Santa Teresa | Page 4

her character and the spell of her pen. 'She electrifies the will,' confessed one of the best judges of good writing in her day. And old Bishop Palafox's tribute to Teresa is far too beautiful to be withheld. 'What I admire in her is the peace, the sweetness, and the consolation with which in her writings she draws us toward the best, so that we find ourselves captured rather than conquered, imprisoned rather than prisoners. No one reads the saint's writings who does not presently seek God, and no one through her writings seeks God who does not remain in love with the saint. I have not met with a single spiritual man who does not become a passionate admirer of Santa Teresa. But her writings do not alone impart a rational, interior, and superior love, but a love at the same time practical, natural, and sensitive; and my own experience proves it to me that there exists no one who loves her but would, if the saint were still in this world, travel far to see and speak with her.' I wish much I could add to that Peter of Alcantara's marvellous analysis of Teresa's experiences and character. Under thirty-three heads that great saint sums up Teresa's character, and gives us a noble, because all unconscious, revelation of his own. And though Teresa has been dead for three hundred years, she speaks to this day in that same way: and that too in quarters in which we would little expect to hear her voice. In that intensely interesting novel of modern Parisian life, En Route, Teresa takes a chief part in the conversion and sanctification of the prodigal son whose return to his father's house is so powerfully depicted in that story. The deeply read and eloquent author of that remarkable book gives us some of the best estimates and descriptions of Santa Teresa that I have anywhere met with. 'That cool-headed business woman . . . that admirable psychologist and of superhuman lucidity . . . that magnificent and over-awing saint . . . she has verified in her own case the supernatural experiences of the greatest mystics,--such are her unparalleled experiences in the supernatural domain. . . . Teresa goes deeper than any like writer into the unexplored regions of the soul. She is the geographer and hydrographer of the sinful soul. She has drawn the map of its poles, marked its latitudes of contemplation and prayer, and laid out all the interior seas and lands of the human heart. Other saints have been among those heights and depths and deserts before her, but no one has left us so methodical and so scientific a survey.' Were it for nothing else, the chapters on mystical literature in M. Huysmans' unfinished trilogy would make it a valued possession to every student of the soul of man under sin and under salvation. I await the completion of his Pilgrim's Progress with great impatience and with great expectation.
And then, absolutely possessed as Teresa always is by the most solemn subjects,--herself, her sin, her Saviour, her original method of prayer and her unshared experiences in prayer,--she showers upon us continually gleams and glances of the sunniest merriment, amid all her sighs and tears. She roasts in caustic the gross-minded, and the self-satisfied, and the self-righteous, as Socrates himself never roasted them better. Again, like his, her irony and her raillery and her satire are sometimes so delicate that it quite eludes you for the first two or three readings of the exquisite page. And then, when you turn the leaf, she is as ostentatiously stupid and ignorant and dependent on your superior mind as ever Socrates himself was. Till I shrewdly suspect that no little of that 'obedience' which so intoxicated and fascinated her inquisitors, and which to this day so exasperates some of her biographers, was largely economical and ironical. Her narrow cell is reported to have often resounded with peals of laughter to the scandal of some of her sisters. In support of all that, I have marked a score of Socratic passages in Woodhead, and Dalton, and Lewis, and Father Coleridge, and Mrs. Cunninghame Graham. They are very delicious passages and very tempting. But were they once begun there would be no end to them. You will believe Froude, for he is an admitted judge in all matters connected with the best literature, and he says in his Quarterly article on Teresa's writings, 'The best satire of Cervantes is not more dainty.'
The great work to which Teresa gave up her whole life, after her full conversion, was the purification of the existing monastic system, and the multiplication and extension of Religious Houses of the strictest, severest, most secluded, most prayerful, and most saintly life. She had been told