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But believe me, my dear Virtuosi, that flavour which the citizens of the Joyous Quarter tasted, that wild-strawberry flavour of living, that dog-rose aroma of reality which you miss by your wilful avoidance of volitional relations, by your gospel of Art for Art’s sake, is as exquisite as any of your hot-house flowers and fruitage. Are you rushing in pursuit of the new pleasure? Nay, it can only be captured by those who do not pursue it, who are even unaware that it exists. Mill’s eudæmonistic paradox again, you see.

Has any professional hunter of the æsthetic ever, I wonder, had so exquisite a sense of the starry heaven as Garibaldi when he embarked from Quarto to redeem his country? “O night of the fifth of May, lit up with the fire of a thousand lamps with which the Omnipotent has adorned the Infinite! Beautiful, tranquil, solemn with that solemnity which swells the hearts of generous men when they go forth to free the slave!”

“He never tampered with his sense of reality.” These words came to me as the epitaph of an old Jewish pedlar when I heard of his passing away in far-off Jerusalem. He too knew this joy of the Allegro Borgo (though in his autocosm the Madonna was an idol) and gleams of it sustained him through long years of poverty and pain, and through the shadows of his closing hour. Pictures, songs, histories—all had no existence for him outside his religion. All were but ministers of faith, to feed its sacred flame. There was not in his whole life a moment of divorce between reality and consciousness. In such simplicity, what a unity, what a giant strength! Pitiful ye seem in comparison, ye unshelled æsthetes, wandering in search of an autocosm or yearning to inhabit every one in turn. Imagine it, to live the years of the Patriarch in our complex tortured era, and never to have had an art-emotion, never—save perhaps in childhood—to have known make-believe, never to have sundered vision and idea from actuality! Think of it, ye who have played such tricks with your souls as would make the angels weep, whose pious emotion has as much relation to religion as the enjoyment of a painted ocean to a struggle in the blind waters. You, Monsieur Loti of the Académie Française, with your vain literary vigil at the Holy Sepulchre, will you not envy this high seriousness which found an exaltation in forty fasts a year, without bite or sup, and drew a salty vitalisation from the tear of penitence? And you, sophisters of religion, who cling to your creed because it is good for the poor, or a beautiful tradition, or a branch of respectability; and above all, you, amateurs of “_la volupté dans la dévotion_,” after the recipe of Barrès; you, neo-Catholics who mistake masturbation for adoration, bow your heads before one who worshipped God as naïvely as a dog adores his master, who did not even know that he believed, who _was_ belief; who went to Jerusalem not because he was a Zionist but because it was Zion, whose tears at the Wailing Wall were tinctured with never a thought of the wonder and picturesqueness of weeping over a Zion lost eighteen hundred years before he was born! Poor Parsifal! Poor pure fool! Gone is thy restful simplicity. Persiflage is now our wisdom.

But because I have been privileged to see this _sancta simplicitas_ of the old Jewish pedlar, I feel I know my Middle Ages better than the Protestant connoisseur whose learning flattens me out, or the pseudo-Catholic in search of sensations. I understand the Allegro Borgo, I say, and I am not appalled by the terrible list of Christian forgeries and legends, the apocryphal Gospels, the pseudo-Epistles, the hagiologies, for I know that ’tis the dry light of literary history that is false—like every other science—and that in life all these figments may have been the harmless nutriment of saintly souls. In this old Jew’s autocosm, too, there were no physical impossibilities, no incredible miracles, no monsters or leviathans so strange but their names in Hebrew letters were a certificate of pedigree; the centuries were fused for him as by a cosmic cinematograph, the patriarchs and saints hovering over him in immortal synchrony. So am I not taken aback to see the _Bambino_ still in his mother’s lap by the time the Visconti present the Certosa to the Madonna, nor does it disconcert me to behold all the abbots and bishops of Christendom in attendance at the Crucifixion with consoling models of their churches. And as for the Madonna being an Italian _grande dame_ dressed in Venetian silks or Florentine brocades, how else, pray, are we to preserve religion? True local colour and true Jerusalem costuming would have brought relativity into the absoluteness of belief, would have been a reminder that the Madonna was a foreigner. The truer truth is that she is _Our_ Lady.

Art, you see, had in its palmy days to be a full-orbed reality, carrying conviction as well as beauty to the guileless beholder. To us too ’tis only the masterpiece attuned to our own macrocosm that can give us this plenary satisfaction. Even “Paradise Lost” is for us merely a magnificent banquet of words, the virgin bloom of Paradise truly lost with our faith in the groundwork of the epic. Tolstoy’s attack on Art fails to differentiate between the Art of alien autocosms, the Culture Art which divides our soul against itself, and the real vitalising Art of our own epoch. For though we say, “Blessed are the simple, who live in the Absolute,” ’tis no necessary converse to cry damnation on the complex. Art, we know, is in a sense a playing with life, an outcome, as Schiller said, of the play-impulse, the exuberance of energies not exhausted in the struggle for existence. This is what Carlyle felt when he denounced mere rhymesters and canvas-colourers; it was the secret of his “imperfect sympathies” (in Elia’s phrase) with Shakespeare himself. ’Tis Hebraism _versus_ Hellenism—the earnestness of the writers of the Bible, whose Art is an unconscious enhancement, a by-product struck off at white heat, _versus_ the self-conscious manipulation of themes by Æschylus or Sophocles. A sense of futility and superfluity, if not of positive pravity, lies behind the eternal distrust of the Puritan for the make-believe of Art, his suspicion of the theatre and the nudities of Pagan sculpture. A prick of atavistic Calvinism caused the writer with the profoundest instinct for make-believe our generation has seen—Robert Louis Stevenson—suddenly to declare that the artist was no better than a _fille de joie_. But this was because the bulk of Stevenson’s fiction—unlike his essays and his poetry—is Art in its anecdotage, without serious relation to the spirit. And there are moods in which a jejune elegance or an empty exhilaration is as unsatisfying as a lady’s boudoir; and the artist, as a maker of beautiful toys, must sink into the same place as the contriver of perfumes and cushions. In Japan, where every workman is an artist, Art is in its proper place, and there is neither cant nor confusion. But besides the little Art of decorative line and melodious tinkle and romantic falsification of life there is the greater Art which has in it the unrest of the ocean and the silence of the starry night. Art, if in some instances it has sprung direct from the play-impulse, has largely come to us by way of religion, and where it is merely play for play’s sake—as in rococo Art—it is doomed to sterility.

Although Art represents, yet, as photography came to prove, representation is not the aim of Art. The aim of Art is creation—creation that stimulates the soul. The artist has not to reproduce his model, but to create something new, living, and stimulating by help of it. He adds new creations to Nature. He marries her facts to his passion and pain, and the offspring is Art—Nature crossed by Man. The great odes of Keats and Wordsworth, the symphonies of Beethoven, the pictures of Bellini, the statues of Michelangelo, transmit to us the artists’ spiritual exaltations, their ideals of beauty and energy. It boots not to point out that the artist is often selfish and licentious, irritable and vain. It is the greatnesses of his soul, not its pettinesses, which he puts into his art; his emotions and ideals into its content, his sincerity into its craftsmanship. And by greatnesses I do not mean only moral greatnesses, for life is larger than morality. It is his own temperament with which the artist crosses Nature. And that is why schools of Art can never yield more than craft: new creations can only be got by new crossings.

I would grant the Puritan, to whom all Art is of Satan, as I would grant his strange ally, Plato, that æsthetics may be abused, especially when divorced from life. There are young ladies who consume a novel a day, Sundays not omitted, by which process half their waking life is passed in a species of opium-eating. There are amateurs of music whose life is a surfeit of sweet sounds, and picture-lovers whose day is an orgy of line and colour. But when Tolstoy, perceiving what a sensual sty of Fine Art we may wallow in, ranged himself with the old Puritan iconoclasts, and launched his famous Platonic encyclical against music divorced from public psalmody, song sundered from harvest-festivity, or poetry that was not a marching song to the Millennium, he overlooked that even a healthy soul may have a surplusage of play-energy—nay, that this is the very child-soul—and that even from a Puritan point of view Fine Art may purify for fine Action, though it lack the direct nexus with Action. Tolstoy’s tracts on religion may even be less vitalising for our age than “Anna Karenina” operating by way of the Aristotelian _katharsis_.

And the relation of so-called fiction to truth may be even closer than its nexus with Action. For it follows from our analysis of Science that novels and plays have the great initial veracity of reproducing the fulness of life as compared with the segregative sciences with their one-sided abstractions, which are to actuality as the conjugations in a Greek grammar are to a conversation with Helen of Troy. While the artificial selection of Science breaks a whole into parts, the artificial selection of Art can make a part truly represent the whole. And the greater the artist-soul the less will it play with its moods by the artificial and conscious refraction of Art for Art’s sake. None should know better than Tolstoy that the highest Art is only Truth seen as Beauty. The great artist’s registration and reflection of the universe in tone or colour, line or word, is, indeed, the highest form of Science at our command, fact and flower in one. “Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty.” Sophocles, Shakespeare, Dante, Michelangelo, Beethoven, Milton, Browning, were not playing with life. The world of Art may not be the world of Science, but it is the world we live in, the human world furnished with faith and emotion, no less “real” than the naked universe of physical law.

To accept Art for Art’s sake, to divorce it from life, would be to pigeon-hole our souls, as most people put their religion into Sundays. The deepest analysis seems to conduct us back to a recognition that Art and Reality, though they have no necessary relation, do actually tend to approach each other in the greatest Art. The greatest writers—a Shakespeare or a Tourgénieff—in that selection from life which constitutes Art, select so as to give a sense of the whole, avoiding the one-sided selection which gives us on the one hand the disproportionate sexualities of the Palais-Royal farce or of the elegant bawdy-book, on the other the disproportionate sentimentalisms of goody-goody fiction. In painting, too, the Art which seizes the essence of places and people is the greatest, and I believe the greatest music seizes the essence of moods. Moreover, it is only by their relations to human realities that imaginative creations like Goethe’s Mephistopheles or Swift’s Lilliputians, the Prometheus of Æschylus, the Caliban of Shakespeare or the Jungle-Beasts of Kipling, have power to hold us. It may give us a useful distinction between Imagination and Fancy to connect the one with invention along the lines of life and born of insight into its essence—as in the creation of Hamlet; the other with artificial invention—as in the creation of Alice’s Wonderland. Whether Hamlet existed or not, or that Prince Hal did exist, is irrelevant to Art. The transient reality has been replaced by the permanent creation. _Per contra_, what was meant as Truth may survive only as Art, like the mythological parts of the “Iliad,” “Macbeth,” “Paradise Lost,” or the “Divina Commedia.” Yet, as I have just pointed out, even these great artistic creations lose their hold in proportion as they cease to seem in correspondence with external realities. And if the supreme test of plastic and literary Art is its communication of a sense of life, is it not Truth we are really worshipping, Truth under another name? For lifelikeness, if it does not necessarily mean likeness to particular individuals, does necessarily mean likeness to universals. And Selection, though it omits portions of the truth, does not omit the whole truth—nay, sometimes reveals the whole truth by cutting away the obscuring details. Reality is the inexhaustible _fons et origo_ of all great Art; apart from which there is no life in Art, but a rootless, sapless, soulless simulacrum. So that with the supreme artist, the Puritan antithesis of Truth and Art, Reality and Make-believe, Hebraism and Hellenism, disappears. A Sophocles is as earnest as a Socrates, a Michelangelo as a Savonarola, a Shakespeare as a Luther, a Beethoven as a Darwin.

As earnest, but not as limited. The biggest souls have never been able to express their sense of the multiform flowingness of things in neat packets of propositions; they have expressed it through the infinitude of Art. And Art, having once in human history been the medium of the spirit, must never sink back into a soulless toy. The Art of the future must vivify Science and take it up into Life; it must touch Truth with emotion and exalt it into Religion.

ST. FRANCIS: OR THE IRONY OF INSTITUTIONS

“Ludibria rerum humanarum cunctis in negotiis.” TACITUS.

I

So _eccomi_ back in Assisi, after heaven knows how many years, and here is the same bland Franciscan—or his brother—to show me the same tiny monastery garden with the same rusty rose-bushes and tell me the same story of how its native thorns and briars turned into thornless roses with blood-specked leaves after St. Francis had rolled in them to subdue the flesh, and the same anecdote of the neophyte who refused to plant cabbages with their roots upward and was rejected by the saint as insufficiently simple and obedient, and I ask the same question as to the botanic results of planting cabbages topsy-turvy and receive the same beaming reassurance that they waxed to prize dimensions, while a blight fell on those whose roots had, with worldly-wise presumption, been planted in earth. And I am shown the same little hut which the saint occupied, with the same unnatural ecclesiastic vaulting and the same unnatural oratory above it, and I go again into the same Lilliputian church (twenty-two feet by thirteen) beloved of St. Francis, with its rude plaster and its wooden benches and its plain brass lamps, and receive the same shock at the thought of its asphyxiation beneath the giant grandeur of S. Maria of the Angels, that spreads over it like a golden eagle brooding a street sparrow. And from the door of this dear little Portiuncula I glean the same glad tidings that Pope Gregory XIII at the instance of the most illustrious Cardinal Sforza has conceded to every faithful Christian who will say (or pay for) a mass at its altar, the grace of liberating a soul from Purgatory. And I am given the same illuminated leaflet about St. Francis, with the same specimen of ensanguined rose-leaf—precisely like that which grows in my own garden—and I pay the same lira on the same spot where St. Francis, who called coins “flies,” had some of these pests, innocently offered by a worshipper, thrown out upon asses’ dung. The only change since my last visit is that a fig-tree has been planted “by request” in remembrance of the old tree in which Sister Grasshopper sang with the saint for eighty days.

And this “by request” is a vivid reminder that the Franciscan legend is flourishing more and more, like the topsy-turvy cabbage, and that shoals of pleasure-pilgrims, richly clad, come by carriage or motor to maunder over “the little poor man of Assisi,” to gloat upon the cord of his tunic, stored up in a cupboard, and to gain an appetite for lunch by rhapsodising over the cell in which he fasted. Yes, the lover of poverty and of the brute creation has brought a good deal of money to the little hill-town, and no small sum of labour and lashings to its horses, and it is not surprising that the region round the poor little abandoned church of S. Maria in Portiuncula has grown up in the last quarter of a century into a big suburb, with eating- and lodging-houses, or that the successors of the saint who in his horror of property tried to tear down the chapter-house built for him, and who left even his cell because somebody referred to it as St. Francis’s, have within the last ten years been able to enrich their vast basilica with three elaborate carven doors and an iron railing, not to mention the horrible modern fresco with six angels like ballet-girls hovering without the chapel where St. Francis died.

As I leave this musty S. Maria of the Angels and mount on this divine spring day towards the sunny hill-top where Assisi proper sits rock-hewn, with its towers, domes, and castles, and see beneath me the wonderful rolling Apennines, and the windings of white roads and silver streams, and around me the grey-green of olives and the bridal white of cherry-trees, and above me the cloud-galleons sailing in the great spaces of sky, a remark of the bland brother comes back to me with added significance. “We do not know where St. Francis’s heart is,” he said, grudgingly conceding that the rival church on high possessed his body. The fancy takes me, as I toil up to this tomb, that St. Francis’s heart refused to be buried in a church, is here out of doors, at one with the spring and the sunshine.

And even more symbolic sounds to me the bland brother’s boast that the colossal church built over the poor little Portiuncula is on the model of St. Peter’s. Canonisation is a process that normally lasts centuries; our King Alfred’s is not yet complete. But twenty months after his death Francesco Bernardone was hustled into formal saintship. The Pope crushed him by a loving embrace, and over his beloved doll’s house of a church was erected a copy of St. Peter’s! And far above, on the rival ridge of Assisi, as if to give a culminating irony to the symbolism, and as if one great church built over his body did not suffice to keep him down, a second church of S. Francesco has been built on the top of the first, and beneath these two churches, each supplied with its frescoed falsifications by the school of Giotto, the little brother of the poor who demanded only to lie among the criminals on the “Infernal Hill” was safely buried.

And yet not so safely but that his spirit has begun to penetrate through all the layers of stone and legend. Perhaps it has escaped through that portal of the upper church which, incautiously thrown open to illumine the painted miracles, tempers the austere gloom and the drone of ceaseless psalm-saying from below with a revealed greensward and a piping of birds. But one cannot imagine that his spirit has gone to occupy that large red throne between two yellow armchairs which the fresco depicts as the vision of his appointed seat in heaven, or that fiery chariot with which to bedazzle the brethren left behind. These twenty-eight wall frescoes, like the four triangular allegories on the ceiling below, hold little of the true St. Francis (notwithstanding that they are all drawn from Franciscan literature), and the least spiritual and the most mythical portions of the legend, the demons flying over Arezzo, or St. Francis hovering in the air while praying, figure on equal terms with his real activities, while the picture of his offering the Soldan the ordeal of fire is an imaginative amplification even of the literature. Setting aside all the fatuous monastic miracles, and the more tedious anecdotes of the Franciscan legend—and it must be remembered that the earliest dated manuscript of the _Fioretti_ comes a hundred and sixty-four years after the death of St. Francis—we are yet able to extricate from it a kernel of personality sufficient to account for its genesis and growth, and it is this St. Francis who has at length burst through the three churches devoted to keeping him down and made his appeal to the modern mind. Yet the modern mind might easily misread itself into the mediæval mystic.

Despite his marriage to Lady Poverty, St. Francis was far from a conscious rebel against the glories of the Vatican. He was too humble-minded to be anything but a meek acceptant of the established Church and the ruling ritual. But there was in his literal translation into life of the Sermon on the Mount, the germ of a dangerous schism—a germ which duly developed into a sect of “Spirituals” for whom the Gospel of Assisi was the Eternal Evangel destined to supersede the Christianity of the Vatican—and it is not an accident that his followers, despite their popularisation of the idea of Papal infallibility, gravitated more to the Ghibelline cause than to the Guelph, and were, later on, formally condemned as heretics by John XXII. This unstatesmanlike Pope was not only ignorant that persecution is the seed of the sect, but he undermined the doctrine of his own Papal infallibility by thus reversing the bull of Nicholas III confirming their order. He alleged that Nicholas had framed it without his Cardinals, but the more logical Minorite Brothers contended that the contradiction of his predecessors proved him no true Pope, but a usurper. John and his successors retorted with the Holy Inquisition, and the Franciscans were burnt in stacks or tortured to death in dungeons; “martyrs,” says Döllinger, “to the doctrine of Papal infallibility and the rule of poverty.” And such is the comedy of Catholicism.

One wonders sometimes what St. Francis would have made of himself, had Christianity never come his way. His own genius would never have created the melancholy dogmas of the mediæval Church. There is neither Christ nor Atonement in his Canticle to the Sun—his most characteristic utterance. The Christianity he absorbed from his environment makes but a hybrid composite with his essential personality. There is thus no real unity in his spiritual being, no real reconciliation between his theory of utter abnegation and unworthiness, and his cheerful mystic oneness with the material universe and all its creatures. That everything God has created is laudable except one’s self, and that all matter is sacramental except one’s own body, is scarcely a congruous creed. And he followed his Christianity for the most part with a prosaic literality that showed that here he was but a passive receiver, as in his pharisaic prohibition against the brethren’s practice of soaking pulse the evening before it was eaten, on the ground that this meant taking thought for the morrow. _Not_ to soak it, is precisely taking thought, since it is concentrating attention on a triviality. But in his tender mystic universalism on the other hand he was a master, a creator. “Our Brother the Sun,” “Our Sister the Moon,” “Our Sister, Water,” “Our little Brothers and Sisters, the Birds,” “Our Sister, the Death of the Body”—these are the mintings of an original genius, not that tame subservience to texts which limited his wardrobe because of certain words in St. Matthew. And the originality of this genius consists, curiously enough, in the spontaneous reproduction of Hindu optimism and universality in a Western. How Hindu this thought is appears vividly from the story in the “Speculum Perfections,” that when St. Francis’s drawers caught fire about the knee, he would not put it out nor harm his brother Fire. From this point of view Hell would only be brother Fire enjoying himself. Yet we find St. Francis engaged all his life in thwarting the fraternal appetite. St. Francis would have been a greater man, had he been less of a Christian.

His distinctively Christian sayings are indeed comparatively poor. One scans the record almost in vain for any flash of the irony or sublimity of Jesus. The profoundest remark of the _Fioretti_—“everything, good or bad, that a man does, he does to himself”—belongs to brother Giles who, one is not surprised to find, left a book of _Verba Aurea_. Occasionally a superb transcendence of ritual as in St. Francis’s remark that so far from not eating meat when Christ’s nativity fell on a Friday, “the very walls should eat flesh on such a day, or if they cannot should at any rate be greased outside,” recalls the flouter of Pharisaism, and we catch the voice of an authentic master in his exposition of a passage of Ezekiel to a peace-loving doctor of divinity perturbed about the text: “If thou proclaim not to the wicked man his wickedness, I will require his soul at thy hand.” It was by the brightness of his own life and the perfume of his fame, said St. Francis, that the servant of God proclaimed their wickedness to the wicked. That was not precisely the method of Jesus, and herein St. Francis is more Christian than Christ. Nevertheless, if one had not his Hindu utterances to supplement his Christian, there would be little to distinguish the skinny black-eyed little strolling preacher from the numberless narrow-browed ascetics of the Church except his childishly dramatic delivery, his success in founding an Order and his redeeming weakness for talking bad French. It is that strange animism of his which gives him his hold upon us, which, not content with reading a soul into the bird, the fish, the grasshopper and the wolf, extends with half-savage, half-childish personalisation to fire and water, and even to wood and stone, nay to the very letters of the alphabet, so that he will not erase a letter even when he has set it down in error. Behind this divination of life in all things must have lain an exquisite sensibility, and it was thus his unfortunate fate to be supremely alive to beauty—even in woman—yet to be driven by his creed to the worship of sorrow, abnegation and self-inflicted pain, though even from these his subtle nervous system could snatch a rare moment of ecstasy, for so delicately was he strung that the mere words “the love of God” set up a sweet vibration like a plectrum striking a lute. How indeed should the gay knight, whom his comrades elected “King of the fools,” change his sensitive skin, merely because he turned to be “God’s fool?” If he now found his joy in the ecstasy of mystic communion and absolute abnegation, the joy was still at his core, and however he might afflict his body, with a sub-conscious sense of setting a model to his weaker brethren, it was impossible for him to subdue his sun-worship, or not to delight in the ripple of water, and the grace of birds and flowers and women. And herein he differs from the Buddha with whose life-story and tenderness for all creation he has so much in common, but to whom this world is merely a mistake to be endured till the nullity of Nirvana is attained. Even the pseudo-Christian theory of this vale of tears is not so pessimistic as Buddhism, for the lachrymose vale is merely the prelude to a mountain of bliss, and Schopenhauer’s attempt to pair Christianity with Buddhism overlooked that the Buddhist saint lives to die and the Christian dies to live. Kuenen showed much deeper insight when he pointed out that Buddha does not value purity and renunciation as virtue—he is “beyond good and evil”—but as the best means of escape from life. But for St. Francis the world is not a vale of tears. Indeed the conception of a world of sorrow is contradicted by the sorrowful lives of the saints. For abnegation is pointless if there is no happiness to be surrendered. The pathos of the life of St. Francis lies precisely in his exquisite capacity for terrestrial happiness, and in his daily crucifixion of every natural desire at the bidding of a vicious theory of virtue, to which a natural want means something created by God in order to be thwarted, and which makes a vice of every necessity. Fortunately he had from his Hindu side the saving grace of joyousness, and could rebuke the saturnine visage of professional sanctity and even—towards the end—his own barbarity to that brotherly ass, his body.