Affirmations

THE religion of Jesus was the invention of a race which itself never accepted that religion. In the East religions spring up, for the most part, as naturally as flowers, and, like flowers, are scarcely a matter for furious propaganda. These deep sagacious Eastern men threw us of old this rejected flower, as they have since sent us the vases and fans they found too tawdry; and when we send our missionaries out to barter back the gift at a profit, they say no word, but their faces wear the mysterious Eastern smile. Yet for us, at all events, the figure of Jesus symbolises, and will always symbolise, a special attitude towards life, made up of tender human sympathy and mystical reliance on the unseen forces of the world. In certain stories of the Gospels, certain sayings, in many of the parables, this attitude finds the completest expression of its sweetest abandonment. But to us, men of another race living in far distant corners of the world, it seems altogether oriental and ascetic, a morbid exceptional phenomenon. And as a matter of fact Jesus found no successor. Over the stage of those gracious and radiant scenes swiftly fell a fire-proof curtain, wrought of systematic theology and formal metaphysics, which even the divine flames of that wonderful personality were unable to melt.

Something even stronger than theology or metaphysics has served to cut us off from the spirit of Jesus, and that is the spirit of Paul, certainly the real founder of “Christianity,” as we know it, for Jerome, Augustine, Luther, were all the children of Paul, and in no respect the children of Jesus. That marvellous little Jew painted in its main outlines the picture of Christianity which in the theatre of this world has for so many centuries shut us off from Jesus. Impelled by the intense and concentrated energy of his twisted suffering nature, Paul brought “moral force” into our western world, and after it that infinite procession of hypocrisies and cruelties and artificialities which still trains loathsomely across the scene of civilised life. Jesus may have been a visionary, but his visions were in divine harmony with the course of nature, with the wine and the bread of life, with children and with flowers. We may be very sure that Paul never considered the lilies, or found benediction with children. He trampled on nature when it came in his way, and for the rest never saw it. He was not, as Festus thought, a madman, but whether or not, as his experiences seem to indicate, he was a victim to the “sacred disease” of epilepsy, concerning his profoundly neurotic temperament there can be no manner of question.

He flung himself on to men, this terrible apostle of the “Gentiles,” thrusting faith down their throats at the point of a spiritual sword so fiery and keen that, by no miracle, it soon became a sword of steel with red blood dripping from its point. Well-nigh everything that has ever been evil in Christianity, its temporal power, its accursed intolerance, its contempt for reason, for beautiful living, for every sweet and sunny and simple aspect of the world—all that is involved in the awful conception of “moral force”—flows directly from Paul. What eternal torture could be adequate for so monstrous an offender? And yet, when you think of the potent personality concentrated in this morbid man, of his courage, of the intolerance that he wreaked on himself, the flashes of divine insight in his restless and turbulent spirit, of the humility of the neuropath who desired to be “altogether mad,” the pathos of it all, indignation falls silent. What can be said?

Thus Paul and not Peter was the rock on which the Church was built, and whatever virtues the Church may have possessed have not been the virtues of Jesus but the quite other virtues of Paul. Yet Jesus has not wholly been left without witness even in Europe, and it is the special charm and significance of Francis of Assisi that he, if not alone certainly chief among European men, has incarnated some measure of the graciousness that was in Jesus, and made it visible and real to the European world. And he has done that by no means through the influence of the Church, or by imitation, but by wholly natural and spontaneous impulse. To understand Francis we must first of all realise that he was in no sense and at no time the creature of the Church, being indeed from first to last in a very real sense antagonistic to the Church. The whole world as Francis knew it was Christian, and he was by no means a man of inquisitive analytic intellectual type, a Bruno or a Campanella; he accepted Christianity because it was there, and while remaining in it was never of it, resenting fiercely any attempt of the Church to encroach on the free activity of his personality, dispensing himself of any intimate adherence not by intellectual sophistries, but by lightly brushing away science and theology altogether as useless superfluities.

An acute psychologist has well remarked that those famous historical persons who have passed through two antithetical phases of character, survive for us usually only in one of those phases, that we can remember only the post-conversion Augustine and the pre-abdication Diocletian. Such one-sided views of great and complex characters suit our rough and lazy methods of ordinary thought, content to regard a man only on that side which has been most prominently displayed to the world. But such methods are fatal to any clear psychological conception of character or to any sound ethical conception of life. Francis lived one of these double-sided lives, and the Francis we remember is the emaciated saint already developing the stigmata of divine grace. In his earlier biographies we catch glimpses of a younger and quite other Francis, in vanitatibus nutritus insolenter, the spendthrift companion of nobles, proud to surpass them in youthful extravagance and dissipation, the head of a band which dazzled the citizens of Assisi with the luxury of their rich garments and the sound of their festive songs by night, a passionate lover of chivalry and the troubadours, whose music then filled the air, so full of gaiety that he sometimes seemed almost mad to the grave citizens of his town, one whose nature it was from the first to go to excess, always to a fine and generous excess, that spiritual excess which Blake called the road to the palace of wisdom.

The later Francis survived; the early Francis is forgotten. But we may be assured that there would have been no Francis the saint if there had not been Francis the sinner. That grace and elation, the tender humanity and infinite delight in natural things, even the profound contempt for luxury and superfluity, were not learnt in any of the saint’s beloved Umbrian cells; they were the final outcome of a beautifully free and excessive life acting on an exquisitely fine-strung organism. Rarely has any follower of Francis attained in any measure to his level of exalted freedom, joy, and simplicity in saintliness. It was not alone that they could not possess his organism, but they had not lived his life. Their piety even blinded their eyes, and just as the biographers of Jesus omitted all reference to the formative years of his life, so also the biographers of Francis gradually eliminated the early records, terrified at the thought that their founder may not have been a virgin. We do not win any clear psychological insight into the man until we realise this.

It is not alone the psychological aspect which becomes clear in the light of Francis’s early life. These stages of development have their ethical significance also. It seems to be too often forgotten that repression and licence are two sides of the same fact. We can only attain a fine temperance through a fine freedom, even a fine excess. The women who think that they must at all costs repress themselves, and the men who—usually with the help of certain private “accommodements”—consider repression as the proper ideal, have missed the true safeguards against licence, and flounder for ever in a turbid sea, at war with themselves, at war with nature. The saints knew better. By a process of spiritual Pasteurism, a natural and spontaneous process, they guaranteed their eternal peace. All the real saints, so far as we know them, had many phases, such of them as were saints from their mothers’ wombs possessing a significance which for human beings generally is minimal. The real saints in all ages have forgotten so many beautiful things, storing so many wonderful experiences in their past. We should not dye our clothes, says St. Clement of Alexandria, our life should now be anything but a pageant. Flower-like garments should be abandoned, and Bacchic revelries, “useful for tragedies, not for life.” The dyes of Sardis—olive, green, rose-coloured, scarlet, and ten thousand other hues—invented for voluptuousness, the garments of embroidered gold and purple, dipped in perfume, stained in saffron, the bright diaphanous tissues of the dancing girl—to all these we must bid farewell. But we cannot bid them farewell unless we have known them. If you would be a saint you must begin by being something other than a saint. This it was that St. Clement forgot, or never knew.

In youth we are so full of energy, and life seems so long. In our ethical fervour we accept Clement’s theory of conduct at his own valuation. One is so scrupulous of others, so anxious lest he hurt them; and another is so contemptuous of others, so eager to hold himself back from all but the highest good, and never to let himself fully go. And there is a fine thrill of pleasure in the self-restraint, an athletic tension of the soul. It is as if the infant at the breast should say, I will hold myself back from sucking; I will take only just ever so little, and not let myself go and draw in the delicious stream with no after-thought; there will be time for that when I am grown up. But it is not so. There is only one time in life for milk, only one time for youth; we cannot postpone life or retrace its milestones, and what is once lost is lost for ever. The cold waters of self-restraint and self-denial, as we first put our young feet in them, send a tonic shiver along the nerves, and we go on and on. But suddenly we find that the water has risen to our breasts, to our chins, that it is too late, too late, that we shall never again move and breathe freely in the open air and sunshine. That is the fate that overtakes the young ascetic ideal. Unhappier yet are those who snatch the cup of life so hastily in youth and fill it with such muddy waters that the dregs cling to their lips for ever, spoiling the taste of the most exquisite things. To live remains an art, an art which every one must learn, and which no one can teach.

It may seem that I speak of out-worn things, and that the problem of saintliness has little relation to the moral problems of our time. It is far otherwise. You have never seen the world if you have not realised that an element of asceticism lies at the foundation of life. You may expel it with the fork of reason or of self-enjoyment, but being part of Nature herself it must ever return. All the art of living lies in a fine mingling of letting go and holding in. The man who makes the one or the other his exclusive aim in life will die before he has ever begun to live. The man who has carried one part of the process to excess before turning to the other will indeed learn what life is, and may leave behind him the memory of a pattern saint. But he alone is the wise master of living who from first to last has held the double ideal in true honour. In these, as in other matters, we cannot know the spiritual facts unless we realise the physical facts of life. All life is a building up and a breaking down, a taking in and a giving out, a perpetually anabolic and katabolic rhythm. To live rightly we must imitate both the luxury of Nature and her austerity.

What should be the place of asceticism in modern life? Evidently there is in human nature an instinct which craves for the sharpening of enjoyment which comes from simplicity and a finely-tempered abstinence, a measured drawing back when also it were possible recklessly to let go. It is easy to wave aside religious asceticism. That, it seems, may well be left to those who decide to invest their enjoyments in a heavenly bank which will pay large dividends in another world. There still remains the rational asceticism that is sweet either for its own sake, or for its immediate and visible results in human joy.

When we contemplate the modern world from a broadly biological standpoint, there can be but little difficulty in finding free and wholesome scope for the ascetic instinct. For the Christian or Buddhist ascetic of old (as in some measure for his feeble modern imitator, the theosophist) asceticism was a rapturous indifference to life for the sake of something that seemed more than life, something that was itself a “higher life,” and only to be achieved in the treading under foot of all that men counted life. Such conceptions belong to the past, and can only be revivified in the failing imaginations of the weary and the aged who belong to the past. The more subtle and complex conception of life which has grown up in the modern world traces life to its roots and finds it most precious where it is most intense. When we wish to carve out a world for ourselves it is the periphery which we cut away and not the core. The immense accretions of that periphery in the modern world make clearer to us than it was to our predecessors that it is in the simple and elementary things that our life consists. It is to the honour of Francis that in a vague, imperfect way he foresaw this. Aided by his early experiences, he cast aside the superfluities of knowledge and labour and skill—all that vain plethora of mere formal things and prescribed acts which men foolishly count life—and symbolising them in wealth, joyfully espoused Poverty as a bride. For poverty to Francis meant contact with Nature and with men. The free play of the individual soul in contact with Nature and men, Francis instinctively felt, is joy and liberation; and if the simple-minded saint went farther than this, and allowed a certain set of dogmatic opinions and conventional abstentions, we may be sure that herein he had no warrant of personal inspiration, but was content to follow the well-nigh unquestioned traditions of his day. Francis fought, not for Christianity and still less for the Church, but for the great secret of fine living which he had personally divined. It was by a true instinct that his modern biographer finds the motto of his life in the exquisite saying of the saint’s great precursor, Joachim of Flora, that the true ascetic counts nothing his own, save only his harp: “Qui vere monachus est nihil reputat esse suum nisi citharam.”

In former days we used to regard the civilised man as in some way incorporating in his organism and bringing into the world with him the inheritance of the ages of human culture. Now the tendency is to regard civilisation as a growth totally outside man, and to consider the man himself as a savage who merely adapts himself to civilisation as he grows up, bringing, it may be, his own little contribution to its development, but himself remaining practically a savage. Thus Weismann has argued that the development of music is purely a development of traditions, and that given the traditions any savage has a chance of becoming a Bach or a Beethoven. I think this is a more extreme view than the facts warrant us in taking. But it is fairly obvious that there has been no growth of the human intellect during at least the last two or three thousand years. We cannot beat the Romans at government; we cannot express passion better than Sappho, or form better than Phidias. We have produced no more truly scientific physicians than Hippocrates or Galen; we cannot map out the world more philosophically than Aristotle, nor play at ball with it with a greater dialectical facility than Plato. What we have done is to burden ourselves with a vaster mass of tradition. Civilisation is the garment which man makes to clothe himself with. It is for each of us to help to put in a patch here, to sew on a button there, or to work in more embroidery. But the individual himself, with his own personal organic passions, never becomes part of the garment, he only wears it. Not, indeed, that we are called upon to refuse to wear it. The person who can so refuse to follow the whole tradition of the race whence he springs is organically abnormal, not to say morbid. His fellows have a fair right to call him a lunatic or a criminal. The real question is whether we shall allow ourselves to be crushed to the earth, lame, impotent, and anæmic, by the mere garment of civilisation, or whether we shall so strive to live that we wear it loosely and easily and athletically, recognising that it is infinitely less precious than the humanity it clothes, still not without its beauty and its use.

If we wish to realise how many things are not required for fine living we may contemplate the “triumphs of the Victorian era.” Contemplating these we are enabled also to see that they mostly belong to the mechanical side of existence, among the things that are remote from the core of life. The new energy that all these inventions may give you on one side they take from you on the other. They run on the energy that you yourself supply. They are but devices for burdening your progress and draining away your energy. For what does it avail though tons of food are piled before you at the banquet of life if the capacity of your stomach remains strictly limited? Only the more exquisite quality of the banquet, with a finer equity in its distribution, could have brought you new joy and strength. The exquisite things of life are to-day as rare and as precious as ever they were. If the Victorian era had given a keener sauce to hunger, a more ravishing delight to love, if it had added a new joy to the sunlight, or a more delicious thrill to the springtime, if it had made any of these things a larger part of the common life, there indeed were a triumph to boast of! But so far as one can see, the Victorian era has mostly helped to cover over and push away from men the essential joys of living. Even those who prate so gleefully of its triumphs find chief of these its narcotics. Let us use these “triumphs” as much as we will, they belong to the unessential background against which the real drama of our life must still be played.

We waste so much of our time on the things that are not truly essential, worrying ourselves and others. Only one thing is really needful, whether with this man we say “Seek first the kingdom of Heaven,” or with that, “Make to yourself a perfect body.” It matters little, because he who pointed to the kingdom of Heaven came eating and drinking, the friend of publicans and sinners, and he who pointed to the body sought solitude and the keenest spiritual austerity. The body includes the soul, and the kingdom of Heaven includes the body. The one thing needful is to seek wisely the fullest organic satisfaction. The more closely we cling to that which satisfies the deepest cravings of the organism, the more gladly we shall let fall the intolerable burden of restraints and licences which are not required for fine living. “The true ascetic counts nothing his own save only his harp.” It is best to feel light and elate, free in every limb. Every man may have his burden to bear; let him only beware that he bears no burden which is not a joy to carry. If a man cannot sing as he carries his cross he had better drop it.

One has to admit that among English-speaking races at all events the conditions have not been favourable for fine living. The racial elements that have chiefly gone to making the English-speaking peoples have been mainly characterised by energy, and while energy is the prime constituent of living, it is scarcely sufficient for fine living. It is quality rather than quantity of life which finally counts: that is the terrible fact it has taken so long for our race to learn. To plough deep in the furrows of life, to scatter human seed broadcast, to bring to birth your random millions to wilt and fade in the black fog of London alleys or the hot steam of Lancashire mills, casting abroad the residue to wreak the vengeance in their blood on every fair and unspoilt land the world may hold—that is scarcely yet civilisation; fishes that spawn in the deep have carried the art of living as far as that. Not energy, even when it shows itself in the blind fury of righteousness, suffices to make civilisation, but sincerity, intelligence, sympathy, grace, and all those subtle amenities which go to what we call, perhaps imperfectly enough, humanity—therein more truly lie the virtues of fine living.

It seems not unnecessary to point out that civilisation was immortal long before the first Englishman was born. The races that have given the world the chief examples of fine living have never, save sometimes in their decay, sought quantity rather than quality of life. Some of the world’s most eternal cities are its smallest cities. If indeed the reckless excess of human life tended to produce happiness, we might well recognise compensation, and rest content. But, as we know, that is not so. The country that men call the wealthiest is the poorest in humanity when the lives and safeties of its workers are concerned, the law of our righteousness demanding that the weakest shall go to the wall.

One asks oneself if such a condition of things is fatally necessary. If that were so, then indeed the outlook of the world is dark. If the ideal of quantity before quality, of brute energy, of complacent self-righteousness, is for ever to dominate a large part of the world through the English-speaking peoples, then indeed we may die happy that the memory and the vision of better things were yet extant in our time.

Yet surely it is not necessary. If civilisation is a tradition then we may mould that tradition. We are no longer fatally damned into the world. If our fathers ate sour grapes our teeth are not on edge. And even so far as the influence of race counts, there is yet to be set against it the influence of climate. In sunnier English-speaking lands we may already trace a new foreign element of grace and suavity, a deeper insight into the art of living, clearly due in large measure to sky alone. When races change their sky, unlike individuals, they change their dispositions also.

But if we put aside this factor—though it is one of much significance when we recall the accumulating evidence that under proper conditions the white races can live and flourish in hot climes—are there no reasons for thinking that even the English in England may acquire those aptitudes which make not only for the grosser virtues of civilisation, but also for those finer qualities which alone make life truly worth living? I think there are.

It is common for pessimists of the baser sort to lament the relative decay of English supremacy in manufacturing and commercial energy, and to look enviously at the development in these directions of other and younger lands. Such an attitude is in any case inhuman, since these younger countries, especially Germany, are undertaking the cruder tasks of civilisation in at once a more scientific and a more humane spirit than we have ever been able to achieve. But it is also uncalled for. As a civilisation declines in brutal material energy it gains in spiritual refinement, thus winning more subtle and permanent influence. Egypt in her old age helped to mould young Greece, which in turn as she fell civilised her barbarian Roman conquerors. Of early vigorous Rome nothing remains save the empty echo of heroic virtue; but on the magnificent compost of Roman, Alexandrian, and Byzantine decay we northerners are flourishing even to-day. France has not taken a leading part in the grosser work of modern civilisation, but her laboratories of ideas, her workshops of beauty, above all her skill in the fine art of living, have given her an influence over men’s minds which swarming millions of pale factory hands and an inconceivable tonnage of mercantile shipping have not so far given to us. But in the very dying down of these grosser energies there is hope, for we may be sure that the forces of life are not yet extinct, and that worthier and subtler ends will float before our eyes as the sculleries and outhouse offices of life are gradually removed elsewhere. England, there can be little doubt, is peculiarly fitted to exercise the finer functions of civilisation, if not indeed for the world generally, at all events for those peoples of the globe which are allied to her wholly by language and largely by race. In new countries, in the hurry of cities, in the barren solitude of plains and hills, men have no time or no chance to elaborate the ideals and visions for which they yet thirst; they are not in touch with those great traditions on which alone all worthy and abiding effort must finally rest. The little group of islands hidden in this far corner of the Atlantic, bathed in their everlasting halo of iridescent mist, will be a sacred shrine for fully half the world. It was the womb in which the world’s most energetic race was elaborated; we may be sure that the mother feeling will never die out. Every great name and episode in the slow incubation of the race has its place and association there. Nothing there which is not visibly bathed in that glory which for ever touches us in the far past. In the light of a newer civilisation every aspect of it will claim the picturesque beauty of the past. And if, as Ribot has lately asserted, the factories of this century will haunt the minds of future men with the same picturesque suggestion as the ruins of thirteenth century abbeys to-day haunt us, how rich a treasure England will possess here! Men will come from afar to wander among the ruined factories and furnaces of Lancashire and the Midlands, to gaze at the crumbling charm of those structures once mortared by tears and blood. They will seek the massive whirr of vanished mills at dawn, the prolonged clatter of clogs along the pavement, the flutter of shawls down dark alleys, the echo of brutal forgotten oaths. Their eyes will vainly try to recall the men and women of the Victorian era, huddled together in pathetic self-satisfaction beneath a black pall of smoke and disease and death, playing out the tragedy they called life. A tender melancholy mightier than beauty will cling to the decay of that vanished past.

So far we have been developing the modern applications of that spirit of simplicity—of sincere and natural asceticism—which was a chief part of the secret of the Umbrian saint’s charm. Francis—as in an earlier age the great Cynics of Greece, and in a later age the New England transcendentalists—enables us to see that asceticism is a natural instinct; he knew that so far from being an effort to crush the body it was an effort to give elation and freedom to the body—Gaude, frater corpus!—and that so far from being an appeal to sorrow it was a perpetual appeal to joy. Let us throw aside the useless burdens of life, he seems to say, the things that oppress body and mind,—care and wealth and learning and books,—that thus we may become free to concentrate ourselves on the natural things of the world, attaining therein the joy of living. That was the simplicity of Francis. There is another vaguer and subtler aspect of his personality which may be expressed by the allied word purity. I mean that clearness and perfect crystalline transparency symbolised by water, in which it has its source. That Francis, with all his fine natural instincts, fully realised all the implications of purity, either on its physical or its spiritual sides, one may well doubt. Purity has never been a great Christian virtue, though ever greatly talked about in Christendom; and while the reliance of Francis on instinct carried him far beyond the age and the faith in which he lived, his indifference to the intellectual grip of things which was part of that natural instinct caused him to be often swayed by the conventions and traditions around him.

It has been well said that purity—which in the last analysis is physical cleanness—is the final result of evolution after which Nature is ever striving. When she had attained to the production of naked savage man, a creature no longer encumbered with the care of his fur but freely and constantly bathed by the elements, the perfection of purity was attained. With the wearing of clothes dirt was again brought into the world; and so-called civilised man—except when he possesses leisure for prolonged attention to his person and his clothes—is once more brought to the level of the lower animals, indeed below them, for few animals spend so little time and trouble in attaining cleanliness as garmented man. Pagan classic times, no doubt, cherished a cult of the body which involved a high regard for physical purity. That is the very reason why such purity has never been a Christian or modern virtue. The early Church, feeling profound antagonism to the vices which in classic times were associated with the bath, from the outset frequently denied that there was any need for cleanliness at all. Even so cultured a Christian as Clement of Alexandria would only admit that women should be clean; it was not necessary for men; “the bath is to be taken by women for cleanliness and health, by men for health alone;” in later days the hatred of cleanliness often became quite whole-hearted. Thus it happens that throughout Europe and wherever the influence of Christianity has spread there has been on the whole an indifference to dirt, which is indeed not uncommonly found among degraded peoples untouched by Christianity, but is certainly nowhere else found in association with a grade of culture in most other matters so high. To the Roman the rites of the bath formed one of the very chief occupations of life, and to this race it has happened, as probably to no other ancient race, that their baths have often survived their temples; Rome holds no more memorable relic than the Baths of Caracalla. For the Mohammedan the love of water is part of religion, and the energy and skill with which in its prime Islamic civilisation exploited the free and beautiful use of water, are still to be traced throughout southern Spain. In the fine civilisation of Japan, again, the pursuit of physical purity has ever been a simple and unashamed public duty, and “a Japanese crowd,” says Professor Chamberlain, “is the sweetest in the world.” How different things are in Christendom one need not insist.

It is, however, impossible to overrate the magnitude of the issues which are directly and indirectly enfolded in this question of physical purity. Christianity, with its studied indifference to cleanliness, is, after all, a force from the outside so far as we are concerned; every spontaneous reflective movement of progress involves a reaction against it. On the physical side it is the mark of the better social classes that they are clean, and any striving for betterment among the masses is on the physical side a striving for greater cleanliness. Personal dirtiness is the real and permanent dividing line of classes. The instinctive physical shrinking of the clean person from the dirty person—except at the rare moments when some stronger emotion comes into play—is profound and inevitable. Nearly every form of honest natural vulgarity it is possible to find tolerable and sometimes even charming, but personal physical unwholesomeness remains an impossible barrier. There is no social equality between the clean and the dirty. The question of physical purity lies at the root of the real democratic problem.

Our attitude towards physical purity inevitably determines our attitude towards the body generally. Without the ideal of cleanliness the body becomes impure. It cannot be shown. Complete concealment becomes the ideal of the impure. And however pure and excellent the body may actually be among ourselves, the traditions of the past remain. The Greeks considered the dislike to nakedness as a mark of Persian and other barbarians; the Japanese—the Greeks of another age and clime—had not conceived the reasons for avoiding nakedness until taught by the lustful and shame-faced eyes of western barbarians. Among ourselves it is “disgusting” even to-day to show so much as the foot.[10] We certainly could not imitate St. Francis, who broke with his old life by abandoning his father’s house and all that he owned, absolutely naked.

There is no real line of demarcation between physical purity and spiritual purity, and the spiritual impurity which marks our civilisation is certainly related to the physical impurity which has so long been a tradition of Christendom. Both alike are a consciousness of uncleanness involving a cloak of hypocrisy. We may well recall that sincerity, if we carry its history sufficiently far back, is one with physical purity. In some districts of Italy a girl shows that she is chaste by joining in a certain procession and bearing the symbols of purity in her hand. At all events so it was once. All women now walk in the procession of the chaste. In civilised modern life everywhere, indeed, we all walk in that procession, and bright lustful eyes mingled with faint starved eyes both look out incongruously from behind the same monotonously chaste masks. We have forgotten, if we ever knew, that the filthy rags of our righteousness have alike robbed desire of its purity and restraint of its beauty.

How far Francis had instinctively divined the meaning and significance of purity, either on the physical or the moral side, it would be idle to attempt to inquire too precisely. But this delicate and admirable saint brings us into an atmosphere in which the true grace of purity may at least be discerned. His indifference to nakedness, his affection for animals and interest in their loves, his audacious banding together of men and women in one order, his gospel of joy and his everlasting delight in all natural and elementary things, make up a whole inconceivably different from that vision of the world which the great mediæval monks, from St. Bernard downwards, spent their lives in maintaining. He brings us to a point at which we are enabled to go beyond his own insight, a point at which we may not only see that asceticism is a simple and natural instinct, not alone recognise the beauty of sex in flowers and birds, but in human creatures also, and learn at last that the finest secrets of purity are known only to the man and woman who have mingled the scent of their sweat with the wild thyme.

At the present moment it may indeed be said that the purity which is one with sincerity presents itself to us more broadly and more clearly in the road of our evolution than it ever has before. Even on the physical side secrecy is becoming impossible, and as the progress of physical science makes matter more and more transparent to our eyes, sincerity must ever become a more stringent and inevitable virtue. And on the psychic side, also, purity—if you will, sincerity—is even more surely imposing itself. Within our own time we have been privileged to see psychology taken from the study into the laboratory and into the market-place. There is no recess of the soul—however intimate, however, as we have been taught to think, disgusting—that is not now opened to the childlike, all-scrutinising curiosity of science. We may perhaps rebel, but so it is. There are no mysteries left, no noisome abysses of ignorance veiled by the pretty mists of innocence. In the face of this tendency private vice must ever become more difficult; we are learning to detect the whole man in the slightest quiver of his muscles. Thus, again, purity becomes yet more stringent and inevitable. We gaze at all facts now, and find none too mean or too sacred for study. But it is fatal to gaze at certain facts if you cannot gaze purely. In that lies the final triumph of purity. We may rebel, I repeat, but so it is, so it must remain.

I do not wish to insist here on the moral aspects of purity—grave and profound as these are—for I am dealing less with the social aspects of simplicity and purity than with what I would call their religious aspects, their power to win our personal peace and joy. How far we are to-day, at all events in England, from the simplicity and purity of Francis in the search for peace and joy is brought home very clearly to those who have ever made it their business to observe the masses of our population in their finest moments of would-be peace and joy. Many years ago a curious fascination drew me every Bank Holiday to haunt the structure and grounds of the Crystal Palace, near which I then lived. The vision of humanity in the mass, when it has lost the interest which individuals possess, and taken on the more abstract interest belonging to the species, has for me at least always had a certain attraction. But these Bank Holiday crowds had a more special interest. They summed up and wrote large the characteristics of a nation. These thirty thousand persons belonging to the class which by virtue of greater fertility furnishes the ultimate substance of all classes, seemed to reveal to me the heart of my own people. The perpetual, violent movement, the meaningless shouts and yells, the haggard bands of young women standing in the corridors to tramp wearily a treadmill variation of the Irish jig until they fell into an almost hypnotic state, the wistful, weary looks in the dull eyes of these seekers, rushing on among the plaster images of old serene gods, seeing nothing but always moving, moving they knew not whither, faint, yet pursuing they knew not what,—the whole of the northern soul, the English soul above all, was there. On! on! never mind how or where: that seemed the perpetual cry of these pale, lean, awkward youths and women. And I would think of the bands of boys and girls in the mediæval crusading epidemics, starting from the north with the same eyes, asking for Jerusalem at every town, soon to be slain or drowned in unknown obscure ways. Or sometimes I recalled the bas-reliefs in the museum at Naples—that most fascinating of museums—which show how the failing Greek genius concentrated its now spiritualised energy in the forms of Dionysus and his mænads. With eager face grown languid he leans on the great thyrsus, which bends beneath his weight, and in front his mænads, upheld by the ardour of the search, with heads thrown back and flying hair, still beat their cymbals desperately, seeking, until they have grown almost unconscious of search, a far-away joy, an ever-fleeting ideal, of which they have at last forgotten the name. And so for hours my gaze would be fixed on the pathetic vulgarity of those terrible crowds.

Of late I have been able to see how the other vigorous and reproductive race—the race that chiefly shares with England the partition of the uncivilised world—comports itself at its great festivals. The Russians are a profoundly and consciously religious race, and I recall above all the unforgettable scene at the ancient monastery of Troitsa, near Moscow, as it appeared on the festival of the Assumption, when pilgrims, women mostly, in every variety of gay costume, crowded thither on foot from all parts of Russia. There, at length within the walls of that monastery-fortress on the hill at Sergievo, they fervently kiss the sacred relics, and having been served by the dark-robed, long-haired monks with soup and black bread, they lie down and fall asleep, placid and motionless, on all sides. Young women, grasping the pilgrim’s staff, a little droop sometimes in the lips, yet with large brawny thighs beneath the short skirts, stolid great-breasted women of middle age, wrinkled old women decked in their ancient traditional adornments—all this gay-coloured multitude fling themselves down to sleep on the church steps, around its walls, over the silent graves, heaped up anywhere that the march of on-coming pilgrims leaves a little space, tired mænads filled for once with the wine their souls craved, colossal images of immense appeasement. It is the orgy of a strong, silent, much-suffering race, with all the charm of childhood yet upon it, too humane to be ferocious in its energy.

We English subordinate the sensory to the motor side of life, and even find our virtue in so doing. To live in the present, to suffer and to enjoy our actual evil and good, facing it squarely and making our account with it—that we cannot do: that was the way of the Greeks and Romans; it is not our way. We are ever poets and idealists, down to the dregs of life’s cup. We must strive and push, using our muscles to narcotise our senses, ever contemptuous of the people who more fully exercise their senses to grasp the world around them. For the sake of this muscular auto-intoxication we miss the finest moments life has to give. The Japanese masses, who fix their popular festival for the day when the cherry-tree is in finest bloom, and take their families into the woods to sip tea and pass the day deliciously with the flowers, are born to a knowledge of that mystery which Francis painfully conquered. The people to whom such an art of enjoyment is the common practice of the common people may possibly not succeed in sending ugly and shoddy goods to clothe and kill the beautiful skins of every savage tribe under heaven, but we need not fear to affirm that they have learnt secrets of civilisation which are yet hidden from us in England.

The worth of a civilisation, we may be very sure, is more surely measured by its power to multiply among the common people the possibility of having and enjoying such moments than by the mileage of cotton goods its factories can yield, or even by the output of Bibles its weary factory hands can stitch. We can know no moments of finer or purer exhilaration, whether we breathe the bright air of Australian solitudes and watch the virgin hills lie fold within fold beneath the stainless sunlight, or in the dimmer and damper air of this old country recline on Surrey heights by the great beeches of the old deserted Pilgrim’s Way and meditate of the past. There are few things sweeter or more profitable than to lie on the velvety floor of a little pine wood on a forgotten southern height in May, where tall clumps of full-flowered rhododendra blend with the fragrant gorse which spreads down to the sparkling sea, and to throw aside everything and dream. In such moments at such spots we reach the summits of life, learning those secrets of asceticism which Francis knew so well.

Thus by his words and by his deeds Francis still has his significance for us. He brought asceticism from the cell into the fields, and became the monk of Nature. One may doubt whether, as Renan thought, the Song to the Sun is the supreme modern expression of the religious spirit, but without doubt it gathers up vaguely and broadly the things that most surely belong to our eternal peace in this world. That it is the simplest and naturalest things to which eternal joy belongs is the divine secret which makes Francis a prince among saints, and it was by a true inspiration that he dedicated the chief utterance of his worship of joy in life to the sun.

If it should ever chance that a sane instinct of worship is born again on earth among civilised men, let us be sure that nothing will seem more worthy of worship than the sun, the source of that energy out of which we and all our ideals ultimately spring. Some day, again, perhaps, men will greet the rising of the sun at the summer solstice on the hills with music and song and dance, framing their most exquisite liturgical art to the honour of that supreme source of all earthly life. It was natural, doubtless, that at some stage of human progress new-found moral conceptions should intrude themselves as worthier of human worship. But even the cross itself—if not its great rival the lunar Mohammedan crescent—was first the symbol of sun-worship, of the source of life. We may yet rescue that sacred symbol, now fallen to such sorrowful uses, bearing it onwards to sunnier heights of wholeness and joy.

Religions are many, and in the mass they seem to us—blinded to the social functions that religions originally subserved—endlessly harsh and cruel. But in their summits, in their finest personalities, they are simple and natural enough, and alike lovely. Look at the Jesus of the Gospels, the friend of publicans and sinners, the marriage guest at Cana, so tender-hearted in the house of Simon, the author of those sayings of quintessential natural wisdom preserved to us in that string of adorable pearls men call the Sermon on the Mount. Look at the prophet of Islam, when gazing back at the earth as it seemed to recede into the distance at the end of his long career, he counted as first among its claims the simple natural joys: “I love your world because of its women and its perfumes.” And we remember the depths to which Christianity and Mohammedanism have alike fallen. Look, again, at Francis, who in no prim academical sense may be called the first modern apostle of sweetness and light, a man who found joy unspeakable in inhaling the fragrance of flowers, in watching the limpid waters of mountain streams, and whose most characteristic symbol is the soaring lark he loved so well. And we remember that a century later even Chaucer, that sweetest and most sympathetic of poets, can only speak of his friar in words that seem to be of inevitable and unconscious irony. For every religion begins as the glorious living flame of a lovely human personality,—or so it seems,—and continues as a barren cinder-heap. As such, as a Church, whether pagan or Christian, it can scarcely afford us either light or heat.

Why, one asks oneself, is it necessary for me to choose between Paul and Petronius? Why pester me on the one hand with the breastplate of faith and the helmet of salvation, on the other with the feast of Trimalchio and the kisses of Giton? “A plague of both your houses!” We are not barbarians, tortured by a moral law, neither are we all pagans with unmixed instincts of luxury. We are the outcome of a civilisation in which not only has what we are pleased to regard as the sensual fury of the ape and tiger become somewhat chastened, but the ascetic fury of the monk and priest also. Let the child of the south feast still in the house of Trimalchio with unwounded conscience, if he can; we will not forbid him. And let the barbarian still flagellate his tense rebellious nerves with knotted spiritual scourges, if only so can he draw out the best music they yield; we will be the first to applaud. But most of us have little to do with the one or the other. The palmiest days of both ended a thousand years ere we were born. Before the threshold of our modern world was reached Francis sang in the sun and smiled away the spectres that squatted on the beautiful things of the earth. On the threshold of our world Rabelais built his Abbey of Thelème, in whose rule was but one clause, Fay ce que vouldras, a rule which no pagan or Christian had ever set up before, because never before except as involved in the abstract conceptions of philosophers, had the thought of voluntary co-operation, of the unsolicited freedom to do well, appeared before European men.

What have we to do also, it may be added, with modernity, with the fashions of an hour? It is well, indeed, to live in the present, whatever that present may be, but sooner or later we are pushed back, weary or disillusioned, on the inspiration of our own personality. All the activity of Francis only wrought a plague of grey friars, scattered like dust on the highways of Europe. But Francis still remains, and all things wither into nothingness in the presence of one natural man who dared to be himself. The best of us can scarcely hope to be more successful than Francis. But at least we may be ourselves. “Whatever happens I must be emerald:” that, Antoninus said, is the emerald’s morality; that must remain our finest affirmation.

Our feet cling to the earth, and it is well that we should learn to grip it closely and nakedly. But the earth beneath us is not all of Nature; there are instincts within us that lead elsewhere, and it is part of the art of living to use naturally all those instincts. In so doing the spiritual burdens which the ages have laid upon us glide away into thin air.

And for us, as for him who wrote De Imitatione Christi—however far differently—there are still two wings by which we may raise ourselves above the earth, simplicity, that is to say, and purity.