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There was probably no greater impulse for social uplift and for real education of the masses than these mystery and morality plays, in which the people took part themselves and in which, as a consequence of the presence of friends in the various roles, the spectators had a livelier interest than would have been otherwise the case under even the most favorable circumstances, or with elaborate presentation. In recent years there has come the realization that the drama may thus be made a real educational influence. Unfortunately at the present time, whatever of influence it has is exerted almost exclusively upon the better-to-do classes, who have so many other opportunities for educational uplift. These plays during the Thirteenth Century brought the people intimately into contact with the great characters of Old Testament and New Testament history, and besides giving them precious religious information, which of itself, however, might mean very little for true education, helped them to an insight into character and to a right appreciation of human actions and a sympathy with what was right even though it entailed suffering, such as could not have otherwise been obtained.

Of course it is easy to say that such dramas constantly repeated, the subjects always the same and only the cast varying from year to year, would become intolerably familiar and might after a time degenerate into the merely contemptible. As a matter of fact, however, they did not. These old stories of religious heroes were written so close to the heart of nature, involved so intimately all the problems of life that they are of undying interest. Their repetition was only from year to year and this did not give the opportunity for the familiarity which breeds contempt. Besides, though the plays in the various cycles existed in definite forms there seems no doubt that certain changes were made by the players themselves and by the managers of the plays from time to time, and indeed such changes of the text of a play as we know from present-day experience, are almost inevitable.

It might be urged, too, that the people themselves would scarcely be possessed of the histrionic talent necessary to make the plays effective. Ordinarily, however, as we know from our modern city life, much less of the actor's art is needed than of interest in the action, to secure the attention of the gallery. It must not be assumed too readily, however, that the guilds which were able to supply men for the great artistic decoration of the cathedrals of the Thirteenth Century, could not supply actors who would so enter into the artistic expression of a part as to represent it to the life. The actor is more born than made, in spite of the number of schools of acting that are supposed to be turning out successful rivals of Roscius, on recurring graduation days. It must not be forgotten that the only example of these mystery plays which is still left to us is the Passion Play at Oberammergau, and that is one of the world's greatest spectacles. On the last occasion when it was given about half a million of people from all over the world, many of them even from distant America and Australia, found their way into the Tyrolese Mountains in order to be present at it. It is only the old, old, old story of the Passion and death of the Lord. It is represented by villagers chosen from among the inhabitants of a little village of fourteen hundred inhabitants, who while they have a distinct taste for the artistic and produce some of the best wood-carving done anywhere in Europe, thus approximating very interestingly the Thirteenth Century peoples, are not particularly noted for their education, nor for their dramatic ability. No one who went up to see the Passion Play came away dissatisfied either with the interest of the play or with its manner of representation. It is distinctly an example of how well men and women do things when they are thoroughly interested in them, and when they are under the influence of an old-time tradition according to which they must have the ability to accomplish what is expected of them. Such a tradition actually existed during the Thirteenth and Fourteenth centuries, leading to a gradual development of dramatic power both in writers and actors, that eventually was to result in the magnificent outburst of dramatic genius during the Elizabethan period. For it must not be forgotten, that mystery and morality plays continued to hold the stage down almost, if not quite, to the time of Shakespeare's early manhood, and he probably saw the Coventry Cycle of plays acted.

While we have a certain number of these old-time plays, most of them, of course, have disappeared by time's attrition during the centuries before the invention of printing, when they were handed round only in manuscript form. Of some of these plays we shall have something to say after a moment, stopping only to call attention to the fact that in this literary mode of the mystery and morality plays, dramatic literature in English reached a height of development which has been equaled only by our greatest dramatic geniuses.

Within the last few years most of the large cities of the English-speaking world, besides the more important universities, have been given the opportunity to hear one of the great products of this form of literary activity. "Everyman" is probably as great a play as there is in English and comparable with the best work of Shakespeare, Marlowe and Jonson. Its author only took the four last things to be remembered—Death, Judgment, Heaven and Hell—the things which must come to every man, and wrote his story around them, yet he did it with such artistic effectiveness as to make his drama a triumph of literary execution.

The Mystery Plays were as interesting in their way to the medieval generations as "Everyman" to us. As may be seen from the list quoted from Mr. Morley, practically all the significant parts of the Bible story were acted by these craftsmen. Too much can scarcely be said of the educational value of such dramatic exercises; the Bible itself with its deep religious teachings, with its simple but sublime style, with its beautiful poetry, entered for a time into the very lives of these people. No wonder that our English speech during these centuries became saturated with biblical thoughts and words. Anyone who has ever had any experience with amateur theatricals when a really great play was given, will be able to realize how much more thoroughly every quality, dramatic, literary, poetic, even lyric and historical, that there might be in the drama, entered into the hearts and minds of those who took part. It is this feature that is especially deserving of attention with regard to these mystery plays which began in the Thirteenth Century. The people's interest in them, lifted them out of themselves and their trivial round of life into the higher life of this great religious poetry. On the other hand the teachings of the Bible came down from the distant plane on which they might otherwise have been set and entered into the very life of the people. Their familiarity with scripture made it a something not to be discussed merely, but to be applied in their everyday affairs.

Besides this, the organization of the company to give the play and the necessity for the display and exercise of taste in the costumes and of ingenuity in the stage settings, were of themselves of great educative value. The rivalry that naturally existed between the various companies chosen from the different guilds only added to the zest with which rehearsals were taken up, and made the play more fully occupy the minds of those actively engaged in its preparation. For several dull winter months before Easter time there was an intense preoccupation of mind with great thoughts and beautiful words, instead of with the paltry round of daily duties, which would otherwise form the burden of conversation. Gossip and scandal mongering had fewer opportunities since people's minds were taken up by so much worthier affairs. The towns in which the plays were given never had more than a few thousand inhabitants and most of them must have been personally interested in some way in the play. The Jesuits, whose acumen for managing students is proverbial, have always considered it of great importance to have their students prepare plays several times a year. Their reason is the occupation of mind which it affords as well as the intellectual and elocutionary training that comes with the work. What they do with premeditation, the old guilds did unconsciously but even more effectively, and their success must be considered as one of the social triumphs of this wonderful Thirteenth Century.

Only in recent years has the idea succeeded in making way in government circles on the continent, that the giving of free dramatic entertainments for the poor would form an excellent addition to other educational procedures. Such performances have new been given for nearly a score of years in Berlin. After all, the subvention allowed by government to the great theaters and opera houses in Europe is part of this same policy, though unfortunately they are calculated to affect only the upper classes, who need the help and the stimulus of great dramatic art and great music less than the lower classes, who have so little of variety or of anything that makes for uplift in their lives. In the Thirteenth Century this very modern notion was anticipated in such a way as to benefit the very poorest of the population, and that not only passively, that is by the hearing of dramatic performances, but also actively, by taking parts in them and so having all the details of the action and the words impressed upon them.

CAPITAL (LINCOLN)

XVI
FRANCIS THE SAINT—THE FATHER OF THE RENAISSANCE

The Renaissance is often thought of as a movement which originated about the middle of the Fifteenth Century. Careful students sometimes trace its origin back somewhat further. In recent years it has come to be realized, however, that the great intellectual development which came during the century after the fall of Constantinople in Italy, and gradually spread to all the civilized countries of Europe, had been preparing for at least two centuries and a half. While the period from the middle of the Fifteenth to the end of the Sixteenth Centuries well deserves the name of Renaissance, because one of the most important fructifying principles of the movement was the rebirth of Greek ideas into the modern world after the dispersion of Greek scholars by the Turkish advance into the Byzantine Empire, the term must not be allowed to carry with it the mistaken notion which only too often has been plausibly accepted, that there was a new birth of poetic, literary and esthetic ideas at this time, just as if there had been nothing worth considering in these lines before. Any such notion as this would be the height of absurdity in the light of the history of the previous centuries in Italy. It was a cherished notion of the people of the Renaissance themselves that they were the first to do artistic and literary work, hence they invented the term Gothic, meaning thereby barbarous, for the art of the preceding time, but in this they were only exercising that amusing, self-complacency which each generation deems its right. Succeeding generations adopting their depreciative term have turned it into one of glory so that Gothic art is now in highest honor.

Fortunately in recent years there has come, as we have said, a growing recognition of the fact that the real beginning of modern art lies much farther back in history, and that the real father of the Italian Renaissance is a man whom very few people in the last three centuries have appreciated at his true worth. Undoubtedly the leader in that great return to nature, which constitutes the true basis of modern poetic and artistic ideas of all kinds, was St. Francis of Assisi. "The poor little man of God," as in his humility he loved to call himself, would surely be the last one to suspect that he should ever come to be thought of as the initiator of a great movement in literature and art. Such he was, however, in the highest sense of the term and because of the modern appreciation of him in this regard, publications concerning him have been more frequent during the last ten years than with regard to almost any other single individual. We have under our hand at the present moment what by no means claims to be a complete bibliography of St. Francis' life and work, yet we can count no less than thirty different works in various languages (not reckoning translations separate from the originals) which have issued from the press during the last ten years alone. This gives some idea of present day interest in St. Francis.

It must not be thought, however, that it is only in our time that these significant tributes have been paid him. Much of his influence in literature and art, as well as in life, was recognized by the southern nations all during the centuries since his death. That it is only during the last century that other nations have come to appreciate him better, and especially have realized his literary significance, has been their loss and that of their literatures. At the beginning of the Nineteenth Century Görres, the German historian who was so sympathetic towards the Middle Ages, wrote of St. Francis as one of the Troubadours, and even did not hesitate to add that without St. Francis at the beginning of the Thirteenth Century there would have been no Dante at the end. Renan, the well-known French rationalist historian and literateur, did not hesitate to proclaim St. Francis one of the great religious poets of all time and his famous Canticle of the Sun as the greatest religious poem since the Hebrew Psalms were written. It was from Renan that Matthew Arnold received his introduction to St. Francis as a literary man, and his own studies led him to write the famous passages in the Essays in Criticism, which are usually so much a source of surprise to those who think of Mr. Arnold as the rationalizing critic, rather than the sympathetic admirer of a medieval saint.

"In the beginning of the Thirteenth Century, when the clouds and storms had come, when the gay sensuous pagan life was gone, when men were not living by the senses and understanding, when they were looking for the speedy coming of Antichrist, there appeared in Italy, to the north of Rome, in the beautiful Umbrian country at the foot of the Appennines, a figure of the most magical power and charm, St. Francis. His century is, I think, the most interesting in the history of Christianity after its primitive age; more interesting than even the century of the Reformation; and one of the chief figures, perhaps the very chief, to which this interest attaches itself, is St. Francis. And why? Because of the profound popular instinct which enabled him, more than any man since the primitive age, to fit religion for popular use. He brought religion to the people. He founded the most popular body of ministers of religion that has ever existed in the Church. He transformed monachism by uprooting the stationary monk, delivering him from the bondage of property, and sending him, as a mendicant friar, to be a stranger and sojourner, not in the wilderness, but in the most crowded haunts of men, to console them and to do them good. This popular instinct of his is at the bottom of his famous marriage with poverty. Poverty and suffering are the condition of the people, the multitude, the immense majority of mankind; and it was towards this people that his soul yearned. "He listens," it was said of him, "to those to whom God himself will not listen."

Matthew Arnold has thus surprisingly summed up Francis' age and his work. With a sympathy that could scarcely be expected from the man for whom the Deity had become merely "a stream of tendency that makes for righteousness," he realized the influence that this supreme lover of a personal God had over his generation, and his brother poet soul flew to its affinity in spite of the apparently insurmountable obstacle of' extreme aloofness of spiritual temperament.

THE GLORIFICATION OF ST. FRANCIS (GIOTTO, LOWER CHURCH OF ASSISI)

Matthew Arnold proceeds:

"So in return, as no other man, St. Francis was listened to. When an Umbrian town or village heard of his approach, the whole population went out in joyful procession to meet him, with green boughs, flags, music, and songs of gladness. The master, who began with two disciples, could in his own lifetime (and he died at forty-five) collect to keep Whitsuntide with him, in presence of an immense multitude, five thousand of his Minorites. He found fulfilment to his prophetic cry: "I hear in my ears the sound of the tongues of all the nations who shall come unto us; Frenchmen, Spaniards, Germans, Englishmen. The Lord will make of us a great people, even unto the ends of the earth."

When we reach the next paragraph the secret of this surprising paradoxical sympathy is out. It is the literary and esthetic side of St. Francis that has appealed to him, and like Renan he does not hesitate to give "the poor little man of God" a place among the great original geniuses of all time, associating his name with that of Dante.

"Prose could not satisfy this ardent soul, and he made poetry. Latin was too learned for this simple, popular nature, and he composed in his mother tongue, in Italian. The beginnings of the mundane poetry of the Italians are in Sicily, at the court of kings; the beginnings of their religious poetry are in Umbria, with St. Francis. His are the humble upper waters of a mighty stream: at the beginning of the Thirteenth Century, it is St. Francis, at the end, Dante. Now it happens that St. Francis, too, like the Alexandrian songstress, has his hymn for the sun, for Adonis; Canticle of the Sun, Canticle of the Creatures, the poem goes by both names. Like the Alexandrian hymn, it is designed for popular use, but not for use by King Ptolemy's people; artless in language, irregular in rhythm, it matches with the childlike genius that produced it, and the simple natures that loved and repeated it."

Probably the most satisfactory translation for those who may not be able to appreciate the original of this sublime hymn that has evoked so many tributes, is the following literal rendering into English in which a quite successful attempt to give the naif rhythm of the original Italian, which necessarily disappears in any formal rhymed translation, has been made by Father Paschal Robinson of the Order of St. Francis for his recent edition of the writings of St. Francis.²³

"Here begin the praises of the Creatures which the Blessed Francis made to the praise and honor of God while he was ill at St. Damian's:

 
  Most high, omnipotent, good Lord,
  Praise, glory and honor and benediction all, are Thine.
  To Thee alone do they belong, most High,
  And there is no man fit to mention Thee.
  Praise be to Thee, my Lord, with all Thy creatures.
  Especially to my worshipful brother sun,
  The which lights up the day, and through him dost Thou brightness give;
  And beautiful is he and radiant with splendor great;
  Of Thee, Most High, signification gives.
  Praised be my Lord, for sister moon and for the stars,
  In heaven Thou hast formed them clear and precious and fair.
  Praised be my Lord for brother wind
  And for the air and clouds and fair and every kind of weather.
  By the which Thou givest to Thy creatures nourishment.
  Praised be my Lord for sister water,
  The which is greatly helpful and humble and precious and pure.
  Praised be my Lord for brother fire,
  By the which Thou lightest up the dark.
  And fair is he and gay and mighty and strong.
  Praised be my Lord for our sister, mother earth.
  The which sustains and keeps us
  And brings forth diverse fruits with grass and flowers bright.
  Praised be my Lord for those who for Thy love forgive
  And weakness bear and tribulation.
  Blessed those who shall in peace endure,
  For by Thee, Most High, shall they be crowned.
  Praised be my Lord for our sister, the bodily death.
  From the which no living man can flee.
 
 
  Woe to them who die in mortal sin;
  Blessed those who shall find themselves in Thy most holy will,
  For the second death shall do them no ill.
  Praise ye and bless ye my Lord, and give Him thanks,
  And be subject unto Him with great humility."
 

Except for his place in literature and art, the lives of few men would seem to be of so little interest to the modern time as that of St. Francis of Assisi, yet it is for the man himself that so many now turn to him. His spirit is entirely opposed to the sordid principles that have been accepted as the basis of success in modern life. His idea was that happiness consisted in being free from unsatisfied desires rather than seeking to secure the satisfaction of his wishes. Duty was self-denial, not self-seeking under any pretext. He stripped himself literally of everything and his mystic marriage to the Lady Poverty was, so far as he was concerned, as absolute a reality, as if the union had been actual instead of imaginary. The commonplace details of his early years seem all the more interesting from these later developments, and have been the subject of much sympathetic study in recent years.

St. Francis' father was a cloth merchant and St. Francis had been brought up and educated as became the son of a man whose commercial journeys often took him to France. It was indeed while his father was absent on one of these business expeditions that Francis was born and on his father's return received from him the name of Francisco—the Frenchman—in joyful commemoration of his birth.

As he grew up he did not differ from the ordinary young man of his time, but seems to have taken the world and its pleasures quite as he found them and after the fashion of those around him. At the age of twenty-five he fell seriously ill and then, for the first time, there came to him the realization of the true significance of life. As Dean Stanley said shortly before his death, "life seemed different when viewed from the horizontal position." Life lived for its own sake was not worth while. To Francis there came the realization that when God Himself became man he lived his life for others. Francis set about literally imitating him. Enthusiastic students of his life consider him the great type of genuine Christian, the most real disciple of Christ who ever lived. Some money and goods that came into his hands having been disposed of for the poor, Francis' father made serious objection and Francis was brought before the ecclesiastical authorities. It was at this moment that he stripped himself of everything that he had, the Bishop even having to provide a cloak to cover his nakedness, and became the wonderful apostle to the poor that he remained during all the rest of his life. Curious as it must ever seem, it was not long before he had many who wished to imitate him and who insisted on becoming his disciples and followers. St. Francis had had no idea how infectious his example was to prove. Before his death his disciples could be numbered by the thousands and the great order of the Franciscans, that for centuries was to do so much work, had come into existence not by any conscious planning, but by the mere force of the great Christian principles that were the guiding factors in St. Francis' own life.

Ruskin in his Mornings in Florence in discussing Giotto's famous picture of St. Francis' renunciation of his inheritance, and his incurrence thereby of his father's anger, has a characteristic passage that sounds the very keynote of the Saint's life and goes to the heart of things. In it he explains the meaning of this apparently contradictory incident in St. Francis' life, since Francis' great virtue was obedience, yet here, apparently as a beginning of his more perfect Christian life, is an act of disobedience. After Ruskin's explanation, however, it is all the more difficult to understand the present generation's revival of interest in Francis unless it be attributed to a liking for contrast.

"That is the meaning of St. Francis' renouncing his inheritance; and it is the beginning of Giotto's gospel of Works. Unless this hardest of deeds be done first—this inheritance of mammon and the world cast away,—all other deeds are useless. You cannot serve, cannot obey, God and mammon. No charities, no obedience, no self-denials, are of any use while you are still at heart in conformity with the world. You go to church, because the world goes. You keep Sunday, because your neighbor keeps it. But you dress ridiculously because your neighbors ask it; and you dare not do a rough piece of work, because your neighbors despise it. You must renounce your neighbor, in his riches and pride, and remember him in his distress. That is St. Francis' 'disobedience.'"

ST. FRANCIS (CHURCH OF THE FRARI, VENICE, NIC. PISANO)

In spite of Ruskin's charming explanation of St. Francis' place in history, and his elucidation of the hard passages in his life, most people will only find it more difficult, after these explanations, to understand the modern acute reawakening of interest in St. Francis. Our generation in its ardent devotion to the things of this world does not seem a promising field for the evangel, "Give up all thou hast and follow me." The mystery of St. Francis' attraction only deepens the more we know of him. An American Franciscan has tried to solve the problem and his words are worth quoting. Father Paschal Robinson, O. S. M., in his "The True St. Francis" says:—

"What is the cause of the present widespread homage to St. Francis? It is, of course, far too wide a question to allow the present writer to do more than make a few suggestions. First and foremost, we must ever reckon with the perennial charm of the Saint's personality, which seems to wield an ineffable influence over the hearts of men—drawing and holding those of the most different habits of mind, with a sense of personal sympathy. Perhaps no other man, unless it be St. Paul, ever had such wide reaching, all-embracing sympathy: and it may have been wider than St. Paul's, for we find no evidence in the great apostle of a love for nature and of animals. This exquisite Franciscan spirit, as it is called, which is the very perfume of religion—this spirit at once so humble, so tender, so devout, so akin to 'the good odor of Christ'—passed out into the whole world and has become a permanent source of inspiration. A character at once so exhalted and so purified as St. Francis was sure to keep alive an ideal; and so he does. From this one can easily understand St. Francis' dominance among a small but earnest band of enthusiasts now pointing the world back to the reign of the spirit. It was this same gentle idealism of St. Francis which inspired the art of the Umbrian people; it was this which was translated into the paintings of the greatest artists. No school of painting has ever been penetrated with such pure idealism as the Umbrian; and this inspiration, at once religious and artistic, came from the tomb of the poverello above which Giotto had painted his mystical frescoes. The earnest quasi-religious study of the medieval beginnings of western art has therefore rightly been set down as another cause for some of the latter-day pilgrimages to Assisi. In like manner, the scientific treatment of the Romance literature leads naturally to St. Francis as to the humble upper waters of a mighty stream; at the beginning of the Thirteenth Century is St. Francis, at the end is Dante. It was Matthew Arnold, we believe, who first held up the poor man of Assisi as a literary type—a type as distinct and formal as the author of the Divine Comedy. 'Prose,' he says, 'could not easily satisfy the saint's ardent soul, and so he made poetry.' 'It was,' writes Ozanam, 'the first cry of a nascent poetry which has grown and made itself heard through the world.'"

Considering how thoroughly impractical Francis seemed to be in his life, it can scarcely help but be a source of ever increasing wonder that he succeeded in influencing, his generation so widely and so thoroughly. It is evident that there were many men of the time tired of the more or less strenuous life, which chained them either to the cares of business or tempted them for the sake of the bubble reputation into a military career. To these St. Francis' method of life came with an especially strong appeal. The example of his neglect of worldly things and of his so thoroughly maintained resolve not to be harassed by the ordinary cares of life, and especially not to take too much thought of the future, penetrated into all classes. While it made the rich realize how much of their lives they were living merely for the sake of others, it helped the poor to be satisfied, since here was a sublime and complete recognition of the fact that an existence without cares was better than one with many cares, such as were sure to come to those who wrought ever and anon increase of the goods of this world. Such ideas may seen to be essentially modern, but anyone who will turn to the chapter on The Three Most Read Books of the Century and read the passages from the "Romance of the Rose" on wealth and poverty, will know better than to think them anything but perennial.

Men gathered around St. Francis then and pleaded to be allowed to follow his mode of life. Some of the men who thus came to him were the choice spirits of the times. Thomas of Celano, who was to be one of the Master's favorite disciples and subsequently to be his most authoritative biographer, was one of the great literary geniuses of all times, the author of the sublime Dies Irae. While most of his first companions were men of such extreme simplicity of mind that the world has been rather in an amused than admiring attitude with regard to them, there can be no doubt that this simplicity was of itself an index not only of their genuine sincerity of heart, but of a greatness of mind that set them above the ordinary run of mankind and made them live poetry when they did not write it. The institute established by St. Francis was destined, in the course of the century, to attract to it some of the great men of every country. Besides Thomas of Celano there was, in Italy, Anthony of Padua, almost as famous as his master for the beauty of his saintly life; Jacopone Da Todi, the well-known author of the Stabat Mater, a hymn that rivals in poetic genius, the Dies Irae; Bonaventure, the great teacher of philosophy and theology at the University of Paris, and the writer of some of the sublimest treatises of mystical theology that were to be text books for the members of the Franciscan order, and of many other religious bodies for centuries after his death, indeed down to even our own times. There was Roger Bacon, in England, the famous teacher of science at Paris and at Oxford; and that Subtle Doctor, Duns Scotus, whose influence in philosophical speculation was destined never quite to disappear, and many others, the pick of the generations in which they lived, all proud to look up to Francis of Assisi as their father; all glad of the opportunity that the order gave them, to pass their lives in peace, far from the madding crowd with its strifes and competition, providing them constantly with opportunities to live their own lives, to find their own souls, to cultivate their own individualities untrammelled by worldly cares.