Modern invention has actually reflected upon ancient history: the railroad, the steam derrick and the photograph have changed our conceptions of the past. Written history is now accepted as its author’s opinion, while tangible records stand forth as facts.

This attitude brings the Middle Ages particularly near to us, for though its people wrote comparatively little, they were wonderful builders: their art was more literally expressive than the classic; then, too, of course, it is better preserved.

While the Greeks and Romans were our schoolmasters, the Europeans of the Middle Ages are our ancestors. Their experience foreshadows our own; for however far removed from us in thought and action they may have been, they were akin to us in feeling.

Though the rude pioneers of Christianity were often intensely cruel, as you follow their history, you may meet with some gentle deed springing from the good seed, even when sown in stony places, with some action in its sweetness and humility entirely beyond the pagan world. In their childish story one may trace the early workings of the Christian ideal. It did not control behavior, nor did it always direct it wisely; morality, being judicial and scientific, implies a certain maturity of mind. Religion is simple; it is unlogical, sentimental and impulsive. Whatever this indefinable instinct may be, it has manifested itself as a spiritualizing force in morality and an initiative force in art.

Religion has in it a craving for a loveliness beyond all literal perception of the senses; a philosophic mind projects this ideal in contemplation; an artistic mind, in symbol; for, as Michael Angelo explains, “Rash is the thought and vain that maketh beauty from the senses grow.”

The Greeks did develop an art from the motif of physical beauty, however, but their statues, executed before art became mature enough to produce that beauty, have no message, while one often catches something high and holy from a very early Christian image. It may radiate from a pretty smile on the face of a crude Madonna, or a graceful upturned head, in a figure entirely destitute of anatomy, which looks as though the simple craftsman had called upon a higher power than knowledge.

Spiritual beauty being the ideal in Christian art, the image, however rude, which suggests it, makes its appeal in the charmed language of that loving religion.

MediÆval archives have been ransacked by Protestants for the errors of Catholicism; by political economists, who even penetrate to the Dark Ages in search of the chilly lessons of the dismal science, for wisdom; and between them what a conception we have! But it is not the whole story, for Chaucer assures us the Moyen Age was a fairly livable period, peopled by beings like ourselves; moreover, it was an artistic age which has left us not only a wonderful architecture but two supreme poets.

Perhaps the fairest chroniclers of such a period are its own artists, great and small, for history has grown too democratic to confine herself to kings, however worthy. She does not find the crude carver voiceless who, in default of skill, surrounds his Madonna with gold and loads her with rude jewels; indeed, she often finds her sweetest flowers growing between the lines of an unskilful brush or chisel.

Although as painting, mediÆval efforts are often taken too seriously, as literature they are charming, for they speak of the good and the beautiful as their Age conceived it. While the written stories of the time were shallow and coarse beyond our endurance, its painters were giving us their accounts of this life and the next (particularly the next). First come bright, pretty colors prettily placed, pretty thoughts of happy angels. Then gold backgrounds give way to skies, and shadows creep onto the canvas. Then they begin to tell stories; so eager they are that they cram four or five pictures into one, dotting the little scenes, by way of parenthesis, into the backgrounds.

These pictures give the other half of the truth, the tenderer side of the old life and theology. What sympathetic Bible scholars some of the artists became! And, in general, the greatest were the tenderest. Albrecht DÜrer’s Evangelists are interesting character studies for all time. He conceives of Saint Mark as a plain, simple enthusiast; of Saint Paul, as a broad-minded, thoughtful man whom he even imagines to be bald. He does not try to make either of them exactly handsome but the way Mark looks up to Paul is most winning. A little later Andrea del Sarto paints a splendid account of the warring doctors of the Church, which shows clearly he saw beyond them: but this takes us into the Renaissance which has been defined as a marriage of the Grecian and the Gothic.

A strict analysis has come into art and it is creeping into life,—our race childhood is drawing to a close but not without leaving us many things that are sweet to remember.

We tell our children some of the very same stories that the wandering story-tellers used to relate to good knights and their fair ladies in the old baronial halls,—Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast, or Puss in Boots,—only the knights and their ladies believed them. There is a pathos in mediÆval story; it is a tragedy of misdirected effort (as perhaps all history is), only the mediÆval tragedy strikes home. Its actors were people of our own blood and of our own Church—our own people only under delusions from which we have emancipated ourselves. To understand their story we must take them as children and listen with them for the imaginary voices that lead them on.

A veritable allegory of the Age of Faith was presented on the great stage of history in 1212, when two enormous armies of little boys and girls started from France and Germany singing, to march to the Holy Land; if any of these children turned back, none of them seem to have found their old homes.

As far as is known to history, one child alone returned as an aged pilgrim, to tell the tale,—how the bones of the children strewed the mountainside; how they had been embarked on unseaworthy vessels to be sold into slavery; how few, how very few, ever reached their goal; how few, how very few, ever remained pure and holy.

Connected with this tragedy was a horrible pope and a horrible doge, but now they seem but foils to the purity of the children, it was all so long ago. And that the mystic beauty of that little legion may live lyrically in our life, the Twentieth Century has set their pathetic march to music in stately oratorio; for pure aspiration is the melody of melodies, the veritable flower of history.

A certain childish disinterestedness was the tender grace of the Age of Faith,—“the tender grace of a day that is dead.” It must pass from a broader age; taking all factors duly into account even drives it from serious history its proportion is so inconsiderable.

The life of Saint Francis, who espoused My Lady Poverty, is one of the sweetest examples of mediÆval disinterestedness. Viewed literally, the accounts picture a crazy man preaching to birds and fishes, making a bargain with a wolf and injudiciously mortifying his flesh till he became blind and useless. Viewed by the light of their influence his teachings were revolutionary,—they brought new-found energy and sympathy into the Church; yet, at best, they were only the teachings of Christ, without the Savior’s beautiful sanity. Viewed by the results he brought about, Saint Francis must have been one of the profoundest of men, and yet his wisdom, if he had any, was only that of the heart.

Sabatier has written a life of Francis, at once scholarly, judicious and vivid, but as the Franciscan Father remarked, he wrote the life of Mr. Francis. If you would learn of Saint Francis of blessed memory, you must study by yourself with loving diligence a childish old book which tells of the miracles wrought through the tail of Saint Francis—“The Little Flowers of Saint Francis.” The fruits of history others may put before us, but the passing fragrance of the flowers we must perceive for ourselves.

I here submit for your interpretation certain incidents that seem to me the outgrowth of the fine feeling of the impulsive Moyen Age.

FLOWERS
FROM MEDIÆVAL
HISTORY