hree Vows had a fine and delicate effect on the
genius of Francis. He was primarily a poet. The perfection of his
literary instinct is shown in his naming the fire 'brother,' and the
water 'sister,' in the quaint demagogic dexterity of the appeal in the
sermon to the fishes 'that they alone were saved in the Flood.' In the
amazingly minute and graphic dramatisation of the life, disappointments
and excuses of any shrub or beast that he happened to be addressing,
his genius has a curious resemblance to that of Burns. But if he avoided
the weakness of Burns' verses to animals, the occasional morbidity,
bombast and moralisation on himself, the credit is surely due to a
cleaner and more transparent life.

The general attitude of St Francis, like that of his Master, embodied a
kind of terrible common-sense. The famous remark of the Caterpillar in
'Alice in Wonderland'--'Why not?' impresses us as his general motto. He
could not see why he should not be on good terms with all things. The
pomp of war and ambition, the great empire of the Middle Ages and all
its fellows begin to look tawdry and top-heavy, under the rationality of
that innocent stare. His questions were blasting and devastating, like
the questions of a child. He would not have been afraid even of the
nightmares of cosmogony, for he had no fear in him. To him the world was
small, not because he had any views as to its size, but for the reason
that gossiping ladies find it small, because so many relatives were to
be found in it. If you had taken him to the loneliest star that the
madness of an astronomer can conceive, he would have only beheld in it
the features of a new friend.

ROSTAND

When 'Cyrano de Bergerac' was published, it bore the subordinate title
of a heroic comedy. We have no tradition in English literature which
would justify us in calling a comedy heroic, though there was once a
poet who called a comedy divine. By the current modern conception, the
hero has his place in a tragedy, and the one kind of strength which is
systematically denied to him is the strength to succeed. That the power
of a man's spirit might possibly go to the length of turning a tragedy
into a comedy is not admitted; nevertheless, almost all the primitive
legends of the world are comedies, not only in the sense that they have
a happy ending, but in the sense that they are based upon a certain
optimistic assumption that the hero is destined to be the destroyer of
the mo