It is not as a rule the calm and controlled people who have this attractiveness for others; it is rather those who unite with an enchanting kind of playfulness an instinct to confide in and to depend upon protective affection. Very probably there is some deep- seated sexual impulse involved, however remotely and unconsciously, in this species of charm. It is the appeal of the child that exults in happiness, claims it as a right, uses it with a pretty petulance,—like the feigned enmity of the kitten and the puppy,— and when it is clouded over, requires tearfully that it shall be restored. That may seem an undignified comparison for a prince of the church. But Newman was artist first, and theologian a long way afterward; he needed comfort and approval and even applause; and he evoked, together with love and admiration, the compassion and protective chivalry of his friends. His writings have little logical or intellectual force; their strength is in their ineffable and fragrant charm, their ordered grace, their infinite pathos.
The Greek word for this subtle kind of beauty is charis, and the Greeks are worth hearing on the subject, because they, of all the nations that ever lived, were penetrated by it, valued it, looked out for it, worshipped it. The word itself has suffered, as all large words are apt to suffer, when they are transferred to another language, because the big, ultimate words of every tongue connote a number of ideas which cannot be exactly rendered by a single word in another language. Let us be mildly philological for a moment, and realise that the word charis in Greek is the substantive of which the verb is chairo, to rejoice. We translate the word charis by the English word "grace," which means, apart from its theological sense, a rich endowment of charm and beauty, a thing which is essentially a gift, and which cannot be captured by taking thought. When we say that a thing is done with a perfect grace, we mean that it seems entirely delightful, appropriate, seemly, and beautiful. It pleases every sense; it is done just as it should be done, easily, courteously, gently, pleasantly, with a confidence which is yet modest, and with a rightness that has nothing rigid or unamiable about it. To see a thing so done, whatever it may be, leaves us with an envious desire that we might do the thing in the same way. It seems easy and effortless, and the one thing worth doing; and this is where the moral appeal of beauty lies, in the contagious sort of example that it sets. But when we clumsily translate the word by "grace," we lose the root idea of the word, which has a certain joyfulness about it. A thing done with charis is done as a pleasure, naturally, eagerly, out of the heart's abundance; and that is the appeal of things so done to the ordinary mind, that they seem to well up out of a beautiful and happy nature, as the clear spring rises from the sandy floor of the pool. The act is done, or the word spoken, out of a tranquil fund of joy, not as a matter of duty, or in reluctant obedience to a principle, but because the thing, whatever it is, is the joyful and beautiful thing to do.
And so the word became the fundamental idea of the Christian life: the grace of God was the power that floods the whole of the earlier teaching of the gospel, before the conflict with the ungracious and suspicious world began—the serene, uncalculating life, lived simply and purely, not from any grim principle of asceticism, but because it was beautiful to live so. It stood for the joy of life, as opposed to its cares and anxieties and ambitions; it was beautiful to share happiness, to give things away, to live in love, to find joy in the fresh mintage of the earth, the flowers, the creatures, the children, before they were clouded and stained by the strife and greed and enmity of the world. The exquisite quality of the first soft touches of the gospel story comes from the fact that it all rose out of a heart of joy, an overflowing certainty of the true values of life, a determination to fight the uglier side of life by opposing to it a simplicity and a sweetness that claimed nothing, and exacted nothing but a right to the purest sort of happiness—the happiness of a loving circle of friends, where the sacrifice of personal desires is the easiest and most natural thing in the world, because such sacrifice is both the best reward and the highest delight of love. It was here that the strength of primitive Christianity lay, that it seemed the possession of a joyful secret that turned all common things, and even sorrow and suffering, to gold. If a man could rejoice in tribulation, he was on his way to be invulnerable.
It is not a very happy business to trace the decay of a great and noble idea; but one can catch a glimpse of the perversion of "grace" in the hands of our Puritan ancestors, when it became a combative thing, which instead of winning the enemies of the Lord by its patient sweetness, put an edge on the sword of holiness, and enabled the staunch Christian to hew the Amalekites hip and thigh; so that the word, which had stood for a perfectly peaceful and attractive charm, became the symbol of righteous persecution, and flowered in cries of anguish and spilled blood.
We shall take a long time before we can crawl out of the shadow of that dark inheritance; but there are signs in the world of an awakening brotherliness; and perhaps we may some day come back to the old truth, so long mishandled, that the essence of all religion is a spirit of beauty and of joy, bent on giving rather than receiving; and so at last we may reach the perception that the fruitful strength of morality lies not in its terror, its prohibitions, its coercions, but in its good-will, its tolerance, its dislike of rebuke and censure, its rapturous acceptance of all generous and chivalrous and noble ways of living.
And thus, then, I mean by charm not a mere superficial gracefulness which can be learned, as good manners are learned, through a certain code of behaviour, but a thing which is the flower and outward sign of a beautiful attitude to life; an eagerness to welcome everything which is fine and fresh and unstained; that turns away the glance from things unlovely and violent and greedy not in a disapproving or a self-righteous spirit, because it is respectable to be shocked, but in a sense of shame and disgrace that such cruel and covetous and unclean things should be. If one takes a figure like that of St. Francis of Assisi, who for all the superstition and fanaticism with which the record is intermingled, showed a real reflection and restoration of the old Christian joy of life, we shall see that he had firm hold of the secret. St. Francis's love of nature, of animals, of flowers, of children, his way of breaking into song about the pleasant things of earth, his praise of "our sister the Water, because she is very serviceable to us and humble and clean," show the outrush of an overpowering joy. He had the courage to do what very few men and women ever dare to do, and that is to make a clean sweep of property and its complications; but even so, the old legend distorts some of this into a priggish desire to set a good example, to warn and rebuke and improve the occasion. But St. Francis's asceticism is the only kind of asceticism that has any charm, the self-denial, namely, that springs from a sense of enjoyment, and is practised from a feeling of its beauty, and not as a matter of timid and anxious calculation. It is true that St. Francis was haunted by the medieval nightmare of the essential vileness of the body, and spurred it too hard. But apart from this, one recognises in him a poet, and a man of ineffable charm, who found the company of sinners at least as attractive as the company of saints, for the simple reason that the sinner is often enough well meaning and humble, and is spared at least the ugliness of respectable self- righteousness, which is of all things most destructive of the sense of proportion, and most divorced from natural joy. St. Francis took human nature as he found it, and recognised that failure has a beauty which is denied to success, for the simple reason that conscious failure makes a man both grateful and affectionate, while success too often makes him cold and hard.
And there is thus a wonderful fragrance about all that St. Francis did and said, though he must have been sorely tried by his stupid and pompous followers, who constantly misunderstood and misrepresented him, and dragged into the light what was meant to be the inner secret of his soul. There are few figures in the roll of saints so profoundly beautiful and touching as that of St. Francis, because he had in a pre-eminent degree that childlike freshness and trustfulness which is the secret of all charm.
Charm is of course not the same thing as beauty, but only a subdivision of it. There are many things in nature and in art, from the Matterhorn to "Samson Agonistes," that have no charm, but that appeal to a different range of emotions, the sublime, the majestic, the awe-inspiring, things in the presence of which we are hardly at ease; but charm is essentially a comfortable quality, something that one gathers to one's heart, and if there is a mystery about it, as there is about all beautiful things, it is not a mystery of which one would be afraid to know the secret. Charm is the quality which makes one desire to linger upon one's pilgrimage, that cries to the soul to halt, to rest, to be content. It is intimate, reassuring, and appealing; and the shadow of it is the gentle pathos, which is in itself half a luxury of sadness, in the thought that sweet things must have an end. As Herrick wrote to the daffodils:
Stay, stay
Until the hasting day
Has run
But to the evensong:
And, having prayed together, we
Will go with you along.
We have short time to stay, as you,
We have as short a spring;
As quick a growth to meet decay
As you, or anything.