Santa Teresa | Page 9

hermit,' said Dr. Johnson to Boswell in St. Andrews, 'but in imagination I kiss his feet: I never read of a monastery, but I could fall on my knees and kiss the pavement. I have thought of retiring myself, and have talked of it to a friend, but I find my vocation is rather in active life.' It was such monasteries as Teresa founded and ruled and wrote the history of that made such a sturdy Protestant as Dr. Johnson was say such a thing as that. The Book of the Foundations is Teresa's own account, written also under superior orders, of that great group of religious houses which she founded and administered for so many years. And the literature into which she puts all those years is literature of the first water. A thousand times I have been reminded of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza as I read Teresa's account of her journeys, and of the people, and of the escapades, and of the entertainments she met with. Yes, quite as good as Cervantes! yes, quite as good as Goldsmith!--I have caught myself exclaiming as I read and laughed till the tears ran down my cheeks. This is literature, this is art without the art, this is literary finish without the labour: and all laid out to the finest of all uses, to tell of the work of God, and of all the enterprises, providences, defeats, successes, recompenses, connected with it. The Foundations is a Christian classic even in Woodhead's and Dalton's and David Lewis's English, what must it then be to those to whom Teresa's exquisite Spanish is their mother-tongue!
If Vaughan had but read The Foundations, which he is honest enough to confess he had only glanced at in a French translation, it would surely have done something to make him reconsider the indecent and disgraceful attack which he makes on Teresa. His chapter on Teresa is a contemptuous and a malicious caricature. Vaughan has often been of great service to me, but if I had gone by that misleading chapter, I would have lost weeks of most intensely interesting and spiritually profitable reading. Vaughan's extravagant misrepresentation of Teresa will henceforth make me hesitate to receive his other judgments till I have read the books myself. I shall not tarry here to controvert Vaughan's utterly untruthful chapter on Teresa, I shall content myself with setting over against it Crashaw's exquisite Hymn and Apology, and especially his magnificent Flaming Heart.
Teresa's Way of Perfection is a truly fine book: full of freshness, suggestiveness, and power. So much so, that I question if William Law's Christian Perfection would ever have been written, but that Teresa had written on that same subject before him. I do not say that Law plagiarised from Teresa, but some of his very best passages are plainly inspired by his great predecessor. You will thank me for the following eloquent passage from Mrs. Cunninghame Graham, which so felicitously characterises this great book, and that in language such as I could not command. 'To my thinking Teresa is at her best in her Way of Perfection with its bursts of impassioned eloquence; its shrewd and caustic irony; its acute and penetrating knowledge of human character, the same in the convent as in the world; above all in its sympathetic and tender instinct for the needs and difficulties of her daughters. The Perfection represents the finished and magnificent fabric of the spiritual life. Her words ring with a strange terseness and earnestness as she here pens her spiritual testament. She points out the mischievous foibles, the little meannesses, the spirit of cantankerousness and strife, which long experience of the cloister had shown her were the besetting sins of the conventual life. She places before them the loftier standard of the Cross. Her words, direct and simple, ring out true and clear, producing somewhat the solemn effect of a Commination Service.' Strong as that estimate is, The Perfection deserves every word of it and more.
Teresa thought that her Mansions was one of her two best books, but she was surely far wrong in that. The Mansions, sometimes called The Interior Castle, to me at any rate, is a most shapeless, monotonous, and wearisome book. Teresa had a splendid imagination, but her imagination had not the architectonic and dramatic quality that is necessary for carrying out such a conception as that is which she has laid in the ground-plan of this book. No one who has ever read The Purgatorio or The Holy War could have patience with the shapeless and inconsequent Mansions. There is nothing that is new in the matter of the Mansions; there is nothing that is not found in a far better shape in some of her other books; and one is continually wearied out by her