This fact of St. Francis becoming a modern fashion, after having been for so long a medieval tradition, might well arouse in his real admirers a fear of his cult becoming merely artistic in the sense of merely artificial. And yet, in spite of one or two incongruous interventions, this has not really taken place. It is perhaps the highest tribute to the truth and sincerity of St. Francis that even now he can keep his simplicity in the face of fashionable admiration; as the Franciscan in the story kept the fashionable crowd at a distance by playing antics on a seesaw. And this remarkable escape from the suffocation of sophistication is nowhere better expressed than in what still remains, even to the eye of the traveller — the naked nobility of his native town.

  A traveller at all experienced in the ways of travellers, not to say of trippers, will approach the steep city of Assisi with some feelings of doubt and even of fear. He will know that the modern discovery of the medieval saint may yet be followed by disasters, more subtle than those which superstition has traced in the modern disinterment of the Egyptian king. He will know that there are things to which guide-books are not the best guides; which are seen better by solitary pilgrims than by sociable tourists; and, without any sort of superiority let alone misanthropy, he will have had experience already of places which crowds of visitors have made less worth visiting. He will know that quarrels not untouched by quackeries have insulted the great silence of Glastonbury; he will know that there is some truth in the report that a bustle of sight-seeing and a bawling for baksheesh has spoiled for many the spiritual adventure of Jerusalem. Knowing how many aimless aesthetes, how many irresponsible intellectuals, how many mere sheep of show and fashion follow this track through Italy, he may well fear to find obliterated the ancient simplicity of Assisi. But when he sees it, if I may answer for at least one among many such travellers, he will receive what I can only describe as a cool shock of consolation.

  The city is founded upon a rock; the city is a rock; and it is too simple for anybody to spoil. It has proved practically impossible to paint or gild or pad or upholster or even to scratch that rock. In the main lines of it an austerity alone remains in the memory; and even the beauty of the milder landscape is itself austere. There may be, indeed there is, the usual accumulation in corners of the popular trinkets or traditional toys of devotion, which some people are so unfortunately fastidious as to resent; but that is not the sort of peril of which I am thinking, even from the point of view of those who would admit it to be in other ways perilous. It is not a question of any abuses among the ignorant or the innocent who look up to the saint; it is a question of the condescending culture that looks down to him; not a matter of importing idolatry into the institution of a patron saint; but a matter of patronising the patron. And though multitudes in this rather snobbish state of mind must have passed through so established a station of the Italian pilgrimage, they have not in fact left any trail behind them, as they have in so many similar places; the hills have forgotten them and their personalities have passed away with the smell of their petrol. St. Francis is still left alone with his own friars and mostly with his own friends; and especially with that great first friend who was his interpreter to the expanding civilisation that came after him; the friend who could express in images what Francis himself had always felt as imagery, or what we call imagination; the painter who translated the poet — Giotto.

  The advance of art criticism is a continual retreat; it would seem in some strange manner destined to march perpetually backwards into older and older periods. At the beginning of the nineteenth century the critics had finally accepted the normality of the Ancient Greeks. By the end of the nineteenth century the critics were already inaugurating the novelty of the Ancient Egyptians. We must all, by this time, be familiar with expressions of admiration for the art of the Caveman, scrawled in rock and red ochre with an unmistakable spirit and even distinction of draughtsmanship; the cult of the prehistoric which has given a new meaning to the cult of the Primitives. It will soon seem perfectly natural to be talking about the modernised and decadent sophistication of the Second Stone Age as compared with the rich but well-balanced civilisation of the First Stone Age. The further we go back to explore, the more we find that is really worth exploring; and the nearer we are to the real primitive man, the further we are from the ape or even the savage. This being true even of the tremendous scope of the whole history of the human tribe, it is not to be wondered at that men have made the same discovery about the high and complex culture of Christendom. The spotlight of artistic interest and concentration has been steadily travelling backwards ever since I was a child. I can remember faintly that in my first years it was still felt as something of a paradox to maintain that the quaintness of Botticelli could be taken as seriously as the solid finish of Guido Reni; that Ruskin was still a revolutionist for preferring the dayspring of the Renaissance in the fourteenth century to the dregs of the Renaissance in the eighteenth. Even as late as that, for most people, Giotto was still not so much a Primitive as a primitive man. He was a sort of savage who had done some service by discovering that it was possible to scratch something resembling a rudimentary human figure on the walls of his cave. For most people all serious art still lay between Raphael and Reynolds. As I grew up, the Ruskinian revolution prevailed, and most men came to realise that Giotto was a great painter; but even those men generally regarded him as the first great painter. But now, in yet more recent times, the artists are yet more like archaeologists, in the sense of going back to what is yet more archaic. The change that has passed over the most recent phase of art criticism can be sufficiently suggested by this one case of Giotto. I referred somewhere, in the Ruskinian manner, to Giotto as the figure who stands at the beginning of Christian art. One of the most creative of modern sculptors, whom many would call a medievalist, wrote to assure me that Giotto stands at the end of Christian art; with something like a broad hint that Giotto brought it to an end.

  The spotlight has moved further back, and is now illuminating what even Ruskin and the romantic medievalists would have regarded as a desert of dead and barbaric formalism; the true Dark Ages. Our Progressives are now bound with golden chains to the decline of Byzantium, rather than to the rise of Florence. It is quaint to think how little harm a blundering nickname need do in the long run. All the admirers of Gothic call it Gothic, though it was originally meant to stamp it as barbaric. And all the admirers of Byzantine call it Byzantine; though the very adjective is already in use as a symbol of stiff degradation and decline. The new theories about rhythm and design have done justice to the old pictures which the romantics regarded merely as diagrams or patterns. The change from Cimabue to Giotto is at least not so certainly an unmixed improvement as it appeared to the Victorian medievalists. There is, as it were, a new school of Pre-Raphaelites, who are not only pre-Raphael, but pre-Giotto. The shining figure of the shepherd no longer stands against a background of black and barbarous darkness; but in a sort of double light, in itself involving some of these subtler problems of balance and recurrence; having on his right hand the wide white daybreak of Rome and Assisi and Paris and all the West, and on his left the long and gorgeous golden sunset of the great city of Constantine.

  But in truth this double light may make for a better enlightenment, both about Giotto and his master St. Francis. The two artistic movements, coming one after the other, have between them done some justice to two halves of medieval history, and an earlier and a later period of Christendom, both of which had been underrated and misunderstood. There is a sort of mathematical beauty in the harshness of Byzantine art which is only beginning to be understood; but there is none the less another and livelier kind of beauty in the more humanised art of the later Middle Ages; something suggestive of a moment when a dead design comes to life, or a pattern begins to move, or even to dance. Some humorist wrote a work called “The Loves of the Triangle”, and a mystical theologian might find in it a profound significance touching the loves of the Trinity. In other words, the old abstract expression of divine beauty was the expression of a truth, but the other truth of its expression in the concrete was none the less true. Now what is true of the early abstract art and the humanistic revolution of Giotto, is equally true of the abstract theology and the humanistic revolution of Francis. Some modern writers on the first Franciscans talk as if Francis was the first to invent the idea of the Love of God and the God of Love; or at least was the first to go back and find it in the Gospels. The truth is that anybody could find it in any of the creeds and doctrinal definitions of any period between the Gospels and the Franciscan movement. But he would find it in the theological dogmas as he would find it in the Byzantine pictures, drawn out in stark and simple lines like a mathematical diagram, asserted with a sort of dark clarity for those who can appreciate the idea of logical content and balance. In the sermons of St. Francis, as in the pictures of Giotto, it is made popular by pantomime. Men are beginning to act it as in a theatre, instead of representing it as in a picture or a pattern. Thus we find that St. Francis was in many ways the actual founder of the medieval miracle play; and there is all this suggestion of a stiff thing coming to life in the tale of his contact with the Bambino, illustrated in one of Giotto’s designs. And thus we find in Giotto himself a quality unique and hardly to be repeated in history. It is a sense, not only of movement, but of the first movement. There is still something in his figures that suggests that they are like the pillars of a church moved by the spiritual earthquake of a divine visitation, but even so moved slowly and with a sort of reluctant grandeur. The figures are still partly architectural while the faces are alive with portraiture. This first moment of motion has much to do with that sense of morning and youth which so many admirers of medievalism have felt, and which I shall continue to feel, with all respect to the medievalist sculptor. Nothing is nearer to the nerve of primal wonder, which is the soul of all the arts, than that strange saying of the blind man in the Gospels, that when he was half awakened to sight, he saw “men as trees walking.” There is something about the figures of Giotto that suggests men as trees walking. The Byzantine School will not permit me to say that before his eyes were thus opened, the artist had been wholly blind. But I will still maintain that there was something like a miracle, in the transition from treating trees as tracery and men as trees, to the realisation of the new shock of liberation; and how, at the word of God, they could arise and walk.

  And here again we strike the parallel between the artist and the saint. The followers of St. Francis were, above all things, men who could walk. Many of them even walked with that sort of dazed unfamiliarity and doubtful balance, being suddenly robbed by a whirlwind of all the props of property. But they walked, because a new spirit of walking, and even of wandering, had entered into the static scheme of medieval Christianity; just as a new spirit of gesture and drama had entered into the static scheme of decorative art. The difference between the Friars and the Monks was, after all, that the Friars now walked like men where the Monks had once stood like statues. I mean nothing but admiration for the Benedictine monks, as for the Byzantine mosaics: or, for that matter, the grand and almost grim rationality of the great abstract dogmas. But there had come upon these flat and spacious things, carved in stone or ordered like statues, a new depth or dimension; a new quality of drama and motion. The popular propaganda of St. Francis, throwing thousands of wandering friars out into roads of the world, was the beginning of what we call the modern spirit; the spirit of romance and experiment and earthly adventure. For once a modern phrase which is much misused, may be rightly used. The Benedictines were, in the exact sense, an Order; as the plan of a cathedral is an Order. The Franciscans were, in the exact sense, a movement. Historically, perhaps, the most interesting of the great pictures by Giotto which are displayed in the Upper Church of Assisi, is that which commemorates the famous dream of the great Pope Innocent the Third; in which he saw the strange beggar, from whom he had almost turned away in the street, upholding the whole toppling load of St. John Lateran, and indeed, in a larger symbolism, the whole load of St. Peter and the Church founded on a rock. More than one historian has suggested that, humanly speaking, it was St. Francis who prevented all Christendom from coming to an end under the double destructive drive and drag of Islam without and the pessimist heresies within. This particular picture is also worth noting, as a perfect example of that solidity which marked the simplicity of the medieval mind. Modern writers have referred often enough to medieval dreams and dark clouds and dim mystical fancies. But in fact the medievals never dealt in these things, even where they would have been justified in dealing in them. There is scarcely any modern of any school, who could deliberately draw a picture of a vision in the watches of the night, especially a vision so very visionary, so transcendental and so tremendously symbolic, as that of an unknown saint upholding a universal church, without bringing into the picture some shadow of unreality, or remoteness, of a lurid halo of the preternatural; at least of mystery and the tints of twilight. But the medieval dream is more solid than the modern reality. The medieval artist has dealt with it with a directness which belongs to the vigorous realism of innocence and of childhood; the sort of actuality which has been wholly untouched by the many sorts of scepticism which masquerade as mysticism. The dream is full of something very extraordinary, something which did indeed, for those who can understand it, shine on the evil and the good throughout the epoch that we call the Dark Ages: broad daylight.

  In another sense, however, the spirit illuminating these great medieval designs is not so much generally the spirit of daylight as in a rather curious and peculiar sense, the spirit of daybreak. Of that highly medieval design it is true to say something of what Keats said of the highly classical design of his Grecian Urn. It is a sort of immortal moment of morning, and that which is a mere transition in time fixed as an absolute for eternity. We are so accustomed, in modern times, to think in terms of what we call progress, that we seldom admit, except in a poetical parenthesis, that there is such a thing as a perfect moment which is better than what comes after, as well as better than what went before. Yet it might well be maintained that art in all its history had no better moment, either before or after, than this in which all that was good in the old framework and formalism still remained with the upstanding strength of a great building, but in which there had already entered that rush of life and growth, which had turned it into something like a forest, without having as yet turned it into anything like a jungle. The naturalistic spirit of the nineteenth century, when it first began to understand the genius of Giotto or St. Francis, as interpreted by the talent of Ruskin or of Renan, was bound to fasten especially on the fanciful and charming episode of the Sermon to the Birds. For that generation was less concerned about the preservation of churches and more about the preservation of birds, even if it were in the equivocal sense of the preservation of game. It would be easy to illustrate the whole development, we might even say, the whole ascent and descent, under the emblem or example of the bird. The birds of the primal and symbolic epoch were simplified and somewhat terrible: as in the Eagle of the Apocalypse or the Dove of the Holy Ghost. All other birds in the Byzantine scheme would have been as abstract and typical as the birds of an Egyptian hieroglyphic. The birds of the later realistic epoch, when the painters of the nineteenth century had brought to the last perfection, or the last satiety, the studies of optics or of physics begun in the sixteenth, might well have been a most detailed and even bewildering display of ornithology. But the birds to whom St. Francis preached, in the vision of the thirteenth-century art, were already birds that could fly and sing, but not yet birds that could be shot or stuffed; they had ceased to be merely heraldic without becoming merely scientific. And as, in all studies of St. Francis, we always return to that great comparison which he at once denied with all his humility and desired with all his heart, we may say that they were not wholly unlike those strange birds in the legend, which the Holy Child pinched into shape out of scraps of clay, and then started into life and swiftness with a clap of His little hands.

  THE NEW GROOVE

  The Poet Tennyson, like a true Victorian, must have written a good many of his poems in the train; travelling by railroad being the chief invention and institution of his age. Indeed he confesses to have written the poem of Lady Godiva while waiting for the train; and to judge by the careful construction of the blank verse the train must have been very late. But there are other Tennysonian lines which Tennyson would seem to have written while he was asleep in the train. They have that peculiar mixture of jumble and jingle familiar to those who go to sleep in trains and only feel the metallic rhythm of the wheels mingling with the most shapeless and senseless dreams. It was at some such moment of profound slumber that Lord Tennyson composed the more progressive and prophetic portions of Locksley Hall; and this is clearly proved by the convincing, nay, damning, fact that one of the lines does really and truly run: