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.
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