Life of St. Francis of Assisi | Page 7

sudden resolutions in which
one risks his life. Open the chronicle of Fra Salimbeni and you will be
shocked to find that the largest place is taken up with the account of the
annual expeditions of Parma against the neighboring cities, or of the
neighboring cities against Parma. What would it have been if this
chronicle, instead of being written by a monk of uncommonly open
mind, a lover of music, at certain times an ardent Joachimite, an
indefatigable traveller, had been written by a warrior? And this is not
all; these wars between city and city were complicated with civil
dissensions, plots were hatched periodically, conspirators were
massacred if they were discovered, or massacred and exiled others in
their turn if they were triumphant.[8] When we picture to ourselves this
state of things dominated by the grand struggles of the papacy against
the empire, heretics, and infidels, we may understand how difficult it is
to describe such a time.
The imagination being haunted by horrible or entrancing pictures like
those of the frescos in the Campo Santo of Pisa, men were always
thinking of heaven and hell; they informed themselves about them with
the feverish curiosity of emigrants, who pass their days on shipboard in
trying to picture that spot in America where in a few days they will
pitch their tent.
Every monk of any notoriety must have gone through this. Dante's
poem is not an isolated work; it is the noblest result of a condition
which had given birth to hundreds of compositions, and Alighieri had

little more to do than to co-ordinate the works of his predecessors and
vivify them with the breath of his own genius.
The unsettled state of men's minds was unimaginable. That unhealthy
curiosity which lies at the bottom of the human heart, and which at the
present day impels men to seek for refined and even perverse
enjoyments, impelled men of that time to devotions which seem like a
defiance to common sense.
Never had hearts been shaken with such terrors, nor ever thrilled with
such radiant hopes. The noblest hymns of the liturgy, the Stabat and the
Dies Iræ, come to us from the thirteenth century, and we may well say
that never has the human plaint been more agonized.
When we look through history, not to find accounts of battles or of the
succession of dynasties, but to try to grasp the evolution of ideas and
feelings, when we seek above all to discover the heart of man and of
epochs, we perceive, on arriving at the thirteenth century, that a fresh
wind has blown over the world, the human lyre has a new string, the
lowest, the most profound; one which sings of woes and hopes to
which the ancient world had not vibrated.
In the breast of the men of that time we think sometimes we feel the
beating of a woman's heart; they have exquisite sentiments, delightful
inspirations, with absurd terrors, fantastic angers, infernal cruelties.
Weakness and fear often make them insincere; they have the idea of the
grand, the beautiful, the ugly, but that of order is wanting; they fast or
feast; the notion of the laws of nature, so deeply graven in our own
minds, is to them entirely a stranger; the words possible and impossible
have for them no meaning. Some give themselves to God, others sell
themselves to the devil, but not one feels himself strong enough to walk
alone, strong enough to have no need to hold on by some one's skirt.
Peopled with spirits and demons nature appeared to them singularly
animated; in her presence they have all the emotions which a child
experiences at night before the trees on the roadside and the vague
forms of the rocks.

Unfortunately, our language is a very imperfect instrument for
rendering all this; it is neither musical nor flexible; since the
seventeenth century it has been deemed seemly to keep one's emotions
to oneself, and the old words which served to note states of the soul
have fallen into neglect; the Imitation and the Fioretti have become
untranslatable.
More than this, in a history like the present one, we must give a large
place to the Italian spirit; it is evident that in a country where they call a
chapel basilica and a tiny house palazzo, or in speaking to a seminarist
say "Your Reverence," words have not the same value as on this side of
the Alps.
The Italians have an imagination which enlarges and simplifies. They
see the forms and outlines of men and things more than they grasp their
spirit. What they most admire in Michael Angelo is gigantic forms,
noble and proud attitudes, while we better understand his secret
thoughts, hidden sorrows, groans, and sighs.
Place before their eyes a