 Chapter 5 Le Jogler de Dieu Many signs and symbols might be used to give a hint of what really happened in the mind of the young poet of Assisi. Indeed, they are at once too numerous for selection and yet too slight for satisfaction. But one of them may be adumbrated in this small and apparently accidental fact. That when he and his secular companions carried their pageant of poetry through the town, they called themselves troubadours. But when he and his spiritual companions came out to do their spiritual work in the world, they were called by their leader, the Jogler de Dieu. Nothing has been said here at any length of the great culture of the troubadours as it appeared in Provence or Languedoc, great as was their influence in history and their influence on St. Francis. Something more may be said of them when we come to summarize 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 pointing question which was the most relevant of all. Everybody knows who the troubadours were. Everybody knows that very early in the Middle Ages, in the 12th and early 13th centuries, there arose a civilization in southern France which threatened to rival or eclipse the rising tradition of Paris. Its chief product was a school of poetry, or rather more especially a school of poets. They were primarily love poets, though they were often also satirists and critics of things in general. Their picturesque picture in history is largely due to the fact that they sang their own poems and often played their own accompaniments on the light musical instruments of the period. They were minstrels as well as men of letters. Allied to their love poetry were either institutions of a decorative and fanciful kind concerned with the same theme. There was what was called the gay science, the attempt to reduce to a sort of system the fine shades of flirtation and flandering. There were the things called courts of love in which the same delicate subjects were dealt with with legal pomp and pedantry. There was one point in this sort of the business that must be remembered in a relation to St. Francis. There were manifest moral dangers in all this superb sentimentalism, but it is a mistake to suppose that its only danger of exaggeration was in the direction of sensualism. There was a strain in the southern romance that was actually an excess of spirituality. Just as the pessimist heresy it produced was in one sense an excess of spirituality. The love was not always animal. Sometimes it was so airy as to be almost allegorical. The reader realizes that the lady is the most beautiful being that can possibly exist only he has so 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 Vita Nuova and has been in love, but the very fact that it is possible to suggest it illustrates something abstract and scholastic in these medieval passions. But though they were abstract passions, they were very passionate passions. These men could feel almost like lovers even about allegories and abstractions. It is necessary to remember this in order to realize 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. What the particular point to be noted here is not concerned so much with the word troubadour as with the word jongleur. It is especially concerned with the transition from one to the other, and for this it is necessary to grasp another detail about the poets of the gay science. A jongleur was not the same as a troubadour even if the same man was both a troubadour and a jongleur. More often I believe they were separate men as well as separate trades. In many cases, apparently, the two men would walk the world together like companions in arms or rather companions in arts. The jongleur was properly a jongleur or jester. Sometimes he was what we would call a juggler. This is the point, I imagine, of the tale about Tullifer, the jongleur, at the battle of Hastings, who sang of the death of Roland when he tossed up his sword and caught it as a juggler catches balls. Sometimes he may even have been a tumbler, like that acrobat in the beautiful legend who was called the Tumbler of Our Lady, because he turned head over heels and stood on his head before the image of the Blessed Virgin, for which he was nobly thanked and comforted by her and the whole company of heaven. In the ordinary way, we may imagine, the troubadour would exalt the company with earnest and solemn strains of love, and then the jongleur would do his turn as a sort of comic relief. A glorious medieval romance remains to be written about two such companions wandering through the world. At any rate, if there is one place in which the true Franciscan spirit can be found outside the true Franciscan story, it is in the 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 gesture was presumably the servant or at least the secondary figure. St. Francis really meant what he said when he said he had found the secret of life in being the servant and the secondary figure. There was to be found, ultimately in such service, a freedom almost amounting to frivolity. It was compared to the condition of the jongleur because it almost amounted to frivolity. The gesture could be free when the night was rigid, and it was possible to be a gesture in the service which is perfect freedom. The 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 endeavor, however insufficiently, to penetrate past the image to the idea. It is so far like the tumblers that it is really to many people a topsy-turvy idea. Francis at the time or somewhere about the time when he disappeared into the prison or the dark cavern, underwent a reversal of a certain psychological kind which was really like the reversal of a complete somersault, in that, by coming full circle, it came back and apparently came back to the same normal posture. It is necessary to use the grotesque simile of an acrobatic antique because there is hardly any other figure that will make the fact clear. But in the inward sense it was a profound spiritual revolution. The man who went into the cave was not the man who came out again. In that sense he was almost as different as if he were dead, as if he were a ghost or a blessed spirit. And the effect of this on his attitude towards the actual world were really as extravagant as any parallel can make them. He looked at the world as differently from other men as if he had come out of that dark hole walking on his hands. If we apply this parable of our lady's tumbler to the case, we shall come very near to the point of it. Now it really is a fact that any scene such as a landscape can sometimes be more clearly and freshly seen if it is seen upside down. There have been landscape painters who adopted the most startling and pentaminic postures in order to look at it for a moment in that fashion. Since that inverted version, so much more bright and quaint and arresting, does bear a certain resemblance to the world which a mystic like St. Francis sees every day. But herein is the essential part of the parable. Our lady's tumbler did not stand on his head in order to see flowers and trees as a clearer or quainter vision. He did not do so, and it would never have occurred to him to do so. Our lady's tumbler stood on his head to please our lady. If St. Francis had done the same thing as he was quite capable of doing, it would originally have been from the same motive, a motive of purely supernatural thought. It would be after this that his enthusiasm would extend itself and give a sort of halo to the edges of all earthly things. This is why it is not true to represent St. Francis as a mere romantic forerunner of the Renaissance and a revival of natural pleasures for their own sake. The whole point of him was that the secret of recovering the natural pleasures lay in regarding them in the light of a supernatural pleasure. In other words, he repeated, in his own person, that historic process noted in the introductory chapter. The vigil of asceticism which ends in the vision of a natural world made new. But in the personal case there was even more than this. There were elements that made the parallel of the jungler or tumbler even more appropriate than this. It may be suspected that in that black cell or cave Francis passed the blackest hours of his life. In nature he was the sort of man who has that vanity which is the opposite of pride, that vanity which is very near to humility. He never despised his fellow-creatures, and therefore he never despised the opinion of his fellow-creatures, including the admiration of his fellow-creatures. All that part of his human nature had suffered the heaviest and most crushing blows. It is possible that after his humiliating return from his frustrated military campaign he was called a coward. It is certain that after his quarrel with his father about the bills of cloth he was called a thief. And even those who had sympathised most with him, the priest whose church he had restored, the bishop whose blessing he had received, had evidently treated him with an almost humorous amiability which left only to clear the ultimate conclusion of the matter. He had made a fool of himself. Any man who has been young, who has ridden horses or thought himself ready for a fight, who has fancied himself as a troubadour and accepted the conventions of comradeship will appreciate the ponderous and crushing weight of that simple phrase. The conversion of St. Francis, like the conversion of St. Paul, involved his being in some sense flung suddenly from a horse, but in a sense it was an even worse fall, for it was a warhorse. Anyhow, there was not a rag of him left that was not ridiculous. Everybody knew that at the best he had made a fool of himself. It was a solid, objective fact like the stones in the road that he had made a fool of himself. He saw himself as an object, very small and distinct like a fly walking on a clear window-pane, and it was unmistakably a fool. As he stared at the world, 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, till last 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 as to what he may have felt. But he may have felt something quite different, but whatever else it was, it was so far analogous to the story of the man making a tunnel through the earth that it did mean a man going down and down until at some mysterious moment he begins to go up and up. We have never gone up like that because we have never gone down like that. We are obviously incapable of saying that it does not happen, and the more candidly and calmly we read human history and especially the history of the wisest men, the more we shall come to the conclusion that it does happen. Of the intrinsic internal essence of the experience I make no pretense 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 crust 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 downward as in a pool, one effect would be to emphasize the idea of deep pendants. This is a Latin and literal connection. For the very word deependants only means hanging, it would make vivid the scriptural text which says that God has hanged the world upon nothing. If St. Francis had seen, in one of his strange dreams, the town of Assisi upside down, it need not have differed in a single detail from itself except in being entirely the other way round. But the point is this, that whereas to the normal eye the large masonry of its walls or the massive foundations of its watchtowers and its high citadel would make it seem safer and more permanent, the moment it was turned over the very same weight would make it seem more helpless and more in peril. It is but a symbol, but it happens to fit the psychological fact. St. Francis might love his little town as much as before or more than before, but the nature of the love would be altered even in being increased. He might see and love every tile on the steep roofs or every bird on the battlements, but he would see them all in a new and divine light of eternal danger and dependence. Instead of being merely proud of his strong city because it could not be moved, he would be thankful to God Almighty that it had not been dropped. He would be thankful to God for not dropping the whole cosmos like a vast crystal to be shattered into falling stars. Thus St. Peter saw the world so when he was crucified head downwards. It is commonly in a somewhat cynical sense that men have said, Blessed is he that expecteth nothing for he shall not be disappointed. It was in a wholly happy and enthusiastic sense that St. Francis said, Blessed is he who expecteth nothing for he shall enjoy everything. It was by this deliberate idea of starting from zero, from the dark nothingness of his own desserts, that he did come to enjoy even earthly things as few people ever have enjoyed them, and they are in themselves the best working example of the idea. For there is no way in which a man can earn a star or deserve a sunset. But there is more than this involved and more indeed than is easily to be expressed in words. It is not only true that the less a man thinks of himself the more he thinks of his good luck and of all the gifts of God. It is also true that he sees more of the things themselves when he sees more of their origin, for their origin is a part of them and indeed the most important part of them. For a mystic like St. Francis the monsters had a meaning, that is they had delivered their message. They spoke no longer in an unknown tongue. That is the meaning of all those stories, whether legendary or historical, in which he appears as a magician speaking the language of beasts and birds. The mystic will have nothing to do with mere mystery. Mere mystery is generally a mystery of iniquity. The transition from the good man to the saint is a sort of revolution by which one for whom all things illustrate and illuminate God becomes one for whom God illustrates and illuminates all things. It is rather like the reversal whereby a lover might say at first sight that a lady looked like a flower, and say afterwards that all flowers reminded him of his lady. A saint and a poet standing by the same flower might seem to say the same thing. But indeed, though they would both be telling the truth, they would be telling different truths. For one the joy of life is a cause of faith, for the other rather a result of faith. But one effect of the difference is that the sense of a divine dependence, which for the artist is like the brilliant leaven blaze, for the saint is like the broad daylight. Going 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 a paradox that by this privilege he is more familiar, more free and fraternal, more carelessly hospitable than we. For us the elements are like heralds who tell us with trumpet and tabard that we are drawing near the city of a great king. But he hails them with an old familiarity that is almost an old frivolity. He calls them his brother fire and his sister water. So arises out of this almost nihilistic abyss the noble thing that is called praise, which no one will ever understand while he identifies it with nature worship or pantheistic optimism. Can 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 none entity to entity. There falls here also the shadow of that archetypal image of the bridge which has given to the priest his archaic and mysterious name. The mystic, who passes through the moment when there is nothing but God, does in some sense behold the beginningless beginnings in which there was really nothing else. He not only appreciates everything, but the nothing out 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 star singing together in the sons of God shouting for joy. That is but a distant adumbration of the reason why the Franciscan, ragged, penniless, homeless, and apparently hopeless did indeed come forth singing such songs as might come from the stars of mourning and shouting a son of God. The sense of the great gratitude and the sublime dependence was not a phrase or even a sentiment. It is the whole point that this was the very rock of reality. It was not a fancy, but a fact. Rather it is true that besides 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, it is not an illusion of imagination. On the contrary, it is the fundamental fact which we cover up as with curtains with the illusion of ordinary life. That ordinary life is an admirable thing in itself just as imagination is an admirable thing in itself, but it is much more the ordinary life that is made of imagination than the contemplative life. He who has seen the whole world hanging on a hair of the mercy of God has seen the truth. We might almost say the cold truth. He who has seen the vision of his city upside down has seen it the right way up. Rosetti makes the remark somewhere, bitterly but with great truth, that the worst moment for the atheist is when he is really thankful and has nobody to thank. The converse of this proposition is also true, and it is certain that this gratitude produced in such minutes we are here considering the most purely joyful moments that have been known to man. The great painter boasted that he mixed all his colors with brains, and the great saint may be said to mix all his thoughts with thanks. All goods look better when they look like gifts. In this sense it is certain that the mystical method establishes a very healthy external relation to everything else. But it must always be remembered that everything else has forever fallen into a second place in comparison with this simple fact of dependence on the divine reality. Insofar as ordinary social relations have in them something that seems solid and self-supporting, some sense of being at once buttressed and cushioned, insofar as they establish sanity in the sense of security and security in the sense of self-sufficiency, the man who has seen the world hanging on a hair does have some difficulty in taking them so seriously as that. Insofar as even the secular authorities and hierarchies, even the most natural superiorities and the most necessary subordinations tend at once to put a man in his place and to make him sure of his position. The man who has seen the human hierarchy upside down will always have something of a smile for its superiorities. In this sense the direct vision of divine reality does disturb celebrities that are sane enough in themselves. The mystic may have added a cubit to his stature, but he generally loses something of his status. He can no longer take himself for granted merely because he can verify his own existence in a parish register or a family Bible. Such a man may have something of the appearance of the lunatic who has lost his name while preserving his nature, who straight away forgets what manner of man he was. Neither do I have called Pietro Berdedone 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 there are both debtors and both creditors. In other words, debt and dependence do become pleasures in the presence of unspoiled love. The word is used too loosely and luxuriously in popular simplifications like the present. But here the word is really the key. It is the key of all the problems of Franciscan morality which puzzle the merely modern mind. But above all it is the key of asceticism. It is the highest and holiest of the paradoxes that the man who really knows he cannot pay his debt will be forever paying it. He will be forever giving back what he cannot give back and cannot be expected to give back. He will be always throwing things away into a bottomless pit of unfathomable thanks. Men who think they are too modern to understand this are in fact too mean to understand it. We are most of us too mean to practice 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 rare 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 and love as the barbarians ruling in Berlin destroyed chivalry and war. If that were ever so, we should have the same sort of unintelligent, nearest and unimaginative questions. Men will ask what selfish sort of woman it must have been who ruthlessly exacted tribute in the form of flowers, or what an avaricious creature she can have been to demand solid gold in the form of a ring, just as they ask what cruel kind of God can have demanded sacrifice and self-denial. They will have lost the clue to all that lovers have meant by love, and will not understand that it was because the thing was not demanded that it was done. But whether or no any such lesser things will throw a light on the greater, it is utterly useless to study a great thing like the Franciscan movement while remaining in the modern mood that murmurs against gloomy asceticism. The whole point about St. Francis of Assisi is that he certainly was ascetical and he certainly was not gloomy. As soon as ever he had been unharmed by the glorious humiliation of his vision of dependence on the divine love, he flung himself into fasting and vigil exactly as he had flung himself furiously into battle. He had wheeled his charger clean round, and there was no halt or check in the thundering impetuosity of his charge. There was nothing negative about it. It was not a regimen or a stoical simplicity of life. It was not self-denial merely in the sense of self-control. It was as positive as a passion, it had all the air of being as positive as a pleasure. He devoured fasting as a man devours food. He plunged after poverty as men have dug madly for gold. And it is precisely the positive and passionate quality of this part of his personality that has a challenge to the modern mind in the whole problem of the pursuit of pleasure. There undeniably is the historical fact, and there attached to it is another moral fact almost as undeniable. It is certain that he held on this heroic or unnatural course, from the moment when he went forth in his hair-shirt into the winter woods, to the moment when he desired even in his death agony to lie bare upon the bare ground, to prove that he had and that he was nothing. And we can say with almost as deep a certainty that the stars which passed above that gaunt and wasted corpse stark upon the rocky floor had for once in all their shining cycles round the world of laboring humanity looked down upon a happy man. CHAPTER VI The Little Poor Man From that cavern that was a furnace of glowing gratitude and humility there came forth one of the strongest and strangest and most original personalities that human history has known. He was, among other things, emphatically what we call a character, almost as we speak of a character in a good novel or play. He was not only a humanist, but a humorist. A humorist especially in the old English sense of a man always in his humor going his own way and doing what nobody else would have done. The anecdotes about him have a certain biographical quality of which the most familiar example is Dr. Johnson, which belongs in another way to William Blake or to Charles Lamb. The atmosphere can only be defined by a sort of antithesis. The act is always unexpected and never inappropriate. Before the thing is said or done it cannot even be conjectured. But after it is said or done it is felt to be merely characteristic. It is surprising and yet inevitably individual. The quality of abrupt fitness and bewildering consistency belongs to St. Francis in a way that marks him out from most men of his time. Men are learning more and more of the solid social virtues of medieval civilization. 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 generalizations were saner and sounder than the mad materialistic theories of today. They would have tolerated a Schopenhauer scarning life, or a Nietzsche living only for scorn. But the modern world is more subtle in its sense of the things in which men are not at one, in the temperamental varieties and differentations that make up the personal problems of life. All men who can think themselves now realize that the great schoolman had a type of thought that was wonderfully clear, but it was as if it were deliberately colorless. Scholar 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 colors in it that are personal almost to the extent of being perverse if one can use the word perversity of an inversion that was also a conversion. Even among the saints, he has the air of a sort of eccentric, if one may use the word of one whose eccentricity consisted in always turning towards the center. Before resuming the narrative of his first adventures and the building of the great brotherhood, which was the beginning of so merciful a revolution, I think it well to complete this imperfect personal portrait here, and having attempted in the last chapter a tentative description of the process to add in this chapter a few touches to describe the result. I mean, by the result, the real man as he was after his first formative experiences, the man whom men met walking about on the Italian roads in his brown tunic tied with a rope. For that man, saving the grace of God, is the explanation of all that followed. Men acted quite differently according to whether they had met him or not. If we see afterwards a vast tumult, an appeal to the pope, mobs of men in brown habits besieging the seats of authority, papal pronouncements, heretical sessions, trial and triumphal survival, the world full of a new movement, the friar a household word in every corner of Europe, and if we ask why all this happened, we can only approximate to any answer to our own question if we can in some faint and indirect imaginative fashion hear one human voice and see one human face under a hood. There is no answer except that Francis Belladonna had happened, and we must try in some sense to see what we should have seen if he had happened to us. In other words, after some groping suggestions about his life from the inside, we must again consider it from the outside, as if he were a stranger coming up the road towards us along the hills of Umbria between the olives or the vines. Francis of Assisi was slight in figure with that sort of slightness which, combined with so much vivacity, gives the impression of smallness. He was probably taller than he looked, middle-sized, his biographers say. He was certainly very active and, considering what he went through, must have been tolerably tough. He was of the brownish-southern colouring, with a dark beard thin and pointed, such as appears in pictures under the hoods of elves, and his eyes glowed with a 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 sciences something that mark him out very distinctively from many who might appear to be more of his kind than they really are. It is truly said that Francis of Assisi was one of the founders of the medieval drama and therefore of the modern drama. He was the very reverse of a theatrical person in the selfish sense, but for all that he was preeminently a dramatic person. This side of him can best be suggested by taking what is commonly regarded as a reposeful quality, what is commonly described as a love of nature. We are compelled to use the term, and it is entirely the wrong term. St. Francis was not a lover of nature. Properly understood, a lover of nature was precisely what he was not. The phrase implies accepting the material universe as a vague environment, a sort of sentimental pantheism. In the romantic period of literature, in the age of Byron and Scott, it was easy enough to imagine that a hermit in the ruins of a chapel, preferably by moonlight, might find peace and a mild pleasure in the harmony of solemn forests and silent stars while he pondered over some scroll or illuminated volume about the liturgical nature of which the author was a little vague. In short, the hermit might love nature as a background. Now for St. Francis, nothing was ever in the background. We might say that his mind had no background, except perhaps the divine darkness out of which the divine love had called up every colored creature one by one. He saw everything as dramatic, distinct from its setting, not at all a piece like a picture, but an action like a plane. A bird went by him like an arrow, something with a story and a purpose, though it was a purpose of life and not a purpose of death. A bush could stop him like a brigand, and indeed he was as ready to welcome the brigand as the bush. In a word we talk about a man who cannot see the wood for the trees. St. Francis was a man who did not want to see the wood for the trees. He wanted to see each tree as a separate and almost a sacred thing, being a child of God and therefore a brother and sister of man. But he did not want to stand against a piece of stage scenery used merely as a background and inscribed in a general fashion scene a wood. In this sense we might say that he was too dramatic for the drama. The scenery would have come to life in his comedies. The walls would really have spoken like snout the tinker, and the trees would really have come walking to Dunsonane. Everything would have been in the foreground, and in that sense in the footlights. Everything would be in every sense a character. This is the quality in which, as a poet, he is the very opposite of a pantheist. He did not call nature his mother. He called a particular donkey his brother, or a particular sparrow his sister. If he had called a pelican his aunt or an elephant his uncle, as he might possibly have done, he would still have meant that they were particular creatures assigned by their creator to particular places, not mere expressions of the evolutionary energy of things. That is where his mysticism is so close to the common sense of the child. Every 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 in 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. And Francis was a mystic, but he believed in mysticism and not in mystification. As a mystic, he was the mortal enemy of all those mystics who melt away the edges of things and dissolve an entity into its environment. He was a mystic of the daylight and the darkness, but not a mystic of the twilight. He was the very contrary of that sort of oriental visionary who is only a mystic because he is too much of a skeptic to be a materialist. St. Francis was emphatically a realist, using the word realist in its much more real medieval sense. In this matter, he really was akin to the best spirit of his age which had just won its victory over the nominalism of the 12th century. In this indeed there was something symbolic in the contemporary art and decoration of his period as in the art of heraldry. The Franciscan birds and beasts were really rather like heraldic birds and beasts, not in the sense of being fabulous animals, but in the sense of being treated as if they were facts, clear and positive and unaffected by the illusions of atmosphere and perspective. In that sense he did see a bird sable on a field of azure or a sheep archant on a field of vert, but the heraldry of humility was richer than the heraldry of pride, for it saw all these things that God has given us as something more precious and unique than the blazonery 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 Caesar or the iron crown of Lumberding. It is an example of extremes that meet that the little poor man who had stripped himself of everything and named himself as nothing took the same title that has been the wild vaunt of the vanity of a gorgeous Asiatic autocrat and called himself the brother of the sun and moon. This quality of something outstanding and even straddling in things that St. Francis saw them is here important as illustrating a character in his own life. As he saw all things dramatically so he himself was always dramatic. We have to assume throughout needless to say that he was a poet and can only be understood as a poet. But he had one poetic privilege denied to most poets. In that respect indeed he might be called the one happy poet among all the unhappy poets of the world. He was a poet whose whole life was a poem. He was not so much a menstrual merely singing his own songs as a dramatist capable of acting the whole of his own play. The things he said were more imaginative than the things he wrote. The things he did were more imaginative than the things he said. His whole course through life was a series of scenes in which he had a sort of perpetual luck in bringing things to a beautiful crisis. To talk about the art of living has come to sound rather artificial than artistic, but St. Francis did in a definite sense make the very act of living an art, though it was an unpremeditated art. Many of his acts will seem grotesque and puzzling to a rationalistic taste, but they were always acts and not explanations, and they always meant what he meant them to mean. The amazing vividness with which he stamped himself on the memory and imagination of mankind is very largely due to the fact that he was seen again and again under such dramatic conditions. From the moment when he rent his robes and flung them at his father's feet to the moment when he stretched himself in death on the bare earth in the pattern of the cross, his life was made up of these unconscious attitudes and unhesitating gestures. It would be easy to fill page after page with examples, but I will here pursue the method found convenient elsewhere in this short sketch and take one typical example, drawing on it with a little more detail than would be possible in a catalogue in the hope of making the meaning more clear. The example taken here occurred in the last days of his life, but it refers back in a rather curious fashion to the first, and rounds off the remarkable unity of that romance of religion. The phrase about his brotherhood with the sun and moon and with the water and the fire occurs, of course, in his famous poem called The Canticle of the Creatures or The Canticle of the Sun. He sang it, wondering in the meadows in the sunnier season of his own career, when he was pouring upwards into the sky all the passions of a poet. It is a supremely characteristic work, and much of St. Francis could be reconstructed from that work alone. Though in some ways the thing is as simple and straightforward as a ballad, there is a delicate instinct of differentiation in it. Notice, for instance, the sense of sex in inanimate things which goes far beyond the arbitrary genders of a grammar. It was not for nothing that he called fire his brother, fear St. Gay and strong, and water his sister, pure and clear and inviolate. Remember that St. Francis was neither encumbered nor assisted by all the 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 recurred to him to connect Neptune and the nymphs with the water or Vulcan and the Cyclops with the flame. This point exactly illustrates what has already been suggested, that so far from being a revival of paganism, the Franciscan renaissance was a sort of fresh start and fresh awakening after a forgetfulness of paganism. Certainly it is responsible for a certain freshness in the thing itself. Anyhow St. Francis was, as it were, the founder of a new folklore, but he could distinguish his mermaids from his mermin 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 Moshe Notre-Fraire, it is like a faint half-ironic shadow of the shining primacy that it had held in the pagan heavens. A bishop is said to have complained of a non-conformist, saying Paul, instead of St. Paul, and to have added, he might have least have called him Mr. Paul. So St. Francis is free of all obligation to cry out in praise or terror on the Lord God Apollo, but in his new nursery heavens he salutes him as Mr. Sun. Those are the things in which he has a sort of inspired infancy only to be paralleled in nursery tales. Something of the same hazy but healthy awe makes the story of Brer Fox and Brer Rabbit refer respectfully to Mr. Man. This poem, full of the mirth of youth and the memories of childhood, runs through his whole life like a refrain and scraps of it turn up continually in the ordinary habit of his talk. Perhaps the last appearance of its special language was in an incident that has always seemed to me intensely impressive and at any rate very illustrative of the great manner and gesture of which I speak. Impressions of that kind are a matter of imagination and in that sense of taste. It is idle to argue about them, for it is the whole point of them that they have passed beyond words, and even when they use words seem to be completed by some ritual movement like a blessing or a blow. In a supreme example, there is something far past all exposition, something like the sweeping movement and mighty shadow of a hand darkening even the darkness of Gethsemane. Sleep on now and take your rest. Yet there are people who have started to paraphrase and expand the story of the Passion. St. Francis was a dying man. We might say he was an old man at the time this typical incident occurred, but in fact he was only prematurely old, for he was not fifty when he died, worn out with his fighting and fasting life. But when he came down from the awful asceticism and more awful revelation of Alverno, he was a broken man. As will be apparent when these events are touched on in their turn, it was not only sickness and bodily decay that may well have darkened his life. He had been recently disappointed in his main mission to end the crusades by the conversion of Islam. He had been still more disappointed by the signs of compromise and a more political or practical spirit in his own order. He had spent his last energies in protest. At this point he was told that he was going blind. If the faintest hint has been given here of what St. Francis felt about the glory and pageantry of earth and sky, about the heraldric shapes and color and symbolisms of birds and beasts and flowers, some notion may be formed of what it meant to him to go blind. Yet the remedy might well have seemed worse than the disease. The remedy, admittedly an uncertain remedy, was to cauterize the eye and that without any anesthetic. In other words, it was to burn his living eyeballs with a red hot iron. Many of the tortures of Mortidom which he envied in Mortarology and sought vainly in Syria can have been no worse. When they took the brand from the furnace he rose as with an urbane gesture and spoke as to an invisible presence. Brother Fire, God made you beautiful and strong and useful, I pray you be courteous with me. If there be any such thing as the art of life, it seems to me that such a moment was one of its masterpieces. Not too many poets has it been given to remember their own poetry at such a moment. Still lest live one of their own poems. Even William Blake would have been disconcerted if, while he was rereading the noble lines Tiger, Tiger, Burning Bright, a real large live bingle tiger had put his head in at the window of the cottage in Felpham, evidently with every intention of biting his head off. He might have wavered before politely saluting it, above all by calmly completing the recitation of the poem to the quadrupet to whom it was dedicated. Shully, 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 midair a thousand feet above the sea. And Keats, knowing that his hold on life was a frail one, might have been disturbed to discover that the true, the blushful hypocrite of which he had just partaken freely, had indeed contained a drug which really ensured that he should cease upon the midnight with no pain. For Francis there was no drug, and for Francis there was plenty of pain, but his first thought was one of his first fancies from the song of his youth. He remembered the time when a flame was a flower, only the most glorious and gaily colored of the flowers in the garden of God. And when that shining thing returned to him in the shape of an instrument of torture, he hailed it from afar like an old friend, calling it by the nickname which might most truly be called its Christian name. That is only one incident out of a life of such incidents, and I have selected it partly because it shows what is meant here by that shadow of gesture there is in all his words, the dramatic gesture of the South, and partly because its special reference to courtesy covers the next fact to be noted. The popular instinct of St. Francis and his perpetual preoccupation with the idea of brotherhood will be entirely misunderstood if it is understood in the sense of what is often called camaraderie, the back-slapping sort of brotherhood. Frequently from the enemies and too frequently from the friends of the democratic ideal, there has come a notion that this note is necessary to that ideal. It is assumed that equality means all men being equally uncivil, whereas it obviously ought to mean all men being equally civil. Such men have forgotten the very meaning and derivation of the word civility. If they do not see that to be uncivil is to be uncivic. But anyhow, that was not the equality which Francis of Assisi encouraged, but an equality of the opposite kind. It was a camaraderie actually founded on courtesy. Even in that very borderland of his mere fantasies about flowers and animals and even inanimate things, he retained this permanent posture of a sort of deference. A friend of mine said that somebody was the sort of man who apologizes to the cat. St. Francis really would have apologized to the cat. When he was about to preach to a wood full of the chatter of birds he said with a gentle gesture, little sisters, if you have now had your say it is time that I also should be heard. And all the birds were silent, as I for one can very easily believe. In deference to my special design of making matters intelligible to average modernity, I have treated separately the subject of the miraculous powers that St. Francis most certainly possessed. But even apart from any miraculous powers, men of that magnetic sort with that intense interest in animals often have an extraordinary power over them. St. Francis's power was always exercised with this elaborate politeness. Much of it was doubtless a sort of symbolic joke. A pious pantomime intended to convey the vital distinction in his divine mission that he not only loved but reverenced God in all his creatures. In this sense he had the air not only of apologizing to the cat or to the birds, but of apologizing to a chair for sitting on it or to a table for sitting down at it. Anyone who had followed him through his life merely to laugh at him as a sort of lovable lunatic might easily have had the impression as of a lunatic who bowed to every post or took off his hat to every tree. This was all a part of his instinct for imaginative gesture. He taught the world a large part of its lessons by a sort of divine dumb alphabet. But if there was this ceremonial element, even in lighter or lesser matters, its significance became far more serious in the serious work of his life which was an appeal to humanity or rather to human beings. I have said that St. Francis deliberately did not see the wood for the trees. It is even more true that he deliberately did not see the mob for the men. What distinguishes this very genuine Democrat from any mere demagogue is that he never either deceived or was deceived by the illusion of mass suggestion. Whatever his taste in monsters he never saw before him a many headed beast. He only saw the image of God multiplied but never monotonous. To him a man was always a man and did not disappear in a dense crowd any more than in a desert. He honored all men, that is, he not only loved but respected them all. What gave him his extraordinary personal power was this, that from the pope to the beggar, from the sultan of Syria in his pavilion to the ragged robbers crawling out of the wood, there was never a man who looked into those brown burning eyes without being certain that Francis Bernadone was really interested in him. In his own inner individual life from the cradle to the grave, that he himself was being valued and taken seriously and not merely added to the spoils of some social policy are the names in some clerical document. Now for this particular moral and religious idea there is no external expression except courtesy. Exhortation does not express it, for it is not mere abstract enthusiasm. Beneficence does not express it, for it is not mere pity. It can only be conveyed by a certain grand manner which may be called good manners. We may say if we like that St. Francis in the bare and barren simplicity of his life had clung to one rag of luxury, the manners of a court, but whereas in a court there is one king and a hundred courtiers, in this story there was one courtier moving among a hundred kings, for he treated the whole mob of men as a mob of kings, and this was really and truly the only attitude that will appeal to that part of man to which he wished to appeal. It cannot be done by giving gold or even bread, for it is a proverb that any reveler may fling largesse in mere scorn. It cannot even be done by giving time and attention for any number of philanthropists and benevolent bureaucrats do such work with a scorn far more cold and horrible than their hearts. No plans or proposals or efficient rearrangements will give back to a broken man his self-respect and sense of speaking with an equal. One gesture will do it. With that gesture Francis of Assisi moved among men, and it was soon found to have something in it of magic and to act in a double sense like a charm. For it must always be conceived as a completely natural gesture, for indeed it was almost a gesture of apology. He must be imagined as moving thus swiftly through the world with a sort of impetuous politeness, almost like the movement of a man who stumbles on one knee half in haste and half in obisience. 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 is now to be described was of the nature of an earthquake or a volcano, an explosion that drove outwards with dynamic energy the forces stored up by ten centuries in the monastic fortress or arsenal and scattered all its riches recklessly to the ends of the earth. In a better sense than the antithesis commonly conveys, it is true to say that what St. Benedict had stored St. Francis scattered. But in the world of spiritual things what had been stored into the barns like grain was scattered over the world as seed. The servants of God who had been a besieged garrison became a marching army. The ways of the world were filled as with thunder with the trampling of their feet and far ahead of that ever-swelling host with a man singing as simply as he had sung that morning in the winter woods where he walked alone. CHAPTER VII THE THREE ARTERS 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 figure moving three deep. The famous trios like the three musketeers are the three soldiers of kippling. But there is another and a different sense in which four is company and three is none. If we use the word company in the vaguer sense of a crowd or a mass, with the fourth man enters the shadow of a mob. The group is no longer one of three individuals only conceived individually. That shadow of the fourth man fell across the little hermitage of the partinucula when a man named Agedio, apparently a poor workman, was invited by St. Francis to enter. He mangled without difficulty with the merchant and the cannon who had already become the companions of Francis. But with his coming an invisible line was crossed, for it must have been felt by this time that the growth of that small group had become potentially infinite, or at least that its outline had become permanently indefinite. It may have been in the time of that transition that Francis had another of his dreams full of voices. But now the voices were a clamour of the tongues of all nations, Frenchmen and Italians and English and Spanish and Germans, telling of the glory of God each in his own tongue a new pentecost and a happier babble. Before describing the first steps he took to regularise the growing group, it is well to have a rough grasp of what he conceived that group to be. He did not call his followers monks, and it is not clear at this time at least that he even thought of them as monks. He called them by a name which is generally rendered in English as the friar's 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 vision of the life of humility. But the supreme difference between his discipline and the discipline of the old monastic system was concerned of course with the idea that the monks were to become migratory and almost nomadic instead of stationary. They were to mingle with the world, and to this the more old fashioned monk would naturally reply by asking how they were to mingle with the world without becoming entangled with the world. It was a much more real question than a loose religiosity is likely to realize, 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 Partinucula without comforts, without possessions, eating anything they could get and sleeping anyhow on the ground. St. Francis answered him with the curious and almost stunning shrewdness which the unworldly can sometimes wield like a club of stone. He said if we had any possessions we should need weapons and laws to defend them. That sentence is the clue to the whole policy that he pursued. It rested upon a real piece of logic, and about that he was never anything but logical. He was ready to own himself wrong about anything else, but he was quite certain he was right about this particular rule. He was only once seen angry, and that was when there was talk of an exception to the rule. His argument was this, that the dedicated man might go anywhere among any kind of men, even the worst kind of men, so long as there was nothing by which they could hold him. If he had any ties or needs like ordinary men, he would become like ordinary men. St. Francis was the last man in the world to think any 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 savor even to turn into human nature's daily food, and the difference between a friar and an ordinary man was really that a friar was freer than an ordinary man. It was necessary that he should be free from the cloister, but it was even more important that he should be free from the world. It is perfectly sound common sense to say that there is a sense in which the ordinary man cannot be free from the world, or rather ought not to be free from the world. The feudal world in particular was one labyrinthine system of dependence, but it was not only the feudal world that went to make up the medieval world, nor the medieval world that went to make up the whole world. And the whole world is full of this fact. Medieval life as much as feudal life is, in its nature, a system of dependence. Modern trade unions, as much as medieval gills, are interdependent among themselves even in order to be independent of others. In medieval, as in modern life, even where these limitations do exist for the sake of liberty, they have in them a considerable element of luck. They are partly the result of circumstances. There's 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 needle-bay little Francis in the old brown coat unless he chose. Even in his relations with his chosen leader, he was in one sense relatively free compared with the world around him. He was obedient, but not dependent. And he was as free as the wind. He was almost wildly free in his relation to that world around him. The world around him was, as has been noted, a network of feudal and family and other forms of dependence. The whole idea of St. Francis was that the little brothers should be like little fishes who could go freely in and out of that net. They could do so precisely because they were small fishes, and in that sense even slippery fishes. There was nothing that the world could hold them by, for the world catches us mostly by the fringes of our garments, the feudal externals of our lives. One of the Franciscans said later, A monk should own nothing but his harp, meaning I suppose that he should value nothing but his song, the song with which it was his business as a minstrel to serenade every castle and cottage, the song of the joy of the creator in his creation, and the beauty of the brotherhood of men. In imagining the life of this sort of visionary vagabond, we may already get a glimpse also of the practical side of that asceticism, which puzzles those who think themselves practical. A man has to be thin to pass always through the bars and out of the cage. He has to travel light in order to ride so fast and so far. It was the whole calculation, so to speak, of that innocent cunning that the world was to be outflanked and outwitted by him, and be embarrassed about what to do with him. You could not threaten to starve a man who was ever striving to fast. You could not ruin him and reduce him to beggary for he was already a beggar. There was a very lukewarm satisfaction even in beating him with a stick, when he only endowed in little leaps and cries of joy, because indignity was his only dignity. You could not put his head in a halter without the risk of putting it in a halo. But one distinction between the old monks and the new friars counted especially in the matter of practicality and especially of promptitude. The old fraternities, with their fixed habitations and enclosed existence, had the limitations of ordinary householders. However, simply they lived there must be a certain number of cells or a certain number of beds, or at least a certain cubic space for a certain number of brothers, their numbers therefore depended on their land and building material. But since a man could become a Franciscan by merely promising to take his chance of eating berries in a lane or begging a crust from a kitchen, of sleeping under a hedge or sitting patiently on a doorstep, there was no economic reason why there should not be any number of such eccentric enthusiasts within any short period of time. It must also be remembered that the whole of this rapid development was full of a certain kind of democratic optimism that really was part of the personal character of St. Francis. His very asceticism was in one sense the height of optimism. He demanded a great deal of human nature, not because he despised it, but rather because he trusted it. He was expecting a very great deal from the extraordinary men who followed him, but he was also expecting a good deal from the ordinary men to whom he sent them. He asked the laity for food as confidently as he asked the fraternity for fasting. But he counted on the hospitality of humanity because he really did regard every house as a 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 exaltation. The point at issue at present is the audacity and simplicity of the Franciscan plan for quartering its spiritual soldiery upon the populace, not by force, but by persuasion and even by the persuasion of impotence. It was an act of confidence and therefore a compliment. It was completely successful. It was an example of something that clung about St. Francis always, a kind of tact that looked like luck because it was as simple and direct as a thunderbolt. There are many examples in his private relations of this sort of tactless tact, this surprise affected by striking at the heart of the matter. Francis said that a young friar was suffering from a sort of sulk 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 diplomats would steer clear of scenes and excitements, how cautiously psychologists would watch and handle such delicate cases. Francis suddenly walked up to the young man, who was of course secretive and silent as the grave, and said, Be not troubled in your thoughts, for you are dear to me, and even among the number of those who are most dear. You know that you are worthy of my friendship and society. Therefore come to me in confidence, when so ever you will, and from friendship learn faith. Exactly as he spoke to that morbid bore he spoke to all mankind. He always went to the point. He always seemed at once more right and more simple than the person he was speaking to. He seemed at once to be laying open his guard and yet lunging at the heart. Something in this attitude disarmed the world as it has never been disarmed again. He was better than other men. He was a benefactor of other men, and yet he was not hated. The world came into church by a newer and nearer door, and by friendship it learned faith. It was while the little knot of people at the Partinucula was still small enough to gather in a small room that St. Francis resolved on his first important and even sensational stroke. It is said that there were only twelve Franciscans in the whole world when he decided to march as it were on Rome and found a Franciscan order. It would seem that this appeal to remote headquarters was not generally regarded as necessary. Possibly something could have been done in a secondary way under the bishop of Assisi and the local clergy. It would seem even more probable that people thought it somewhat unnecessary to trouble the supreme tribunal of Christendom about what a dozen chants men chose to call themselves. But Francis was obstinate and as it were blind on this point, and his brilliant blindness is exceedingly characteristic of him. A man satisfied with small things, or even in love with small things, he yet never felt quite as we do about the disproportion between small things and large. He never saw things to scale in our sense, but with a dizzy disproportion which makes the mind real. Sometimes it seems merely out of drawing like a gilly colored medieval map, and then again it seems to have escaped from everywhere like a shortcut in the fourth dimension. He is said to have made a journey to interview the emperor, thrown upon his armies under the eagle of the Holy Roman Empire, to intercede for the lives of certain little birds. He was quite capable of facing fifty emperors to intercede for one bird. He started out with two companions to convert the Mohammedan world. He started out with eleven companions to ask the pope to make a new monastic world. Innocent III, the great pope, according to Bonaventura, was walking on the terrace of Saint John Letterman, doubtless revolving the great political questions which troubled his reign, when there appeared abruptly before him a person in present costume whom he took to be some sort of a shepherd. He appears to have gotten rid of the shepherd with all convenient speed, possibly he farmed 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 Saint John Letterman 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 under an earthquake. Then he looked again and saw that a human figure was holding it up like a living keratid, and the figure was that of the ragged shepherd or peasant from whom he had turned away on the terrace. Whether this be a fact or a figure, it is a very true figure of the abrupt simplicity with which Francis won the attention and favor of Rome. His first friend seems to have been the cardinal, Giovanni di San Paolo, who pleaded for the Franciscan idea before a conclave of cardinals summoned for the purpose. It is interesting to note that the doubts thrown upon it seem to have been chiefly doubts about whether the rule was not too hard for humanity. For the Catholic Church is always on the watch against successive asceticism and its evils. Possibly they mean, especially when they said it was unduly hard, that it was unduly dangerous. For a certain element that can only be called danger is what marks the innovation as compared with older institutions of the kind. In one sense, indeed, the friar was almost the opposite of the monk. The value of the old monasticism had been that there was not only an ethical but an economic repose. Out of that repose had come the works for which the world will never be sufficiently grateful, the preservation of the classics, the beginning of the Gothic, the schemes of science and philosophies, the illuminated manuscripts, and the colored glass. The whole point of a monk was that his economic affairs were settled for good. He knew where he would get his supper, though it was a very plain supper. But the whole point of a friar was that he did not know where he would get his supper. There was always a possibility that he might get no supper. There was an element of what would be called romance as of the Gypsy or adventurer. But there was also an element of potential tragedy as of the tramp or the casual laborer. So the cardinals of the 13th century were filled with compassion, seeing a few men entering of their own free will, that estate to which the poor of the 20th century are daily driven by cold coercion and moved on by the police. It seems to have argued more or less in this manner. It may be a hard life, but after all it is the life apparently described as ideal in the gospel. Make what compromises you think wise or humane about that ideal, but do not commit yourselves to saying that men shall not fulfill that ideal if they can. We shall see the importance of this argument when we come to the whole of that higher aspect of a life of St. Francis, which may be called the imitation of Christ. The upshot of the discussion was that the pope gave his verbal approval to the project and promised a more definite endorsement if the movement should grow to more considerable proportions. It is probable that innocent, who was himself a man of no ordinary mentality, had very little doubt that it would do so. Anyhow he was not left long in doubt before it did do so. The next passage in the history of the order is simply the story of more and more people flocking to its standard, and, as has already been remarked, once it had began to grow, it could in its nature grow much more quickly than in the ordinary society requiring ordinary funds and public buildings. Even the return of the twelve pioneers from their papal audience seems to have been a sort of triumphal procession. In one place in particular it is said, the whole population of a town, men, women, and children turned out leaving their work and wealth and homes exactly as they stood and begging to be taken into the army of God on the spot. According to the story, it was on this occasion that St. Francis first foreshadowed his idea of the third order which enabled men to share in the movement without leaving the homes and habits of normal humanity. For the moment it is most important to regard this story as one example of the riot of conversion with which he was already filling all the roads of Italy. It was a world of wondering, friars perpetually coming and going in all the highways and byways, seeking to ensure that any man who met one of them by chance should have a spiritual adventure. The first order of St. Francis had entered history. This rough outline can only be rounded off here with some description of the second and third orders, though they were founded later and at separate times. The former was an order for women and owed his existence, of course, to the beautiful friendship of St. Francis and St. Claire. 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 Claire and belonging to one of the noble families of Assisi was filled with an enthusiasm for the conventional life, and Francis helped her to escape from her home and to take up the conventional life. If we like to put it so, he helped her to elope into the cloister, defying her parents as he had defied his father. Indeed, the scene had many of the elements of a regular romantic elopement, for she escaped through a hole in the wall, fled through a wood, and was received at midnight by the light of torches. Even Mrs. Oliphant, in her fine and delicate study of St. Francis, calls it an incident which we can hardly record with satisfaction. Now about that incident I will say here only 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 Claire had been the action of the friar towards Juliet, everybody would be sympathizing with her exactly as they sympathize with Juliet. It is not conclusive to say that Claire was only seventeen, Juliet was only fourteen. Girls married and boys fought in battles at such early ages in medieval times, and a girl of seventeen in the thirteenth century was certainly old enough to know her own mind. There cannot be the shadow of doubt for any sane person considering subsequent events that St. Claire did know her own mind. But the point for the moment is that modern romanticism entirely encourages such defiance of parents when it is done in the name of romantic love, for it knows that romantic love is a reality, but it does not know that divine love is a reality. There may have been something to be said for the parents of Claire. There may have been something to be said for Peter better than Dona, so there may have been a great deal to be said for the montages 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. Claire assumed all the time as an absolute, that there is a direct divine revelation more glorious than any romance, the story of St. Claire'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. Claire. She did most truly in the modern jargon live her own life, the life that she herself wanted to lead as distinct from the life into which parental commands and conventional arrangements would have forced her. She became the foundress of a great feminine movement which still profoundly affects the world, and her place is with the powerful women of history. It is not clear that she would have been so great or so useful if she had made a runaway match or even stopped at home and made a mirage de convenience. So much any sensible man may well say considering the matter merely from the outside, and I have no intention of considering it from the inside. If a man may well doubt whether he is worthy to write a word about St. Francis, he will certainly want words better than his own to speak of the friendship of St. Francis and St. Claire. I have often remarked that the mysteries of this story are best expressed symbolically in certain silent attitudes and actions. And I know no better symbol than that found by the felicity of popular legend which says that one night the people of Assisi thought the trees and the holy house were on fire and rushed up to extinguish the conflagration. But they found all quiet within where St. Francis broke bread with St. Claire at one of their rare meetings and talked of the love of God. It would be hard to find a more imaginative image for some sort of utterly pure and disembodied passion than that red halo round the unconscious figure on the hill, a flame feeding on nothing and setting the very air on fire. But if the second order was the memorial of such an unearthly love, the third order was as solid a memorial of a very solid sympathy with earthly loves and earthly lives. The whole of this feature in Catholic life, the lay orders in touch with clerical orders, is very little understood in Protestant countries and very little allowed for in Protestant history. The vision which has been so faintly suggested in these pages has never been confined to monks or even to friars. It has been an inspiration to innumerable crowds of ordinary married men and women living lives like our own only entirely different. That morning glory which St. Francis spread over earth and sky has lingered as a secret sunshine under a multitude of roofs and in a multitude of rooms. In societies like ours nothing is known of such a Franciscan following, nothing is known of such obscure followers, and if possible less is known of the well-known followers. If we imagine passing us in the street a pageant of the third order of St. Francis, the famous figures would surprise us more than the strange ones. For us it would be like the unmasking of some mighty secret society. There rides St. Louis the great king, lord of the higher justice, whose scales hang crooked in favour of the poor. There is Dante crowned with Laurel, the poet who in his life of passions sang the praises of the lady poverty, whose gray garment is lined with purple and all glorious within. All sorts of great names from the most recent and rationalistic centuries would stand revealed. The great Galvani, for instance, the father of electricity, the magician who has made so many modern systems of stars and sounds, so various safe following would alone be enough to prove that St. Francis had no lack of sympathy with normal man if the whole of his own life did not prove it. But in fact his life did prove it, and that possibly in a more subtle sense. There is, I fancy, some truth in the hint of one of his modern biographers that even his natural passions were singularly normal, and even noble in the sense of turning towards things not unlawful in themselves, but only unlawful for him. Nobody ever lived of whom we could less fitly use the word regret than Francis of Assisi. Though there was much that was romantic, there was nothing in the least sentimental about his mood. It was not melancholy enough for that. He was a far too swift than rushing a temper to be troubled with doubts and reconsiderations about the race he ran, though he had any amount of self-reproach about not running faster. But it is true, one suspects, that when he wrestled with the devil, as every man must to be worth calling a man, the whispers referred mostly to those healthy instincts that he would have approved for others. They bore no resemblance to that ghastly, pated paganism which sent its demoniac courtesans to plague St. Anthony in the desert. If St. Francis had only pleased himself it would have been with simpler pleasures. He was moved to love rather than lust, and by nothing wilder than wedding bells. It is suggested in that strange story of how he defied the devil by making images in the snow and crying out that thee sufficed him for a wife and family. It is suggested in the saying he used when disclaiming any security from sin, I may yet have children, almost as if it was of the children rather than the woman that he dreamed. And this, if it be true, gives a final touch to the truth about his character. There was so much about him of the spirit of the morning, so much that was curiously young and clean that even what was bad in him was good. As it was said of others that the light in their body was darkness, so it may be said of this luminous spirit that the very shadows in his soul were of light. Evil itself could not come to him save in the form of a forbidden good, and he could only be tempted by a sacrament.