This book is in fact an essentially local[28] chronicle; the author has in mind to erect a monument to the glory of the Brothers Minor of the March of Ancona. This province, which is evidently his own, "does it not resemble the sky blazing with stars? The holy Brothers who dwelt in it, like the stars in the sky, have illuminated and adorned the Order of St. Francis, filling the world with their examples and teaching." He is acquainted with the smallest villages,[29] each having at a short distance its monastery, well apart, usually near a torrent, in the edge of a wood, and above, near the hilltop, a few almost inaccessible cells, the asylums of Brothers even more than the others in love with contemplation and retirement.[30]
The chapters that concern St. Francis and the Umbrian Brothers are only a sort of introduction; Egidio, Masseo, Leo on one side, St. Clara on the other, are witnesses that the ideal at Portiuncula and St. Damian was indeed the same to which in later days Giachimo di Massa, Pietro di Monticulo, Conrad di Offida, Giovanni di Penna, and Giovanni della Verna endeavored to attain.
While most of the other legends give us the Franciscan tradition of the great convents, the Fioretti are almost the only document which shows it as it was perpetuated in the hermitages and among the people. In default of accuracy of detail, the incidents which are related here contain a higher truth—their tone is true. Here are words that were never uttered, acts that never took place, but the soul and the heart of the early Franciscans were surely what they are depicted here.
The Fioretti have the living truth that the pencil gives. Something is wanting in the physiognomy of the Poverello when we forget his conversation with Brother Leo on the perfect joy, his journey to Sienna with Masseo, or even the conversion of the wolf of Gubbio.
We must not, however, exaggerate the legendary side of the Fioretti: there are not more that two or three of these stories of which the kernel is not historic and easy to find. The famous episode of the wolf of Gubbio, which is unquestionably the most marvellous of all the series, is only, to speak the engraver's language, the third state of the story of the robbers of Monte Casale[31] mingled with a legend of the Verna.
The stories crowd one another in this book like flocks of memories that come upon us pell-mell, and in which insignificant details occupy a larger place than the most important events; our memory is, in fact, an overgrown child, and what it retains of a man is generally a feature, a word, a gesture. Scientific history is trying to react, to mark the relative value of facts, to bring forward the important ones, to cast into shade that which is secondary. Is it not a mistake? Is there such a thing as the important and the secondary? How is it going to be marked?
The popular imagination is right: what we need to retain of a man is the expression of countenance in which lives his whole being, a heart-cry, a gesture that expresses his personality. Do we not find all of Jesus in the words of the Last Supper? And all of St. Francis in his address to brother wolf and his sermon to the birds?
Let us beware of despising these documents in which the first Franciscans are described as they saw themselves to be. Unfolding under the Umbrian sky at the foot of the olives of St. Damian, or the firs of the March of Ancona, these wild flowers have a perfume and an originality which we look for in vain in the carefully cultivated flowers of a learned gardener.
Appendices of the Fioretti
In the first of these appendices the compiler has divided into five chapters all the information on the stigmata which he was able to gather. It is easy to understand the success of the Fioretti. The people fell in love with these stories, in which St. Francis and his companions appear both more human and more divine than in the other legends; and they began very soon to feel the need of so completing them as to form a veritable biography.[32]