Page:The Mediaeval Mind Vol 1.djvu/442

420 The biographers assert that Francis was nourished in worldly vanity and insolence. His temperament drew him to the former, but kept him from the latter. For while he delighted in making merry with his friends, he was always distinguished by a winning courtesy of manner toward poor and rich. An innate generosity was also his, and he loved to spend money as he roamed with his companions about Assisi singing jovial choruses and himself the leader of the frolic. Bernardone did not object to his son's squandering some money in a way which led others to admire him and think his parents rich; while Pica would keep saying that some day he would be God's son through grace. A vein of sprightly fantasy runs through these gaieties of Francis's, which we may be sure were unstained by any gross dissipation. Francis's life as a saint is peculiarly free from monkish impudicity, free, that is, from morbid dwelling upon things sensual; which shows that in him there was no reaction or need of reaction against any youthful dissoluteness, and bears testimony to the purity of his unconverted years.

In those days Francis loved to be admired and praised. He was possessed with a romantic and imaginative vanity. Costly clothes delighted him as he dreamed of still more royal entertainment, and fancied great things to come. His mind was filled with the figures of Romance; a knight would he be at least; why not a paladin, whom all the world should wonder at? So he dreamed, and so he acted out his whim as best he might on the little stage of Assisi; for Francis was a poet, and a poet even more in deed than in words. He was endowed with exquisite fancy, and he did its dictates never doubting. His life was to prove an almost unexampled inspiration to art, because it was itself a poem by reason of its unfailing realization of the conceptions of a fervent and beautiful imagination.

There came war with Perugia, a very hard-hitting town; and the Assisi cavaliers, Francis among them, found themselves in their neighbours' dungeons. There some desponded; but not Francis. For in these careless days he was always gleeful and jocular, even as afterwards his entire saintly life