Life of St. Francis of Assisi | Page 8

picture by Rembrandt, and more often than not
it will appear to them ugly; its charm cannot be caught at a glance as in
those of their artists; to see it you must examine it, make an effort, and
with them effort is the beginning of pain.
Do not ask them, then, to understand the pathos of things, to be touched
by the mysterious and almost fanciful emotion which northern hearts
discover and enjoy in the works of the Amsterdam master. No, instead
of a forest they want a few trees, standing out clearly against the
horizon; instead of a multitude swarming in the penumbra of reality, a
few personages, larger than nature, forming harmonious groups in an
ideal temple.
The genius of a people[9] is all of a piece: they apply to history the
same processes that they apply to the arts. While the Germanic spirit
considers events rather in their evolution, in their complex becoming,
the Italian spirit takes them at a given moment, overlooks the shadows,
the clouds, the mists, everything that makes the line indistinct, brings
out the contour sharply, and thus constructs a very lucid story, which is

a delight to the eyes, but which is little more than a symbol of the
reality.
At other times it takes a man, separates him from the unnamed crowd,
and by a labor often unconscious, makes him the ideal type of a whole
epoch.[10]
Certainly there is in every people a tendency to give themselves a circle
of divinities and heroes who are, so to say, the incarnation of its
instincts; but generally that requires the long labor of centuries. The
Italian character will not suffer this slow action; as soon as it
recognizes a man it says so, it even shouts it aloud if that is necessary,
and makes him enter upon immortality while still alive. Thus legend
almost confounds itself with history, and it becomes very difficult to
reduce men to their true proportions.
We must not, then, ask too much of history. The more beautiful is the
dawn, the less one can describe it. The most beautiful things in nature,
the flower and the butterfly, should be touched only by delicate hands.
The effort here made to indicate the variegated, wavering tints which
form the atmosphere in which St. Francis lived is therefore of very
uncertain success. It was perhaps presumptuous to undertake it.
Happily we are no longer in the time when historians thought they had
done the right thing when they had reduced everything to its proper size,
contenting themselves with denying or omitting everything in the life
of the heroes of humanity which rises above the level of our every-day
experience.
No doubt Francis did not meet on the road to Sienna three pure and
gentle virgins come from heaven to greet him; the devil did not
overturn rocks for the sake of terrifying him; but when we deny these
visions and apparitions, we are victims of an error graver, perhaps, than
that of those who affirm them.
The first time that I was at Assisi I arrived in the middle of the night.
When the sun rose, flooding everything with warmth and light, the old

basilica[11] seemed suddenly to quiver; one might have said that it
wished to speak and sing. Giotto's frescos, but now invisible, awoke to
a strange life, you might have thought them painted the evening before
so much alive they were; everything was moving without awkwardness
or jar.
I returned six months later. A scaffold had been put up in the middle of
the nave; upon it an art critic was examining the paintings, and as the
day was overcast he threw upon the walls the beams of a lamp with a
reflector. Then you saw arms thrown out, faces grimacing, without
unity, without harmony; the most exquisite figures took on something
fantastic and grotesque.
He came down triumphant, with a portfolio stuffed with sketches; here
a foot, there a muscle, farther on a bit of face, and I could not refrain
from musing on the frescos as I had seen them bathed in sunlight.
The sun and the lamp are both deceivers; they transform what they
show; but if the truth must be told I own to my preference for the
falsehoods of the sun.
History is a landscape, and like those of nature it is continually
changing. Two persons who look at it at the same time do not find in it
the same charm, and you yourself, if you had it continually before your
eyes, would never see it twice alike. The general lines are permanent,
but it needs only a cloud to hide the most important ones, as it needs
only a jet of light to bring out such or such a detail and