St Francis | Page 3

like the point of a sword, the sword
that pierced the heart of the Mother of God.
And you will not be able rationally to read the story of a man presented
as a Mirror of Christ without understanding his final phase as a Man of
Sorrows, and at least artistically appreciating the appropriatness of his

receiving, in a cloud of mystery and isolation, inflicted by no human
hand, the unhealed everlasting wounds that heal the world.
The practical reconciliation of the gaiety and austerity I must leave the
story itself to suggest. But since I have mentioned Matthew Arnold and
Renan and the rationalistic admirers of St. Francis, I will here give a
hint of what it seems to me most advisable for such readers to keep in
mind. These distinguished writers found things like the Stigmata a
stumbling block because to them a religion was a philosophy. It was an
impersonal thing; and it is only the most personal passion that provides
here an approximate earthly parallel. A man will not roll in the snow
for a stream of tendency by which all things fulfil the law of their being.
He will not go without food in the name of something, not ourselves,
that makes for righteousness. He will do things like this, or pretty like
this, under quite a different impulse. He will do these things when he is
in love. The first fact to realise about St Francis is involved with the
first fact with which his story starts; that when he said from the first
that he was a Troubadour, and said later that he was a Troubadour of a
newer and nobler romance, he was not using a mere metaphor, but
understood himself much better than the scholars understand him. He
was, to the last agonies of asceticism, a Troubadour. He was a Lover.
He was a lover of God and he was really and truly a lover of men;
possibly a much rarer mystical vocation. A lover of men is very nearly
the opposite of a philanthropist; indeed the pedantry of the Greek word
carries something like a satire on itself. A philanthropist may be said to
love anthropoids. But as St. Francis did not love humanity but men, so
he did not love Christianity but Christ. Say, if you think so, that he was
a lunatic loving an imaginary person; but an imaginary person, not an
imaginary idea. And for the modern reader the clue to the asceticism
and all the rest can be found in the stories of lovers when they seemed
to be rather like lunatics. Tell it as the tale of one of the Troubadours,
and the wild things he would do for his lady, and the whole of the
modern puzzle disappears. In such a romance there would be no
contradiction between the poet gathering flowers in the sun and
enduring a freezing vigil in the snow, between his praising all earthly
and bodily beauty and then refusing to eat, and between his glorifying
gold and purple and perversely going in rags, between his showing

pathetically a hunger for a happy life and a thirst for a heroic death. All
these riddles would be easily be resolved in the simplicity of any noble
love; only this was so noble a love that nine out of ten men have hardly
even heard of it. We shall see later that this parallel of the earthly lover
has a very practical relation to the problems of his life, as to his
relations with his father and his friends and their families. The modern
reader will almost always find that if he could only find this kind of
love as a reality, he could feel this kind of extravagance as a romance.
But I only note it here as a preliminary point because, though it is very
far from being the final truth in the matter, it is the best approach to it.
The reader cannot even begin to see the sense of a story that may well
seem to him a very wild one, until he understands that to this great
mystic his religion was not a thing like a theory but a thing like a love
affair. And the only purpose of this prefatory chapter is to explain the
limits of the present book; which is only addressed to that part of the
modern world which finds in St. Francis a certain modern difficulty;
which can admire him yet hardly accept him, or which can appreciate
the saint almost without the sanctity. And my only claim even to
attempt such a task is that I myself have for so long been in various
stages of such a condition. Many thousand things that I now partly
comprehend I should have thought utterly incomprehensible,