And these legends of his pious influence over the cicala and the swallow and the wolf, this tench that plays around his boat, this pheasant that haunts his cell, this falcon that wakes him for matins during his fast in the mountain, these birds that fly off in four companies like a cross after devoutly digesting his sermon, all make for the comity of creation, especially in Italy, where animals have no souls, only bodies that may be ill-used: indeed, St. Francis—with his disciple St. Antony of Padua—contributes to Christianity that missing note of respect for the animal creation which Hinduism expresses “in the great word Tat-twam-asi (This is thyself!).” And here at least modern thought is with St. Francis and his Hindu universalism. The evolution theory is usually considered a depressing doctrine, yet it has its stimulating aspects. For though we may doubt if St. Francis converted the wolf, we cannot doubt that Nature Christianised it, or at least some creature as low and savage. For from some gibbering ferocious brute there did, in the process of the suns, emerge a seraphic, selfless being with love for all creation. The wolf, in fact, became St. Francis; a more notable conversion than any in the missionary books.
But what did St. Francis become? Here the record is not so stimulating; here begins degeneration, devolution. Before he died he was an idol and the nominal centre of vast organisations, lay as well as monastic, female as well as male, and in this success lay his defeat. Lachrymæ rerum inhere even more in success than in failure. The portrait of St. Francis by Ribera which may be seen at Florence—a melancholy monk with his eyes turned up, holding a skull—was no sadder caricature of the blithe little man who swept out dirty churches with a broom than these gigantic and infinitely quarrelsome organisations were of his teaching.
A great man may either influence humanity by his solitary work or he may found an institution. The institution (if adequately financed) will live, but with himself squeezed out of it—for worship at a safe height. The squeezing out of St. Francis from Franciscanism began even before his death—the Papacy pressing from without and his own vicars from within. That very sensible fear of Brother William of Nottingham—evidently a practical Briton—that superfluities would grow up in the Order as insensibly as hairs in the beard, was more than verified. The dangerous rule of Absolute Poverty was relaxed, scholastic learning was reinstalled in its armchair, a network of rules replaced the rule of the spirit, and the little brotherhood that had lain on straw and tattered mattresses in the Portiuncula swelled and split into Conventualists and Observants, the majority established in magnificent monasteries. St. Francis lamented the degeneration of the brethren, though he characteristically refused to punish it. And when he was quite squeezed to death there began a fight for his body—holy body-snatching was a feature of the Middle Ages—and that vile enemy of the soul which he had battled against all his life took his place as the centre of the cult. Perugia, holding by force the body of St. Giles, removed from Assisi the only possible rival of his relics. His very poultice is still preserved as an object of edification.
II
Erasmus dreamed once—so he writes to Charles Utenhove—that St. Francis came to thank him for chastising the Franciscans. The Founder had not the scrupulous stage-costume of his degenerate followers: his brown frock was of undyed wool; the hood was not peaked, but merely hung behind to cover the head in bad weather; the cord was a piece of rope from a farmyard; the feet were bare. Of the five wounds of the stigmata there was as little trace in St. Francis as of the six virtues in the Franciscans. Obedience, poverty, chastity, humility, simplicity, charity—where had flown these “six wings of the seraph”?
Eheu fugaces! ’Tis the story of all founders, of all orders. St. Francis at his supreme moment of renunciation had not even the brown frock of Erasmus’s dream. In the market-place of Assisi he stood in his shirt. And he desired to die even more naked, as Thomas of Celano and the “Legenda Trium Sociorum” testify. The first Franciscans were simple souls kindled by his love and ecstasy, “the minstrels of the dear Lord.” They bore revilement and scourging; dragged along by their hoods, they never ceased to proclaim Peace. They lay a-cold in caves, with hearts careless of the morrow; they served in lepers’ houses. And above all they worked; begging was only to be a last resort, and never was money to be asked for. “Beware of money,” says the “Regula.”
Brother Elias of Cortona, the immediate successor of St. Francis, is said to have lived like a prince, with valets and horses, and he readily got the Pope to sanction a device by which he obtained all the money he wanted per interpositas personas. Nor did the Master’s teaching fare better at the hands of the more faithful faction—the Observants whom the Conventualists persecuted—for the rule of Absolute Poverty was applied without the genial concessions and exceptions he knew how to make; and under the guidance of the caustic and canonical Antony of Padua the ancient gaudentes in Domino hardened into slaves of the letter, while the more mystic degenerated into anchorites who retired to the mountains to save their own souls.
Nothing can point the tragedy of St. Francis’s success more vividly than his own homely words in his “Testamentum.” “And they who came to take up this life gave up whatever they might have to the poor and were content with a single tunic, patched inside and out (if they wished), together with a girdle and drawers: and we would have no more. We clerks said the office like other clerks; the lay-brothers said the Lord’s Prayer. We gladly abode in poor and forsaken churches, and were simple folk and subject to all. And I used to work with my hands, and I desire to work, and my earnest wish is that all the brethren should work at some decent employment.”
Only a century later Dante’s eulogy of the Founder (“Paradiso,” Canto XI) is qualified by the remark that so few of his followers cleave to his teachings that “a little stuff may furnish out their cloaks.” And three centuries later the spectacle which these Fratri Minori represented to Erasmus was that of arrogant mendicants, often of loose morals, begging with forged testimonials, haunting the palaces of the rich, forcing themselves into families, selling the Franciscan habit to wealthy dying sinners as a funeral cloak to cover many sins. His little sisters, the swallows and the doves, fluttered over St. Francis’s tomb, but from it issued the hawks and the vultures. An old, old moral, though humanity will never learn it.
Saint Francis was Francis Saint. The Lady Poverty “who for eleven hundred years had remained without a single suitor” found in him a spouse faithful unto death. His soul went out in fraternity to all the wonderful creation, in joyous surrender to pain and tribulation: even Death was his sister. To found an Order of St. Francis is to count upon a succession of St. Francises. As well found an Order of Shakespeare, a phalanstery of Da Vincis.