And thus, then, I mean by charm not a mere superficial gracefulness which can be learned, as good manners are learned, through a certain code of behaviour, but a thing which is the flower and outward sign of a beautiful attitude to life; an eagerness to welcome everything which is fine and fresh and unstained; that turns away the glance from things unlovely and violent and greedy not in a disapproving or a self-righteous spirit, because it is respectable to be shocked, but in a sense of shame and disgrace that such cruel and covetous and unclean things should be.  If one takes a figure like that of St. Francis of Assisi, who for all the superstition and fanaticism with which the record is intermingled, showed a real reflection and restoration of the old Christian joy of life, we shall see that he had firm hold of the secret.  St. Francis’s love of nature, of animals, of flowers, of children, his way of breaking into song about the pleasant things of earth, his praise of “our sister the Water, because she is very serviceable to us and humble and clean,” show the outrush of an overpowering joy.  He had the courage to do what very few men and women ever dare to do, and that is to make a clean sweep of property and its complications; but even so, the old legend distorts some of this into a priggish desire to set a good example, to warn and rebuke and improve the occasion.  But St. Francis’s asceticism is the only kind of asceticism that has any charm, the self-denial, namely, that springs from a sense of enjoyment, and is practised from a feeling of its beauty, and not as a matter of timid and anxious calculation.  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.