St Francis | Page 4

G.K. Chesterton
many
things I now hold sacred I should have scouted as utterly superstitious,
many things that seem to me lucid and enlightened now they are seen
from the inside I should honestly have called dark and barbarous seen
from the outside, when long ago in those days of boyhood my fancy
first caught fire with the glory of Francis of Assisi. I too have lived in
Arcady; but even in Arcady I met one walking in a brown habit who
loved the woods better than Pan. The figure in the brown habit stands
above the hearth in the room where I write, and alone among many
such images, at no stage of my pilgrimage has he ever seemed to me a
stranger. There is something of a harmony between the hearth and the
firelight and my own first pleasure in his words about the brother fire;
for he stands far enough back in my memory to mingle with all those
more domestic dreams of the first days. Even the fantastic shadows
thrown by fire make a sort of shadow pantomine that belongs to the
nursery; yet the shadows were even then the shadows of his favourite
beast and birds, as he saw them, grotesque but haloed with the love of

God. His Brother Wolf and Brother Sheep seemed then almost like the
Brer Fox and Brer Rabbit of a more Christian Uncle Remus. I have
come slowly to see many more marvellous aspects of such a man, but I
have never lost that one. His figure stands on a sort of bridge
connecting my boyhood with my conversion to many other things; for
the romance of his religion has penetrated even the rationalism of that
vague Victorian time. In so far as I have had this experience, I may be
able to lead others a little further along that road; but only a very little
further. Nobody knows better than I do now that it is a road upon which
angels might fear to tread; but though I am certain of failure I am not
altogether overcome by fear; for he suffered fools gladly.
CHAPTER II

THE WORLD ST. FRANCIS FOUND
The modern innovation which has substituted journalism for history, or
for that tradition that is the gossip of history, has had at least one
definite effect. It has insured that everybody should only hear the end
of every story. Journalists are in the habit of printing above the very
last chapters of their serial stories (when the hero and the heroine are
just about to embrace in the last chapter, as only an unfathomable
perversity prevented them from doing so in the first) the rather
misleading words, "You can only begin this story here." But even this
is not a complete parallel; for the journals do give some sort of a
summary of the story, while they never give anything remotely
resembling a summary of the history. Newspapers not only deal with
news, but they deal with everything as if it were entirely new. It is
exactly in the same fashion that we read that Admiral Bangs has been
shot, which is the first intimation we have that he has ever been born.
There is something singularly significant in the use which journalism
makes of its stores of biography. It never thinks of publishing the life
until it is publishing the death. As it deals with individuals it deals with
institutions and ideas. After the Great War our public began to be told
of all sorts of nations being emancipated. It had never been told a word

about their being enslaved. We were called upon to judge of the justice
of settlements, when we had never been allowed to hear of the very
existence of the quarrels. People would think it pedantic to talk about
the Serbian epics and they prefer to talk about the Yugo-Slavonic
international new diplomacy; and they are quite excited about
something they call Czecho-Slovakia without apparently having ever
heard about Bohemia. Things that are as old as Europe are regarded as
more recent than the very latest claims pegged out on the prairies of
America. It is very exciting; like the last act of a play to people who
have only come into the theatre just before the curtain falls. But it does
not conduce exactly to knowing what it is all about. To those content
with the mere fact of a pistol-shot or a passionate embrace, such a
leisurely manner of patronising the drama may be recommended. To
those tormented by a mere intellectual curiosity about who is kissing or
killing whom, it is unsatisfactory.
Most modern history, especially in England, suffers from the same
imperfection as journalism. At best it only tells half the story of
Christendom; and that the second half without
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