Nature was not accurate or well founded is perfectly tenable, but surely it is not tenable that it was not optimistic.  We insist, however, upon treating this matter tail foremost.  We insist that the ascetics were pessimists because they gave up threescore years and ten for an eternity of happiness.  We forget that the bare proposition of an eternity of happiness is by its very nature ten thousand times more optimistic than ten thousand pagan saturnalias.

Mr. Adderley’s life of Francis of Assisi does not, of course, bring this out; nor does it fully bring out the character of Francis.  It has rather the tone of a devotional book.  A devotional book is an excellent thing, but we do not look in it for the portrait of a man, for the same reason that we do not look in a love-sonnet for the portrait of a woman, because men in such conditions of mind not only apply all virtues to their idol, but all virtues in equal quantities.  There is no outline, because the artist cannot bear to put in a black line.  This blaze of benediction, this conflict between lights, has its place in poetry, not in biography.  The successful examples of it may be found, for instance, in the more idealistic odes of Spenser.  The design is sometimes almost indecipherable, for the poet draws in silver upon white.

It is natural, of course, that Mr. Adderley should see Francis primarily as the founder of the Franciscan Order.  We suspect this was only one, perhaps a minor one, of the things that he was; we suspect that one of the minor things that Christ did was to found Christianity.  But the vast practical work of Francis is assuredly not to be ignored, for this amazingly unworldly and almost maddeningly simple-minded infant was one of the most consistently successful men that ever fought with this bitter world.  It is the custom to say that the secret of such men is their profound belief in themselves, and this is true, but not all the truth.  Workhouses and lunatic asylums are thronged with men who believe in themselves.  Of Francis it is far truer to say that the secret of his success was his profound belief in other people, and it is the lack of this that has commonly been the curse of these obscure Napoleons.  Francis always assumed that everyone must be just as anxious about their common relative, the water-rat, as he was.  He planned a visit to the Emperor to draw his attention to the needs of “his little sisters the larks.”  He used to talk to any thieves and robbers he met about their misfortune in being unable to give rein to their desire for holiness.  It was an innocent habit, and doubtless the robbers often “got round him,” as the phrase goes.  Quite as often, however, they discovered that he had “got round” them, and discovered the other side, the side of secret nobility.