,
within himself, something that might almost
have been la \vless if it had not been reaching out
to a more divine law; but it is doubtful whether
he yet knew that the law was divine. It is
evident that he had not at this time any notion
of abandoning the military, still less of adopting
the monastic life. It is true that there is not,

52

St. Francis of Assisi

as pacifists and prigs imagine, the least inconsist-
ency between loving men and fighting them, if
we fight them fairly and for a good cause. But
it seems to me that there was more than this
involved; that the mind of the young man was
really running towards a military morality in
any case. About this time the first calamity
crossed his path in the form of a malady which
was to revisit him many times and hamper his
headlong career. Sickness made him more serious;
bu t one fancies it would only have made him
a more serious soldier, or even more serious about
soldiering. And while he was recovering, some-
thing rather larger than the little feuds and raids
of the Italian towns opened an a venue of adventure
and ambition. The crown of Sicily, a consider-
able centre of controversy at the time, was appar-
ently claimed by a certain Gauthier de Brienne,
and the Papal cause to aid which Gauthier was
called in aroused enthusiasm among a number
of young Assisians, including Francis, who pro-
posed to march into Apulia on the count's behalf J
perhaps his French name had something to do
with it. For it must never be forgotten that
though that world was in one sense a world of
little things, it was a world of little things con-
cerned about great things. There was more
internationalislll in the lands dotted with tiny
republics than in the huge homogeneous impene-
trable national divisions of to-day. The legal

Francis the Fighter

53

authority of the Assisian magistrates might
hardly reach further than a bow-shot from their
high embattled city walls. But their sympathies
might be with the ride of the Normans through
Sicily or the palace of the Troubadours at Toulouse;

ith the Emperor throned in the German forests or
the great Pope dying in the exile of Salerno. Above
all, it must be remembered that when the interests
of an age are mainly religious they must be uni-
versal. Nothing can be more universal than the
universe. And there are several things about
the religious position at that particular moment
which modem people not unnaturally fail to
realise. For one thing, modern people naturally
think of people so remote as ancient people, and
even early people. We feel vaguely that these
things happened in the first ages of the Church.
The Church was already a good deal more than
a thousand years old. That is, the Church was
then rather older than France is now, a great
deal older than England is now. And she looked
old then; almost as old as she does now; possibly
older than she does now. The Church looked
like great Charlemagne with the long white
beard, who had already fought a hundred wars
with the heathen, and in the legend was bidden
by an angel to go forth and fight once more though
he was two hundred years old. The Church had
topped her thousand years and turned the comer
of the second thousand; she had come through

54

St. Francis of Assisi

the Dark Ages in \vhich nothing could be done
except desperate fighting against the barbarians
and the stubborn repetition of the creed. The
creed was still being repeated after the victory
or escape; but it is not unnatural to suppose
that there was something a little monotonous
about the repetition. The Church looked old
then as now; and there were some who thought
her dying then as now. In truth orthodoxy
,vas not dead but it may have been dull; it is
certain that some people began to think it dull.
The Troubadours of the Provençal movement
had already begun to take that turn or twist
towards Oriental fancies and the paradox of
pessimism, which always come to Europeans as
something fresh when their own sanity seems to
be something stale. It is likely enough that after
all those centuries of hopeless war without and
ruthless asceticism within, the official orthodoxy
seemed to be something stale. The freshness
and freedom of the first Christians seemed then
as much as now a lost and almost prehistoric age
of gold. Rome was still more rational than
anything else; the Church was really wiser but
it may well have seemed wearier than the world.
There was something more adventurous and
alluring, perhaps, about the mad metaphysics
that had been blown across out of Asia. Dreams
were gathering like dark clouds over the l\lidi
to break in a thunder of anathema and civil war.

Francis the Fighter

55

Only the light lay on the great plain round Rome;
but the light was blank and the plain was flat;
and there was no stir in the still air and the imme-
morial silence about the sacred town.
High in the dark house of Assisi Francesco
Bernardone slept and dreamed of arms. There
came to him in the darkness a vision splendid
with swords, patterned after the cross in the
Crusading fashion, of spears and shields and helmets
hung in a high armoury, all bearing the sacred
sign. When he awoke he accepted the dream
as a trumpet bidding him to the battlefield, and
rushed out to take horse and arms. He delighted
in all the exercises of chivalry; and was eviden tl y
an accomplished cavalier and fighting man by
the tests of the tournament and the camp. He
would doubtless at any time have preferred a
Christian sort of chivalry; but it seems clear
that he was also in a mood which thirsted for
glory, though in him that glory would always
have been identical with honour. He was not
without some vision of that wreath of laurel
which Cæsar has left for all the Latins. As he
rode out to war the great gate in the deep wall
of Assisi resounded with his last boast, " I shall
come back a great prince."
A Ii ttle wa y along his road his sickness rose
again and threw him. It seems highly probable,
in the light of his impetuous temper, that he had
ridden away long before he was fit to move. And

56

St. Francis of Assisi

in the darkness of this second and far more
desolating interruption, he seems to have had
another dream in which a voice said to him,
" You have mistaken the meaning of the vision.
Return to your own town." And Francis trailed
back in his sickness to Assisi, a very dismal and
disappointed and perhaps even derided figure,
with nothing to do but to wait for what should
happen next. It was his first descent into a dark
ra vine that is called the valley of humiliation,
which seemed to him very rocky and desolate,
but in which he was afterwards to find many
flowers.
But he was not only disappointed and humili-
ated; he was also very much puzzled and bewild-
ered. He still firmly believed that his two dreams
must have meant something; and he could not
imagine what they could possibly mean. It was
while he was drifting, one may even say mooning,
about the streets of Assisi and the fields outside
the city wall, that an incident occurred to him
which has not always been immediately connected
with the business of the dreams, but which seems
to me the obvious culmination of them. He
was riding listlessly in some wayside place, appar-
ently in the open country, when he saw a figure
coming along the road towards him and halted;
for he saw it was a leper. And he knew instantly
that his courage was challenged, not as the world
challenges, but as one would challenge who knew

Francis the Fighter

57

the secrets of the heart of a man. What he saw
ad vancing was not the banner and spears of
Perugia, from which it never occurred to him
to shrink; not the armies that fought for the
crown of Sicily, of which he had always thought
as a courageous man thinks of mere vulgar
danger. Francis Bemardone saw his fear coming
up the road towards him; the fear that comes from
within and not without; though it stood white
and horrible in the sunlight. For once in the
long rush of his life his soul must have stood still.
Then he sprang from his horse, knowing nothing
between stillness and swiftness, and rushed on
the leper and threw his arms round him. I twas
the beginning of a long vocation of ministry among
many lepers, for whom he did many services;
to this man he gave what money he could and
mounted and rode on. We do not know how far
he rode, or with what sense of the things around
him; but it is said that when he looked back,
he could see no figure on the road.

Chapter 117

Francis the Builder

WE have now reached the great break in the
life of Francis of Assisi; the point at which
something happened to him that must remain
greatly dark to most of us, who are ordinary
and selfish men whom God has not broken to
make anew.
In dealing with this difficult passage, especially
for my own purpose of making things moderately
easy for the more secular sympathiser, I have
hesitated as to the proper course; and have
eventually decided to state first of all what
happened, with little more than a hint of what
I imagine to have been the meaning of what
happened. The fuller meaning may be debated
more easily afterwards, when it was unfolded
in the full Franciscan life. Anyhow what
happened was this. The story very largely
revolves round the ruins of the Church of St.
Damian, an old shrine in Assisi which was appar-
ently neglected and falling to pieces. Here
Francis was in the habit of praying before the
crucifix during these dark and aimless days of
58

Francis the Builder

59

transition that followed the tragical collapse
of all his military ambitions, probably made
bitter by some loss of social prestige terrible
to his sensitive spirit. As he did so he heard
a voice saying to him, II Francis, seest thou not
that my house is in ruins? Go and restore it
for me."
Francis sprang up and went. To go and do
something was one of the driving demands of
his nature; probably he had gone and done it
before he had at all thoroughly thought out
what he had done. In any case "That he had
done was something very decisive and immediately
very disastrous for his singular social career.
In the coarse conventional language of the
uncomprehending world, he stole. From his
own enthusiastic point of view, he extended to
his venerable father Peter Bemardone the exquisite
excitement and inestimable privilege of assisting,
more or less unconsciously, in the rebuilding
of St. Damian's Church. In point of fact what
he did was first to sell his own horse and then
to go off and sell several bales of his father's
cloth, making the sign of the cross over them
to indicate their pious and charitable destination.
Peter Bernardone did not see things in this light.
Peter Bemardone indeed had not very much
light to see by, so far as understanding the
genius and temperament of his extraordinary
son was concerned. Instead of u
derstanding

60

St. Francis of Assisi

in what sort of a ,vind and flame of abstract
appetites the lad was living, instead of simply
telling him (as the priest practically did later)
that he had done an indefensible thing with the
best intentions, old Bernardone took up the
matter in the hardest style; in a legal and
literal fashion. He used absolute political powers
like a heathen father, and himself put his son under
lock and key as a vulgar thief. It would appear
that the cry was caught up among many with
whom the unlucky Francis had once been popular;
and altogether, in his efforts to build up the
house of God he had only succeeded in bringing
his own house about his ears and lying buried
under the ruins. The quarrel dragged drearily
through several stages; at one time the wretched
young man seems to have disappeared under-
ground, so to speak, into some cavern or cellar
where he remained huddled hopelessly in the
darkness. Anyhow, it was his blackest moment;
the whole world had turned over; the whole
\vorld was on top of him.
When he came out, it was only perhaps
gradually that anybody grasped that something
had happened. He and his father were sum-
moned in the court of the bishop; for Francis
had refused the authority of all legal tribunals.
The bishop addressed some remarks to him,
full of that excellent common sense which the
Catholic Church keeps permanently as the back-

Francis the Builder 61

ground for all the fiery attitudes of her saints.
He told Francis that he must unquestionably
restore the money to his father; that no blessing
could follow a good work done by unjust methods;
and in short (to put it crudely) if the young
fanatic would give back his money to the old
fool, the incident would then terminate. There
was a new air about Francis. He was no longer
crushed, still less crawling, so far as his father
was concerned; yet his words do not, I think,
indicate either just indignation or wanton insult
or anything in the nature of a mere can tin ua tion
of the quarrel. They are rather remotely akin
to mysterious utterances of his great model,
II What have I to do with thee? " or even the
terrible II Touch me not."
He stood up before them all and said, II Up
to this time I have called Pietro Bernardone
father, but now I am the servant of God. Not
only the money but everything that can be
called his I will restore to my father, even the
very clothes he has given me." And he rent
off all his ga.rments except one; and they saw
that that was a hair-shirt.
He piled the garments in a heap on the floor
and tossed the money on top of Ulem. Then
he turned to the bishop, and received his blessing,
like one who turns his back on society; and,
according to the account, went out as he was
into the cold world. Apparently it was literally

62

St. Francis of Assisi

a cold world at the moment, and snow was on
the ground. A curious detail, very deep in its
significance, I fancy, is given in the same account
of this great crisis in his life. He went out
half-naked in his hair-shirt into the winter
woods, walking the frozen ground between the
frosty trees; a man without a father. He was
penniless, he was parentless, he was to all appear-
ance without a trade or a plan or a hope in the
world; and as he went under the frosty trees,
he burst suddenly into song.
It was apparently noted as remarkable that
the language in which he sang was French,
or that Provençal which was called for conveni-
ence French. It was not his native language;
and it was in his native language that he
ultimately won fame as a poet; indeed St.
Francis is one of the very first of the national
poets in the purely national dialects of Europe.
But it was the language with which all his most
boyish ardours and ambitions had been iden-
tified; it was for him pre-eminently the language
of romance. That it broke from him in this
extraordinary extremity seems to me something
at first sight very strange and in the last analysis
very significant. What that significance was,
or may well have been, I will try to suggest in
the subsequent chapter; it is enough to indicate
here that the whole philosophy of St. Francis
revolved round the idea of a new supernatural

Francis the Builder

63

light on natural things, which meant the ultimate
recovery not the ultimate refusal of natural
things. And for the purpose of this purely
narrative part of the business, it is enough to
record that while he wandered in the winter
forest in his hair-shirt, like the very wildest
of the hermits, he sang in the tongue of the
Troubadours.
Meanwhile the narrative naturally reverts to
the problem of the ruined or at least neglected
church, which had been the starting point of
the saint's innocent crime and bea tific punish-
ment. That problem still predominated in his
mind and was soon engaging his insatiable
activities; but they were activities of a new
sort; and he made no more attempts to inter-
fere with the commercial ethics of the town of
Assisi. There had dawned on him one of those
great paradoxes that are also platitudes. He
realised that the way to build a church is not to
become entangled in bargains and, to him, rather
bewildering questions of legal claim. The way
to build a church is not to pay for it, certainly
not with somebody else's money. The way to
build a church is not even to pay for it with your
own money. The way to build a church is to
build it.
He went about by himself collecting stones.
He begged all the people he met to give him
stones. In fact he became a new sort of beggar,

64

St. Francis of Assisi

reversing the parable; a beggar who asks not
for bread but a stone. Probably, as happened
to him again and again throughout his extra-
ordinary existence, the very queerness of the
request gave it a sort of popularity; and all
sorts of idle and luxurious people fell in with
the benevolent project, as they would have
done with a bet. He worked with his own
hands at the rebuilding of the church, dragging
the material like a beast of burden and learning
the very last and lo\vest lessons of toil. A
vast number of stories are told about Francis
at this as at every other period of his life; but
for the purpose here, which is one of simplifi-
cation, it is best to dwell on this definite re-
entrance of the saint into the world by the low
gate of manual labour. There does indeed run
through the whole of his life a sort of double
meaning, like his shadow thrown upon the wall.
All his action had something of the character
of an allegory; and it is likely enough that some
leaden-witted scientific historian may some day
try to prove that he himself was never anything
but an allegory. It is true enough in this sense
that he was labouring at a double task, and
rebuilding something else as well as the church
of St. Damian. He was not only discovering
the general lesson that his glory was not to be
in overthrowing men in battle but in building
up the positive and creative monuments of

Francis the ButÏder

65

peace. He was truly building up something
else, or beginning to build it up; something
that has often enough fallen into ruin but has
never been past rebuilding; a church that could
always be built anew though it had rotted away
to its first foundation-stone, against which the
gates of hell shall not prevail.
The next stage in his progress is probably
marked by his transferring the same energies
of architectural reconstruction to the little
church of St. Mary of the Angels at the Portiun-
cula. He had already done something of the same
kind at a church dedicated to St. Peter; and
that quality in his life noted above, which made
it seem like a symbolical drama, led many of
his most devout biographers to note the numerical
symbolism of the three churches. There ,vas at
any rate a more historical and practical symbolism
about two of them. For the original church
of St. Damian afterwards became the seat of
his striking experiment of a female order, and
of the pure and spiritual romance of St. Clare.
And the church of the Portiuncula will remain
for ever as one of the great historic buildings
of the ,vorld; for it ,vas there that he gathered
the little knot of friends and enthusiasts; it
was the home of many homeless men. At this
time, however, it is not clear that he had the
definite idea of any such monastic developments.
Ho,v early the plan appeared in his own mind
E

66

St. Francis of Assisi

it is of course impossible to say; but on the face
of events it first takes the form of a few friends
who attached themselves to him one by one
because they shared his own passion for simplicity.
The account given of the form of their dedication
is, however, very significant; for it was that of an
invocation of the simplification of life as suggested
in the New Testament. The adoration of Christ
had been a part of the man's passionate nature
for a long time past. But the imitation of
Christ, as a sort of plan or ordered scheme of
life, may in that sense be said to begin here.
The two men who have the credit, apparently,
of having first perceived something of what
was happening in the world of the soul were a
solid and wealthy citizen named Bernard of
Quintavalle and a canon from a neighbouring
church named Peter. It is the more to their
credit because Francis" if one may put it
so, was by this time wallowing in poverty
and association with lepers and ragged mendi-
cants; and these two were men with much
to give up; the one of comforts in the world
and the other of ambition in the Church. Bernard
the rich burgher did quite literally and finally
sell all he had and give to the poor. Peter did
even more; for he descended from a chair of
spiritual authority, probably when he was already
a man of mature years and therefore of fixed
mental habits, to follow an extravagant young

Francis the Builder

67

eccentric whom most people probably regarded
as a maniac \Vhat it was of which they had
caught a glimpse, of which Francis had seen
the glory, may be suggested later so far as it
can be suggested at all. A t this stage \ve need
profess to see no more than all Assisi sa w, and
that something not altogether un\vorthy of
comment. The citizens of Assisi only saw the
camel go in triumph through the eye of the
needle and God doing impossible things because
to him all things were possible; only a priest
who rent his robes like the Publican and n( t
like the Pharisee and a rich man \vho went
away joyful, for he had no possessions.
These three strange figures are said to have
built themselves a sort of hut or den adjoining
the leper hospital. There they talked to each
other, in the intervals of drudgery and danger
(for it needed ten times more courage to look
after a leper than to fight for the crown of Sicily) J
in the terms of their new life, almost like children
talking a secret language. Of these individual
elements on their first friendship we can say
little with certainty; but it is certain that
they remained friends to the end. Bernard of
Quin ta valle occupies in the story something of
the position of Sir Bedivere, "first made and
la test left of Arthur's knights, JJ for he reappears
again at the right hand of the saint on his death-
bed and receives some sort of special blessing.

68

St. Francis of Ass1'si

But all those things belong to another historical
world and were quite remote from the ragged
and fantastic trio in their tumble-down hut.
They were not monks except perhaps in the
most literal and archaic sense which was iden-
tical with hermits. They were, so to speak,
three solitaries living together socially, but not
as a society. The whole thing seems to have
been intensely individual, as seen from the
outside doubtless individual to the point of
insanity. The stir of something that had in
it the promise of a movement or a mission can
first be felt as I have said in the affair of the
appeal to the New Testament.
It \vas a sort of sors virgiliana applied to the
Bible; a practice not unknown among Protest-
ants though open to their criticism, one would
think, as being rather a superstition of pagans.
Anyhow it seems almost the opposite of searching
the Scriptures to open them at random; but
St. Francis certainly opened them at random.
According to one story J he merely made the
sign of the cross over the volume of the Gospel and
opened it at three places reading three texts.
The first was the tale of the rich young man \vhose
refusal to sell all his goods was the occasion of
the great paradox about the camel and the
needle. The second was the commandment to
the disciples to take nothing with them on their
journey, neither scrip nor staff nor any money.

Francis the Builder

69

The third was that saying, literally to be called
crucial, that the follo\ver of Christ must also
carry his cross There is a somewhat similar
story of Francis finding one of these texts, almost
as accidentally, merely in listening to what
happened to be the Gospel of the day. But
from the former version at least it would seem
that the incident occurred very early indeed in
his new life, perhaps soon after his breach with
his father; for it was after this oracle, apparently,
that Bernard the first disciple rushed forth and
sca ttered all his goods among the poor, If
this be so, it would seem that nothing followed
it for the moment except the individual ascetical
life \vith the hut for a hermitdge. I t must of
course have been a rather public sort of hermitage,
but it was none the less in a very real sense
withdrawn from the world. St. Simeon Stylites
on the top of his pillar was in one sense an exceed-
ingly public character; but there was some-
thing a little singular in his situation for all
that. I t may be presumed that most people
thought the situation of Francis singular, that
some even thought it too singular. There was
inevitably indeed in any Catholic society some-
thing ultimate and even subconscious that was
at least capable of comprehending it better
than a pagan or puritan society could comprehend
it. But we must not at this stage, I think,
exaggerate this potential public sympathy. As

7 0

St. Francis of Assisi

has already been suggested, the Church and all
its institutions had already the air of being old
and settled and sensible things, the monastic
institutions among the rest. Common sense
was commoner in the Middle Ages, I think, than
in our own rather jumpy journalistic age; but
men like Francis are not common in any age,
nor are they to be fully understood merely by
the exercise of common sense. The thirteenth
century was certainly a progressive period;
perhaps the only really progressive period in
human history. But it can truly be called
progressive precisely because its progress was
very orderly. It is really and truly an example
of an epoch of reforms without revolutions.
But the reforms were not only progressive but
very practical; and they were very much to
the advantage of highly practical institutions;
the towns and the trading guilds and the manual
crafts. N ow the solid men of town and guild
in the time of Francis of Assisi were probably
very solid indeed. They were much more econ-
omically equal, they were much more justly
governed in their own economic environment,
than the moderns who struggle madly between
starvation and the monopolist prizes of capital-
ism; but it is likely enough that the majority
of such citizens were as hard-headed as peasants.
Certainly the behaviour of the venerable Peter
Bemardone does not indicate a delicate sympathy

Francis the Builder

7 1

with the fine and almost fanciful subtleties of
the Franciscan spirit. And we cannot measure
the beauty and originality of this strange spiritual
adventure, unless we have the humour and
human sympathy to put into plain words how
it would have looked to such an unsympathetic
person at the time when it happened. In the
next chapter I shall make an attempt, inevit-
ably inadequate, to indicate the inside of this
story of the building of the three churches and
the little hut. In this chapter I have but out-
lined it from the outside. And in concluding
that chapter I ask the reader to remember and
realise what that story really looked like, when
thus seen from the outside. Given a critic
of rather coarse common sense, with no feeling
about the incident except annoyance, and how
would the story seem to stand?
A young fool or rascal is caught robbing his
father and selling goods which he ought to
guard; and the only explanation he will offer
is that a loud voice from nowhere spoke in his
ear and told him to mend the cracks and holes
in a particular wall. He then declares himself
naturally independent of all powers corresponding
to the police or the magistrates, and takes refuge
with an amiable bishop who is forced to remon-
strate with him and tell him he is wrong. He
then proceeds to take off his clothes in public
and practically throw them at his father;

7 2

St. Francis of Assisi

announcing at the same time that his father is
not his father at all. He then runs about the
town asking everybody he meets to give him
fragments of buildings or building materials,
apparently with reference to his old monomania
about mending the wall. It may be an excellent
thing that cracks should be filled up, but prefer-
ably not by somebody who is himself cracked;
and architectural restoration like other things
is not best performed by builders who, as
we should say , have a tile loose. Finally the
wretched youth relapses into rags and squalor and
practically cra\vls away into the gutter. That is
the spectacle that Francis must have presented to
a very large number of his neighbours and friends.
How he lived at all must have seemed to them
dubious; but presumably he already begged for
bread as he had begged for building materials.
But he was always very careful to beg for the
blackest or worst bread he could get, for the
stalest crusts or something rather less luxurious
than the crumbs which the dogs eat, and which
fall from the rich man's table. Thus he probably
fared worse than an ordinary beggar; for the
beggar would eat the best he could get and the
saint ate the worst he could get. In plain fact
he was ready to live on refuse; and it was probably
something much uglier as an experience than the
refined simplicity which vegetarians and water-
drinkers would call the simple life. As he dealt

Francis the Builder

73

with the question of food, so he apparently
dealt with the question of clothing. He dealt
with it, that is, upon the same principle of taking
what he could get, and not even the best of what
he could get. According to one story he changed
clothes with a beggar; and he would doubtless
have been content to change them with a scare-
crow. In another version he got hold of the
rough bro\Vll tunic of a peasant, but presumably
only because the peasant gave him his very
oldest brown tunic, which was probably very
old indeed. Most peasants have few changes of
clothing to give away; and some peasants are
not specially inclined to give them away until it
is absolutely necessary. It is said that in place
of the girdle which he had flung off (perhaps with
the more symbolic scorn because it probably
carried the purse or wallet by the fashion of the
period) he picked up a rope more or less at random,
because it was lying near, and tied it round his
waist. He undoubtedly meant it as a shabby
expedient; rather as the very destitute tramp
will sometimes tie his clothes together \vith a
piece of string. He meant to strike the note
of collecting his clothes anyhow, like rags from
a succession of dust-bins. Ten years later that
make-shift costume was the uniform of five
thousand men; and a hundred years later, in
that, for a pontifical panoply, they laid great
Dante in the grave.

Chapter J7

Le Jongleur de Dieu

1:ANY signs and symbols might be used to
give a hint of what really happened in the mind
of the young poet of Assisi. Indeed they are at
once too numerous for selection and yet too
slight for satisfaction. But one of them may be
adumbrated in this small and apparently acci-
dental fact: that when he and his secular com-
panions carried their pageant of poetry through
the town, they called then1selves Troubadours.
But \vhen he and his spiritual companions came
out to do their spiritual work in the world, they
were called by their leader the Jongleurs de
Dieu.
Nothing has been said here at any length of
the gTeat culture of the Troubadours as it appeared
in Provence or Languedoc, great as \vas their influ-
ence in history and their influence on St. Francis.
Something more may be said of them \vhen we
come to summarise his relation to history; it is
enough to note here in a few sentences the facts
about them that were relevant to him, and
especially the particular point no\v in Question.
74

Le J onglellT de Dieu

75

which was the most relevant of all. Everybody
knows who the Troubadours were; everybody
knows that very early in the Middle Ages, in the
twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, there arose
a civilisation in Southern France which threat-
ened to rival or eclipse the rising tradition of
Paris. Its chief product was a school of poetry,
or rather more especially a school of poets. They
were primarily love-poets, though they were often
also satirists and critics of things in general.
Their picturesque posture in history is largely
due to the fact that they sang their own poems
and often played their own accompaniments, on
the light musical instruments of the period; they
\vere minstrels as well as men of letters. Allied
to their love-poetry were other institutions of a
decorative and fanciful kind concerned with th

same theme. There was what was called the
U Gay Science," the attempt to reduce to a sort of
system the fine shades of flirtation and philander-
ing. There were the things called Courts of
Love, in which the same delicate subjects were
de'1It with with legal pomp and pedantry. There
is one point in this part of the business that must
be remembered in relation to St. Francis. There
were manifest moral dangers in all this superb
sentimentalism; but it is a mistake to suppose
that its only danger of exaggeration was in the
direction of sensualism. There \vas a strain in
the southern romance that was actually an excess

7 6

St. Francis of A ssisi

of spirituality; just as the pessimist heresy it
produced was in one sense an excess of spirituality.
The love was not always animal; sometimes it
was so airy as to be almost allegorical. The
reader realises that the lady is the most beautiful
being that can possibly exist, only he has occasional
doubts as to whether she does exist. Dante owed
something to the Troubadours; and the critical
debates about his ideal woman are an excellent
example of these doubts. We know that Beatrice
was not his wife, but we should in any case be
equally sure that she was not his mistress; and
some critics have even suggested that she was
nothing at all, so to speak, except his muse. This
idea of Beatrice as an allegorical figure is, I
believe, unsound; it would seem unsound to any
man who has read the V ita N uova and has been in
love. But the very fact that it is possible to sug-
gest it illustrates something abstract and scholastic
in these medieval passions. But though they were
abstract passions they were very passionate
passions. These men could feel almost like lovers,
even about allegories and abstractions. It is
necessary to remember this in order to realise
that St. Francis was talking the true language of
a troubadour when he said that he also had a
most glorious and gracious lady and that her
name was Poverty.
But the particular point to be noted here is
not concerned so much with the word Troubadour

Le Jongleur de Dieu

77

as with the \vord Jongleur. It is especially con-
cerned with the transition from one to the other;
and for this it is necessary to grasp another detail
about the poets of the Gay Science. A jongleur
was not the same thing as a troubadour, even if
the same man were both a troubadour and a
jongleur. 1tlore often, I believe, they were separate
men as well as separate trades. In many cases
apparently the two men would walk the world
together like companions in arms, or rather
companions in arts. The jongleur was properly
a joculator or jester; sometimes he \vas what we
should call a juggler. This is the point, I iInagine,
of the tale about Taillefer the Jongleur at the
battle of Hastings, who sang of the death of Roland
while he tossed up his sword and caught it, as a
juggler catches balls. Sometimes he may have
been even a tumbler; like that acrobat in the
beautiful legend who \vas called" The Tumbler of
Our Lady," because he turned head over heels and
stood on his head before the image of the Blessed
Virgin, for which he was nobly thanked and
comforted by her and the \vhole company of
heaven. In the ordinary way, we may imagine,
the troubadour wou]d exalt the company with
earnest and solemn strains of love and then the
jongleur would do his turn as a sort of comic
relief. A glorious medieval romance remains to
be \\TItten about t\VO such companions wandering
through the world. At any rate, if there is one

7 8

St. Francis of Assisi

place in which the true Franciscan spirit can be
found outside the true Franciscan story, it is in
that tale of the Tumbler of Our Lady. And when
St. Francis called his followers the Jongleurs de
Dieu, he meant something very like the Tumblers
of Our Lord.
Somewhere in that transition from the ambition
of the Troubadour to the antics of the Tumbler is
hidden, as under a parable, the truth of St. Francis.
Of the two minstrels or entertainers, the jester
was presumably the servant or at least the second-
ary figure. St. Francis really meant what he
said when he said he had found the secret of life
in being the servant and the secondary figure.
There was to be found ultimately in such service
a freedom almost amounting to frivolity. It was
comparable to the condition of the jongleur
because it almost amounted to frivolity. The
jester could be free when the knight was rigid;
and it was possible to be a j ester in the service
which is perfect freedom. This parallel of the two
poets or minstrels is perhaps the best preliminary
and external statement of the Franciscan change
of heart, being conceived under an image with
which the imagination of the modern world has a
certain sympathy. There was, of course, a great
deal more than this involved; and we must en-
deavourhoweverinsufficiently to penetrate past the
image to the idea. It is so far like the tumblers
that it is really to many people a topsy-turvy idea.

Le Jongleur de Dieu

79

Francis, at the time or somewhere about the
time when he disappeared into the prison or the
dark cavern, underwent a reversal of a certain
psychological kind; which was really like the
reversal of a complete somersault, in that by
coming full circle it came back, or apparently
came back, to the same nonnal posture. I t is
necessary to use the grotesque simile of an
acrobatic antic, because there is hardly any other
figure that ,viII make the fact clear. But in the
inward sense it was a profound spiritual revolu-
tion. The man who went into the cave was not
the man who came out again; in th3.t sense he
was almost as different as if he were dead, as if
he were a ghost or a blessed spirit. And the
effects of this on his attitude towards the actual
world were really as extravagant as any parallel
can make them. He looked at the world as
differently from other men as if he had come out
of that dark hole walking on his hands.
If we apply this parable of Our Lady's Tumbler
to the case, we shall come very near to the point
of it. Now it really is a fact that any scene such
as a landsca pe can sonletimes be more clearly
and freshly seen if it is seen upside do\vn. There
have been landscape-painters who adopted the
most startling and pantomimic postures in order
to look at it for a moment in that fashion. Thus
that inverted vision, so much more bright and
quaint and arresting, does bear a certain resem-

80

St. Francis of Assisi

blance to the world which a mystic like St. Francis
sees every day. But herein is the essential part
of the parable. Our Lady's Tumbler did not
stand on his head in order to see flowers and trees
as a clearer or quainter vision. He did not do so ;
and it would never have occurred to him to do so.
Our Lady's Tumbler stood on his head to please
Our Lady. If St. Francis had done the same
thing, as he was quite capable of doing, it would
originally have been from the same motive; a
motive of a purely supernatural thought. It
would be alter this that his enthusiasm ,vould
extend itself and give a sort of halo to the edges
of all earthly things. This is why it is not true
to represent St. Francis as a mere romantic fore-
runner of the Renaissance and a revival of natural
pleasures for their own sake. The whole point
of him ,vas that the secret of recovering the natura!
pleasures lay in regarding them in the light of
a supernatural pleasure. In other words, he
repeated in his own person that historic process
noted in the introductory chapter; the vigil of
asceticism which ends in the vision of a natural
world made new. But in the personal case there
was even more than this; there were elements
that make the parallel of the Jongleur or Tumbler
even more appropriate than this.
It maybe suspected tha t in that black cell or
cave Francis passed the blackest hours of his life.
By nature he was the sort of man who has that

Le Jongleur de Dieu

81

vanity which is the opposite of pride; that vanity
which is very near to humility, He never
despised his fellow creatures and therefore he
never despised the opinion of his fellow creatures;
including the admiration of his fellow creatures.
All that part of his human nature had suffered the
heavi
st and most crushing blo\vs. It is possible
that after his humiliating return from his frustrated
military campaign he was called a coward. It is
certain that after his quarrel with his father about
the bales of cloth he was called a thief. And even
those \vho had sympathised most with him, the
priest whose church he had restored, the bishop
whose blessing he had received, had evidently
treated him with an almost humorous amiability
which left only too clear the ultimate conclusion.
of the matter. He had made a fool of himself.
Any man who has been young, \vho has ridden
horses or thought himself ready for a fight, who
has fancied himself as a troubadour and accepted
the conventions of comradeship, will appreciate
the ponderous and crushing \veight of that simple
phrase. The conversion of St. Francis, like the
conversion of St. Paul, involved his being in
some sense flung suddenly from a horse; but in a
sense it was an even worse fall; for it was a war-
horse. Anyhow, there was not a rag of him left
that was not ridiculous. Everybody knew that
at the best he had made a fool of himself. It was
a solid 0 bj ecti ve fact, like the stones in the road,
F

82

St. Francis of Assisi

that he had made a fool of himself. He saw him-
self as an object, very small and distinct like a fly
walking on a clear window pane; and it was un-
mistakably a fool. And as he stared at the word
II fool" written in luminous letters before him,
the word itself began to shine and change.
We used to be told in the nursery that if a man
were to bore a hole through the centre of the earth
and climb continually down and down, there
would come a moment at the centre when he
would seem to be climbing up and up. I do not
know whether this is true. The reason I do not
know whether it is true is that I never happened to
bore a hole through the centre of the earth, still
less to crawl through it. If I do not know what
this reversal or inversion feels like, it is because
I have never been there. And this also is an
allegory. It is certain that the writer, it is even
possible that the reader, is an ordinary person
who has never been there. We cannot follow
St Francis to that final spiritual overturn in
which complete humiliation becomes complete
holiness or happiness, because we have never been
there. I for one do not profess to follow it any
further than that first breaking down of the
romantic barricades of boyish vanity, which I have
suggested in the last paragraph. And even that
paragraph, of course, is merely conjectural, an
individual guess at what he may have felt; but
he may have felt something quite different. But

Le Jongleur de Dieu

83

whatever else it was, it was so far analogous to
the story of the man making a tunnel through the
earth that it did mean a man going down and
down until at some mysterious moment he begins
to go up and up. We have never gone up like
that because we have never gone down like that;
we are obviously incapable of saying that it does
not happen; and the more candidly and calmly
\ve read human history, and especially the history
of the wisest men, the more we shall come to the
conclusion that it does happen. Of the intrinsic
internal essence of the experience I make no
pretence of writing at all. But the external effect
of it, for the purpose of this narrative, may be
expressed by saying that when Francis came forth
from his cave of vision, he was wearing the same
word " fool " as a feather in his cap; as a crest
or even a crown. He would go on being a fool;
he would become more and more of a fool; he
would be the court fool of the King of Paradise.
This state can only be represented in symbol;
but the symbol of inversion is true in another way.
If a man saw the world upside down, with all the
trees and towers hanging head downwards as in
a pool, one effect would be to emphasise the idea
of deþendence. There is a Latin and literal con-
nection; for the very word dependence only means
hanging. It would make vivid the Scriptural
text which says that God has hanged the world
upon nothing. If St. Francis had seen, in one of

84

St. Francis of Assisi

his strange dreams, the town of Assisi upside down,
it need not have differed in a single detail from
itself except in being entirely the other way round.
But the point is this: that whereas to the normal
eye the large masonry of its walls or the massive
foundations of its watchtowers and its high citadel
would make it seem safer and more permanent,
the moment it was turned over the very same
weight would make it seem more helpless and
more in peril. It is but a symbol; but it happens
to fit the psychological fact. St. Francis might
love his little town as much as before, or more
than before; but the nature of the love would be
altered even in being increased. He might see
and love every tile on the steep roofs or every
bird on the battlements; but he would see them
all in a new and divine light of eternal danger and
dependence. Instead of being merely proud of
his strong city because it could not be moved, he
would be thankful to God Almighty that it had
not been dropped; he would be thankful to God
for not dropping the whole cosmos like a vast
crystal to be shattered into falling stars. Perhaps
St. Peter saw the world so, when he was crucified
head-downwards.
It is comn10nly in a somewhat cynical sense that
men have said, (( Blessed is he that expecteth
nothing, for he shall not be disappointed." It
was in a wholly happy and enthusiastic sense that
St. Francis said, (( Blessed is he who expecteth

Le Jongleur de Dieu

85

nothing, for he shall enjoy everything." It was
by this deliberate idea of starting from zero, from
the dark nothingness of his own deserts, that he
did come to enjoy even earthly things as few
people have enjoyed them; and they are in them-
selves the best working example of the idea. For
there is no way in which a man can earn a star or
deserve a sunset. Bu t there is more than this
involved, and more indeed than is easily to be
expressed in words. It is not only true that the
less a man thinks of himself, the more he thinks
of his good luck and of all the gifts of God. It is
also true that he sees more of the things themselves
when he sees more of their origin; for their origin
is a part of them and indeed the most important
part of them. Thus they become more extra-.
ordinary by being explained. He has more wonder
at them but less fear of them; for a thing is
really wonderful when it is significant and not
when it is insignificant; and a monster, shapeless
or dumb or merely destructive, may be larger
than the mountains, but is still in a literal sense
insignificant. For a mystic like St. Francis the
monsters had a meaning; that is, they had
deli vered their message. They spoke no longer
in an unknown tongue. That is the meaning
of all those stories, whether legendary or his-
torical, in which he appears as a magician
speaking the language of beasts and birds.
The mystic will have nothing to do with mere

86

St. Francis of Assisi

mystery; mere mystery is generally a mystery
of iniquity.
The transition from the good man to the saint
is a sort of revolution; by which one for whom all
things illustrate and illuminate God becomes one
for whom God illustrates and illuminates all
things. It is rather like the reversal whereby a
lover might say at first sight that a lady looked
like a flower, and say afterwards that all flowers
reminded him of his lady. A saint and a poet
standing by the same flower might seem to say
the same thing; but indeed though they would
both be telling the truth, they would be telling
different truths. For one the joy of life is a cause
of faith, for the other rather a result of faith.
But one effect of the difference is that the sense
of a divine dependence, which for the artist is
like the brilliant levin-blaze, for the saint is like
the broad daylight. Being in some mystical
sense on the other side of things, he sees things
go forth from the divine as children going forth
from a familiar and accepted home, instead of
meeting them as they come out, as most of us do,
upon the roads of the world. And it is the paradox
that by this privilege he is more familiar, more
free and fraternal, more carelessly hospitable than
we. For us the elements are like heralds who tell
us with trumpet and tabard that we are drawing
near the city of a great king; but he hails them
with an old familiarity that is almost an old

Le Jongleur de Dieu

87

frivolity. He calls them his Brother Fire and his
Sister Water.
So arises out of this almost nihilistic abyss
the noble thing that is called Praise; which no
one will ever understand while he identifies it
\vith nature-worship or pantheistic optimism.
\Vhen we say that a poet praises the whole creation,
we commonly mean only that he praises the whole
cosmos. But this sort of poet does really praise
creation, in the sense of the act of creation. He
praises the passage or transition from nonentity
to entity; there falls here also the shadow of that
archetypal image of the bridge, which has given
to the priest his archaic and mysterious name.
The mystic who passes through the moment when
there is nothing but God does in some sense
behold the beginningless beginnings in which
there was reall y nothing else. He not onl y
appreciates everything but the nothing of which
everything was made. In a fashion he endures
and answers even the earthquake irony of the
Book of Job; in some sense he is there when the
foundations of the world are laid, with the morning
stars singing together and the sons of God shout-
ing for joy. That is but a distant adumbration
of the reason why the Franciscan, ragged, penni-
less, homeless and apparently hopeless, did indeed
come forth singing such songs as might come from
the stars of morning; and shouting, a son of God.
This sense of the great gratitude and the sublime

88

St. Francis of Assist'

dependence was not a phrase or even a sentiment;
it is the whole point that this was the very rock
of reality. It was not a fancy but a fact; rather
it is true that beside it all facts are fancies. That
we all depend in every detail, at every instant,
as a Christian would say upon God, as even an
agnostic would say upon existence and the nature
of things, is not an illusion of imagination; on
the contrary, it is the fundamental fact which we
cover up, as with curtains, with the illusion of
ordinary life. That ordinary life is an admir-
able thing in itself, just as imagination is an
admirable thing in itself. But it is much more
the ordinary life that is made of imagination than
the contemplative life. He who has seen the whole
world hanging on a hair of the mercy of God has
seen the truth; we might almost say the cold
truth. He who has seen the vision of his city
upside-down has seen it the right way up.
Rossetti makes the remark somewhere, bitterly
but with great truth, that the worst moment for
the atheist is when he is really thankful and has
nobody to thank. The converse of this proposi-
tion is also true; and it is certain that this grati-
tude produced, in such men as we are here con-
sidering, the most purely joyful moments that
have been known to man. The great painter
boasted that he mixed all his colours with brains,
and the great saint may be said to mix all his
thoughts with thanks. All goods look better

Le Jongleur de Dieu

89

when they look like gifts. In this sense it is
certain that the mystical method establishes a
very healthy external relation to everything else.
But it must always be remembered that every-
thing else has for ever fallen into a second place,
in comparison with this simple fact of dependence
on the divine reality. In so far as ordinary social
rela tions have in them something that seems solid
and self-supporting, some sense of being at once
buttressed and cushioned; in so far as they estab-
lish sanity in the sense of security and security in
the sense of self-sufficiency, the man who has
seen the world hanging on a hair does have some
difficulty in taking them so seriously as that.
In so far as even the secular authorities and
hierarchies, even the most natural superiorities
and the most necessary subordinations, tend at
once to put a man in his place, and to make him
sure of his position, the man who has seen the
human hierarchy upside down will always have
something of a smile for its superiorities. In this
sense the direct vision of divine reality does dis-
turb solemnities that are sane enough in them-
selves. The mystic may have added a cubit to
his stature; but he generally loses something of
his status. He can no longer take himself for
granted, merely because he can verify his own
existence in a parish register or a fanlily Bible.
Such a man may have something of the appearance
of the lunatic who has lost his name while pre-

9 0

St. Francis of Assisi

serving his nature; who straightway forgets what
manner of man he was. II Hitherto I have called
Pietro Bemardone father; but now I am the
servant of God,"
All these profound matters must be suggested
in short and imperfect phrases; and the shortest
statement of one aspect of this illumination is to
say that it is the discovery of an infinite debt.
It may seem a paradox to say that a man may
be transported with joy to discover that he is in
debt. But this is only because in commercial
cases the creditor does not generally share the
transports of joy; especially when the debt is by
hypothesis infinite and therefore unrecoverable.
But here again the parallel of a natural love-story
of the nobler sort disposes of the difficulty in a
flash. There the infinite creditor does share the
joy of the infinite debtor; for indeed they are both
debtors and both creditors. In other words debt
and dependence do become pleasures in the
presence of unspoilt love; the word is used too
loosely and luxuriously in popular simplifications
like the pres en t; bu t here the word is really the
key. It is the key of all the problems of Franciscan
morality which puzzle the merely modem mind;
but above all it is the key of asceticism. It is the
highest and holiest of the paradoxes that the man
who really knows he cannot pay his debt will be
for ever paying it. He will be for ever giving back
what he cannot give back, and cannot be expected

Ie Jongleur de Dieu

9 1

to give back. He will be always throwing things
away into a bottomless pit of unfathomable
thanks. Men who think they are too modem to
understand this are in fact too mean to under-
stand it; we are most of us too mean to practise
it. We are not generous enough to be ascetics;
one might almost say not genial enough to be
ascetics. A man must have magnanimity of
surrender, of which he commonly only catches a
glimpse in first love, like a glimpse of our lost
Eden. But whether he sees it or not, the truth
is in that riddle; that the whole world has, or is,
only one good thing; and it is a bad debt.
If ever that rarer sort of romantic love, which
was the truth that sustained the Troubadours,
falls out of fashion and is treated as fiction, we
may see some such misunderstanding as that of
the modern world about asceticism. For it seems
conceivable that some barbarians might try to
destroy chivalry in love, as the barbarians ruling
in Berlin destroyed chivalry in war. If that were
ever so, we should have the same sort of unintelli-
gent sneers and unimaginative questions. Men
will ask what selfish sort of woman it must have
been who ruthlessly exacted tribute in the form
of flowers, or what an avaricious creature she can
ha ve been to demand solid gold in the form of a
ring; just as they ask what cruel kind of God can
ha ve demanded sacrifice and self-denial. They will
ha ve lost the clue to all that lovers have n1eant

9 2

St. Francis of Assisi

by love; and will not understand that it was
because the thing was not demanded that it was
done. But ,vhether or no any such lesser things
will throw a light on the greater, it is utterly
useless to study a great thing like the Franciscan
movement while remaining in the modem mood
that murmurs against gloomy asceticism. The
whole point about St. Francis of Assisi is that he
certainly was ascetical and he certainly was not
gloomy. As soon as ever he had been unhorsed
by the glorious humiliation of his vision of de-
pendence on the divine love, he flung himself
into fasting and vigil exactly as he had flung
himself furiously into battle. He had wheeled
his charger clean round, but there was no halt
or check in the thundering impetuosity of his
charge. There was nothing negative about it; it
was not a regimen or a stoical simplicity of life.
It was not self-denial merely in the sense of self-
control. It was as positive as a passion; it had
all the air of being as positive as a pleasure. He
devoured fasting as a man devours food. He
plunged after poverty as men have dug madly for
gold. And it is precisely the positive and passion-
ate quality of this part of his personality that is
a challenge to the modem mind in the whole prob-
lem of the pursuit of pleasure. There undeniably
is the historical fact; and there attached to it is
another moral fact almost as undeniable. I t is
certain that he held on this heroic or unnatural

Le J ollg1eur de Dieu

93

course from the moment when he went forth in his
hair-shirt into the winter woods to the moment
when he desired even in his death agony to lie bare
upon the bare ground, to prove that he had and
that he was nothing. And ,ve can say, with
almost as deep a certainty, that the stars which
passed above that gaunt and wasted corpse stark
upon the rocky floor had for once, in all their
shining cycles round the world of labouring
humanity, looked down upon a happy man.

Chapter 1/1

'Ihe Little Poor Man

FROM that cavern, that was a furnace of glowing
gratitude and humility, there came forth one of
the strongest and strangest and most original
personalities that human history has known.
He was, among other things, emphatically what
we call a character; almost as we speak of a
character in a good novel or play. He was not
only a humanist but a humorist; a humorist
especially in the old English sense of a man always
in his humour, going his own way and doing what
no bod y else would have done. The anecdotes
about him have a certain biographical quality of
which the n10st famìliar example is Dr. Johnson;
which belongs in another way to William Blake or
to Charles Lamb. The atmosphere can only be
defined by a sort of antithesis; the act is always
unexpected and never inappropriate. Before the
thing is said or done it cannot even be conjectured;
but after it is said or done it is felt to be merely
characteristic. It is surprisingly and yet inevi-
tably individual. This quality of abrupt fitness
and bewildering consistency belongs to St. Francis
94

'Ihe Little Poor Man

95

in a way that marks him out from most men of
his time. Men are learning more and more of
the solid social virtues of medieval civilisation;
but those impressions are still social rather than
individual. The medieval world was far ahead of
the modern world in its sense of the things in
which all men are at one: death and the daylight
of reason and the common conscience that holds
communities together. Its generalisations were
saner and sounder than the mad ma terialistic
theories of to-day; nobody would have tolerated
a Schopenhauer scorning life or a Nietzsche living
only for scorn. But the modem world is more
subtle in its sense of the things in which men are
not at one; in the temperamental varieties and
differen tia tions that make up the personal pro b-
lems of life. All men who can think themselves
now realise that the great schoolmen had a type of
thought that was wonderfully clear; but it was
as it were deliberately colourless. All are now
agreed that the greatest art of the age was the
art of public buildings; the popular and communal
art of architecture. But it was not an age for
the art of portrait-painting. Yet the friends of
St. Francis have really contrived to leave behind
a portrait; something almost resembling a devout
and affectionate caricature. There are lines and
colours in it that are personal almost to the extent
of being perverse, if one can use the word perver-
sity of an inversion that was also a conversion.

9 6

St. Francis of Assisi

Even among the saints he has the air of a sort of
eccentric, if one may use the word of one whose
eccentricity consisted in always turning towards
the centre.
Before resuming the narrative of his first
adventures, and the building of the great brother-
hood which was the beginning of so merciful a
revolution, I think it well to complete this imper-
fect personal portrait here; and having attempted
in the last chapter a tentative description of the
process, to add in this chapter a few touches to
describe the result. I mean by the result the real
man as he was after his first forma ti ve experiences;
the man whom men met walking about on the
Italian roads in his brown tunic tied with a rope.
For that man, saving the grace of God, is the
explanation of all that followed; nlen acted quite
differently according to whether they had met
him or not. If 'we see afterwards a vast tumult,
an appeal to the Pope, mobs of men in brown
habits besieging the seats of authority, Papal
pronouncements, heretical sessions, trial and
triumphant survival, the world full of a new
movement, the friar a household word in every
comer of Europe, and if we ask why all this
happened, we can only approximate to any answer
to our own question if we can, in some faint and
indirect imaginative fashion, hear one human
voice or see one human face under a hood. There
is no answer except that Francis Bemardone had

'Ihe Little Poor Man

97

ha ppened; and we must try in some sense to see
what we should have seen if he had happened to
us. In other words, after some groping sugges-
tions about his life from the inside, we must
again consider it from the outside; as if he were a
stranger coming up the road towards us, along
the hills of Umbria, between the olives or the
Vlnes.
Francis of Assisi \vas slight in figure with that
sort of slightness which, combined with so much
vivacity, gives the impression of smallness. He
was probably taller than he looked; middle-
sized, his biographers say; he was certainly very
active and, considering what he went through,
Inust have been tolerably tough. He was of th

brownish Southern colouring, with a dark beard
thin and pointed such as appears in pictures under
the hoods of elves; and his eyes glowed with the
fire that fretted him night and day. There is
something about the description of all he said and
did which suggests that, even more than most
Italians, he turned naturally to a passionate
pantomime of gestures. If this was so it is
equally certain that with him, even more than with
most Italians, the gestures were all gestures of
politeness or hospitality. And both these facts,
the vivacity and the courtesy, are the outward
signs of something that mark him out very dis-
tinctively from many who might appear to be more
of his kind than they really are. It is truly said
G

9 8

St. Francis of Assisi

that Francis of Assisi was one of the founders of
the medieval drama, and therefore of the modern
drama. He was the very reverse of a theatrical
person in the selfish sense; but for all that he was
pre-eminently a dramatic person. This side
of hhn can best be suggested by taking what is
commonly regarded as a reposeful quality; what
is commonly described as a love of nature. We
are compelled to use the term; and it is entirely
the wrong term.
St. Francis ",yas not a lover of nature. Properly
understood, a lover of nature was precisely what
he was not. The phrase implies accepting the
ma terial universe as a vague en vironmen t, a sort
of sentimental pantheism. In the romantic
period of Ii tera ture, in the age of Byron and Scott,
it was easy enough to imagine that a hermit in
the ruins of a chapel (preferably by moonlight)
might find peace and a mild pleasure in the
harmony of solemn forests and silent stars, while
he pondered over some scroll or illuminated
volume, about the liturgical nature of which the
author was a little vague. In short, the hermit
might love nature as a background. Now for
St. Francis nothing was ever in the background.
We might say that his mind had no background,
except perhaps that divine darkness out of which
the divine love had called up every coloured
creature one by one. He sa w everything as
dramatic, distinct from its setting, not all of a

Cf'he Little Poor A1an

99

piece like a picture but in action like a play. A
bird went by him like an arrow; something with
a story and a purpose, though it was a purpose of
life and not a purpose of death. A bush could
stop him like a brigand; and indeed he was as
read y to welcome the brigand as the bush.
In a word, we talk about a man who cannot see
the wood for the trees. St. Francis was a man
who did not want to see the wood for the trees.
He wanted to see each tree as a separate and
almost a sacred thing, being a child of God and
therefore a brother or sister of man. But he did
not want to stand against a piece of stage scenery
used merely as a background, and inscribed in a
general fashion: II Scene; a wood." In this sense
we might sa y that he was too drama tic for the
drama. The scenery would have come to life
in his comedies; the walls would really have
spoken like Snout the Tinker and the trees would
really have come walking to Dunsinane. Every-
thing would have been in the foreground; and in
that sense in the footlights. Everything would
be in every sense a character. This is the quality
in which, as a poet, he is the very opposite of a
pantheist. He did not call nature his mother; he
called a particular donkey his brother or a particu- .
lar sparrow his sister. If he had called a pelican
his aunt or an elephant his uncle, as he might
possibly have done, he would still have meant that
they 'were particular creatures assigned by their

100

St. Francis of Assisi

Crea tor to particular places; not mere expressions
of the evolutionary energy of things. That is
w here his mysticism is so close to the common
sense of the child. A child has no difficulty about
understanding that God made the dog and the
cat; though he is well aware that the making of
dogs and cats out of nothing is a mysterious
process beyond his own imagination. But no
child would understand what you meant if you
mixed up the dog and the cat and everything
else into one monster with a myriad legs and called
it nature. The child would resolutely refuse to
make head or tail of any such animal. St.
Francis was a mystic, but he believed in mysticism
and not in mystification. As a mystic he was the
mortal enemy of all those mystics who melt away
the edges of things and dissolve an entity into its
environment. He was a mystic of the daylight
and the darkness; but not a mystic of the twi1ight.
He was the very contrary of that sort of oriental
visionary who is only a mystic because he is
too much of a sceptic to be a materialist. St.
Francis was emphatically a realist, using the
\,,"ord realist in its much more real medieval sense.
In this matter he really was akin to the best spirit
of his age, which had just won its victory over the
nominalism of the twelfth century. In this indeed
there was something symbolic in the contemporary
art and decoration of his period; as in the art
of heraldry. The Franciscan birds and beasts

he Little Poor Man 101

were really rather like heraldic birds and beasts;
not in the sense of being fabulous animals but in
the sense of being treated as if they were facts,
clear and positive and unaffected by the illusions
of atmosphere and perspective. In that sense
he did see a bird sable on a field azure or a sheep
argent on a field vert. But the heraldry of
humility was richer than the heraldry of pride;
for i t sawall these things that God had given as
something more precious and unique than the
blazonry that princes and peers had only given
to themselves. Indeed out of the depths of that
surrender it rose higher than the highest titles
of the feudal age; than the laurel of Cæsar or the
Iron Crown of Lombardy. It is an example of
extremes that meet, that the Little Poor
1an,
who had stripped himself of everything and named
himself as nothing, took the same title that has
been the wild vaunt of the vanity of the gorgeous
Asiatic autocrat, and called himself the Brother of
the Sun and
Ioon.
This quality, of something outstanding and even
startling in things as St. Francis saw them, is here
important as illustrating a character in his own
life. As he sawall things dramatically, so he
himself was ahvays dramatic. \Ve have to assume
throughout, needless to say, that he was a poet
and can only be understood as a poet. But he had
one poetic privilege denied to most poets In that
respect indeed he might be called the one happy

102

St. Francis of Assisi

poet among all the unhappy poets of the world.
He was a poet whose whole life was a poem. He
was not so much a minstrel merely singing his
own songs as a dramatist capable of acting the
'whole of his own play. The things he said were
more imaginative than the things he wrote. The
things he did were more imaginative than the
things he said, His whole course through life
was a series of scenes in \vhich he had a sort of
perpetual luck in bringing things to a beautiful
crisis To talk about the art of living has come
to sound rather artificial than artistic. But St,
Francis did in a definite sense make the very act
of living an art, though it was an unpremeditated
art. 1\1any of his acts vvill seem grotesque and
puzzling to a rationalistic taste. But they \vere
always acts and not explanations; and they
always meant what he meant them to mean. The
amazing vividness with which he stamped himself
on the memory and imagination of mankind is
very largely due to the fact that he \vas seen again
and again under such dramatic conditions. From
the moment when he rent his robes and flung them
at his father's feet to the moment when he
stretched himself in death on the bare earth in the
pa ttern of the cross, his life was made up of these
unconscious attitudes and unhesitating gestures.
It \vould be easy to fill page after page with
examples; but I will here pursue the method found
convenient everywhere in this short sketch, and

'I he Little Poor Man

10 3

take one typical example, dwelling on it with a
little more detail than would be possible in a
catalogue, in the hope of making the meaning
more clear. The example taken here occurred
in the last days of his life, but it refers back in a
fa ther curious fashion to the first; and rounds off
the remarkable unity of that romance of religion.
The phrase about his brotherhood with the sun
and moon, and with the water and the fire, occurs
of course in his famous poem called the Canticle
of the Creatures or the Canticle of the Sun. He
sang it \vandering in th e meadows in the sunnier
season of his own career l when he was pouring
upwards into the sky all the passions of a poet.
I t is a supremely characteristic work, and Inuch of
St. Francis could be reconstructed from that work
alone, Though in some ways the thing is as
simple and straightforward as a ballad, there is
a delicate instinct of differentiation in it. Notice,
for instance, the sense of sex in inanimate things,
which goes far beyond the arbitrary genders of a
grammar It \vas not for nothing that he called
fire his brother, fierce and gay and strong, and
water his sister, pure and clear and inviolate.
Remember that St Francis was neither encum-
bered nor assisted by all that Greek and Roman
polytheism turned into allegory, which has been
to European poetry often an inspiration, too often
a convention. Whether he gained or lost by his
contempt of learning, it never occurred to him

10 4

St. Francis of Assisi

to connect Neptune and the nymphs with the
water or Vulcan and the Cyclops with the flame.
This point exactly illustrates what has already
been suggested; that, so far from being a revival
of paganism, the Franciscan renascence was a sort
of fresh start and first a\vakening after a forget-
fulness of paganism. Certainly it is responsible
for a certain freshness in the thing itself. Anyhow
St Francis was, as it \vere, the founder of a new
folk-lore; but he could distinguish his mermaids
from his mermen and his witches from his wizards.
In short, he had to make his own mythology; but
he knew at a glance the goddesses from the gods.
This fanciful instinct for the sexes is not the only
example of an imaginative instinct of the kind.
There is just the same quaint felicity in the fact
that he singles out the sun with a slightly more
courtly title besides that of brother; a phrase that
one king might use of another, corresponding to
" Monsieur notre frère." It is like a faint half
ironic shadow of the shining primacy that it had
held in the pagan hea vens. A bishop is said to
have complained of a Nonconformist saying Paul
instead of Saint Pa ul ; and to have a dded II He
might at least have called him Mr. Paul." So
St. Francis is free of all obligation to cry out in
praise or terror on the Lord God Apollo, but in
his new nursery heavens, he salutes him as Mr.
Sun. Those are the things in which he has a sort
of inspired infancy, only to be paralleled in nursery

he Little Poor Jt;fan

10 5

tales Something of the same hazy but healthy
awe makes the story of Erer Fox and Erer Rabbit
refer respectfully to l\lr. Man.
This poem, full of the mirth of youth and the
memories of childhood, rUllS through his \vhole
life like a refrain, and scraps of it turn up contin-
ually in the ordinary habit of his talk. Perhaps
the last appearance of its special language was in
an incident that has always seemed to me intensely
impressive, and is at any rate very illustrative of
the great manner and gesture of which I speak.
Impressions of that kind are a matter of imagina-
tion and in that sense of taste. It is idle to argue
about them; for it is the whole point of them
tha t they have passed beyond words; and even
,vhen they use \vords, seem to be completed by some
ritual movement like a blessing or a blow. So, in a
supreme exam pIe, there is something far pa st all
exposition, sOlnething like the sweeping move-
ment and mighty shadow of a hand, darkening
even the darkness of Gethsemane; II Sleep on
nüw, and take your rest. . . ." Yet there are
people who have started to paraphrase and
expand the story of the Passion.
St. Francis \vas a dying man. We might say
he was an old man, at the time this typical incident
occurred; but in fact he was only prematurely
old; for he was not fifty when he died, worn out
with his fighting and fasting life. But when he
came down from the awful asceticism and more

106

St. Francis of Assisi

awful revelation of Alverno, he was a broken man.
As will be apparent when these events are touched
on in their turn, it was not only sickness and bodily
decay that may well have darkened his life; he
had been recently disappointed in his main mission
to end the Crusades by the conversion of Islam;
he had been still more disappointed by the signs
of compromise and a more political or practical
spirit in his own order; he had spent his last
energies in protest. At this point he was told
that he was going blind. If the faintest hint has
been given here of what St Francis felt about the
glory and pageantry of earth and sky, about the
heraldic shape and colour and symbolism of birds
and beasts and flo\vers, some notion may be
formed of what it meant to him to go blind. Yet
the remedy might well have seemed \vorse than
the disease. The remedy, admittedly an uncertaIn
remedy, was to cauterise the eye, and that without
any anæsthetic In other words it was to burn
his living eyeballs with a red-hot iron. 1fany of
the tortures of martyrdom, which he envied in
martyrology and sought vainly in Syria, can have
been no worse. When they took the brand from
the furnace, he rose as with an urbane gesture and
spoke as to an invisible presence: It Brother
Fire, God made you beautiful and strong and
useful; I pray you be courteous with me."
If there be any such thing as the art of life, it
seems to me that such a moment was one of its

'Ihe Little Poor
lan

10 7

masterpieces. l'
ot to many poets has it been
given to remember their own poetry at such a
moment, still less to live one of their own poems.
Even William Blake would have been disconcerted
if, while he was re-reading the noble lines II Tiger,
tiger, burning bright," a real large live Bengal tiger
had put his head in at the window of the cottage
in Felpham, evidently with every intention of
biting his head off. He might have ,vavered
before politely saluting it, above all by calmly
completing the recitation of the poem to the
quadruped to whom it was dedicated. Shel1ey,
when he wished to be a cloud or a leaf carried
before the wind, might have been mildly surprised
to find himself turning slowly head over heels in
mid air a thousand feet above the sea. Even
Keats, knowing that his hold on life was a frail
one, might have been disturbed to discover that
the true, the blushful Hippocrene of \vhich he
had just partaken freely had indeed contained a
drug, which really ensured that he should cease
upon the midnight with no pain. For Francis
there was no drug; and for Francis there was
plenty of pain. But his first thought was one of
his first fancies from the songs of his youth. He
remembered the time "'hen a flame was a flower,
only the most glorious and gaily coloured of the
flowers in the garden of God; and when that
shining thing returned to him in the shape of an
instrument of torture" he hailed it from afar like

108

St. Francis of Assisi

an old friend, calling it by the nickname which
might most truly be called its Christian name.
That is only one incident out of a life of such
incidents; and I have selected it partly because
it shows what is meant here by that shadow of
gesture there is in all his words, the dramatic
gesture of the south; and partly because its
special reference to courtesy covers the next fact
to be noted. The popular instinct of St. Francis,
and his perpetual preoccupation \vith the idea of
brotherhood, will be entirely misunderstood if it
is understood in the sense of what is often called
camaraderie; the back-slapping sort of brother-
hood. Frequently from the enemies and too
frequently from the friends of the democratic
ideal, there has come a notion that this note is
necessary to that ideal. It is assumed that
equality means all men being equally uncivil,
whereas it obviously ought to mean all men being
equally civil Such people have forgotten the
very meaning and derivation of the word civility,
if they do not see that to be uncivil is to be
uncivic. But anyhow that was not the equality
which Francis of Assisi encouraged; but an
equality of the opposite kind; it was a cama-
raderie actually founded on courtesy.
Even in that fairy borderland of his mere
fancies a bout flowers and animals and even
inanima te things, he retained this permanent
posture of a sort of deference. A friend of mine

'I he Little Poor Man

10 9

said that somebody was the sort of man who
apologises to the cat. St. Francis really would
have apologised to the cat. \Vhen he was about
to preach in a wood full of the chatter of birds,
he said, with a gentle gesture II Little sisters, if
you have no\v had your say, it is time that I also
should be heard." And all the birds were silent;
as I for one can very easily believe. In deference
to my special design of making matters intelligible
to average moderni ty, I have treated separa tel y
the subject of the miraculous powers that St
Francis most certainly possessed But even apart
from any miraculous powers, men of that magnetic
sort, with that intense interest in aniInals, often
have an extraordinary power over them. St.
Francis's power was always exercised with this
elaborate politeness. Much of it was doubtless a
sort of symbolic joke, a pious pantomime intended
to convey the vital distinction in his divine
mission, that he not only loved but reverenced
God in all his creatures. In this sense he had t1 e
air not only of apologising to the cat or to tl:e
birds, but of apologising to a chair for sitting
en it or to a table for sitting down at it. Anyone
who had followed him through life merely to laugh
at him, as a sort of lovable lunatic, might easily
have had an impression as of a lunatic who bowed
to every post or took off his hat to every tree.
This was all a part of his instinct for imagina ti ve
gesture. He taught the world a large part of

lID

St. Francis of Assisi

its Jesson by a sort of divine dumb alphabet. But
if there was this ceremonial element even in lighter
or lesser matters, its significance became far more
serious in the serious work of his life, \vhich \vas
an appeal to humanity, or rather to human
beings.
I have said that St. Francis deliberately did
not see the wood for the trees. I t is even more
true that he deliberately did not see the mob for
the men. \Vhat distinguishes this very genuine
democrat from any mere demagogue is that he
never ei th er decei ved or was decei ved by the
illusion of mass-suggestion. Whatever his taste
in monsters, he never saw before him a many-
headed beast. He only saw the image of God
multiplied but never monotonous. To him a man
was always a man and did not disappear in a dense
crowd any more than in a desert. He honoured
all men; that is, he not only loved but respected
them all. Wha t gave him his extraordinary
personal power was this; tha t from the Pope to
the beggar, from the sultan of Syria in his
pavilion to the ragged robbers crawling out of the
wood, there was never a man who looked into
those brown burning eyes without being certain
that Francis Bernardone was really interested in
him; in his O\Vll inner individual life from the
cradle to the gra ve ; tha t he himself was being
valued and taken seriously, and not Inerely added
to the spoils of some sncial policy or the names in

'The Little Poor Alan

III

some clerical document. Now for this particular
moral and religious idea there is no external
expression except courtesy. Exhorta tion does not
express it, for it is not mere abstract enthusiasm;
beneficence does not express it, for it is not mere
pity It can only be conveyed by a certain grand
manner which may be called good manners. We
may say if we like that St. Francis, in the bare
and barren simplicity of his life, had clung to one
rag of luxury; the manners of a court. But
whereas in a court there is one king and a hundred
courtiers, in this story there was one courtier,
moving among a hundred kings. For he treated
the \vhole mob of men as a mob of kings. And
this was real]y and truly the only attitude that
will appeal to that part of man to which he wished
to appeal. It cannot be done by giving gold or
even bread; for it is a proverb that any reveller
may fling largesse in mere scorn. It cannot even
be done by giving time and attention; for
any number of philanthropists and benevolent
bureaucrats do such \vork with a scorn far more
cold and horrible in their hearts. No plans or
proposals or efficient rearrangements will give
back to a broken man his self-respect and sense
of speaking with an equal One gesture will do it.
With that gesture Francis of Assisi nloved
among men; and it was soon found to have some-
thing in it of magic and to act, in a double sense,
like a charm. But it must always be conceived

112

St. Francis of Assisi

as a completely natural gesture; for indeed it
was almost a gesture of apology. He Inust be
imagined as moving thus swiftly through the
world \vith a sort of impetuous politeness; almost
like the movement of a man who stumbles on one
knee half in haste and half in obeisance. The
eager face under the brown hood was that of a
man always going somewhere, as if he followed as
well as watched the flight of the birds. And this
sense of motion is indeed the meaning of the whole
revolution that he made; for the work that has
now to be described was of the nature of an earth-
quake or a volcano, an explosion that drove
outwards with dynamic energy the forces stored
up by ten centuries in the monastic fortress or
arsenal and scattered all its riches recklessly to
the ends of the earth. In a better sense than the
antithesis commonly conveys, it is true to say
that what St. Benedict had stored St. Francis
scattered: but in the world of spiritual things
what had been stored into the barns like grain
was scattered over the world as seed. The
servants of God who had been a besieged garrison
became a marching army; the \vays of the world
were filled as with thunder \vith the trampling
of their feet and far ahead of that ever s\velling
host \vent a man singing; as simply he had sung
that morning in the winter woods, where he walked
alone.

Chapter 1711

'Ihe 'Ihree Orders

THERE is undoubtedly a sense in which two is
company and three is none; there is also another
sense in which three is company and four is none,
as is proved by the procession of historic and
fictitious figures moving three deep, the famous
trios like the Three Musketeers or the Three
Soldiers of Kipling. But there is yet another
and a different sense in which four is company and
three is none; if we use the word com pan y in
the vaguer sense of a crowd or a mass. \Vith the
fourth man enters the shadow of a mob; the
group is no longer one of three individuals only
conceived individually. That shadow of the
fourth man fell across the little hermitage of the
Portiuncula when a man named Egidio, apparently
a poor workman, was invited by St. Francis to
enter. He mingled without difficulty with the
merchant and the canon who had already become
the companions of Francis; but with his coming
an invisible line was crossed; for it must have been
felt by this time that the growth of that sman
group had become potentially infinite, or at least
that its outline had become permanently indefi-
H 113

114

St. Francis of Assisi

nite. It may have been in the time of that
transition that Francis had another of his dreams
full of voices; but now the voices were a clamour
of the tongues of all nations, Frenchmen and
Italians and English and Spanish and Germans,
telling of the glory of God each in his own tongue;
a new Pentecost and a happier Babel.
Before describing the first steps he took to regu-
larise the growing group, it is well to have a rough
grasp of what he conceived that group to be. He
did not call his followers monks; and it is not
clear, at this time at least, that he even thought
of them as monks. He called them by a name
which is generally rendered in English as the
Friars Minor; but we shall be much closer to the
atmosphere of his own mind if we render it almost
literally as The Little Brothers. Presumably he
was already resolved, indeed, that they should
take the three vows of poverty, chastity and
obedience which had always been the mark of a
monk. But it would seem that he was not so
much afraid of the idea of a monk as of the idea
of an abbot. He was afraid that the great
spiritual magistracies which had given even to
their holiest possessors at least a sort of impersonal
and corporate pride, would import an element of
pomposity that would spoil his extremely and
almost extravagantly simple version of the life of
humility. But the supreme difference between
his discipline and the discipline of the old monastic

'Ihe 'Ihree Orders

lIS

system was concerned, of course, with the idea
that the monks were to become migratory and
almost nomadic instead of stationary. They were
to mingle with the world; and to this the more
old-fashioned monk would naturally reply by
asking how they \vere to mingle with the world
without becoming entangled with the world. It
was a much more real question than a loose reli-
giosity is likely to realise; but St. Francis had his
answer to it, of his own individual sort; and the
interest of the problem is in that highly individual
answer.
The good Bishop of Assisi expressed a sort of
horror at the hard life which the Little Brothers
lived at the Portiuncula, without comforts, with-
out possessions, eating anything they could get
and sleeping anyho\v on the ground. 51. Francis
answered him with that curious and almost
stunning shre\vdness which the unworldly can
sometimes wield like a club of stone. He said,
"If we had any possessions, we should need
weapons and laws to defend them." That
sentence is the clue to the whole policy that he
pursued. It rested upon a real piece of logic;
and about that he was never anything but logical.
He was ready to own himself wrong about any-
thing else; but he \V'as quite certain he was right
about this particular rule. He was only once seen
angry; and that \vas \vhen there was talk of an
exception to the rule.

116

St. Francis of Assisi

His argument was this: that the dedicated
man might go anywhere among any kind of men,
even the worst kind of men, so long as there was
nothing by which they could hold him. If he had
any ties or needs like ordinary men, he would
become like ordinary men. St. Francis was the
last man in the world to think any the worse of
ordinary men for being ordinary. They had more
affection and admiration from him than they are
ever likely to have again. But for his own
particular purpose of stirring up the world to a
new spiritual enthusiasm, he saw with a logical
clarity that was quite reverse of fanatical or
sentimental, that friars must not become like
ordinary men; that the salt must not lose its
savour even to turn into human nature's daily
food. And the difference between a friar and
an ordinary man was really that a friar was freer
than an ordinary man. It was necessary that he
should be free from the cloister; but it was even
more im port an t tha t he should be free from the
world. It is perfectly sound common sense to say
that there is a sense in which the ordinary man
cannot be free from the world; or rather ought
not to be free from the world. The feudal world
in particular was one labyrinthine system of
dependence; but it was not only the feudal world
that went to make up the medieval world nor the
medieval world that went to make up the whole
world; and the whole world is full of this fact.

'Ihe 'Ihree Orders

117

Family life as much as feudal life is in its nature
a system of dependence. Modern trade unions
as much as medieval guilds are interdependent
among themselves even in order to be independent
of others. In medieval as in modern life, even
where these limitations do exist for the sake of
liberty, they have in them a considerable element
of luck. They are partly the result of circum-
stances; sometimes the almost unavoidable result
of circumstances. So the twelfth century had
been the age of vows; and there was something
of relative freedom in that feudal gesture of the
vow; for no man asks vows from slaves any more
than from spades. Still, in practice, a man rode
to war in support of the ancient house of the
Column or behind the Great Dog of the Stairway
largely because he had been born in a certain city
or countryside. But no man need obey little
Francis in the old brown coat unless he chose.
Even in his relations with his chosen leader he
was in one sense relatively free, compared \vith
the world around him. He was obedient but not
dependent. And he was as free as the wind, he
was almost wildly free, in his relation to that
world around him. The world around him was,
as has been noted, a network of feudal and family
and other forms of dependence. The whole idea
of St. Francis was that the Little Brothers should
be like little fishes who could go freely in and out
of that net. They could do so precisely because

118

St. Francis of Assisi

they were small fishes and in tha t sense even
slippery fishes. There was nothing that the world
could hold them by; for the world catches us
mostly by the fringes of our garments, the futile
externals of our lives. One of the Franciscans
says later, U A monk should own nothing but his
harp"; meaning, I suppose, that he should value
nothing but his song, the song with which it was
his business as a minstrel to serenade every castle
and cottage, the song of the joy of the Creator
in his creation and the beauty of the brotherhood
of men. In imagining the life of this sort of
visionary vagabond, we may already get a glimpse
also of the practical side of that asceticism which
puzzles those who think themsel ves practical.
A man had to be thin to pass always through the
bars and out of the cage; he had to travel light
in order to ride so fast and so far. I t was the
whole calculation, so to speak, of that innocent
cunning, that the world was to be outflanked and
outwitted by him, and be embarrassed about what
to do with him. You could not threaten to starve
a man who was ever striving to fast. You could
not ruin him and reduce him to beggary, for he
was already a beggar. There was a very luke-
warm satisfaction even in beating him with a
stick, when he only indulged in little leaps
and cries of joy because indignity was his only
dignity. You could not put his head in a halter
without the risk of putting it in a halo.

Cfhe Cfhree Orders

119

But one distinction between the old monks and
the new friars counted especially in the matter of
practicality and especially of promptitude. The
old fraternities with their fixed habitations and
enclosed existence had the limitations of ordinary
householders. However simply they lived there
must be a certain number of cells or a certain
number of beds or at least a certain cubic space
for a certain number of brothers; their numbers
therefore depended on their land and building
material. But since a man could become a
Franciscan by merely promising to take his chance
of eating berries in a lane or begging a crust from
a kitchen, of sleeping under a hedge or sitting
patiently on a doorstep, there was no econollÚc
reason why there should not be any number of
such eccentric enthusiasts within any short period
of time. It must also be remembered that the
whole of this rapid development was full of
a certain kind of democratic optimism that really
was part of the personal character of St. Francis.
His very asceticism was in one sense the height of
optimism. He demanded a great deal of human
nature not because he despised it but rather
because he trusted it. He was expecting a very
great deal from the extraordinary men who
followed him; but he was also expecting a good
deal from the ordinary men to whom he sent
them. lIe asked the laity for food as confidently
as he asked the fraternity for fasting. But he

120

St. Francis of Assisi

counted on the hospitality of humanity because he
really did regard every house as the house of a
friend. He really did love and honour ordinary
men and ordinary things; indeed we may say
that he only sent out the extraordinary men to
encourage men to be ordinary.
This paradox may be more exactly stated or
explained when we come to deal with the very
interesting matter of the Third Order, which was
designed to assist ordinary men to be ordinary
with an extraordinary exultation. The point at
issue at present is the audacity and simplicity of
the Franciscan plan for quartering its spiritual
soldiery upon the population; not by force but
by persuasion, and even by the persuasion of
impotence. It was an act of confidence and
therefore a compliment. It was completely
successful. I t was an example of something that
clung about St. Francis always; a kind of tact that
looked like luck because it was as simple and direct
as a thunderbolt. There are many examples in
his pri va te relations of this sort of tactless tact;
this surprise effected by striking at the heart of the
matter. It is said that a young friar was suffer-
ing from a sort of sulks between morbidity and
humility, common enough in youth and hero-
worship, in which he had got it into his head that
his hero hated or despised him. We can imagine
how tactfully social diplomatists would steer clear
of scenes and excitements, how cautiously psycho-

'Ihe 'Ihree Orders

121

logists would watch and handle such delicate
cases. Francis suddenly walked up to the young
man, who was of course secretive and silent as the
grave, and said, II Be not troubled in your thoughts
for you are dear to me, and even among the num-
ber of those who are most dear. You know that you
are worthy of my friendship and society; there-
fore come to me, in confidence, whensoever you
will, and from friendship learn faith." Exactly
as he spoke to that morbid boy he spoke to all
mankind. He always went to the point; he
always seemed at once more right and more simple
than the person he was speaking to. He seemed
at once to be laying open his guard and yet lung-
ing at the heart. Something in this attitude dis-
anned the world as it has never been disanned
again. He was better than other men; he was
a benefactor of other men; and yet he was not
hated. The world came into church by a newer
and nearer door; and by friendship it learnt
faith.
It was while the little knot of people at the
Portiuncula was still small enough to gather in a
small room that St. Francis resolved on his first
important and even sensational stroke. It is
said that there were only twelve Franciscans in
the whole world when he decided to march, as
it were, on Rome and found a Franciscan order.
It would seem that this appeal to remote head-
quarters was not generally regarded as necessary.

122

St. Francis of Assisi

possibly something could have been done in a
secondary way under the Bishop of Assisi and the
local clergy. It would seem even more probable
that people thought it somewhat unnecessary to
trouble the supreme tribunal of Christendom about
what a dozen chance men chose to call themselves.
But Francis was obstinate and as it were blind
on this point; and his brilliant blindness is exceed-
ingly characteristic of him. A man satisfied with
small things, or even in love with small things,
he yet never felt quite as we do about the dispro-
portion between small things and large. He never
saw things to scale in our sense, but with a dizzy
disproportion which makes the mind reel. Some-
times it seems merely out of drawing like a gaily
coloured medieval map; and then again it seems
to have escaped from everything like a short cut
in the fourth dimension. He is said to have made
a journey to interview the Emperor, throned
among his armies under the eagle of the Holy
Roman Empire, to intercede for the lives of
certain little birds. He was quite capable of
facing fifty emperors to intercede for one bird.
He started out with t\VO companions to convert
the Mahomedan world. He started out with
eleven companions to ask the Pope to make a ne\v
monastic world.
Innocent III., the great Pope, according to
Bonaventura, was walking on the terrace of St.
John Lateran, doubtless revolving the great

'Ihe 'Ihree Orders

12 3

political questions which troubled his reign, when
there appeared abruptly before him a person in
peasant costume \vhom he took to be some sort
of shepherd. He appears to have got rid of the
shepherd with all convenient speed; possibly he
formed the opinion that the shepherd was mad.
Anyhow he thought no more about it until, says
the great Franciscan biographer, he dreamed that
night a strange dream. He fancied that he saw
the whole huge ancient temple of St. John Lateran,
on whose high terraces he had walked so securely,
leaning horribly and crooked against the sky as
if all its domes and turrets were stooping before an
earthquake. Then he looked again and saw
that a human figure was holding it up like a
living caryatid; and the figure was that of the
ragged shepherd or peasant from \vhom he had
turned a wa y on the terrace. Whether this be a
fact or a figure it is a very true figure of the abrupt
simplicity with which Francis won the attention
and the favour of Rome. His first friend seems
to have been the Cardinal Giovanni di San Paolo
who pleaded for the Franciscan idea before a
conclave of Cardinals summoned for the purpose.
I t is interesting to note that the doubts thrown
upon it seem to have been chiefly doubts about
whether the rule was not too hard for humanity,
for the Catholic Church is ahvays on the watch
against excessive asceticism and its evils.
Prubably they meant, especially when they said

12 4

St. Francis of Assisi

it was unduly hard, that it was unduly dangerous.
For a certain element that can only be called
danger is what marks the innovation as compared
with older institutions of the kind. In one sense
indeed the friar was almost the opposite of the
monk. The value of the old monasticism had
been that there was not only an ethical but an
economic repose. Out of that repose had come
the works for which the world will never be suffi-
ciently grateful, the preservation of the classics,
the beginning of the Gothic, the schemes of science
and philosophies, the illuminated manuscripts and
the coloured glass. The whole point of a monk
was that his economic affairs were settled for good;
he knew where he would get his supper, though it
was a very plain supper. But the whole point
of a friar was that he did not know where he
would get his supper. There was always a possi-
bility that he might get no supper. There was an
element of what would be called romance, as of
the gipsy or adventurer. But there was also an
element of potential tragedy, as of the tramp or
the casual labourer. So the Cardinals of the
thirteenth century were filled with compassion,
seeing a few men entering of their own free will
that estate to which the poor of the twentieth
century are daily driven by cold coercion and
moved on by the police.
Cardinal San Paolo seems to have argued more
or less in this manner: it may be a hard life, but

q'he q'hree Orders

12 5

after all it is the life apparently described as
ideal in the Gospel; make what compromises you
think wise or humane about that ideal; but do not
commit yourselves to saying that men shall not
fulfil that ideal if they can. We shall see the
importance of this argument when \ve come to
the whole of that higher aspect of the life of
St. Francis which may be called the Imitation of
Christ. The upshot of the discussion was that the
Pope gave his verbal approval to the project and
promised a more definite endorsement, if the
movement should grow to more considerable
proportions. It is probable that Innocent, who
was himself a man of no ordinary mentality, had
very little doubt that it would do so; anyhow he
was not left long in doubt before it did do so.
The next passage in the history of the order is
simply the story of more and more people flock-
ing to its standard; and as has already been
remarked, once it had begun to grO\V, it could in
its nature grow much more quickly than any
ordinary society req uiring ordinary funds and
public buildings. Even the return of the twelve
pioneers from their papal audience seems to have
been a sort of triumphal procession. In one place
in particular, it is said, the whole population of
a town, men, women and children, turned out,
leaving their work and wealth and homes exactly
as they stood and begging to be taken into the
army of God on the spot. According to the story,

126

St. Francis of Assisi

it was on this occasion that St. Francis first fore-
shadowed his idea of the Third Order which
enabled men to share in the movement without
leaving the homes and habits of normal humanity.
For the moment it is most important to regard
this story as one example of the riot of conversion
\vith which he was already filling all the roads of
Italy. It \vas a world of wandering; friars per-
petually coming and going in all the highways and
byways, seeking to ensure that any man who met
one of them by chance should have a spiritual
adventure. The First Order of St. Francis had
entered history.
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 fonner 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

r:r he r:r hree Order J

12 7

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 ,vas
.received at midnight by the light of torches.
Even
Irs. Oliphant, in her fine and delicate study
of St. Francis, calls it II an incident which we can
hardly record with satisfaction."
No,v 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
seven teen. 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 o\vn mind. There cannot be the
shado\v 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

128

St. Francis of A ssisi

modem 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 o\Vll life J
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

CJ'he CJ'hree Orders

12 9

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 \vill 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 conflagra-
tion. 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 dis-
embodied 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 ".as as
I

13 0

St. Francis of Assisi

solid a memorial of a very solid sympathy with
earthly loves and earthly lives. The whole of this
fea ture 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. I t 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 \vith 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 rational-
istic centuries would stand revealed; the great

r:r he r:r hree Orders

13 1

Galvani, for instance, the father of all electricity,
the magician who has made so many modern
systems of stars and sounds. So various a follow-
ing would alone be enough to prove that St.
Francis had no lack of sympathy \vith normal men,
if the \vhole 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 them-
selves 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 \vas 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 \vith
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 \vhen he wrestled \vith the devil,
as every man must to be worth calling a man, the
whispers referred mostly to those healthy instincts
that he wou1d 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 \vith

13 2

St. Francis of A ssisi

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, H 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 ,vas good. As it was said of others
that the light in their body was darkness, so it
may be said of this IUlninous spirit that the very
shadows in his soul were of light, Evil itself
could not come to him save in the form of a for-
bidden good; and he could only be tempted by a
sacramel1 t.

Chapter 11'111

1"he
lirror 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 con-
centrate 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 \vorld 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 differ-
ence between the Creator and the creature;
133

134

St. Francis of ASJiJi

and certainly no creature was ever so con-
scious 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
poin ts their human and historical lives were even
curiously coincident; and above all, that com-
pared 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
Ca tholic Church.
Cardinal Newman wrote in his liveliest con-
troversial 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, II 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

he Mirror of Christ

135

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 tha t 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,
lid.ny minur things that seem mysteries in the

13 6

St. Francis of Assisi

mouth of Christ would seem merely character-
istic 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 circum-
stances 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 conven-
tional 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
though t for the morrow. The sceptic has alter-

'I he Ai irror of Christ 137
nated 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.JJ 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. I t 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 police-
men against a poor fellow-citizen. Here again I

13 8

St. FranciJ of Assisi

am content to point out that the paradox becomes
perfectly human and probable if addressed by
Francis to Franciscans. Nobody would be sur-
prised to read that Brother J uni per 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 atmo-
sphere 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 humor-
ous sense of bewildering the worldly with the
unexpected; something of the joy of carrying
an enthusiastic conviction to a logical extreme.
But anyhow w.e 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

The Mirror of Christ

139

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 explica ble
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,
tha t 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 \vhich 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
F ranciscus.
But if we understand that it was truly under
the inspiration of his divine
laster 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

14 0

St. Francis of Ãssisi

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 1iount. 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 Ghrist 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 conven-
iences of the ascetical privilege. Every other
sort of superiority may be superciliousness.

'Ihe Mirror of Christ 141

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 con-
cei ved 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
roughl y summarised as the Search for
Iartyrdom.
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 modem mind is
hard to please; and it generally calls the way of
Godfrey ferocious and the way of Francis fana-
tical. That is, it calls any moral method unprac-
tical, 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

14 2

St. Francis of Assisi

saw the problem as rather too simple, lacking
the learning of his great inheritor Raymond
Lul1y, who understood more but has been quite
as Ii ttle understood. The way he approached
the matter was indeed highly personal and
peculiar; but that was true of almGst 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 ,vas, 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 immeasur-
ably more united and happy; for one thing,
three quarters of the wars of modem 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 \vhen 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

The Mirror of Christ 143
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. I t 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 \vithout 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 do\vn 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

144

St. Francis of Assisi

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 philo-
sophy of toleration; and the a verage 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 -eviden t 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 uncon-
scious meeting the unfamiliar, and called it
the liberality of his own mind. Medieval men

The Mirror of Christ 145
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 com-
munists 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 character-
istically 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
K

14 6

St. Francis of Assisi

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 unfor-
tuna te and erra tic 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 con-
cerned. 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

'I he Mirror of Christ

147

solitary fashion to seek the headquarters of the
Saracens. He succeeded in obtaining an inter-
view with the Sultan; and it was at that interview
that he evidently offered, and as some say pro-
ceeded, to fling himself into the fire as a divine
ordeal, defying the Moslem religious teachers
to do the same. I t 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. I t is said further that
the Mahomedan muftis showed some coldness
towards the proposed competition, and that one
of them quietly \vithdrew 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
sOIIlething in the story of the individual impres-
sion produced on the Sultan, which the narrator
represents as a sort of secret conversion. There
ma y be something in the suggestion tha t the
holy man was unconsciously protected among
half-barbarous orientals by the halo of sanctity
tha t is supposed in such places to surround an
idiot. There is probably as much or more in
the more generous explanation of that graceflù
though capricious courtesy and compassion which
mingled with wilder things in the stately Soldans

14 8

St. Francis of Assisi

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,
beca use 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
Inaking giant strides. Backed now by papal
authority a
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 resur-
rections 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

'Ihe Alirror of Christ

149

Poverty had thus been insulted with the luxury
of palaces. I t 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 \vhich
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 shado\v 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 every-
thing 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 \vhether or no it
was chronologically it \vas certainly logically
the culmination of the story, and may best be
indicated here. I say indicated for it must be a
ma tter of little more than indication; the thing
being a mystery both in the higher moral and the
more trivial historical sense. Anyhow the con-
di tions of the affair seem to ha ve 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 knight-

15 0

St. Francis of Assisi

hood. This aristocratic mansion, which took its
name from Monte FeItro, 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 II 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
Qn the subject; it would be highly characteristic,

'I he Mirror of Christ

IS I

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. Subj ect 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 tha t
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 sera ph 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 con-
tradiction 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

'52

St. Francis of Alsis;

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
wi th the sense of something ended and complete;
and as he stared downwards, he saw the marks
of nails in his own hands.

Chapter I X

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 lingering 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 com-
mon 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. I t 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 out-
line. It is the natural occasion for considering
153

154

St. Francis of Assisi

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, some.
what hastily, all such jewels into a heap.
I have here adopted this course in order to
make allowance for a prej udice. I t 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 II 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 simpli-
fication 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

Miracles and Death

155

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. Every-
body 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
\vhat 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 a\vay 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

15 6

St. Francis of Assisi

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 corro-
borated. 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 under-
stand their saying that these details would never
have been included in a chronicle except by
lunatics or liars; but in that case the only infer-
ence 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: II The
credulity of the age readily believed that Joan
of Arc had been inspired to point out the Dauphin

Miracles and Death

157

although he was in disguise." \Vhy should they
not write on the same principle: II 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 II ? 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. Per-
haps 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.
I t 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

15 8

St. Francis of Assisi

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
modem 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 \vas 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 mag-
nificent Sun-l\lyth. 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? I t is needless to point out that the
fire in Syria was the dawn in the East and the

AI iracles and Death

159

bleeding wounds in Tuscany the sunset in the
West. I could expound this theory at con-
siderable length; only, as so often happens to
such fine theorists, another and more promising
theory occurs to me. I cannot think how every-
body, 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

160

St. Francis of Assisi

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 bum.
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

Miracles and Death

161

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 It perceiving men's thoughts." What is
the use of censoring them and blacking them out
because they are marked It miracles," when
thought-reading is already a parlour game like
musical chairs? There is another whole depart-
ment, 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 incon-
ceivable, when even these common psychical
parlour tricks turn perpetually upon touching
some familiar 0 bj ect or holding in the hand
some personal possession? I do not believe, of
course, that these tricks are of the same type
L

162

St. Francis of Assisi

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 prob-
ably 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 under-
stand before those they ha ve 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 them-
selves, they will soon find that the supernatural
part of the story seems quite as natural as the

Al iracl
J and D
ath

16 3

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 a bout some distinctions that
may reasonably be observed in the matter by
any man of any views; that he may not confuse
the Doint and climax of the saint':; life \vith the
.a.
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 explana-
tion. 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 thaJ1

16 4

St. Francis of Assisi

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 propound-
ing a religious doctrine to be received or rejected,
but only rounding off a story in the most sym-
metrical 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 testi-
mony that is truth or lies; and it will be very
hard for any judge of human nature to think
they are lies.
I t 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

Miracles and Death

16 5

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,
II I saw St. Francis's wounds"; they say, II St.
Francis received wounds." But neither do they
say, II I saw St. Francis go into the Portiuncula " ;
they say, II 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

166

St. Francis oj Assisi

mentioned; the question of why these chronicles
should be credited at all, if they are credited
\vith 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.
Tha t 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 super-
naturalism in the comparatively material and
popular sense of supernatural acts, we shall miss
the whole point of St. Francis, especially of
St. Francis after Alvemo, 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 a pproaches 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
IDS message that such mysticism makes a man
cheerful and humane. But it was the whole
point of his position, and it was the whole mean-
ing of his message, that the power that did it
was a supernatural power. If this simple dis-

M iracleJ and Death

16 7

tinction 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 ha ve 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. cc Never," he cried with the
sudden energy of strong spirits in death, cc 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

168

St. Francis of Assisi

brethren gathered round him for the last long
vigil. It seems to me no moment for entering
into the subsequent disputes about which suc-
cessors 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 \voods from the presence of
his father. I t 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 isola-
tion, 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
memqries 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 con-
troversial wars that could be reduced to a plan
and handed on like a plan; a master of a machine

Miracles and Death

16 9

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 repea ted
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 land-
scape 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 artilex
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 traè3tion tried to turn into a sort of Judas,

17 0

St. Francis of Assis;

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 Fran-
ciscan heart, or at any rate with a very un-
Franciscan head. But though he made a bad Fran-
ciscan, he might have made a decent Dominican.
Anyhow, there is DO 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 Mitten
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

Miracles and D
ath

17 1

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
bad not broken till it held the wurld.

Chapter X

he
estament 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 dis-
agreements. 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 wicked-
ness 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
172

'[he '[estament of St. Francis 173
of the individual friar that he would have no
individual possessions. Nobody, that is, pro-
posed 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 arrange-
ment, 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 work-
able 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 con-
cerning a number of historic edifices and ordinary
goods and chattels. Many idealists of a social-

174

St. Francis of Assisi

istic sort, notably of the school of ?vIr. 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 nlerely 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 civilisa-
tion. 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.

:rhe :r
stamtnt of St. Francis 175
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.

17 6

St. Francis of Assisi

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 b
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

'Ihe Testament of St. Francis 177
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 lèaf 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 I talian 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
JrI

17 8

St. Francis of A ssisi

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
Iinos or of Charon, only give a hint of some
enormous natural religion behind all history
and from the first foreshadowing the F ai tho 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 ha ve 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. I t 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

'Ihe 'Testament of St. Francis 179
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 Bene-
dictine 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 imagina-
tion 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 origin-
ally 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

180

St. Francis of Assist'

of St. Francis and broke away from the com-
promises 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 \vere 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 t9 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

:Ihe :Iestament of St. Francis I8I
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
a t the ends of the earth. The sense of humour
which salts all the stories of his escapades alone
preven ted him from ever hardening in to 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 nega tions ha ve
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
\vorld. 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

182

St. Francis of Assisi

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 thanks-
giving. If another great man wrote a gramm3.r
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

'The 'Testament of St. Francis 183
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 awaken-
ing of the world and a dawn in which all shapes
and colours could be seen ane\v. 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 Euro-
pean painting had himself gone to St. Francis to
be inspired. I t 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 \vooden 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 \ve call the drama. Save for his intense
individual love of song, he did not perhaps him-
self embody this spirit in any of these arts. He
was the spirit that \vas embodied. He was the
spiritual essence and substance that walked the

18 4

St. FranciJ of Assz'si

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
Democra 1. N ei ther 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 ha ve done
infinitely more and the futility of ha ving done
anything. He will know what it is to stand under

'The 'Testament of St. Francis 185
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, over-
whelming arches of such a temple of time and
eternity, but this brief candle burnt out so quickly
before his shrine.