<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_94" id="Page_94">{94}</SPAN></span>
<h2><i>Chapter VI</i><br/> <small><i>The Little Poor Man</i></small></h2></div>
<p><span class="smc">From</span> that cavern, that was a furnace of glowing
gratitude and humility, there came forth one of
the strongest and strangest and most original
personalities that human history has known.
He was, among other things, emphatically what
we call a character; almost as we speak of a
character in a good novel or play. He was not
only a humanist but a humorist; a humorist
especially in the old English sense of a man always
in his humour, going his own way and doing what
nobody else would have done. The anecdotes
about him have a certain biographical quality of
which the most familiar example is Dr. Johnson;
which belongs in another way to William Blake or
to Charles Lamb. The atmosphere can only be
defined by a sort of antithesis; the act is always
unexpected and never inappropriate. Before the
thing is said or done it cannot even be conjectured;
but after it is said or done it is felt to be merely
characteristic. It is surprisingly and yet inevitably
individual. This quality of abrupt fitness
and bewildering consistency belongs to St. Francis
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_95" id="Page_95">{95}</SPAN></span>
in a way that marks him out from most men of
his time. Men are learning more and more of
the solid social virtues of medieval civilisation;
but those impressions are still social rather than
individual. The medieval world was far ahead of
the modern world in its sense of the things in
which all men are at one: death and the daylight
of reason and the common conscience that holds
communities together. Its generalisations were
saner and sounder than the mad materialistic
theories of to-day; nobody would have tolerated
a Schopenhauer scorning life or a Nietzsche living
only for scorn. But the modern world is more
subtle in its sense of the things in which men are
not at one; in the temperamental varieties and
differentiations that make up the personal problems
of life. All men who can think themselves
now realise that the great schoolmen had a type of
thought that was wonderfully clear; but it was
as it were deliberately colourless. All are now
agreed that the greatest art of the age was the
art of public buildings; the popular and communal
art of architecture. But it was not an age for
the art of portrait-painting. Yet the friends of
St. Francis have really contrived to leave behind
a portrait; something almost resembling a devout
and affectionate caricature. There are lines and
colours in it that are personal almost to the extent
of being perverse, if one can use the word perversity
of an inversion that was also a conversion.
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_96" id="Page_96">{96}</SPAN></span>
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.</p>
<p>Before resuming the narrative of his first
adventures, and the building of the great brotherhood
which was the beginning of so merciful a
revolution, I think it well to complete this imperfect
personal portrait here; and having attempted
in the last chapter a tentative description of the
process, to add in this chapter a few touches to
describe the result. I mean by the result the real
man as he was after his first formative experiences;
the man whom men met walking about on the
Italian roads in his brown tunic tied with a rope.
For that man, saving the grace of God, is the
explanation of all that followed; men acted quite
differently according to whether they had met
him or not. If we see afterwards a vast tumult,
an appeal to the Pope, mobs of men in brown
habits besieging the seats of authority, Papal
pronouncements, heretical sessions, trial and
triumphant survival, the world full of a new
movement, the friar a household word in every
corner of Europe, and if we ask <i>why</i> all this
happened, we can only approximate to any answer
to our own question if we can, in some faint and
indirect imaginative fashion, hear one human
voice or see one human face under a hood. There
is no answer except that Francis Bernardone had
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_97" id="Page_97">{97}</SPAN></span>
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.</p>
<p>Francis of Assisi was slight in figure with that
sort of slightness which, combined with so much
vivacity, gives the impression of smallness. He
was probably taller than he looked; middle-sized,
his biographers say; he was certainly very
active and, considering what he went through,
must have been tolerably tough. He was of the
brownish Southern colouring, with a dark beard
thin and pointed such as appears in pictures under
the hoods of elves; and his eyes glowed with the
fire that fretted him night and day. There is
something about the description of all he said and
did which suggests that, even more than most
Italians, he turned naturally to a passionate
pantomime of gestures. If this was so it is
equally certain that with him, even more than with
most Italians, the gestures were all gestures of
politeness or hospitality. And both these facts,
the vivacity and the courtesy, are the outward
signs of something that mark him out very distinctively
from many who might appear to be more
of his kind than they really are. It is truly said
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_98" id="Page_98">{98}</SPAN></span>
that Francis of Assisi was one of the founders of
the medieval drama, and therefore of the modern
drama. He was the very reverse of a theatrical
person in the selfish sense; but for all that he was
pre-eminently a dramatic person. This side
of him can best be suggested by taking what is
commonly regarded as a reposeful quality; what
is commonly described as a love of nature. We
are compelled to use the term; and it is entirely
the wrong term.</p>
<p>St. Francis was not a lover of nature. Properly
understood, a lover of nature was precisely what
he was not. The phrase implies accepting the
material universe as a vague environment, a sort
of sentimental pantheism. In the romantic
period of literature, in the age of Byron and Scott,
it was easy enough to imagine that a hermit in
the ruins of a chapel (preferably by moonlight)
might find peace and a mild pleasure in the
harmony of solemn forests and silent stars, while
he pondered over some scroll or illuminated
volume, about the liturgical nature of which the
author was a little vague. In short, the hermit
might love nature as a background. Now for
St. Francis nothing was ever in the background.
We might say that his mind had no background,
except perhaps that divine darkness out of which
the divine love had called up every coloured
creature one by one. He saw everything as
dramatic, distinct from its setting, not all of a
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_99" id="Page_99">{99}</SPAN></span>
piece like a picture but in action like a play. A
bird went by him like an arrow; something with
a story and a purpose, though it was a purpose of
life and not a purpose of death. A bush could
stop him like a brigand; and indeed he was as
ready to welcome the brigand as the bush.</p>
<p>In a word, we talk about a man who cannot see
the wood for the trees. St. Francis was a man
who did not want to see the wood for the trees.
He wanted to see each tree as a separate and
almost a sacred thing, being a child of God and
therefore a brother or sister of man. But he did
not want to stand against a piece of stage scenery
used merely as a background, and inscribed in a
general fashion: "Scene; a wood." In this sense
we might say that he was too dramatic for the
drama. The scenery would have come to life
in his comedies; the walls would really have
spoken like Snout the Tinker and the trees would
really have come walking to Dunsinane. Everything
would have been in the foreground; and in
that sense in the footlights. Everything would
be in every sense a character. This is the quality
in which, as a poet, he is the very opposite of a
pantheist. He did not call nature his mother; he
called a particular donkey his brother or a particular
sparrow his sister. If he had called a pelican
his aunt or an elephant his uncle, as he might
possibly have done, he would still have meant that
they were particular creatures assigned by their
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_100" id="Page_100">{100}</SPAN></span>
Creator to particular places; not mere expressions
of the evolutionary energy of things. That is
where his mysticism is so close to the common
sense of the child. A child has no difficulty about
understanding that God made the dog and the
cat; though he is well aware that the making of
dogs and cats out of nothing is a mysterious
process beyond his own imagination. But no
child would understand what you meant if you
mixed up the dog and the cat and everything
else into one monster with a myriad legs and called
it nature. The child would resolutely refuse to
make head or tail of any such animal. St. Francis
was a mystic, but he believed in mysticism
and not in mystification. As a mystic he was the
mortal enemy of all those mystics who melt away
the edges of things and dissolve an entity into its
environment. He was a mystic of the daylight
and the darkness; but not a mystic of the twilight.
He was the very contrary of that sort of oriental
visionary who is only a mystic because he is
too much of a sceptic to be a materialist. St. Francis
was emphatically a realist, using the
word realist in its much more real medieval sense.
In this matter he really was akin to the best spirit
of his age, which had just won its victory over the
nominalism of the twelfth century. In this indeed
there was something symbolic in the contemporary
art and decoration of his period; as in the art
of heraldry. The Franciscan birds and beasts
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_101" id="Page_101">{101}</SPAN></span>
were really rather like heraldic birds and beasts;
not in the sense of being fabulous animals but in
the sense of being treated as if they were facts,
clear and positive and unaffected by the illusions
of atmosphere and perspective. In that sense
he did see a bird sable on a field azure or a sheep
argent on a field vert. But the heraldry of
humility was richer than the heraldry of pride;
for it saw all these things that God had given as
something more precious and unique than the
blazonry that princes and peers had only given
to themselves. Indeed out of the depths of that
surrender it rose higher than the highest titles
of the feudal age; than the laurel of Cæsar or the
Iron Crown of Lombardy. It is an example of
extremes that meet, that the Little Poor Man,
who had stripped himself of everything and named
himself as nothing, took the same title that has
been the wild vaunt of the vanity of the gorgeous
Asiatic autocrat, and called himself the Brother of
the Sun and Moon.</p>
<p>This quality, of something outstanding and even
startling in things as St. Francis saw them, is here
important as illustrating a character in his own
life. As he saw all things dramatically, so he
himself was always dramatic. We have to assume
throughout, needless to say, that he was a poet
and can only be understood as a poet. But he had
one poetic privilege denied to most poets. In that
respect indeed he might be called the one happy
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_102" id="Page_102">{102}</SPAN></span>
poet among all the unhappy poets of the world.
He was a poet whose whole life was a poem. He
was not so much a minstrel merely singing his
own songs as a dramatist capable of acting the
whole of his own play. The things he said were
more imaginative than the things he wrote. The
things he did were more imaginative than the
things he said. His whole course through life
was a series of scenes in which he had a sort of
perpetual luck in bringing things to a beautiful
crisis. To talk about the art of living has come
to sound rather artificial than artistic. But St. Francis
did in a definite sense make the very act
of living an art, though it was an unpremeditated
art. Many of his acts will seem grotesque and
puzzling to a rationalistic taste. But they were
always acts and not explanations; and they
always meant what he meant them to mean. The
amazing vividness with which he stamped himself
on the memory and imagination of mankind is
very largely due to the fact that he was seen again
and again under such dramatic conditions. From
the moment when he rent his robes and flung them
at his father's feet to the moment when he
stretched himself in death on the bare earth in the
pattern of the cross, his life was made up of these
unconscious attitudes and unhesitating gestures.
It would be easy to fill page after page with
examples; but I will here pursue the method found
convenient everywhere in this short sketch, and
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_103" id="Page_103">{103}</SPAN></span>
take one typical example, dwelling on it with a
little more detail than would be possible in a
catalogue, in the hope of making the meaning
more clear. The example taken here occurred
in the last days of his life, but it refers back in a
rather curious fashion to the first; and rounds off
the remarkable unity of that romance of religion.</p>
<p>The phrase about his brotherhood with the sun
and moon, and with the water and the fire, occurs
of course in his famous poem called the Canticle
of the Creatures or the Canticle of the Sun. He
sang it wandering in the meadows in the sunnier
season of his own career, when he was pouring
upwards into the sky all the passions of a poet.
It is a supremely characteristic work, and much of
St. Francis could be reconstructed from that work
alone. Though in some ways the thing is as
simple and straightforward as a ballad, there is
a delicate instinct of differentiation in it. Notice,
for instance, the sense of sex in inanimate things,
which goes far beyond the arbitrary genders of a
grammar. It was not for nothing that he called
fire his brother, fierce and gay and strong, and
water his sister, pure and clear and inviolate.
Remember that St. Francis was neither encumbered
nor assisted by all that Greek and Roman
polytheism turned into allegory, which has been
to European poetry often an inspiration, too often
a convention. Whether he gained or lost by his
contempt of learning, it never occurred to him
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_104" id="Page_104">{104}</SPAN></span>
to connect Neptune and the nymphs with the
water or Vulcan and the Cyclops with the flame.
This point exactly illustrates what has already
been suggested; that, so far from being a revival
of paganism, the Franciscan renascence was a sort
of fresh start and first awakening after a forgetfulness
of paganism. Certainly it is responsible
for a certain freshness in the thing itself. Anyhow
St. Francis was, as it were, the founder of a new
folk-lore; but he could distinguish his mermaids
from his mermen and his witches from his wizards.
In short, he had to make his own mythology; but
he knew at a glance the goddesses from the gods.
This fanciful instinct for the sexes is not the only
example of an imaginative instinct of the kind.
There is just the same quaint felicity in the fact
that he singles out the sun with a slightly more
courtly title besides that of brother; a phrase that
one king might use of another, corresponding to
"Monsieur notre frère." It is like a faint half
ironic shadow of the shining primacy that it had
held in the pagan heavens. A bishop is said to
have complained of a Nonconformist saying Paul
instead of Saint Paul; and to have added "He
might at least have called him Mr. Paul." So
St. Francis is free of all obligation to cry out in
praise or terror on the Lord God Apollo, but in
his new nursery heavens, he salutes him as Mr.
Sun. Those are the things in which he has a sort
of inspired infancy, only to be paralleled in nursery
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_105" id="Page_105">{105}</SPAN></span>
tales. Something of the same hazy but healthy
awe makes the story of Brer Fox and Brer Rabbit
refer respectfully to Mr. Man.</p>
<p>This poem, full of the mirth of youth and the
memories of childhood, runs through his whole
life like a refrain, and scraps of it turn up continually
in the ordinary habit of his talk. Perhaps
the last appearance of its special language was in
an incident that has always seemed to me intensely
impressive, and is at any rate very illustrative of
the great manner and gesture of which I speak.
Impressions of that kind are a matter of imagination
and in that sense of taste. It is idle to argue
about them; for it is the whole point of them
that they have passed beyond words; and even
when they use words, seem to be completed by some
ritual movement like a blessing or a blow. So, in a
supreme example, there is something far past all
exposition, something like the sweeping movement
and mighty shadow of a hand, darkening
even the darkness of Gethsemane; "Sleep on
now, and take your rest...." Yet there are
people who have started to paraphrase and
expand the story of the Passion.</p>
<p>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
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_106" id="Page_106">{106}</SPAN></span>
awful revelation of Alverno, he was a broken man.
As will be apparent when these events are touched
on in their turn, it was not only sickness and bodily
decay that may well have darkened his life; he
had been recently disappointed in his main mission
to end the Crusades by the conversion of Islam;
he had been still more disappointed by the signs
of compromise and a more political or practical
spirit in his own order; he had spent his last
energies in protest. At this point he was told
that he was going blind. If the faintest hint has
been given here of what St. Francis felt about the
glory and pageantry of earth and sky, about the
heraldic shape and colour and symbolism of birds
and beasts and flowers, some notion may be
formed of what it meant to him to go blind. Yet
the remedy might well have seemed worse than
the disease. The remedy, admittedly an uncertain
remedy, was to cauterise the eye, and that without
any anæsthetic. In other words it was to burn
his living eyeballs with a red-hot iron. Many of
the tortures of martyrdom, which he envied in
martyrology and sought vainly in Syria, can have
been no worse. When they took the brand from
the furnace, he rose as with an urbane gesture and
spoke as to an invisible presence: "Brother
Fire, God made you beautiful and strong and
useful; I pray you be courteous with me."</p>
<p>If there be any such thing as the art of life, it
seems to me that such a moment was one of its
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_107" id="Page_107">{107}</SPAN></span>
masterpieces. Not to many poets has it been
given to remember their own poetry at such a
moment, still less to live one of their own poems.
Even William Blake would have been disconcerted
if, while he was re-reading the noble lines "Tiger,
tiger, burning bright," a real large live Bengal tiger
had put his head in at the window of the cottage
in Felpham, evidently with every intention of
biting his head off. He might have wavered
before politely saluting it, above all by calmly
completing the recitation of the poem to the
quadruped to whom it was dedicated. Shelley,
when he wished to be a cloud or a leaf carried
before the wind, might have been mildly surprised
to find himself turning slowly head over heels in
mid air a thousand feet above the sea. Even
Keats, knowing that his hold on life was a frail
one, might have been disturbed to discover that
the true, the blushful Hippocrene of which he
had just partaken freely had indeed contained a
drug, which really ensured that he should cease
upon the midnight with no pain. For Francis
there was no drug; and for Francis there was
plenty of pain. But his first thought was one of
his first fancies from the songs of his youth. He
remembered the time when a flame was a flower,
only the most glorious and gaily coloured of the
flowers in the garden of God; and when that
shining thing returned to him in the shape of an
instrument of torture, he hailed it from afar like
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_108" id="Page_108">{108}</SPAN></span>
an old friend, calling it by the nickname which
might most truly be called its Christian name.</p>
<p>That is only one incident out of a life of such
incidents; and I have selected it partly because
it shows what is meant here by that shadow of
gesture there is in all his words, the dramatic
gesture of the south; and partly because its
special reference to courtesy covers the next fact
to be noted. The popular instinct of St. Francis,
and his perpetual preoccupation with the idea of
brotherhood, will be entirely misunderstood if it
is understood in the sense of what is often called
camaraderie; the back-slapping sort of brotherhood.
Frequently from the enemies and too
frequently from the friends of the democratic
ideal, there has come a notion that this note is
necessary to that ideal. It is assumed that
equality means all men being equally uncivil,
whereas it obviously ought to mean all men being
equally civil. Such people have forgotten the
very meaning and derivation of the word civility,
if they do not see that to be uncivil is to be
uncivic. But anyhow that was not the equality
which Francis of Assisi encouraged; but an
equality of the opposite kind; it was a camaraderie
actually founded on courtesy.</p>
<p>Even in that fairy borderland of his mere
fancies about flowers and animals and even
inanimate things, he retained this permanent
posture of a sort of deference. A friend of mine
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_109" id="Page_109">{109}</SPAN></span>
said that somebody was the sort of man who
apologises to the cat. St. Francis really would
have apologised to the cat. When he was about
to preach in a wood full of the chatter of birds,
he said, with a gentle gesture "Little sisters, if
you have now had your say, it is time that I also
should be heard." And all the birds were silent;
as I for one can very easily believe. In deference
to my special design of making matters intelligible
to average modernity, I have treated separately
the subject of the miraculous powers that St. Francis
most certainly possessed. But even apart
from any miraculous powers, men of that magnetic
sort, with that intense interest in animals, often
have an extraordinary power over them. St. Francis's power was always exercised with this
elaborate politeness. Much of it was doubtless a
sort of symbolic joke, a pious pantomime intended
to convey the vital distinction in his divine
mission, that he not only loved but reverenced
God in all his creatures. In this sense he had the
air not only of apologising to the cat or to the
birds, but of apologising to a chair for sitting
on it or to a table for sitting down at it. Anyone
who had followed him through life merely to laugh
at him, as a sort of lovable lunatic, might easily
have had an impression as of a lunatic who bowed
to every post or took off his hat to every tree.
This was all a part of his instinct for imaginative
gesture. He taught the world a large part of
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_110" id="Page_110">{110}</SPAN></span>
its lesson by a sort of divine dumb alphabet. But
if there was this ceremonial element even in lighter
or lesser matters, its significance became far more
serious in the serious work of his life, which was
an appeal to humanity, or rather to human
beings.</p>
<p>I have said that St. Francis deliberately did
not see the wood for the trees. It is even more
true that he deliberately did not see the mob for
the men. What distinguishes this very genuine
democrat from any mere demagogue is that he
never either deceived or was deceived by the
illusion of mass-suggestion. Whatever his taste
in monsters, he never saw before him a many-headed
beast. He only saw the image of God
multiplied but never monotonous. To him a man
was always a man and did not disappear in a dense
crowd any more than in a desert. He honoured
all men; that is, he not only loved but respected
them all. What gave him his extraordinary
personal power was this; that from the Pope to
the beggar, from the sultan of Syria in his
pavilion to the ragged robbers crawling out of the
wood, there was never a man who looked into
those brown burning eyes without being certain
that Francis Bernardone was really interested in
<i>him</i>; in his own inner individual life from the
cradle to the grave; that he himself was being
valued and taken seriously, and not merely added
to the spoils of some social policy or the names in
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_111" id="Page_111">{111}</SPAN></span>
some clerical document. Now for this particular
moral and religious idea there is no external
expression except courtesy. Exhortation does not
express it, for it is not mere abstract enthusiasm;
beneficence does not express it, for it is not mere
pity. It can only be conveyed by a certain grand
manner which may be called good manners. We
may say if we like that St. Francis, in the bare
and barren simplicity of his life, had clung to one
rag of luxury; the manners of a court. But
whereas in a court there is one king and a hundred
courtiers, in this story there was one courtier,
moving among a hundred kings. For he treated
the whole mob of men as a mob of kings. And
this was really and truly the only attitude that
will appeal to that part of man to which he wished
to appeal. It cannot be done by giving gold or
even bread; for it is a proverb that any reveller
may fling largesse in mere scorn. It cannot even
be done by giving time and attention; for
any number of philanthropists and benevolent
bureaucrats do such work with a scorn far more
cold and horrible in their hearts. No plans or
proposals or efficient rearrangements will give
back to a broken man his self-respect and sense
of speaking with an equal. One gesture will do it.</p>
<p>With that gesture Francis of Assisi moved
among men; and it was soon found to have something
in it of magic and to act, in a double sense,
like a charm. But it must always be conceived
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_112" id="Page_112">{112}</SPAN></span>
as a completely natural gesture; for indeed it
was almost a gesture of apology. He must be
imagined as moving thus swiftly through the
world with a sort of impetuous politeness; almost
like the movement of a man who stumbles on one
knee half in haste and half in obeisance. The
eager face under the brown hood was that of a
man always going somewhere, as if he followed as
well as watched the flight of the birds. And this
sense of motion is indeed the meaning of the whole
revolution that he made; for the work that has
now to be described was of the nature of an earthquake
or a volcano, an explosion that drove
outwards with dynamic energy the forces stored
up by ten centuries in the monastic fortress or
arsenal and scattered all its riches recklessly to
the ends of the earth. In a better sense than the
antithesis commonly conveys, it is true to say
that what St. Benedict had stored St. Francis
scattered; but in the world of spiritual things
what had been stored into the barns like grain
was scattered over the world as seed. The
servants of God who had been a besieged garrison
became a marching army; the ways of the world
were filled as with thunder with the trampling
of their feet and far ahead of that ever swelling
host went a man singing; as simply he had sung
that morning in the winter woods, where he walked
alone.</p>
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