SANTA TERESA HER LIFE AND TIMES DECOR CARMELI GABRIELACUNNINGHAME GRAHAM SANTA TERESA SANTA TERESA. SANTA TERESA BEING SOME ACCOUNT OF HER LIFE AND TIMES TOGETHER WITH SOME PAGES FROM THE HISTORY OF THE LAST GREAT REFORM IN THE RELIGIOUS ORDERS BY GABRIELA CUNNINGHAME /GRAHAM A NEW EDITION LONDON EVELEIGH NASH 1907 Pocas reliquias conte', Qua aunque acabo no comienzo ; Hay huesos de Sant Lorenzo Y de Sant Bartolome, Y otros que contar no se Que su cuento y medida ; Mas se que puedo dar f6 Que son huesos de quien fue De muy santfsima vida. JUAN DE LA ENCINA. I DEDICATE THIS BOOK TO Br. Bon yranrtsro U*rmo CANON AND TREASURER OF VALLADOLID CATHEDRAL. Not that he will agree with much or perhaps with any of it. Still he has jogged over so many miles of Castilian roads to trace her footsteps, and waded through so many musty volumes to search for the minutest details of her, that I think any study of his saint will be interesting to one whose whole life has been a long devotion to Teresa's memory, and who may be called " un Teresiano si los hay? PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION TO TERESIANS T BELIEVE that there are still Teresians. Not, I mean, eccentrics, lost to the world, buried in country granges, moated by prejudice against all common-sense, as were the few Sebastianists who, it is said, lingered in Portugal almost down to the present century, but men who love and reverence the saint. I do not know if here in England there are those who sign their letters, " your Teresian friend," as I averred there were in Spain, when I sat down to write my preface to the first edition, thirteen years ago. But, if there be such, it seems to me the author of the book has done her part in the continuation of the pious memory, by setting forth the saint, " Her Life and Miracles," as people say in Spain of saints, in her own way. Thirteen years ago . . . and now, sitting alone to write, with the mild thaw wind after a long frost, singing amongst the naked trees, just as if some one had hung up an ^Eolian harp amongst the branches, but yet more sadly, for the yEolian harp I hear is in the mind, my point of view about the book is still the same as it was yesterday ; for thirteen years is yesterday, although it seems a century, at least, in looking backwards ; that is to say, when you look backwards without faith. Faith, as I take it, cannot be compassed ; but either comes vii viii SANTA TERESA into existence with us at our birth, or else we never find it, for I imagine faith and belief are very different things. Therefore, the book is not for those who, as the author says, have made of " Teresa, the high-minded, and Teresa, the human ; Teresa, the woman who is loved and reverenced by her pious votaries ... a garbled image decked and obscured with tinsel and paper flowers, and swathed about with strange super- stitions and puerile miracles, through which we must not let the sunlight penetrate for fear of exploding the monstrous creature of distorted fancy." Had Teresa de Jesus been but a mere saint, no one, in Spain at least, the land of realism, would have been found to sign, " su amigo Teresiano" when they wrote letters to their friends. The calendar is stuffed with saints far more miraculous than she, yet no one makes an adjective out of their names to place before their signature. Well did San Antonino, Archbishop of Florence, say, " As for us, whose path is surrounded by shadows, to whom it is permitted to judge of the saints by what we know and preserve of their works, I think that none can doubt but that many of the blessed men and women who have not been canonized by the Church, nor even mentioned by her, have not been less worthy nor less glorious than many who are canonized. For the canonizing of them does not make them more worthy, nor give them more essential glory, neither does it determine the degree of sanctity but only that temporal honour and glory that may accrue to them from the solemn celebration of their office and festival, which, without this, cannot be done." The Church indeed canonized Teresa de Jesus, but she had already canonized herself in the hearts of the Spanish people who, more simple than ourselves (the introspectives of the north), saw in her life and works her real saintliness. It might PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION ix have been found possible to canonize her for her mere faith and visions ; but without works there would have been no love, certainly none of the intense love and feeling almost of relation- ship, which still obtains amongst the simpler of her votaries, in Spain. Before the simple realism of Spanish faith, the modern mysticism so far divorced from the old mystic, human spirit, shrinks into contempt. Well did Teresa and her nuns, well did St. Peter of Alcantara, St. John of the Cross, and all the band of Spanish saints (even he of Loyola, on a lower plane) know that the battle was not in the clouds. " These friars," says the author of the book, but the same applies to all the glorious band of saints grouped round Teresa, " only kept alive the great thought which philosophy in all ages has proclaimed that the world exists not in time, but in thought . . . they asserted the equality of man ... a lofty Socialism." And she goes on to say, "The lives of those obscure monks, those unknown nuns, have not been lost." That is the true way to look at the matter ; first they were men and women, and in the next place, saints, that is, those of them who were canonized. Self-abnegation, as it seems to me, is the true spirituality ; without it, all your ecstatic visions are but a tinkling cymbal, and they who place them first are in the same position as are those dilettanti who prefer the turned-up eyes and sweetness of a Carlo Dolce to the right realism of Velazquez's style. Any- one, by taking down a volume of the Bolandists, or any of those maudlin modern lives of "La Sainte Therese" seen through a Gallic medium, the medium best constructed to obscure the vision of things Spanish, can achieve a book about the saint of Avila, which may be " spiritual," as they understand x SANTA T,ERESA the word. That is to say, they can leave out of sight her genius and dwell upon her visions, as to which the saint herself was never sure, as her own words testify most abundantly, as when she says, " I was like one amazed, with so much tribulation and fear whether the devil had deceived me," although at other times she is assured that she has seen and spoken with the Lord. One would have thought that genius was perhaps the greatest gift that God could give, especially when joined, as in the saint's case, with beauty, and great powers of faith, persua- sion, and command. But no ; those who adore her virtues (that is outside Spain, for there they make themselves no spiced con- science) seem to take pleasure in bringing down the object of their adoration to the same level as a hundred thousand more friars and nuns and laymen, who have seen visions and dreamed dreams. But, be that as it may, and take the saint on which side of her character you will, the fact remains that in the calendar there is no other name that, on the whole, has called forth such enthusiasm as did the practical, hard-working, vision- seeing Castilian gentlewoman who passed so much of her life's pilgrimage upon the road. On her account the writer of the book spent all the summers ol six years, wandering about the sweet thyme-scented wastes of Spain, sleeping in rough posadas, rising at daybreak and jogging on a mule through the hot sun, to find in upland world- forgotten villages a trace of the saint's footsteps, and happy, after a long day's ride, if she came on a house where once the saint had slept. Not so, her faithful servant Peregrina, a tall Gallician, looking exactly like a Scotchwoman, who with the fervent faith through which a grain of scepticism ran, as often is the case with Spaniards of the lower class, at times addressed the saint in terms half of devotion and half of objurgation, promising candles for her shrine in difficulties, and telling her, PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION xi the danger past, in good set terms, of all that she had undergone on her behalf. In her devotion to the foundress and to the writer of such idiomatic prose and strangely haunting little verses, with their jingling quaint refrain, the author learned to read the crabbed old court hands, of which the kind known as " la mano procesal " seems a mere wavering line, whilst others still preserve a look of Arabic. And as she wandered through the pine woods of Castille, emerging now and then upon some rocky knoll from which the hills of Piedrahita, faintly streaked with snow, were seen far off, landmarks on the Teresian wild hill track, which leads from Avila, by Macote'ra and Mancera de Abajo, till it emerges on the banks of the green Tormes, close to Alba, no doubt that hunger, heat and cold were all forgotten, and she felt animated by the thought that the saint's covered cart had jolted on the self-same stones, three hundred years ago. Possibly other " Lives " of the Castilian saint may show more faith ; but none can show more love, and love, I take it, at the day when each receives his due reward, will outworth faith a hundredfold, in the same way that humour outweighs wit. No dry recital of mere facts culled from dead books, which in the greater part have never been alive ; no rhapsodies of mysticism can produce this kind of Life, for no one, except perhaps some half-illuminated Spanish friar, has ever girded up his loins to follow after the great saint of Avila through Spain. It was the author's wish some day to illustrate the book with her own pencil ; but as it was Teresa's chief ambition to found a convent of her nuns, in the One Court (Madrid), a wish she never lived to gratify, so did an unkind fate step in between the author and her hope. But, she had taken many photographs, and some of them adorn the book. Thus, sadly, for where the heart is, there also xiv SANTA TERESA Religious lives of her, dwelling on her saintship, seem to me to take away from the merit of the woman. It may be that whilst dwelling on the virtues of the woman, the merits of the saint may but appear more clearly. R. B. CUNNINGHAME GRAHAM. GARTMORE, is/ February 1894. CONTENTS PAGE INTRODUCTION . . i CHAPTER I TERESA'S CHILDHOOD . . . . . .66 CHAPTER II VENITE POST ME ....... 89 CHAPTER III THE ENCARNACION . . ..... . .107 CHAPTER IV TERESA THE MYSTIC . . . . . .123 CHAPTER V FERENDUM ET SPERANDUM . . . . . .157 CHAPTER VI QUIEN NO SE ESCONDE NO LUCE . . . . .170 CHAPTER VII WE MUST AIM AT THE HIGHEST TO ATTAIN THE LOWEST . . 196 xvi SANTA TERESA CHAPTER VIII PACK FOUNDATION OF SAN Jos 22 3 CHAPTER IX MOUNT CARMEL . . 2 43 CHAPTER X CAMINO DE PER FECCION FOUNDATION OF MEDINA DEL CAMPO . 267 CHAPTER XI FOUNDATION OF MALAGON . . 2 9^ CHAPTER XII DURUELO AND FOUNDATION AT TOLEDO . 3^ CHAPTER XIII THE FOUNDATION OF PASTRANA DIFFICULTIES WITH THE PRINCESS OF EBOLI ..... -347 CHAPTER XIV THE FOUNDATIONS OF SALAMANCA AND ALBA DE TORMES . 373 CHAPTER XV LIFE IN THE ENCARNACION JOURNEY TO SALAMANCA FOUNDA- TION AT SEGOVIA . 4 02 CHAPTER XVI THE FATE OF THE CONVENT OF PASTRANA . . 4 2 9 CHAPTER XVII HISTORY OF CASILDA DE PADILLA FOUNDATION OF VEAS . 437 CONTENTS xvii CHAPTER XVIII PAGE SUPERABUNDO GAUDIO ....... 479 CHAPTER XIX LETTERS FROM TOLEDO. 509 CHAPTER XX FROM AUGUST TO CHRISTMAS DAY 1577 . . .558 CHAPTER XXI FROM JANUARY 1578 TO CHRISTMAS DAY . . . .577 CHAPTER XXII LA VERDAD PADECE PERO NO PERECE . . . .601 CHAPTER XXIII DIGS E Vos ........ 615 CHAPTER XXIV ANTES QUEBRAR QUE DOBLAR. . . . . .643 CHAPTER XXV EL ORO FINO SE ECHARA DE VER EN EL TOQUK . . . 667 CHAPTER XXVI THE CROWN OF THORNS AND ROSES . . . . .695 CHAPTER XXVII NOT TO A STRANGE COUNTRY, BUT TO HER NATIVE LAND . 718 xvin SANTA TERESA CHAPTER XXVIII PAGE THE PATRON SAINT OF SPAIN . CONCLUSION 753 INVENI PORTAM . EPILOGUE 78Q INDEX . LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS SANTA TERESA ...... Frontispiece WALLS OF AVILA ... . . Facing p. \ SAN VICENTE, AVILA . . . . . 8 CLOISTERS OF SAN VICENTE . . . . . 16 GATEWAY, ENCARNACION, AVILA . . . . 58 LES CUATRO POSTES, AVILA . . . . 76 GATEWAY, CONVENT OF ENCARNACION, AVILA . . 108 THE PATIO OF THE ENCARNACION, AVILA . . 114 THE WATER-WHEEL . . . . . . 182 CONVENT OF SAN JOSE, AVILA . . . . . 226 INTERIOR OF CONVENT OF SAN JOSE, AVILA . . 236 CONVENT OF MEDINA DEL CAMPO . . . 286 INTERIOR OF CONVENT CHURCH, MEDINA DEL CAMPO . 294 TANK IN THE GARDEN OF LA SERNA, NEAR AVILA . . 536 GARDEN, LA SERNA, NEAR AVILA . . . 652 CASTILLO DE LA MOTA, MEDINA DEL CAMPO . . 700 xix SANTA TERESA INTRODUCTION r I A HERE is, it seems to me, a mysterious affinity and similarity J_ between the character of Santa Teresa and the grim border fortress of Castille that gave her birth. An age of intense faith, an age of constant warfare, produced them both ; they both represent to the full the spirit of their epoch. A war- like spirit, a stormy and fighting past, is impressed on every stone in Avila. Teresa is a true daughter of such a past. She embodies all that is noblest, most representative, in the Castilian character a character famed for its stern self-repres- sion, its endurance, rectitude, sobriety, dignified simplicity and austerity, its grave and stately courtesy. To know Avila to wander through its streets, to watch the sun rise and set over the sombre moorlands beyond the city walls is greatly to know Teresa. In one of its fortress houses, where on the shield over the gateway the bucklers of the Davilas were quartered with the rampant lion of the Cepedas, she was born and passed her childhood. In the cathedral which looms over the city walls, half church, half fortress fit place in which to praise and give thanks to the God of Battles she worshipped and gazed with ardent eyes, and with a thrill of wonder and terror, into the dim mysteries of its roof. In the quiet cloisters of the Encarnacion she passed the greater part of her life of peace and contemplation. She was thinking of the wild and tumbled landscape of Avila, its trees, and sky, and running water, when she wrote : " It profited me too to see fields, water, flowers ; in these things did I find a memory of the Creator I mean that they aroused me, tranquillised me, and were as books." These time-stained stones, these silent cloisters all that remains in outward bodily form of that strangely complex age, which produced her and the gentle San Juan de la Cruz, so different from her in character and tendencies ; together with 2 SANTA TERESA Philip II., the gloomy and conscientious bigot who championed them both shaped and moulded her existence, shut in and controlled her life. Most meet background for her whose whole life was to be one long battle, this city of warriors and knights their very memory all so shadowy. Of all the cities that break up the monotonous surface of Castille, none so characteristic, none impresses the imagination more profoundly than Avila. Hung between earth and sky, clustered around its gray cathedral, on the last spur of the Guadarramas, dominating the wildest, bleakest uplands in Castille; a city such as Van Eyck painted, or some quaint illuminator drew with minute hand on the yellow pages of a missal. Seen from afar it might be some phantom city, such as the Indians tell of in Mexico or in the Andes; or a fantastic rock balanced on the crag it clings to. Houses and boulders jumbled together, the very surface of the streets broken and pierced with rocks. The brown parameras at her feet are covered with craggy rocks. Gray rocky landscape, gray rocky towers, natural and chiselled rocks in jagged outline against the sky. " Cantos y santos " goes the proverb alas ! the saints are gone, the stones alone remain. If it be true that as Christ passed through Avila he shed tears as he saw the barrenness and nakedness of the soil, which were thereupon congealed into rocks, then indeed must he have wept long and bitterly over its melancholy plains. On the highest point of the rock, half church, half fortress, its apse forming a flanking tower to the walls, the cathedral looms high over the city it defends a shrine to watch and pray in. Clustering under its shadow is the town : obscure tortuous labyrinths of lanes and narrow streets ; lines of gloomy houses ; round-headed or square gate- ways overhung by proud escutcheons; here and there some round Mudejar 1 tower rising high above the roof no doubt what it was meant for to scan the neighbouring sierras. From the cathedral the walls, not more than half a mile asunder at their widest point, follow the sinuous movement of the ridge on either side, enclosing the face of the hill, until sweeping down, sharply narrowing as they go, they overhang the bridge of the Adaja and guard its entrance. To the north- west, at first following the course of the river its placid current broken by water-mills almost as Moorish as those of Cordoba 1 The Mudejares were the conquered Moors left in the territories re-taken by the Christians, and allowed to retain their own faith and customs with some restric- tions they continued in Spain until the expulsion in 1609. Avila was full of Mude- iares ' The style of architecture called Mudejar is a debased Moorish : note the church tower of San Andres in Avila. The word is from the Arabic, mudejal, and its derivative mudejalat. INTRODUCTION 3 then leaving it in the hollow behind, until the tips of the poplars that line its banks alone are visible, a devious path winds over the granite-strewn waste, amidst thyme and rose- mary, to the Convent of the Encarnacion. Over against the bridge, straight in front of us, where the diligence roads to Salamanca and Piedrahita (both modern) separate the one to the right, the other to the left of it some ventas at the bottom of a sandy hill still mark the beginning of the steep ascent, the only communication in Teresa's time between Avila and the back-lying country between it and Alba de Tormes. A little to one side of it Los Cuatro Postes "the four columns" indicate the spot where her childish journey to martyrdom was brought to an abrupt conclusion. The narrow high-pitched bridge Teresa knew is gone. Gone, too, the little hermitage of San Lazaro, dear to her childhood, that guarded its entrance to the old-fashioned faith of that age as potent a protection as the walls. Opposite the bridge still the place, as in ancient times, to watch the current of human life flow in and out of Avila is the deep-mouthed gateway, once shut and barred at nightfall. Unlucky the traveller overtaken by night before he reached the town ; for until daybreak, none might enter or leave it. The deep shadow of this gateway frames a sunlit street, narrow and tortuous, deserted and silent, creeping up the hill in aerial perspective, between high walls fissured with time and baked by the heat into indefinable gradations of colour. Let us follow it into the town. Behind these walls, enclosed between them and the walls of the town itself, as you may see by peeping through a chink in some mouldering doorway, the ground is partly covered with the ddbris and rubbish of what once were houses, interspersed where possible with patches of cultivation. Perhaps some little house with its characteristic Moorish lattice, before which a fig-tree, luxuriant and neglected, flings its leafy boughs, lies huddled beneath a sunny terrace. In Teresa's time this street, which rarely to-day echoes to the footsteps of a chance passer-by, was thickly inhabited by an industrious and harmless population of Mudejares and Jews. Then it was the main artery of the town, the central line between the walls. Through that sombre and silent gateway at the bridge once flowed the stream of the quaint mediaeval life of Castille : strange processions of mailed and plumed warriors ; hunting parties with hawks and hounds ; bishops in full ponti- ficals, surrounded by kneeling crowds ; a tide of travellers whose weary footsteps left a mark on the rough causeway ere they went their way on their endless journey out of the memory of men and Avila. To-day, a few donkeys enter or emerge 4 SANTA TERESA through its shadow, their drivers labourers and peasants, who with the characteristic costume of the country, preserve, across so many ages, the peculiar dignity and stateliness of another world the tight knee-breeches tied in at the knee with a bunch of ribbons ; the short jackets, black or brown, scorched by the sun into many hues ; the " abarcas " (sandals) fastened to the legs with strips of leather : or fresh-coloured serranas from those little gray villages hidden in the sierras, who still wear their national dress with the arrogance and grace natural to their race the short scarlet or yellow petticoat, the low velvet bodice, the massive earrings of rare and intricate workmanship. All this still lingers, impregnated with the perfume of the past, the only link between it and the present a past which is destined soon to fade away, even in this remote and little-visited district of Castille. They are all that remain of the life Teresa knew. The knights have gone : long ago they have mouldered to dust under their alabaster tombs in the cathedral. The peasant alone remains unchanged : his ways of life, his dress, his proverbs, his strange wild legends, in no wise different from his ancestor who drove his donkey or yoke of oxen through the postern gate opposite to the house of one Alonso de Cepeda. The same Gil, Pascual, Bras, Llorente, and Menga ; the same tawny herdsmen clothed in sheepskin, and ruddy-faced zagalas (lasses, Arabice), who celebrated Christ's birth and resurrection in the simple "letrillas" Teresa wrote for her nuns at those great festivals, whose homely composition and rustic language and allusions' have so shocked her superfine and learned commentators. For her the birth of Christ took place not in Jewish Bethlehem, but in some rude sheep-cot lost among the folds of the great Castilian sierras covered with the first fine sprinkling of snow. For her the star of great magnitude, which rose in the midnight heavens of Judea, shed its mystic radiance over the frosty deserts of Castille. Landscape, town, cathedral, people, and climate alike rigid, gray, fierce, storm-tossed. Snow, hail, and storms of wind and rain sweep over the arid plains from October to June, succeeded by a fierce period of African heat. The tender gradations of spring and autumn are unknown. To the climate and physical configuration of the country may be ascribed the peculiar type of the serrano of Avila hardy, robust, fresh-complexioned, wiry and clean-limed; the wild and guttural ring of his distinctive accent. Stand with me a moment amongst the stunted rose-bushes in the little alameda under the walls, on the extreme southern ridge of the hill. INTRODUCTION 5 Beneath us, clinging to its face as to a staircase so steep as to be in many places inaccessible, lie the quarters of San Nicolas, Santiago, and Las Vacas, grouped around their respective churches. To the left, glimmering on its hillside, is the shrine of the Virgin of Sonsoles. Facing us is the pleasant Valle Ambles, studded with little hamlets and dark patches of pine forest, shut in by the scarred sides and gorges of the grim sierras of Avila, Menga, and Villatoro. That thin blue line to the south-west is the strange and enormous range known as the Sierras de Credos the barrier between Avila and Estremadura. To this day the fastnesses of the Credos remain virtually unexplored. On their summit, hemmed in by the peaks of Los Dos Hermanos de Credos, lies an ice- bound lake, its unfathomed depths looked upon with instinctive and peculiar horror. Here lingers the Capra Hispanica, extinct almost everywhere else in Spain. Over this gloomy, unhallowed region brooded in Teresa's time (as it does still, to a less extent) all the mystery of the unknown. Superstition and ignorance lend a thousand fantastic terrors to the wild and horrible legends told by the peasants under their breath round the blazing hearth of a winter's night, and to which Teresa as a child must so often have listened. As the sun grows low in the horizon, the landscape is filled with an indefinable charm. The little houses and Romanesque towers of the low-lying "barrio" beneath us whiten, flushed with wonderful gradations of colour, against the darkening paramera, where glisten the windings of a stream a strip of silver. Sadly and slowly the deep cathedral bell gives the first note of the Oraciones, and the sound is taken up and repeated from church and monastery tower. The sierras, a purple mass all detail faded out rise soft and peaceful against the pale amber light of a translucent sky, and night falls over Avila and wraps it up in shadow. Nor is the surrounding landscape of Avila any less impressive than the town itself. Dotted amongst the para- meras and serrania of Avila are little villages inhabited by a race of shepherds and herdsmen, rude and tawny, but "hombres de bien," who pasture their flocks and herds on the vast treeless uplands in summer green, and brilliant with flowers, a brighter line of verdure marking the course of some streamlet pure as crystal, which, gushing down from its birthplace in the sierras, crosses the vastness of the prairie ; melancholy and imposing in autumn, when the solitary figure of some herdsman leaning on his staff rises erect and motion- less against the sky, and a strange vegetation, forked and 6 SANTA TERESA spiny, dried to brittleness by the short, fervent heat of summer, covers the sandy soil, monstrous thistles profiled sharply against the pale blue haze of distant mountains. Avila did not always gaze over the barren, granite-strewn desert at her feet with the stony apathy of a petrified city, a spectral image from which all life has fled. Turn back the pages of its wild and turbulent chronicles to those stirring times to us so dim and vague when Goth and Moor struggled for the mastery; when the passes were never safe from the raids of the Moors. Many a fray has been fought beneath its walls ; many a fierce encounter on its desolate plains ; many a peaceful streamlet has run red with the blood of victors and vanquished. Nay, does not the quarter of San Nicolas owe its existence so it is written to one of these wild scenes of reprisal when the Moors, swooping down from the mountain passes, during the absence of the "serranos," 1 ravaged the country, and drove off the cattle even to the very walls? Spurring after them on their return the knights of Avila fell upon them encamped on the banks of a stream near Barbacedo, and utterly destroyed them. Their ungrateful townsmen, however, insisting on a share of the booty over and above the restitution of their wives, children, and belong- ings, shut the gates in the faces of the victorious "serranos," and the fight promised to be a bloody one, had not Count Raimundo of Burgundy arrived from Segovia to establish peace. Those inside the walls, who had guarded them so ill, were banished to a quarter outside the city, and the custody of the gates confided to the warlike " serranos " to every five of whom, from the rich booty they had taken, were awarded fifty horses. For ages this quarrel between those inside and beyond the walls inflamed the city with fierce faction fights, which lasted until Teresa's time. For four centuries the history of Avila was that of Spain herself; for close on two of these the advanced outpost of the Christian frontier, it was her mission to defend it from Moorish invasion. Great hearts were nurtured in this strong old border fortress, that nature and art alike combined to render im- pregnable. The keystone of the two Castilles, guarding the defiles of the Guadarramas, the mountain wall that severed her from the ancient Moorish kingdom of Toledo on the one side and the gloomy passes of Estremadura on the other, Moor and Christian fought desperately for her possession. 1 A term constantly applied by the chroniclers of Avila to the Knights, either on account of their origin from the mountains of Cantabria, or from the sierras they defended, and where they had their possessions. INTRODUCTION 7 Finally wrenched from the Infidel by Alfonso VI., its restora- tion and recolonisation would seem to have taken place in the last decade of the eleventh century, following close on that of Segovia and Salamanca. From Asturias and Burgos, the wild mountains of Canta- bria and Galicia, came the first settlers of the reconquered Avila, bringing with them their flocks and herds, two of the four great chieftains under whom the exodus took place being appointed its hereditary governors. In 1099 so runs the legend, scarcely nine years after their site had been solemnly blessed by the Bishop of Oviedo in full pontificals, the dentel- lated crest of its famous walls sprang from the granite ridges and encircled the town within a continuous line of fortifications. The entrances were guarded by five cyclopean gateways marvels of mediaeval engineering skill ; the houses of the chieftains formed an inner circle of fortresses within the walls it was their duty and proud prerogative to defend. For, although Toledo was in the power of the Christians, the mountains that girdled the Tagus and stretched down into Estremadura were infested with refugees and warlike Moors, who, prowling down from their fastnesses, harassed the Christians with a predatory and guerilla warfare. Sentinel-like, bristling with defences, guarded by walls still the most perfect in Europe and the wonder of our age, filled with the stoutest fighters of Castille, Avila hung on its rocky height, in the very jaws of danger. Well did those knights of old fulfil their mission. The first in battle, in loyalty, and chivalry, it was the proud privilege of Avila Avila of the Knights Avila the Loyal the King's Avila to bear her flag in the vanguard of the armies. To her valour was mainly due the total rout of " Miramamolin " l and his forces on the plains of Las Navas. To-day her flags are rotting to dust in the grandiose naves of Baeza, Jaen, Granada. A Spanish knight of that day could produce no greater proof of unstained nobility than his descent from the great chieftains of Avila. After Alfonso's death (1109) the city, besieged by the Almoravides of AH driven back from Toledo, is said to have owed its safety to the masculine energy of a woman. Familiar to Teresa as the songs of her cradle, the story of Jimena Blasquez she who, when all the warriors were fighting, and the tents of the Moors glistened amidst the sierras, summoned the women of Avila together to the battlements, and rode all 1 The Spanish corruption of the Arabic Emir-el-Muminin, commander of the faithful. He was Mohammed-el-Nasr, son of the celebrated Yacub called El Mansur, "the victorious," King of Morocco. 8 SANTA TERESA night round the city walls to keep the sentinels at their post. " My kinswomen ! do like me, and God will give us the victory ! " And God did ; and not until Abdalla Alhacem sounded the trumpets of retreat, and the bells of the cathedral and San Vicente clashed out in triumph, did they descend from the walls they had so valiantly guarded. " God had placed in her heart," says the record long preserved in the old calf book l of Avila, " great daring, for she seemed rather a valiant chieftain than a woman." So that it is the peculiar boast of Avila, this grim, rugged corner of Castille, to have produced women as great and heroic as any of her men. The past of Avila teemed with such legends, and others even more wild and weird. Teresa sucked them in from childhood was nurtured on them. On the long winter nights when, as was and is still the custom in these patriarchal Castilian households, the heads of the family gathered round the blazing hearth with their hinds and waiting women, such were the themes that stirred her blood and excited her imagination. But we should be mistaken if we supposed the Avila of Teresa's day to be in any way what it is now stricken down with poverty and desolation, whole quarters unpeopled and untenanted. It is true that the death-knell of its prosperity had been sounded in the expulsion of the Jews the cloth- workers, carpet-makers, artificers, and manufacturers (not in the modern sense), who enriched the Gothic city with their industry. Whole quarters were even then deserted, and have remained so from that day to this. On either side of the narrow and silent lanes winding between high walls, patches of uneven ground, covered with the debris of building material, show where were once the dwellings of the Jews and the vast- ness of the destruction. Nevertheless Avila still conserved her ancient prestige and glory as one of the chief jewels of the Castilian crown. Within her walls passed some of the most momentous events of the age. Avila was Isabella's native province, and in the palace of Madrigal, now a deserted convent, she spent her tranquil youth. In the dehesa 2 of Avila just outside the walls (1465) the turbulent nobles struck the sceptre from the hands of the effigy of their incapable monarch Henry IV., and in the name of Castille hailed his young brother Alfonso their king. Not many leagues from Avila, in the 1 El Libra de Becerro. " Dehesa is an extent of wild land, woodland or otherwise, sometimes belonging to a municipality and sometimes to a private owner. In the former case, it often lies just outside the town. INTRODUCTION 9 Jeronimite monastery of Guisando, Isabella was recognised by her brother as heir to the crown. With the community of Santa Ana of the Bernardines, a convent just outside the walls of Avila, she took refuge from the intrigues of her nobles. For a better understanding of the period on which I am about to enter, it does not seem inopportune to take a (neces- sarily brief) view of the past events which were still agitating the national conscience at the date of Teresa's birth, and pre- determined the Spain of her day with its wonderful and heroic absorption in, and devotion to, an Idea. An Idea destined to control the fate of Spain for many centuries ; to lay the founda- tion of decay in an empire on which the sun never set; its effects to last down to this present day. Twenty-three years before Teresa's birth, the warriors of Avila, carrying their flag in the vanguard of the Castilian army, had helped to terminate the fierce struggle of centuries in the crowning victory of Granada ; twenty-three years since the enactment of one of the strangest and most touching scenes in the history of Spain or of the world. Amidst the silence and woe of the vanquished, a cardinal of Spain floated the flag of the cross above the red towers of the Alhambra. As the flags of Santiago and the King waved for the first time above the tower of Comares, an exultant shout rent the air, " Granada, Granada, for the Kings of Castille, Don Fernando, and Doiia Isabel." A great matter indeed, that taking of Granada, for it inaugurated the national ruin. The heat of the fray, the wonderful feats of prowess accomplished in the skirmishes, the thousand marvels and vicissitudes of such a campaign, in which the religious and national spirit of the whole continent had gone out in a burst of wild enthusiasm, were still narrated with pride and hotly debated round the firesides of Avila at the period when Teresa was born. For years after, the Spaniards scarcely realised the complete- ness of their victory over these dreaded enemies of their religion and race. For years after, the rebellions of the wretched Moors, left in the inaccessible mountains of the Alpujarras, Ronda, and the Sierra Bermeja, who fought like wolves against the chivalry of Castille, fanned the flame of hatred and intolerance in their victors' breasts. At any moment the cry of alarm might spread like wildfire for the Castilles and Aragon to take up arms against an invading host. In those rude times of difficult communication, when the only warning might be some smouldering watch-tower, it behoved every one to be on the alert. The dread and hatred of the Moors had become a hereditary instinct, handed on as a legacy from father to son. io SANTA TERESA Only a narrow strait (known in Arabic by a name which sounded ominously on a Spaniard's ears, La Puerto, del Camino, The Gate of the Road) separated them from the country whence the hosts of Tarik and Muza had first landed on Algeciras (the green island). That point had been the scene of all subsequent invasions. Thence had poured not only the troops of Tarik and Muza, but towards the end of the eleventh century, the fierce Almoravides ; thence the conquering host whose dynasty was only broken a century later by the holy King, San Fernando. For ages it had been the dream of the Castilian Kings those paladins who had won their country, inch by inch, from the grip of the Moors, to conquer the northern shores of Africa, a constant source of danger, an eternal menace. This same Ferdinand was himself fascinated with the scheme that had exercised so many of his forefathers. It took entire possession of Raimundo Llull, the great philosopher and Arabic scholar of Mallorca, who was stoned to death in Africa. It was fraught with fresh significance in a century which had seen the downfall of the last citadel where Moorish rule still lingered. What had been, could be again. The King had everything to fear from the resentment and suppressed vengeance of the Moors, still lingering in the rocky fastnesses of Andalucia. Not without reason did he dread their intrigues with their kinsmen on the opposite shores of Africa those brave and warlike enemies, from whom a narrow arm of the sea alone separated him. In 1500, ostensibly on account of a rebellion amongst the Moors of the Alpujarras, he proceeds against them with an army as large and powerful "as if again he was obliged to conquer the kingdom." To the end of his life the Catholic King was haunted by the fear of some such invasion, when every Moor left lurking in the country would have risen to a man. For this reason, as well as to divert the thoughts of his powerful nobles and subjects from machinations against his government at home, the astute and wily Ferdinand sends out a fleet from Malaga (1508) to suppress piracy and pillage on the coasts of Andalucia, Murcia, and Valencia. Isabel's dying legacy to her successors was, " not to desist in the conquest of Africa, and to fight for the faith against the Infidels." Strange if, after the lapse of nearly five centuries, it should be reserved to Spain still to accomplish the last charge of this remarkable woman ! It was in pursuance of some such thought that in 1 509, six years before Teresa's birth, two fleets were prepared in Spain, one against Venice, the other against Barbary. Cardinal Cisneros, then over seventy, not only offered to advance the money, but to lead the expedition in person. INTRODUCTION n He proceeded to replenish the King's empty coffers by means of Crusades, jubilees, and ecclesiastical penalties. It is a curious fact that amongst the dispensations then granted for that purpose, in return for the ducats of the faithful, was one dated Valladolid, i/th October 1509, to one Alonso Sanchez, inhabitant of Avila, to legitimise his marriage with Beatriz de Ahumada, his deceased wife's cousin in the fourth degree. Amongst the offspring of this union was one, the glory of whose name was far to transcend the narrow bounds of her native city nay of Spain itself Teresa de Jesus. Impossible to say what the great schemes that floated through Cisneros's brain perhaps the conquest of Jerusalem and the East as he sailed out of Cartagena on that Sunday afternoon the i6th of May 1509. At the siege of Oran, arrayed in full pontificals and surrounded by a body of priests and monks devoutly chanting Vexilla Regis, he insisted on putting himself at the head of the Spanish army. After a terrible slaughter, in which four thousand Moors were massacred, and five thousand captured, the Spanish troops entered the town on the 1 8th, the mosque being consecrated by the Most Christian Cardinal. What further conquests he might have achieved, had it not been for Ferdinand's ambiguous attitude at home, and the conduct of Count Pedro Navarro, Commander of the Spanish forces, who forced him to embark on the 23rd of May, a week after he had set forth from Cartagena after having put to a triumphant proof his policy of extermination, must remain amongst the insoluble secrets of fate. Let us return to Avila. To the south of the town the Dominican monastery of Santo Tomas still draws by its potent charm the steps of the artist and dreamer. In Teresa's childhood it was almost new. Twenty-two years previous to her birth, the master masons cut the last stone-mark on the blocks of granite and chiselled the last pomegranate the emblem of Ferdinand's only title to glory. Built to record the last and final victory over Granada, every moulding, the arch of every gateway, every niche and pinnacle, is covered with interminable traceries of pomegranates (granadas}. This flattering symbol recorded the crowning triumph of the Christians, the fulfilment of the proud boast made by the Aragonese King in the freshness of his youth : " I will pluck out all the seeds from that Granada." It also records some- thing more the foul blemish of their reign. The memory of Torquemada is indelibly connected with Santo Tomds. Its origin is mainly due to him, and it was built through the 12 SANTA TERESA system of spoliation so rigorously put in practice, from the confiscation of the money and property of the Jews and Moors. The first Sanbenitos seen in Spain were guarded before its high altar: a sad and fearful renown. In the first quarter of the present century, the inhabitants of Avila still pointed out to their children an elevated spot on the plains beyond the city walls, where a few wretched Jews were solemnly burnt to expiate the imaginary crimes imputed to them by the vindictive Dominicans. A green cross affixed to the battle- ments of the church porch of San Pedro (a green cross still nailed to the outer walls of the apse is probably the same) long renewed that sinister scene in the memory of the descendants of those who witnessed it. Before the principal entrance of San Pedro sat the terrible tribunal of Black Friars ; a gazing and bloodthirsty multitude thronged the space where now the countrymen from the neighbouring hamlets congregate to sell their vegetables and charcoal. Under the influence of torture almost too terrible to contemplate torture administered and suffered in those peaceful cloisters a converted Jew of Tembleque was induced to accuse himself, and those implicated with him, of the crime of procuring the heart of a Christian child stolen from Toledo, to be used together with a consecrated wafer as a magic conjuration against the powers of the Inquisitors, with the object (it was said) of making the latter die of madness and restoring to the Jews the free exercise of their Hebrew rites. All the evidence produced in proof of the accusation was that a wafer Jiad been found in Benito Garcia's knapsack ; but where procured was still a matter of conjecture. There were strange discrepancies in the evidence. No Alonso Martin of Quintanar, the parent of the child supposed to have been murdered, could be produced ; the Inquisition, unable _ to identify its nationality, was forced to style him a "nifio Cristiano * ; the dates even on which the tragedy was _said to have taken place were conflicting. But, to the public of Avila, the fatal discrepancies in the evidence mattered little. They accepted blindly the story in all its horrible significance, and the sight they witnessed must have remained seared into their memory until their dying day. So hot and fierce the hatred it excited in Avila against the unfortunate Hebrews, that the Catholic Kings, then in Cordoba, were obliged to issue letters to the magistrates taking the Jews under the royal safeguard, and ordering the condign punishment of their persecutors. The Host supposed to have been found in the knapsack of the Jew was placed in a pearl coffer given for INTRODUCTION 13 that purpose by the Princess Margaret, wife of the young Prince of Castille, and was long venerated in the monastery of Santo Tomas. In consequence of the political disturbances of later time, it found a resting-place above the altar of San Pedro, where it may still be an object of worship, for all I know to the contrary. I may remark that the burning of these Jews was the first exercise of the powers of the Grand Inquisitor in Castille. Whether or not this terrible tragedy, elaborated with all its sickening details in the peaceful calm of the cloister, was some deep-laid scheme on the part of Torquemada and his satellites to inflame the national hatred against the enemies of their faith and crucifiers of their Saviour, I will not attempt to decide. It is a significant fact that a year later, when this occurrence had aroused the attention of all Spain and inflamed the hatred against the Jews to its highest pitch, the Catholic monarchs signed from the Alhambra the sentence of expulsion. " That Torquemada," says a recent and learned critic, " used the case effectively with Ferdinand and Isabella to procure the decree of expulsion, there can be but little doubt. It was generally thought so at the time. In fact, it is hardly possible to compare the expressions of the edict without feeling convinced that the latter were fresh in the mind of the draftsman of the former." Llorente, whose evidence on so many other points has been accepted as conclusive by Spanish critics (more eager perhaps to clear the character of their sovereign than to investigate truth), has denied the truth of the story related by him, that when the Catholic Kings were debating whether the edict should be annulled for 30,000 ducats, offered in the name of their compatriots by the richest Jews in the kingdom, Torquemada suddenly appeared in the royal apartment and, taking out a crucifix he carried hidden under his habit, cried with a loud and discordant voice : " Judas Iscariot sold his Master for thirty ducats of silver, and your Highnesses are going to sell him for thirty thousand. Here he is ; take and sell him." Thus it was that Avila Avila which had ever led the vanguard of the Spanish armies then obtained the miserable pre-eminence of having first fanned the flames of intolerance and persecution. It was from Avila that the spark sped which deprived Spain of eighty-five thousand of her most learned and industrious population ; and it was meet that she should suffer for her sins. It is said that 11,412 Jews left Avila alone after that fatal edict of the 3ist of March 1492, by which Ferdinand and Isabella, with the menacing shadow of Torquemada behind them, so lightly signed away the i 4 SANTA TERESA material prosperity of their kingdom. From that moment the city which until then had been one of the richest of Castille dated its incline. Avila, and with her Spain, never recovered this deathblow to the manufacturing industries, hitherto sustained by the hated Hebrew. The Grand Inquisitor of Spain, recking not of the note of infamy with which succeeding generations have loaded his name, sleeps quietly enough under the bare slab of slate in the midst of the vast sacristy of Santo Tomas of Avila. No inscription records his name and virtues; and none is needed. Strangely enough the building designed to signalise a triumph and become the palace of the Catholic Kings, became the sad Pantheon of their hopes ! Yet, although the Jews were expelled twenty-three years before Teresa saw the light, the resultant decay was gradual, the consequences not to be immediately apprehended. Nemesis is not always swift to avenge. Nay, as in our own day in like cases, the grave hidalgo sententiously plumed himself on a measure which exterminated the blood-sucker of the national wealth. The apple was still fair to look upon, although rotten at the core. In the sixteenth century, in spite of the expulsion of the Jews, Avila still contained within her walls fourteen thousand inhabitants, which tradition increases to eighteen thousand. She had fifteen parish churches. It needed twenty mills containing six wheels each, to provide the inhabitants with bread. It is worth while noting that the house in which Teresa first saw the light was situated in the Jewish quarter of the town, then and for all time thenceforward left desolate and abandoned. Their graveyard became the future garden of the Encarnacion, in whose peaceful alleys so much of her life was to pass so peacefully away. Not six years before the Saint's birth, another great Castilian, Queen Isabella, delivered up her soul to God in Medina del Campo, following close upon the death of her most illustrious subject he whom she had created Admiral of Spain, and then left to die, disappointed and broken-hearted, in an obscure house in Valladolid. Still vibrating with the excitement of success, the cupidity, the imagination, the ardour of the nation was aroused by the discovery of this rich and wonderful New World across the ocean. Fleet after fleet left Cadiz, taking the most adventurous spirits of the age, to sate their restless longings for conquest by massacre and cruelty. With this New World the fortunes of the Saint's brothers are closely connected. There were then only two careers open to sons of noble families that of arms and the priesthood. Of INTRODUCTION 15 her nine brothers, seven seek their fortunes in the " Indies " with varying result ; one only became a monk. The brief notes attached to their names read like a page from some old moth-eaten chronicle. Hernan Ruy de Ahumada was a great soldier in the conquest of Peru, and as one of the " conquistadores " was allotted his share of slaves and land. That favourite brother, the companion of her childhood, he whom she persuaded to go with her to seek martyrdom for " Christ's sake " at the hand of the Moors, Rodrigo, went out to America with the grade of captain, and died in the conquest of Peru. Don Lorenzo goes out, with the grade of captain, to the " Indies," and becomes treasurer in the province of Quito. Pedro served the King of Spain in the conquest of that undefined and boundless country referred to by the Saint as " Las Indias," returned to his country to seek some acknowledgment for his services, and soon afterwards died. Geronimo was killed in the conquest of Peru. He died, says Teresa, valorously and as became a saint. Agustin, a b^ave captain in Chili, won seventeen battles there, and was made governor of a town. The Jesuit father Luis Valdivia's account of Agustin's death- bed confession is curious enough. Owing to his sister Teresa's warning letters, he relinquishes his posts in the New World, and arrives in Spain about the date of her death. Unsuccessful in procuring a meet reward for his services, he accepts a governorship in Tucuman, where he is taken ill, and obliged to return to Avila. This so preys upon his mind, as being a divine punishment for neglecting his sister's counsels, that he falls seriously ill, and prepares to die. On his deathbed she appears to him, and bears him to heaven. Antonio took the habit in Santo Tomas de Avila, and died a monk. Teresa must have watched these strong young men, in all the flush of their youth and enthusiasm, one by one swallowed up by the unknown Indies. The jingling of armour and of swords was a familiar sound in her ears. Many a gallant company of knights and men-at-arms did she watch as they rode out of the gray gates of Avila, bound for the battlefields of Portugal, Navarre, Italy, or Flanders ; or to embark on the galleons in the harbour of Cadiz to sail out of the memory of Avila and its sierras, many of them for ever. Many a time did she see a little band, on lame and jaded horses, dusty, travel- stained, and wearied, some of them bound up and wounded, bring back the flag of some leader who had fallen in the fight, to be hung up sadly and reverently above the aisles in the cathedral a record and a memory ! Many a time in those 16 SANTA TERESA early days, when she accuses herself of taking pleasure in many "vanities," must she have witnessed the jousts and tilting of the gay young knights of Avila. All the details which have become so dim and obscure, the distinctness of which, time in its progress is fast blotting out, throwing over them a mysterious veil of distance, were to her the sights and sounds of her daily life. For the past of Ferdinand and Isabella must have lingered long, must have died hard, in this remote Castilian town harder almost than in any other part of Spain. Avila rang with the sound of fighting ; her sons were all fighters, imbibing it in childhood like mother's milk. Se llamani abiles en esta tierra, El que mas abil es para la guerra. A few years united them to that wild stirring time of fear and war, expectation and glory. The banner of Santa Monica, which accompanied Ferdinand at the head of his troops, had still to find a place high above the cathedral aisles at Jaen. Not trite and threadbare phrases, all sound and fury, signifying nothing, those allusions scattered through her books to the mediaeval life fading away around her, still for a little while real and instinct with significance. The Christian is the faithful "alcaide" (governor) of the castle in an enemy's country, who keeps his post at the risk of life rather than betray his master ; or a " good knight who, without hope of reward or payment, serves his king." But if the solemn and terrible auto de ft, which had for its scene the Mercado Grande of Avila, burnt itself into her childish imagination, her childhood was surrounded by other and gentler influence. Sunlit pilgrimages to the famous shrine of Sonsoles, lying on a hillside about a league to the south- east of Avila across the pleasant Valle de Ambles. Glad and triumphant processions, of which those of modern Spain, im- pressive as they are, are only a dim reflex, when, amidst the joy and devotion of kneeling crowds, " Our Lady of the Cows," her velvet robes sparkling with gold and pearls, was borne aloft to the Convent of the Encarnacion, the solemn function concluding in the gray old Gothic church of San Juan, the scene of Teresa's baptism. Visits to the famous Basilica of San Vicente, where lay the bodies of the holy martyrs, Vicente, Sabina, and Cristeta, the patron saints of the city. She believed implicitly who then doubted ? all the strange and miraculous legends that cluster around their shrines, famous throughout the whole province: how that the Virgin of Sonsoles, buried for so many years during the Moorish invasion in a remote place of the sierras, INTRODUCTION 17 revealed her hiding-place to a shepherd, appearing to him with the infant Jesus in her arms. " Son soles ! " (they are suns) he exclaimed, as he described the marvellous apparition ; and Sonsoles it has remained ever since. A bold man he, to-day, who dared to cast a doubt on the authenticity of the image, held in such devotion and esteem by the whole serrania of Avila. In times of dearth or public pestilence she is brought from her hermitage in the hills and borne to the cathedral, there to receive the homage of her worshippers ; after which she is carried back, for her efficacy is unquestioned, and deposited in her shrine. Still more marvellous the stories told of " Our Lady of the Cows," so called, it is said, from her appearing to a charcoal- burner in a cowshed ; although another version has it equally authenticated and equally credible, and both alike believed by the good people of Avila that a devout labourer who always sped to church whenever he heard the sound of bells, found one day on his return to work that the pious cows of their own motion had gone on with the ploughing. But the most singular part of the history is that for ages in uninterrupted succession, on the eve or the day of her festival, a lovely butterfly, larger and more beautiful than any seen in the country, alights on the mantle of the Virgin, and remains there during the course of the procession, portending for the coming year peace and abundance, prosperity and health. Certain it is that the centuries have faithfully transmitted the belief to our own day, in the embroidered butterflies on the Virgin's robes. "And," concludes the historian of Avila one of those simple and childlike priests, alike the honour and reproach of the Spanish clergy (and let us respect his belief, and that of all like him) " let naturalists, philosophers, and rationalists explain us this phenomenon, or leave the piety of Avila to congratulate itself on the apparition and constant continuance of this singular butterfly on the Virgin's mantle." Around Teresa, the child of five years old, building in her garden little hermitages which presently toppled down again in mockery of her feeble strength, surged within a short distance of her father's dwelling, goaded into fury, that same old honest and defiant spirit of Castilian independence, which once more invited the democracy and nobility of Spain to assert their ancient uses and privileges. The people of Avila were not behind in the robust defence of their liberties, and boldly proclaimed them in the different cortes convoked by Charles V., the fair young Fleming with the underhanging jaw, who could as yet only utter a few stumbling 18 SANTA TERESA sentences in the language of the nation he was called upon to govern. Yet it must be noted that if they sacked and dis- mantled the houses of the two procurators who had betrayed their trust and acted against the general wishes of the community, no atrocities were witnessed, such as took place in Segovia. A popular government was peaceably inaugurated, composed of nobles and plebeians in equal number, landowners, manufac- turers, and artisans. Amongst them a notable figure, one of those figures which in times of disturbance flash forth as leaders of men, to sink again into obscurity when the occasion is over, a wool-comber, Pinillos by name, became the popular hero. In the chapter-house of the cathedral sat the Holy League, composed of men whose dramatic history and fate shed a strange interest over this curious episode in the national life. The attempt ended in failure. The turbulent fighting bishop of Zamora terminated his life on the gallows; the brave and noble Juan de Padilla, Juan Bravo (whose gloomy old house still exists in Segovia), Francisco Maldonado, met their death bravely on the scaffold, in the final and horrible scene enacted after Villalar. Padilla's wife, of the great line of the Mendozas (and she not the least of them in spirit and valour), Maria Pacheco, intrenched in Toledo, alone encouraged to the last moment the [resistance of the brave inhabitants to the royal forces. Fourteen years later, when Teresa had shot up into woman- hood, she had heard of, if not actually witnessed, the entry of the great emperor, flushed with the victory of Pavia, who, still young, ruled the destinies of Europe with the treasures of Spain, his only recorded visit to the city so dear to the heart of his grandmother Isabella. Having requested the authorities of the city to spend as little as possible on his reception, he rode into Avila under a baldequin of brocade, accompanied by a hundred and fifty of its gentlemen and knights, mounted on richly caparisoned horses. It was noted that his dress was of the most modest and simplest, although, as became the " prince of light horsemen," the carelessness of his attire did not extend to the trappings of his horse, a magnificent chestnut. Such then are some of the external events which convulsed that old gray sixteenth-century town, sleeping to-day smokeless and serene on the face of its gray hillside : the residuum, as it were, of much that has escaped us ; the external and outward manifestations of this stream of human life, the inward phases of which must ever remain so dim to us. Dim as it is, impossible as it is to fill in the missing links, we may still seize some glimmerings out of the universal darkness vague and unsatis- INTRODUCTION 19 factory perhaps, slipping from us as soon as seized of the inner life of that old Avila, lost amidst the Castilian uplands. If we cannot mark the characteristic slash of a doublet, its colour, the lining of a cloak, if we cannot stand with Teresa the child at a corner of a street and watch these mediaeval folk and ways, we can still sketch a few brief outlines, leaving it to fancy to fill in the quaint accessories. In those days there being no fixed court to drain off the noble and wealthy landowners (Madrid did not become the permanent seat of royalty until long afterwards) practically shut off from its neighbours and the rest of the world by the infamous roads, or rather absence of them, and the consequent difficulty of communication, each Spanish town was of necessity the capital and court of its peculiar district, and not only presented a distinctly marked personality (a personality they retain to this day), but was a complete and self-sufficing transcript of the whole social life of the epoch. Thus, within the walls of Avila, for instance, was congregated every grade of the social and ecclesiastical hierarchy, the whole effervescence of mediaeval life : the bishop and his clergy ; the men of letters and of law ; the entire nobility, wealth, and power of the province. Around the nobles clustered a cloud of lesser gentry, although it is quite a mistake to suppose that many of them did not live in the country either permanently or part of the year. The serrania of Avila is studded with old manor houses. Teresa's uncle, Pedro de Cepeda, her brother-in-law, Martin Guzman y Barrientos, were both landed country gentlemen, and lived in rustic state the one in his "palace" (so it is known by the neighbouring peasantry to this day) of Ortigosa, the other in his gray old escutcheoned mansion of Castellanos de la Canada, midway between Avila and Alba riding in and out as pleasure or business dictated. Then the grim fortress-palaces of Avila, the grass-grown courtyards, the square towers pierced with loopholes, to-day so empty and so sad, full of mouldering decay, were full of life and movement. Of great riches or luxury in the modern sense of the term there was none. Magnificence there was, but it was rather the bare, austere magnificence of the monastery, and had nothing in common with what we now associate with the word. Indeed it is a monastery to-day that gives us the best idea of the dwelling, the habits, and a thousand other minute details of the life these mediaeval Spaniards led. Their houses massive, frigid, bare, dark, spacious within, imposing without a type of the character of the inmates. The Spaniard is by nature grave, formal, ceremonious. 2 o SANTA TERESA There was much grandeur but little gaiety. The junketings and splendid functions which enlivened the Italian courts were unknown in Castille. Abstemious and frugal, in his house as in a beleaguered castle, he intrenched himself from the outer world. The relations between noble and retainer, master and servitor (the term servant does not apply to a Spaniard even in a menial capacity), were of the most patriarchal nature. Indeed the peculiar and characteristic feature of Spanish mediaeval society was the strong democratic spirit that linked together in indissoluble union all the heterogeneous elements that formed it. Class distinctions in a country where all were gentlemen, where all had fought side by side to wrench every inch of the soil from the hands of the invader, were, as they are still, more apparent than real. The humblest citizen of Avila was an Aviles before he was a Spaniard, and as such merited and received consideration from his fellow-townsmen be he noble, merchant, craftsman, or labourer. The very fact of their being shut off from the rest of the world, centred all their interests on that one corner of it, and fostered relations of a familiar, almost a fraternal, character between all classes, for which there is no parallel at the present day, now that this old order of things has been so completely swept away. Cohesion amongst themselves, a league offensive and defensive against the rest of the world such was the animating principle. The people of a neighbouring city Medina del Campo, for instance were looked on as strangers and aliens. An inhabitant of the serrania of Avila had the strongest claim on the general benevolence and goodwill of the community. Then the lives of kings themselves were of a grandiose simplicity. They travelled about from place to place on horseback (not, as now, rattled about in railway trains like royal commis voyageurs}. Isabella thought nothing of mounting her horse and riding alone from Valladolid to Simancas without an attendant. The mode of travelling was the same for all classes : on horse or mule back, the great noble, accompanied by one or two servants, either mounted or on foot, traversed the deserts of Castille. In these journeys he was inured to hunger, fatigue, and thirst Oh ! dura tellus Iberiae ! bore them with the same uncompromising stoicism as his followers. These external influences, acting on the peculiar tempera- ment of the nation, produced a race of great nobility different indeed from their debased descendants of to-day a race stalwart and manly, simple of life and habits, contented with little, able not only to plan but to achieve great things. The natural consequence was a tendency to despise material comfort. No INTRODUCTION 21 gentleman however poor, scarcely any labourer, but thought it a disgrace, a stigma, to stain his hands with commerce. Com- merce was left to the Jews ; the arts and crafts to the Moors. To keep a hostelry, or to dispense hospitality for profit, was of all ways of earning a livelihood accounted the most despicable and ignominious. In some towns it was necessary to have recourse to a municipal regulation which forced each inhabitant to take the odious duty by turns and for a year at a time. Ponz attributes the ruin and decay of Avila not so much to the expulsion of the Jews, as to the centralising influence of a fixed capital. His remarks are worth quoting : " Avila is in the most abject decadence, and in great measure it must be attributed to the fact that, of all the hereditary nobility and gentry it formerly possessed, scarcely a resident proprietor is to be found in it, nor even a trace of their families. It is full of farmers-out of land, and stewards the latter bent on increasing its owners' rent to straining point, whilst the unhappy peasants can scarcely, how- ever hard they may toil, procure a wretched maintenance. The proprietors do not see the hardship of their vassals, nor hear their groans, and almost look upon their lands, which by every way and if only for the sake of their own interests they should endeavour to render more prosperous, promoting and protecting its inhabitants, as something extraneous to them. The Court (Madrid) has for a century absorbed infinite families, who played a great part and were extremely useful in the cities since they looked after their own properties which have since been abandoned to the management of their stewards ; they were economical and saving, in order to give their children a fitting education and establishment. Their thoughts were directed to the benefit of the towns and the poor dependent on them, and a thousand other matters, which disappear amidst the attractions of the Court, where they generally live forgetful even of them- selves. The Government recognises the evil and has often endeavoured to remedy it." Such then was the opinion of a judicious traveller at the latter end of the eighteenth century, and the comparison it suggests may serve to place before the reader more vividly than any words of mine the world into which Teresa was born a world very simple, very stately, very dignified, a constitution of society that would seem, alas ! to have disappeared off the face of the world for ever. The reigns of Charles V. and Philip II. were times of transi- tion. In Spain, as elsewhere, the world was creeping out of mediaevalism, and gradually assuming the form under which we now know it. The character of the nation, too, had profoundly 22 SANTA TERESA changed with the expulsion of the Jews. That lesson of in- tolerance was ineffaceable. Different indeed was the race that had lived in amity with them from that which expelled them. The old Spaniard of Ferdinand and Isabella's time, semi-pagan, semi-materialist, sparing of words but great of deeds his religion not the grim, sour creed it afterwards became, fanned by the flame of fanaticism, but an old-established order of things handed him by his ancestors, to which he was content to belong without tormenting himself by many scruples of conscience was wiped out. With him the jovial, inconsequent world he had belonged to, with its exuberant delight in life, faded away. No more Moorish "juglaresas" wandered about between town and hamlet, delighting the people with their songs and dances. The turbulent, fighting prelate who figured at the head of every conspiracy, and could bring an army into the field ; who as often as not secured the reversion of his benefice for his son or nephew, had died a natural death. The parish priest of Isabella's time, whose "ciencia parda" (the homely wisdom of the peasants) had sufficiently equipped him for the divine office, was forced to know Latin and possess a breviary. The monasteries full of jolly, rollicking, wine-bibbing monks, who helped to people the neighbouring villages, their eyes more bent on the temporal gear of this world than the spiritual interests of the next, although it may be doubted whether any radical change was effected either as regards the clergy or the religious orders until the Council of Trent resolutely grappled with the problems that threatened to undermine Catholic Christendom had under- gone a partial reformation. The " pestiferous brood " of com- mendatory abbots, bishops, legates, cardinals, or sons of princely houses who farmed their revenues and never went near them, was cleared away. At the beginning of Isabella's reign, the fact of a primate of Spain, Archbishop Carrillo, being buried beside his natural son his alabaster tomb, a marvel of late Gothic art, may still be seen in the nave of the collegiate Church of AlcaU de Henares created neither scandal nor remark. For indeed what surprises us in the mediaeval Spaniard, considering what he afterwards became, is, not his intolerance, but rather his tolerance, not only for his neighbour's vices and his own, but his neighbour's faith as well. In Avila, for instance, he dwelt side by side with the Mude'jar and the Jew Romanesque Christian tower, mosque, or synagogue existing amicably side by side. The flame battlements of the Cathedral of Avila were built by Mudejar masons. The open roofs of cedar wood, inlaid with pearl and ivory, of its palaces were the work of INTRODUCTION 23 his fingers. To the Jewish doctor the Christian had recourse in his ailments, so much so that a law had to be made to prevent it. Let us turn now to the Spaniard of the concluding years of Charles v. and the reign of Philip II. The prevailing note of the period is one of helplessness and despair. It would seem as if the grinning devils, griffins, and unholy monsters carved by the mediaeval stone-cutters, crawling slimily amidst the vine leaves and trefoil of a capital, had become incarnated in man's mind, and driven him mad with their fantastic terrors. The world had become a strange and evil phantasmagoria of shadows. Sin lurked in every action ; life a tempting curse, given by the tempter of men to destroy the soul the handiwork of God within. Instead of the old buoyant faith that had led them to a thousand victories, instead of the materialistic, positive belief in the luminous figure of the Virgin covering her children with her starry mantle whatever their sin or sorrow, they saw (so true is it that man makes God after his own image) a narrow, jealous, vindictive being an arch-inquisitor ever menacing them with fire and flames. It cannot surprise us that men doubted whether any peni- tence, any extreme of mortification, were enough to conciliate the forgiveness (a forgiveness it was alien to their own character and traditions to bestow, revenge for injuries being the fiercest and most exacting article in the grim social creed of honour) of this Moloch of their own creation ; whether any means were too violent to propitiate him. Religion as they then conceived it, and as it was pointed out to them by the Inquisition, much more than difference of race for before then racial hatred had lain latent condoned, nay rendered to a certain extent meri- torious, the horrible massacres in the New World. Every Indian slaughtered, every Jew and Moor spoliated and forcibly bap- tized, every cruelty exercised on the wretched inhabitants of Peru, Chile, or Mexico, were so many sacrifices laid on the altar of this God sacrifices that were to remit the sins of the victor in this world and be placed to his credit in the next. If any palliation can be found for all this carnage, this wholesale waste of human life, it is in the fact that the Spaniard was at least consequent, that he proved his grim sincerity by pushing it to its logical conclusion. He did no more than carry out with regard to those who differed from him in faith the same conduct he pursued towards himself. For him, too, in one place only is there safety from the mocking demon the cloister ; but one passport to Heaven the hair shirt. Religion an intense, bigoted desire for the welfare of souls, zeal degenerated into 24 SANTA TERESA fanaticism lighted the autos de ft of Valladolid and Seville. Once admit the dualism of soul and body, or rather the pre- ponderating claims of the soul over the body, and this is the infallible consequence. Teresa herself, sympathetic as she was, was far more profoundly distressed at the perdition of their souls than at the massacres of the bodies of the Indians. The loss of a Lutheran soul touched her far more keenly than the torment endured by his burning body. It is not that men have grown better, that their humanity has grown wider one has only to survey our whole commercial system of the sweaters and sweated to give any such quibble a startling denial it is rather because men are no longer capable of the same depth of conviction, the same passionate energy of belief, nay, a century so emasculated as ours is scarcely capable of conceiving it, that scenes like this, not for faith but for greed, not to save our souls and those of others, but our purses at the expense of the general happiness of humanity, do not take place to-day. I would, moreover, point out that a grandiose aberration like this, by its very exaggeration of a principle (even if a wrong one) is productive of grandiose qualities. This age, of all others the most fiercely influenced by re- ligion dogma you cannot call it, for to these people it was a living, substantial thing, was a noble and a virtuous one. If intolerance scorched into the national character, scoring it as with an iron brand ferocious, scathing, ineffaceable, scarcely scarred over to this day: if it completely did away with the valour and sturdy independence of old semi-pagan, semi- materialist, fighting Spain, like a beacon on the mountain top it burnt into a pure, clear flame, generating the sublimest con- stancy, the most passionate devotion to duty, and love for humanity, its sufferings and its sins. In its very intensity of purpose and earnestness this age of iron may find somewhat of redemption for its crimes. Wherever we turn we are struck by the same violent contrast of brilliant light and profoundest shadow. The dreaded Inquisitor himself was by no means a monster insensible to sympathy and compassion. If in the aggregate, and in the exercise of his fatal authority, he became a cruel and ravening demon, in his individual capacity (with a few rare exceptions, such as the grasping and avaricious Valdes and the vindictive Cano), in all the private relations of life, he displayed the virtues and benevolence of the Christian. The Order of the Dominicans, the Black Friars of the Inquisition, included men eminent in virtue, learning, literature, and polemics. The sweetness and purity of style of Fray Luis INTRODUCTION 25 de Granada is only equal to that of his life. Domingo de Soto, Melchor Cano, were justly famous in the Council of Trent. Baflez, Teresa's friend, at seventy-nine years of age travelled on foot to Rome and triumphantly impugned the Jesuits Monte- mayor and Molina in the famous congregation De Auxiliis. Lemos entered the lists a bold champion of St. Thomas's Doctrine of Grace. The famous Archbishop of Braga, called by obedience to rule a diocese of 1226 parishes, conserved in the archiepiscopal chair the simple habits of the friar, spending all his revenues in charity. Wherever we turn we are faced with the same problem, unparalleled indeed in the history of human thought. On the one side a rich and varied intellectual effervescence limited to the few ; a group of thinkers imbued with the tendencies of the Renaissance, giving them profoundly original expression : on the other the main body of the people completely isolated from this mental activity by the repressive edicts of the Inquisition, thrown forcibly back on old forms of thought exploded everywhere else by the march of new ideas. On the one side a group of learned philologists and commentators, of brilliant scholars and divines ; of philosophers like Vive's, styled by the greatest of modern Spanish critics, Menendez Pelayo, " the most prodigious amongst the producers of the Renacimiento " ; Fox Morcillo, the would-be conciliator of Plato and Aristotle ; Gomez Pereira Valle"s, Huarte, Dona Oliva de Sabuca : on the other a stringent embargo placed by the In- quisitors on any book in the vulgar tongue that dared to treat of the mysteries of faith and religion an embargo that extended to every other class of literature. If we carry this strange and unique contrast further we are struck by the potent individuality and personality of individual character. I forget who it is that says, but it is strictly true, that the men of that day, although socially inferior, were worth far more personally than those of our own ; mark for instance the frankness and daring with which some of them asserted, to the face of Charles v. and Philip himself, the liberties of the subject and humanity. At the very moment when the conquistadores of America were enduring unparalleled hardships and exhibiting prodigies of heroism in order to make slaves of the gentle races of America and claim them for the faith which the Moors of Granada preferred death and exile rather than receive, up gets Fray Bartolom^ de las Casas and demands boldly of Charles V. the liberty of those men whose freedom had been given them by nature whereby he believed he was serving God, " since, if it were not so, speaking with the respect and reverence due to so 26 SANTA TERESA mighty a king and lord, I would not move from here to that corner, even to serve your Majesty." In art, if indeed art had ever languished in that strange and original country, and in literature, it was the same : Spain was perhaps more profoundly touched by the Renaissance than any other country in Europe after Italy, and impressed it with the additional seal of her own individuality. At the time when the splendid town of Salamanca and its new cathedral, 1 inspired with all the newly awakened spirit of classical enthusiasm, were springing up in their pristine beauty to delight the eyes of the world for ever; at the time when Garcilaso was writing his tender lyrics, and Diego Hurtado de Mendoza (who for the elegance and precision of his periods was known by his contemporaries as the Spanish Sallust) his History of the Rebellions of Granada, the inquisitors were burning, Alba was decimating Flanders. The wood-carvers 2 and iron-workers of Spam were the most renowned in Europe. Its embroiderers 3 of church vestments, than which none have ever been more magnificent, still have their peculiar niche in the temple of fame. To this period belong many of those wrought rejas or iron gates that separate the high altar from the choir in cathedrals and collegiate churches; the choir-books, with their quaint miniatures, that adorn the sculptured " atriles " (lecterns) of Valladolid Cathedral and the monastery church of the Esconal. In some little dark shop, open to the street, in the sombre towns of Valladolid or Burgos, the silversmiths of the age hammered out their monstrances, crucifixes, and pixes, valued and conserved to-day as the most precious jewels in the dusty treasures of great cathedrals often transmitting, as in the case of the Arfes (silversmiths) and the Becerras (wood-carvers), not only the peculiar traditions of their respective arts, but, strangely enough, their talent to their sons and grandsons. The church music of Spain, so stern and impressive, which thunders still to-day through the aisles of its cathedrals, was renowned even in Italy. The blind organist of Burgos, Francisco de Salinas, who could by his art " so entrance his hearers and Ut presents a curious contrast to the Cathedral Vieja, or old cathedral a iewel of Gothic art built by Duke Ramon of Burgundy the repeopler of Avila. Nowhere than in these two buildings can the peculiar difference of their respective periods exist in more perfection or be more completely studied. I may mention Alonso Berruguete, Diego de Siloe, Andres de Najera in Castille ; Pedro Delgado in Seville ; Caspar Becerra of Jaen. Ochandiano, Camifia, Simon de Aspe, Juan Gomez of Seville. A special factory superintended by Fray Lorenzo de Montserrate and after his death by Diego de Rutiner, existed for them in the Esconal and here were embroidered the famous vestments for which Peregrino Tibaldo made the designs. INTRODUCTION 27 fill their souls with most diverse movements of sadness and joy, impetus and repose," that Morales declares himself no longer amazed at what Pythagoras wrote concerning the power of music, was declared by the Romans themselves to be nemini secundus. To him Fray Luis de Leon dedicated one of his most beautiful odes, inspired in the purest spirit of Platonism. The cathedrals of Toledo, Valencia, Seville, Burgos, Santiago, contained priceless and numberless treasures, each of them conserving their peculiar traditions, repertories, masters, and disciples. Jorge de Montemayor, the author of the pastoral novel of the Diana (a book by the bye that Teresa must have read when she devoured those books of fiction and caballen'a that took such a hold on her imagination that she herself composed one), was perhaps still more celebrated as a musician than an author. As a member of the Royal Chapel, composed of the most excellent and choicest musicians and singers of the kingdom, he accompanied Philip II., still a youth, on his first visit to Germany, Italy, and the Low Countries. If from general considerations we come down to individual character, we shall discover the same violent contrasts of brightest light and profoundest shadow, of wide sympathies and intellectual limitations. Take Philip II. himself. If common- place, narrow-minded, routinier, and a bigot, there is no doubt of it that in the main he was a good, conscientious, and sincerely earnest man. Arch-bigot as he was, he shows glimmerings of perceptions and views altogether surprising to those incapable of entering into all the complexities and strange twistings of that cosmos a human character. He, too, is the most striking anomaly of the age. A magnificent patron of art and music, of both a more than merely intelligent critic, capable of con- ceiving and executing a grandiose design like the Escorial, he genuinely loved and appreciated, with all the enthusiasm his cold, passionless temperament was capable of, the world- renowned canvases he spared neither money nor pains to acquire. He it was who gathered together the nucleus of that gallery now one of the most famous, if not the most famous, of Europe. He allowed Titian a yearly pension of two hundred ducats. To Luqueto or Lucas Cangiasi he gave twelve thousand ducats for painting the cupola of the high altar and the roof of the Escorial. 1 Philip's affection for music was no less keen. Under his auspices the works of Palestrina were mainly printed and published, and the grateful musician dedicated to his royal 1 It may be doubted, however, whether even this princely sum compensated the poor artist for the loss of his life caused, it is said, by the strained and unnatural attitude he was forced to paint in. 2 8 SANTA TERESA patron two volumes of his most famous masses. On the death of Don Diego de Mendoza, his ambassador at the Court of Rome and Venice, he bought his librarythe most famous then belonging to any private person in Europe to form that of the Escorial. He even obtained one hundred and thirty volumes prohibited by the Inquisition to place on its shelves, besides taking an active part in Arias Montano's impression of the Polyglot Bible. The crime for which Philip must answer to posterity does not spring from any inherent cruelty of his nature, from diabolical malice, but rather that he placed himself under the scourge and bonds of the Inquisition as completely as he did his nation. Not to his confessors, not to himself, may be attributed those fearful stains on his reign and character still so hotly debated on by historians. Let us rather find in the irresistible, imperative demands of an unexpected current of events the secret of the Inquisition, of Philip's errors and the errors of the nation. The reigns of Ferdinand and Isabella had been ceaselessly occupied in the extermination of the Moor ; the reigns of Charles V. and his son were almost equally directed to exterminate the Christian population of Spain. The Caesar had crushed out the sturdy and manly independence of the race at Villalar ; he had completely subordinated and broken the power of that nobility who had in the past maintained their right to abandon any monarch if he overstepped the limits of his just prerogative or attempted to infringe the liberty of the subject (themselves the subject) ; all this he had done, when up springs an Augustinian friar who, with a few bold words, makes the whole structure of Catholic Christendom totter to its foundations. 1 He before whom all Europe quailed had found his adversary at last. These two men, father and son, stood up in the face of Europe to arrest the march of thought : paladins fighting in a hopeless cause a Quixotic and useless struggle against time and the inevitable. For a moment they nourished the belief that, if baffled and worsted in their contest with Protestantism in Germany and Flanders, they had freed Spain from the contagion. But at what a price ! Blood was poured out like water. The Inquisition faithfully fulfilled her mission in the squares of Valladolid ; the Duke of Alba his in Flanders. Spain roused herself to a prodigious and desperate effort, but in it her strength went out never to return ; and above the ruins 1 Although the Wittenberg theses were published before the execution of the Comuneros, there were still hopes until the Council of Trent, that the abyss between Catholicism and Protestantism might be bridged over and a modus vivendi arrived at. INTRODUCTION 29 under which lay buried her valour, liberties, and prosperity, rose the monstrous catafalque of the Catholic Faith. For a moment at least, under the auspices of a bigot and the thumb-screw of the Inquisitor, the Catholic Faith rallied into a purer and more brilliant flame than she had known for many centuries, or was destined to know again. The religious conscience of the age had never been more pro- foundly stirred. From every religious corporation in the country the war-cry went forth that was meant to give the counter-blast to Protestantism. Spain it was that forced the pope to hold the Council of Trent ; Spanish prelates and friars who in that assembly insisted on the reform of the religious Orders and the clergy. Never had the faithful been more magnificently munificent ; never have the ecclesiastical annals of Spain been rendered illustrious by a larger number of great and good men men of pure and unblemished life, of noble and earnest aspirations. New Orders were founded every day; many of them offering positive and material advantages to the social needs of the period. Thus the Hospitallers of San Juan de Dios were dedicated to the assistance of the sick, especially those afflicted with venereal diseases ; the Escuelas Pias of San Jose de Calasanz to the education of poor children. The practical good that accrued from the introduction of the Basilians and the regular Order of St. Francis of Caracciolo is not so evident. Santa Teresa and her friars were also engaged in the struggle to maintain the unity of Catholic Christendom, and it is the object of this work to show how nobly they maintained it. The brightness of the flame was, alas ! deceptive ; it soon flickered and went out. Underneath, the slow poison was already subtly working that was at no distant date to paralyse the energies of the country which had ruled the fate of Europe, and condemn her to centuries of inanition and stagnation. The vigour of the human intellect can neither be arrested nor repressed with impunity. The interests of a nation cannot be immolated, its conscience forcibly compressed, without exacting a terrible vengeance. The curses of those dead people, burned to death or tortured by the Inquisition for a verbal difference of opinion, alighted on the sons of the fathers to the fourth and fifth generations. In the reign of Philip III. the valiant race, noted above all others for its manly and stalwart qualities and unquenchable spirit of freedom, had sunk into one of sombre and soured fanatics. The effects of the repressive measures then taken, than 30 SANTA TERESA which none were ever imagined more stultifying to the national intelligence, endure to this day. The gigantic shadow of the Inquisition loomed menacing and terrible over every perplexed conscience in the country. The only safeguard from heresy was ignorance. It was better to be ignorant than to be burnt. The stringent embargo placed by the Inquisitors in their exquisite prudence on any book in the vulgar tongue that dared to treat of the mysteries of faith, extended to every other class of literature. Never has the doctrine of those pious bigots who would save the soul at the expense of the body had a fiercer moral 1 They alone (the pious bigots aforesaid) can contend that the Inquisition was the most benevolent and fatherly of institutions, and that a difference of opinion condoned for manacled limbs and burnt bodies that would otherwise have rotted to dust in peace. What, however, humanity shall never pardon her is that, from whatever motive, she laid her iron hand on the national intellect and crippled it for centuries ; that she sucked out all the buoyancy and healthy energies of a race formerly so great and noble. I will not deny that the Spanish theologian carefully read all the fathers and ecclesiastical doctors anterior to 1515; that he was familiar with the schoolmen of the Middle Ages, the Arab and Jewish philosophers, Maimonides, Averroes, Avempace, Tofail ; the philosophers of the Renaissance and Raimundo Llull. I would merely suggest, however, that in like manner a thousand erudite treatises were at the disposal of the ordinary Englishman in Elizabeth's reign: but did he take his daily recreation in reading them ? I will not deny, for to my mind it is abundantly proved, that Spain was ahead of Europe in philosophical thought that she first gave to the world those marvellous germs that Descartes perfected and the English Bacon elaborated. I will not deny that she was great, incomparably great in art and literature ; in independence and robustness of individual character, but I would insist on the fact that these brilliant manifestations did not extend to the vast body of the nation. The books I have spoken of were written for the most part in a so-called learned tongue; or their contents were of so ab- struse and philosophical a character as to make them " caviare to the general." It mattered little except to a few schoolmen their brains addled with fine-spun sophisms on the Summa of Saint Thomas, or, in the words of a writer of that day, " lessons of vain sophistry, that he who knows them learns nothing from, nor does he who knows them not, lose anything INTRODUCTION 31 by his ignorance" whether these books were placed on the Index or not. The Emperor himself meekly bowed the head to the decree of the Inquisition that not only withdrew many books that hitherto had been circulated freely amongst the people, but prevented the issue of others. During the last year of his life he humbly pleaded to be allowed to read a French translation of the Bible. A superb copy that belonged to one of his attendants, Van Male, was ruthlessly consigned to the flames. And, Heaven knows ! there was but little enough education that it should have been discouraged. What there was of it was practically monopolised by the clergy. In Andalucia, for instance notably in Cordoba instruction was so scarce and rare, that the youth of the towns, submerged in vice and idleness, presented no small danger to the public peace. The profound ignorance of the rural population of Spain is almost incredible to one who has not penetrated deeply into the period and into the country life of to-day. The villages and hamlets, by reason of their remoteness and the difficulty of communication rarely visited, were altogether deprived of even the most rudimentary notions of the faith which was being kept alive by autos de ft nA. home and wholesale massacres abroad. There were whole town- ships that had never so much as heard the name of God. " They lived," says a contemporary Spaniard, " like the Arabs of the desert." I have indeed been sometimes inclined to attribute the stalwart independence of the Spanish peasant an independence so marked as to single him out as of a different race from the middle and upper classes, steeped, the one in vulgarity, the other in the vices and effeteness of a superficial civilisation to this very reason. Sometimes a devoted priest, as in the case of Master Daza of Avila, girding up his cassock, trudged into the wild plains or mountain fastnesses to baptize, and teach the Catechism ; but such examples were rare. Fancy then the lurid flames of the Inquisition against such a background ! But as every age has its Galileo, its Giordano Bruno, so the old independent spirit showed itself even amongst the schoolmen and the friars ; and they who gave expression to it were the greatest of the respective Orders they belonged to, and have flung upon them the greatness of their individual fame. Fray Luis de Leon and Malon de Chaide, both Augustinians, elected themselves the champions of the rights and liberties of the Spanish tongue that tongue which, owing to the Inquisition, was fast becoming obsolete as a literary medium. In words of ringing eloquence, Fray Luis de Leon 32 SANTA TERESA vindicated it from the stigma of being unfit and unworthy for the conveyance of religious thought ; and Malon de Chaide expressed the patriotic hope, which he himself converted into a reality by his Magdalena, composed by him in the vulgar tongue, that " a language so rich and sonorous as the Spanish should soon be dispersed as widely as the banners of Spain, which stretched from one pole to the other ; and that the glory of the nations should quail before that of Spain even on this point as they had quailed before her arms." It is with a feeling of relief obeying the same sentiment that drove our ancestors to seek, in the mystic tranquillity of the cloister, balm and consolation for their troubled conscience that, sickened by violence and repression, I turn to the monasteries. Herein is rest and peace, and here alone did life find its highest and noblest expression. Religion was then no mere abstraction, no mere metaphysical juggling with words, but moulded and controlled every manifestation, every develop- ment, of energy and thought. No relegation of it to a secondary place as is the case to-day. It was a profound national senti- ment. The principal watchwords of the Armada laid down for each day in the week were Jesus, The Holy Ghost, The Holy Trinity, and Our Lady. To these minds profoundly positive, their God was a concrete and tangible reality ; not an emana- tion, a dimly-conceived power lost in the regions of space, as he has become to the Neo-Christians of this century. A cloud, slight and filmy, that might be riven asunder any moment, alone separated him from the vision of men. In every extraordinary event his finger was distinctly visible. The popular conscience was full of a dishevelled tangle of fantastic beliefs : sometimes tender and dreamy as a ray of moonshine, at others horrible with all the gloomy terrors of hell. Loyola, like a preux chevalier, hangs up his sword and lance before Our Lady of Montserrate. She it is who forms the one spot of benignant beauty in their lives this type of womanhood so sweet, so fair, so powerful. As the worshipper kneels before some life-size figure of Christ, fraught with that strange appearance of life that the fingers of the mediaeval sculptor of Spain alone seem to have possessed the power of transmitting, the divine lips open and give vent to words of warning or of ineffable sweetness and consolation. The devil appears in bodily shape to torment and lure souls to their destruction : not the emasculated phantom of evil evolved by modern conscience ; nor the sombre, melancholy angel of Milton, ruined by the very sublimity of pride ; still less the sardonic courtier-devil of Faust ; but a hairy monster with claws and forked tongue and (to a Spaniard) with the suspicion INTRODUCTION 33 of a turban over his horns, his jabbering mouth vomiting flames, and his eyes blazing like coals of fire. The soldier's armour concealed the asceticism of the monk ; the authority and dominion that animated and ruled the com- manders and armies of Spain were as often as not concealed under the folds of the habit of a monk. There was no transition between the battlefield and the cloister. In the heat and dust of the /ray there is neither time nor room for thought ; but when the lance was hung upon the wall, and his armour began to get rusty, the soldier's mind, recoiling on itself, shrinking back appalled before the problems of the future, seeks a refuge from the despair and hopelessness of the present in asceticism and the monastery. It is hard to figure to oneself the holocaust of human lives and hopes and ambitions represented by one of these dim old convents, lost in the far-away recesses of Castille and La Mancha. All life was tinctured with the same spirit. The existence of the great nobles in their vast palaces, regulated by a severe ceremonial, was in itself almost monastic. The spirit that impelled the Caesar himself to die in the lovely solitudes of Yuste, and his son l to spend the latter years of his life a frigid recluse in the great pile of the Escorial, was that of the entire nation. Take Teresa's own family alone. Her father died in the odour of sanctity : towards the close of his life his visits to her in the Convent of the Encarnacion became shorter and less frequent, owing to the increasing claims of prayer and con- templation on his time. Two of her uncles became friars one towards the end of his life. Her brother Lorenzo, returning rich and successful from his treasurership of Quito to his native town, is haunted by the desire to leave a world which in spite of his riches he had found so empty, and spend the remainder of his days in the shadow of the cloister. His life, such as it is in the world, is that of an ascetic : he wears a hair shirt next his skin. Helped and sustained by his sister's guiding hand, controlled by her strong good sense and recognition of the physical claims of the body, he climbs the mystic steps of prayer. Monasticism was not then the anachronism it has since become. It was the natural and spontaneous outburst of society ; nay, the highest and most beneficent model of it. It kept alive the brotherhood of men ; it interposed a constant barrier between the oppression of the monarch and the nobles on the one side, and the people on the other. If they owned an 1 Philip n. was buried in the habit of a Franciscan friar ; a common wooden cross tied round his neck with a bit of rope. 3 34 SANTA TERESA altogether disproportionate share of power and wealth they wielded the power wisely and well ; the wealth was generously distributed. . There is no recorded instance of the great religious corpora- tions the clergy and the monasteries, having ever been accused of aggression on, or exaction from, the vassals who farmed their vast possessions. In this one respect at least, and let us for ever honour them for it, they acted up to the spirit of Jesus. in Teresa's time we note the first appearance of that iconoclastic movement, so forcibly brought to a head by the State three centuries later, we must not forget that it was entirely uncon- nected with any question of morals or manners; that the movement was not a popular one ; that it was entirely contrary to the wishes of the people, to whom the monasteries were an unmixed blessing. The " desamortizacion " of the convents of Spain as well as the similar movement in Henry VIII. s time in England arose entirely from the middle classes, and in both cases were mainly fostered by those who hoped to, and in .many cases actually did, enrich themselves with their spoils. If Charles V. and Philip took advantage of a pontifical Brief to sell the donations made by their predecessors to the churches and monasteries, it was a step forced on them by hard necessity- the bankruptcy of the country, and (as they said) to make war in the interests of agitated Christendom. Even so, the Bene- dictines and the Bernardines valued the untold riches of their sacristies at far more than the interests of Christendom and before their stout resistance Charles was forced to desist. Nevertheless, both father and son left the remonstrances of the Cortes that some measure should be placed to the acquiring of landed property by the clergy and religious orders unheeded. Charles answered them not at all as was his wont ; from Philip (he having previously strengthened his conscience by the advice of capable theologians such as Cano) they drew the laconic reply T "To this I say it is not expedient to make any has been calculated that in Charles v.'s reign quite two- thirds of the lands of Spain were owned by the monks and clerev They had acquired, and were still acquiring, immense tracts 'of territory. The monks of the great Estremenan monastery of Guadalupe, for instance, could journey to the frontiers of Portugal without stepping beyond the limits of thei: vast domains. ... Some idea may be formed of the power and riches still possessed by the great monasteries, and the splendour of their ceremonial-I say still, because the reigns of Charles V. and INTRODUCTION 35 Philip II., paradoxical as it may appear, inaugurated a new era in the monastic life no longer that of their predecessors from the celebrated Convent of Las Huelgas of Burgos. I take an extreme but by no means an unusual or unparalleled instance of temporal and spiritual power. Accompany me then in imagination to the mouldering pile which lies amidst the water-meadows, but a stone's throw from Burgos. In its dreamlike silence, amongst its ruined tombs and echoing courts, let us reconstruct this decayed life of an earlier age, as it was even in Teresa's time. Let it once more rise before our eyes solid, beautiful, homogeneous as we retrace the links, so slight, so firm, and so continuous, which bind our life to that of our forefathers. Once more through the silent cloisters flow the current and multiple forces of human life : the trailing of nuns' habits as they sweep through the rich corridors. Men-at-arms and dependants fill the outside courts with anima- tion and life ; the poor throng round the gates, waiting for their evening dole ; as evening steals over Burgos, and the last gleam of the setting sun flushes its lace-work spire, pilgrims and travellers find food and shelter for the night in its hospitable guest-house. For there is no prouder and more stately monastery in all Spain than this. The nuns are all daughters of the nobility, each is served by her own waiting-woman. The perpetual Abbess of Las Huelgas exercises civil and criminal jurisdiction over sixty towns and villages. No one from the King downwards can muster or bring into the field so many vassals. Her spiritual jurisdiction is supreme, exclusive, almost episcopal, nullius dioecesis. She can convoke synods and make synodical constitutions and laws, binding not only on her ecclesiastical but her secular subjects. The abbesses of seven- teen affiliated convents attend the great and solemn chapter held every year on St. Martin's Day, directly after the singing of Prime in Santa Maria de las Huelgas. On those occasions when the Abbess of Las Huelgas goes forth in solemn state to assist at the election of an abbess in the convents subject to her authority, surrounded by nuns and servants, her journey is little less than a royal progress. The new abbess is required to come to Santa Maria de las Huelgas, to make her solemn oath of obedience. Through this closed door, open only to the feet of kings, have passed into the church a strange phantom procession of kings and queens, filling the nave with the clang of armour, the sweeping of brocaded robes over the pavement. How the bells clashed out in the tower above in peals of deafening mirth and triumph as through serried lines of prelates and 3 6 SANTA TERESA "ricos hombres"they crossed the threshold of Las Huelgas! TWmt its altar to-day shorn of its ancient splendour and bathed n a penumbra^ sadness, have they knelt for knight- hood and coronation; here on the eve of knighthood have they watched their armour gleaming on the altar through the ^ hours of the night; here the miraculous figure of Santiago raised his arm and dubbed San Fernando knight ; and hfre trough these same gates, met by the bent and shadov^ figures of weeping nuns, lying on cloth of gold and covereYwith royal mantles and insignia, have they returned for the 1st time -these kings and founders -to lay their bones in the shrine they had enriched and beautified in life. As one reads the long list of heritages, towns, villages, forests vineyards, oliveyards, grazing grounds, sovereign pr v Lies rights and immunities conferred on the Abbey of La Huelg"? by Alfonso VIIL, one turns sadly to survey the relics of this unlimited power, this abbatial grandeur. Powerts were the last words of the founder to avert decay and ruin, the spoliations of his successors the march of tim. These last comminatory words run thus: And it any one of our blood or otherwise, shall dare to break or dimmish in anything this our letter of donation and privilege, let him rin upon himself the wrath of God^ Almighty, and be nreig uyui traitor to infernal pains; and Monastery the harm he shall have done. And I, Alfonso, reignTngTn Castille and Toledo, confirm and authonse this fetter which I ordered to be made, with my own hand Powerless indeed the seal of a dead man s hand ! For centuTes S abbesses of Las Huelgas preserved their proteges and "unities unshorn. With the advent o f the house of exhausting wars; some of its towns were sold The decree of the Council of Trent directed a still severer blow to its un- other order, had enjoyed a certain amount of INTRODUCTION 37 freedom, and within certain restrictions could come and go as they liked, were strictly confined to the convent cloister. But still, in spite of the sources of its power being thus undermined, it conserved much of its ancient splendour. Its nuns were chosen from the noblest families of Spain. A township of labourers and dependants clustered around the gray buildings of the monastery. The church, to-day so sad and silent, was full of the countless and indefinable indications of habitation and life : hushed footsteps died away in distant aisles ; figures knelt before the shrines ; from the dim altars requiem masses ascended day and night for the souls of the kings and queens who slept before them. Twenty-one chaplains celebrated the services no less solemn and stately than those of a cathedral. If not the substance, Las Huelgas still conserved the shadow of its ancient preroga- tives and wealth. And now! the bell from the stork-haunted tower calls together a few poor old nuns, whose quavering voices ring brokenly through the vastness of the shadowy choir. They wonder in terror if it will be granted to them to end their days in the tranquil asylum of their youth, whilst over the aisles, the tomb of life and hope so deep the spirit of decay and deso- lation a tattered banner recalls Castille's most splendid victory over the Mussulman host at Las Navas. Against the gloomy background I have depicted, lit up by the lurid flames of the Inquisition, the virtues and learning of some few of the religious orders and the clergy the one pleasing and refreshing feature, there were only two means of escape possible for the force and concentrated energy of the Spanish character. In the former century it had found an efficient outlet in the long and fluctuating struggles with the Moors, ended only with their expulsion from their last stronghold in Spain. Henceforth it was inexorably doomed, either to blossom forth into the most exaggerated fanaticism or to sink into utter lethargy. The greater part of the nation found a refuge in ignorance and superstition ; religious impostors swarmed and gained ready credence. Minds of a finer fibre were led to seek safety in an inner world where the sounds of life grew dim and faded away ; where the actual world around them with its torturing realities could not enter. It is easy to see how, when positive dogma was hedged about with such danger, and an unguarded phrase or the slightest want of clearness in its exposition exposed a man to imprisonment and the stake (as in the case of Carranza, Archbishop of Toledo, who had otherwise proved his orthodoxy by a long life spent in the extirpation of heresy), a tendency was evolved towards what 38 SANTA TERESA may be called the emotional part of religion, that part of it farthest removed from dogma the testimony and the aspira- tions of the individual conscience. The great religious revolution in northern Europe, the revival of philosophy in Italy, may be said to have had their counterpart in Spain in the simultaneous development of a group of mystics, who gave original and forcible expression to a doctrine which, anterior to Christianity, has never ceased to reassert itself at varying intervals in the history of human thought The German mysticism of the fourteenth century, the Spanish mysticism of the sixteenth, was only the resur- rection in the human conscience of a doctrine coeval with thought itself. It is the nihilism of the Buddhists ; the quietism of the Gnostics; the illumination of the Neoplatonists. It is the eternal war of idealism as against the positivism of exist- ence ; a bold attempt to pierce the envelope of matter, which the mystics join hands with the philosophers in declaring a shadow, a figment, a dream, whereas the only truth, the only reality, lies in that which we can neither touch, nor see, nor hear in what remains an eternal and impenetrable mystery; the spiritual life of the individual conscience, chained to the primordial idea, governing an assemblage of fallacious appear- ances. The idea which precedes dogma, which remains long after the dogma of a sect shall serve for any other purpose than an extinct historical curiosity, is the same for mystics of all ages. As a matter of fact, the dogma of their several creeds shrinks into utter insignificance, and is only useful as a means of classification. In this light the question, still so eagerly dis- cussed by critics with such varying results, sinks altogether into a secondary place. Whether or not, and to what extent, Spanish mysticism was influenced by the German, is an inquiry that presents but little interest from the moment we view them both as merely manifestations of one and the same force. Since that force is the same for mystics of all nations and all ages, the difference is merely formal and superficial. The peculiar features of Spanish mysticism had their origin in the special conditions to which it owed its birth, to the character and tendencies of the race, rather than any difference in the fundamental idea underlying it. These features I shall now endeavour briefly to indicate. In Teresa's case, for instance, her fervent genius and enthusiastic and passionate temperament chafed at the limits of a narrow dogma which her mind far outstripped, whilst the eminently practical part of her nature made her view with extreme impatience the routine and observance of a cloister INTRODUCTION 39 life already in full decadence, and devoid of all transcendental meaning. She may or may not have read Eckart, Tauler, Suso, Ruysbroech, translations of whose works were freely circulated throughout Spain in the beginning of the century until the eulogies bestowed upon them by Luther made them suspicious to the Inquisition. She may or may not have imbibed some tincture of German mysticism in Dionysius the Carthusian, who repro- duced the doctrines of Eckart, and whose works, according to the testimony of Sor Francisca de Jesus, 1 together with the Morals of St. Gregory and the Epistles of St. Jerome, were her favourite books. Besides these she was familiar with the writings of Fray Luis de Granada ; The Art of Serving God, and the Contemptus Mundi. She need not then have gone so far afield to obtain an acquaintance with doctrines which were no more indigenous to Germany than to Spain, although in the latter country they did not attain their full expression until a century later. The book above all others responsible for her initiation into the strange psychological life of mysticism was the Third Alphabet of Fray Francisco de Osuna a Spanish Franciscan friar who wrote in the early part of the century. According to her own statement this work had a most mo- mentous influence on her spiritual development. Although she never quotes him directly, it is easy to one familiar with the writings of both master and disciple to trace many points of intimate resemblance, which prove how deeply she was indebted to the obscure Franciscan mystic. Whatever the most accredited opinion amongst Spanish critics, I can find no sign of German influence in the book, which now takes its place amongst the curiosities of literature. The analogy between Osuna's mysticism and that of Eckart and his school, does not extend farther than that purely accidental one between writers who, widely separated from each other by all other conditions, are alike affected by the vague ideas floating as it were in the air of the period they live in. Strewn thickly with citations from the Fathers, whose names he quotes in every instance, his body of practical mysticism is compiled from many sources. We come across traces of the Platonism that formed the groundwork of the speculations of the Greek Fathers Dionysius the pseudo- Areopagite, St. Gregory of Nyssa, Clement, and Origen. How far he was tinctured with the ideas of the Alexandrian school may be judged from the following passage, inspired in the J That is if she did not refer to the "Life of Christ" by Ludolf of Saxony, generally known in Spain as the Cartujano, when the above hypothesis must fall to the ground. 40 SANTA TERESA spirit of pure Platonism : " Habituate thyself to seek the reasons and causes which thou shalt find to make creatures lovable, in the love of God. Considering these reasons apart from the creature, and placing and contemplating them in God alone : where thou shalt find them more perfectly united ; for from him, as from a fount, emanated the causes which inspire love, remaining in him to a high degree of perfection." He may have read the German mystics (if he had, why does he not quote them ?), but their influence (and I can find none) is neither palpable nor direct. His favourite authors, after the Fathers, and those he quotes most frequently, are St. Bona- ventura, Gerson, and Richard of Saint Victor. If Teresa had any acquaintance with Eckart's doctrines at all, it was as they came down strained through the medium of Dionysius the Carthusian, who reproduced them. It may be as well to investigate what those mystic doctrines were, which bear such a singular resemblance to those of Schopenhauer. Such an inquiry may assist us materially in obtaining a term of comparison by which to arrive at a better knowledge of that famous group of mystics whose chief exponents are Teresa and San Juan de la Cruz. Between Eckart's mysticism and Teresa's there is a wide chasm. Eckart is not only an idealist but a profound and original thinker one of the greatest and most profound thinkers that mediaevalism has produced. For him no language is metaphysical enough to describe what is almost unthinkable. The doctrines of the Platonists and Neoplatonists of Alexandria blossom into renewed vigour in the subtle and hardy Pan- theism of this obscure German mystic who preaches the unity of God and the creature in the consciousness. True life, asserts Eckart, begins with the abolition of the individual, the extinction of humanity. The intelligence can find no rest until she has penetrated into the sanctuary whence goodness and wisdom emanate, and seized them at their source, before they have received a name. She must arrive at the Supreme Principle in that hushed solitude of the Divinity, ere as yet there is neither Father, nor Son, nor Holy Ghost. By an invincible logic, every link in the chain unbroken, he arrives at the doctrine which identifies man and the Creator, and consequently at a complete quietism : " If God desires me to sin, I should not wish not to sin." In one thing, whatever their minor differences, his disciples, Tauler, Suso, and Ruysbroech, all agree with this bold and original thinker, who towered head and shoulders immeasurably above them : that ignorance of all created things, and negation, are the only ways to arrive at a INTRODUCTION 41 knowledge of God. We must die to ourselves, and lose sight of our own individuality, before we can attain to a consciousness of the divine Being. They inculcate the same quietism, the same state of passive receptivity : " Man must be silent before he can hear the divine Voice." By different ways, whether arrived at by the speculative force of a rigorous logic, as Eckart, when he addresses himself exclusively to the intelligence, or from an intimate conviction, or an effort of love which seeks its supreme end, as in Suso, the conclusion arrived at is the same: the silencing of all activity and consciousness ; the absorption and annihilation of humanity in the bosom of the Divinity. Eckart may be said to have risen above all religion and dogma into the primordial region of thought where the Trinity and the Incarnation of the Son of God exist only in essence ; above the regions of humanity, to where the Father, the Son, and the Spirit are lost in the abyss of Divinity, which has nothing in common with life, intelligence, virtue, love. To describe mysteries which are almost impalpable to thought itself, he found no abstraction in the language of theology pure enough to speak of God, his operations, the felicity of the soul hidden in the bosom of the Divinity. Indeed it may be doubted whether the whole groundwork of Schopenhauer's philosophy is not to be found in Eckart's daring assertion, " that without man, God can neither engender nor exist." " Let," says the philosopher and the phrase is but the same thought amplified " man's consciousness disappear, and the world will disappear for him at the same moment." The peculiar note of mysticism is that, flying from the cold abstractions of theology, it is based on the individual experience of its votaries (this personal note accentuating itself more strongly in Teresa than perhaps any of the mystics of her period, if we except her great disciple, San Juan de la Cruz), who aspire by love alone without any effort of the imagina- tion, the intelligence soaring beyond all that can be imagined to reach God, the final goal of love. Then takes place what transcends all language to explain the transformation of the entire soul in God : " So abundantly does she taste his sweet- ness, that she is lulled to sleep as in a wine cell. . . . She is silent, all her desires are satisfied, desiring nothing more : rather is she asleep to herself, and clothed with radiance like another Moses after he had entered into the cloud above the Mount." This transformation of the soul into God ; this flight of the soul on the wings of love until she is absorbed, annihilated, and loses all consciousness in the Divinity; this suspension of corporeal and exterior sense ; this hushed silence, in which the 4 2 SANTA TERESA celestial Father descends into the mystic chamber of the spouse, who apprehends, she knows not how, an infused and ineffable science this then is mysticism, the Art of Love, Union, Mystic Theology, Profundity, Abstraction, Illumination of the Theologians, who have felt the powerlessness of any defini- tion to declare what, after all, must remain indefinable, and transcends the capability of any language to shadow forth. Teresa is above all a woman ; unimaginative, but at the same time possessed of the creative and visionary faculty in a superlative degree. The bent of her mind is to clothe what to Eckart is pure and incorporeal essence with the concrete attributes of humanity. She may be said to materialise the ideal, to give it form and substance, before it exists for her intellectually ; whereas Eckart's tendencies are in the contrary direction. Teresa is mentally incapable of thinking an abstrac- tion. Yet a delicate psychological insight, an intuitive instinct aided by the passionate enthusiasm of a nature deflected un- naturally upon itself, lead to the same results as those attained by Eckart. Thanks to this very limitation of her thought, and to the positive tendency of her mind which led her to a com- plete anthropomorphism, she was unable to foresee the ultimate consequences to which the central idea of mysticism inevitably leads. That Mysticism is but a form of Pantheism has perhaps been most keenly apprehended by those who have most hotly defended her orthodoxy. San Juan de la Cruz, whose penetra- tion of intellect was far superior to hers, sharpened by a know- ledge of scholastic philosophy of which he had been in his youth an ardent student, was more alive to the nature of the abyss he skirted, and cleverly avoided it by drawing a fine and subtle distinction between what he termed " transformation ^by ^partici- pation of union " and " substantial or essential union." This he illustrated by an allegory, in which he compared the soul to a window, penetrated and transformed by a ray of light in such^a way that both light and window seem inseparable ; whereas, in reality, however great the similarity between the window and the ray, the nature of the one is distinct from that of the other, so that the window can only be said to be the ray or the light by participation. Thus the soul is God by participation, whilst the substance of both remains distinct. This able attempt to solve an insuperable difficulty, which shows how clearly the mystics foresaw and safeguarded against the dangers of their position, is rather a solution in words than reality. Mysticism consists then in the reconciliation of Pantheism with Christianity. Christianity gained unspeakably by the interfusion, whilst philosophy lost. INTRODUCTION 43 The mysticism of a race of profound thinkers like the Germans led them to the negation of any historic dogma whatsoever. The endeavour of the Spaniard, quaking under the menacing shadow of the Inquisition and shrinking appalled from the vastness of the speculations before him, was to make it subservient to dogma and palatable to the Inquisition. Thus we shall see how a great thought which, in minds not crippled by repression, might have led to the mental emancipation of Spain, was destined to sterility, and its brief apogee of glory over, deprived of all its significance and transcendentalism, became an instrument in the hands of the most degraded section of the nation. In what consists the originality, the characteristic note of Teresa's mysticism ? As a matter of fact she has added nothing to the practical body of mystical theology as set forth in Fray Francisco's Treatise on Prayer, her first guide into the arcana of the contemplative and ecstatic life. Her mysticism was no spontaneous product of individual genius. She frayed no new path ; she but followed in the wake of others. Her own experiences in this strange world of subjective introspection were already well known to all who had dipped into the science which had for its title Mystical Theology. If she philosophised, it was unconsciously to herself. I doubt whether she had more than heard of Plato, whose doctrines came filtered down to her through the obscure and not wholly trustworthy medium of the early Fathers ; but that she could distinguish Platonism from the theological disquisitions in which they were embedded is doubtful. She was profoundly ignorant of the first terms of philosophy, as she herself confesses : " Nor do I understand what the mind is, or how it differs from the soul or the spirit. It all appears one to me." Nevertheless, suppress her writings, and the loss to mysticism is greater than if you suppressed a great thinker like Eckart. It is that she brought to the common store what it had never possessed before in such a marked or strange degree, the profound personal note of her own experiences. Where others have but theorised she has ventured to tread perhaps at the risk of the general good sense of humanity ; and boldly placed on record the researches she at times believed she made, into regions but vaguely hinted at by her predecessors. Her very impotence as a thinker contributes to the almost painful interest aroused by the history of her struggles, in the mind of even the most careless reader. Although, however, it is usual to consider Teresa chiefly as a mystic, and certainly her visions, experiences, etc., cannot be classed under any other term than the general and vague 44 SANTA TERESA one of mysticism, yet she is not a mystic, but an ascetic. ^It is not her visions, which are often gross and material, devoid of any glorifying halo of poetic imagination, that make her remarkable. Nor is it the manner in which she has described them ; although as she records these emotions, ecstasies, rapts, passionate delights, these agonising, yet delicious pains, these moments of darkness, aridness, and despair, her words at times resembling the erotic language of human passion, vibrate through the senses, at others, ascend to heights of serenity and peace. No! it is in the constant attempt of her positive practical intellect to reconcile these things with common sense, to chain them down in graphic and homely phrase, so as to make them comprehensible to others, that she shows her peculiar genius. In this impossible attempt, like sparks from the steel, she strikes out all manner of delicate comparisons ; and following the inspiration of a genius as rare and uncontrollable in its way as that of a Cervantes or a Shakespeare, displays a wonderful gift of analysis, unerring, subtle, and even at ^times convincing. By an instinct, as fine as it is vigorous, this un- lettered Castilian nun reveals a long train of psychological emotions, and touches, without knowing it, the heights and profundities of philosophic thought. As it is impossible to live long with the shadowy form of some loved person from whom death or some accident of life separates us, remitting all our actions to his decision, and making him the invisible companion and confidant of our daily life, without becoming the victim of illusion an illusion so strong that the tones of his voice ring in our ears and vibrate through our brain, and we feel the imperceptible effluvia of his presence so Teresa lived with Christ. In her first faltering steps in mysticism, whilst still a girl of twenty, frustrated at first by the torpor of her imagination which refused its aid, her constant endeavour was to bring within herself the humanity of Christ. All the concentrated tenderness and passion of her nature, unnaturally deflected from human objects, found here a legitimate outlet. Christ with his shadowy face and tender eyes, suffering and abnegation stamped on his pallid brow and written on his mouth, Christ as he is repre- sented in the wonderful painting which is still amongst the treasures of the Encarnacion,and which tradition affirms to have been Teresa's becomes the object of and returns her passionate devotion. She cannot sleep at night without following her Spouse into the Garden of Gethsemane, there to wipe off the drops of sweat which stream from his jaded brow. His smile thrills her with delight. She would fain note the shape and INTRODUCTION 45 colour of his eyes, but they evade her scrutiny. Her life is spent in the closest communion with this Form, who takes shape and colour in the depths of her being: at his feet she crouches in moments of doubt and difficulty ; she nestles close to him and embraces his knees with passionate adoration. In the delirious ecstasy of union, a subtle mixture of agonising pain and keen delight, she loses consciousness, her body stiffens and becomes rigid as a corpse. This world of illusions and hallucinations that she herself forged in the dim and mysterious regions of her inner consciousness imposed themselves at length upon the receptive part of her nature with all the startling force of reality. That she herself discerned this, that she was never entirely satisfied as to whether she was not deceiving herself, is evident to any one who has read her Life with an unbiassed mind. Her doubts as to whether these things were of divine or diabolical origin, tormented her in life, and were only stilled as she was nearing the grave. Nevertheless it cannot be too strongly insisted on that she was herself the deluded, never the deluder. Her visions and ecstasies underwent a vigorous and searching examination by the most capable and learned men of Spain, bred like sleuth-hounds to hunt out the slightest trace of heresy or heterodoxy men who regarded mysticism with suspicious terror and distrust, as being closely allied to all the aberrations of Illuminism and Quietism. Indeed to a mind untrained to deal with philosophical subtleties, the line between Illuminism and Mysticism is so thin as not to be perceptible. These men brought to the task, as in the case of Banes, the Dominican theologian and scholar, the highest theological attainments ; in the case of Medina, the rigid old catedratico of Salamanca, a strong, instinctive prejudice against the Saint and all her ways. Widely opposed in thought and sentiment to Juan de Avila, the Illuminated Apostle of Andalucia, lost in wonderment and admiration, convinced by her genuine sincerity, they could but sanction that which baffled and surpassed their understanding, but in which they felt the ring of truth. If they were hallucinations which so sustained and strengthened her, and gave her the second sight of the ancient prophets, bred from the fixity of purpose, the intimate convic- tion of the greatness of her mission, if the divine locutions were moulded by her own desires, arriving as they did at the most propitious moment, it but proves her to have been of the race of giants who have founded religions and impressed their personality most strongly on the world. This very force of self-concentration which raises up shadows of beings and things 46 SANTA TERESA imperceptible to others, this force of projection in which the mind flings itself on the blank surface of the minds of others, is no other than the gift of seeing the vision of the poets. The following lines seem to me peculiarly applicable to what Teresa calls her Divine Locutions : Is it a voice, or nothing answers me? I hear a sound so fine there's nothing lives 'Twixt it and silence. Such a slender one I've heard when I have talk'd with her in fancy ! A phantom sound ! If they were, as some vulgar and ignorant minds, incapable of appreciating the beauty of her life or the greatness and majesty of her soul, have contended, the effects of strange and mysterious diseases, a mixture of hysteria and melancholy, a disorganisation of the sexual faculties, catalepsy, insomnia, and the like, then Saint Thomas Aquinas, San Pedro de Alcantara, Juan de Avila, San Juan de la Cruz, and a cloud of others have been afflicted with the same maladies, if they are to be diagnosed by ecstasies, rapts, and visions. Besides her mysticism there is another aspect of Teresa's life full of interest, which has never yet been sufficiently taken into consideration her character as a religious reformer. Two years after her birth Luther had published his famous Ninety- seven Propositions against the sale of indulgences. She had been a spectator of the gradual growth of the heresy, and seen it overspread the whole north of Europe. Its futile attempts to take root on Spanish soil were effectually counteracted by the terrible autos de ft of 1559 and 1560 in Valladolid and Seville, and the severe repressive policy of the Inquisition. Various expressions in her writings show how indelibly these scenes had burnt themselves into her mind. A few ardent minds discerning, however dimly, the causes which had ended so fatally to a union consecrated by centuries, set to work to find a remedy. A little band of revolutionaries arose in the bosom of the Church itself, and, keenly alive to the growing decadence of the religious spirit, realised that Lutheranism was but the product of an inevitable reaction against the abuses of an effete and materialised institution. They cherished the vain dream that if they could but vitalise time-worn ceremonies and beliefs with the magnetism of their own lofty idealism, Catholicism might not only maintain her ground against her enemies, but gain what she had lost, and once more draw them within the fold. Amongst them were Teresa and Loyola. The echo of these "miserable heresies," which reached the uplands of Castille, drove Teresa INTRODUCTION 47 to combat them by the only weapon in a nun's armoury prayer. For this purpose she travelled over thousands of miles of Spanish soil, founding convent after convent, her arsenals of defence against the enemy. For this purpose Loyola formed his project of a Company of Jesus, a serried phalanx destined to fight in defence of the papacy against the attacks of heresy. The object of both was the same, although Teresa's was perhaps the most transcendental. The limitations imposed on her by her sex, against which she never ceased to chafe, did not permit her to enter the lists as a champion of the faith. In spite of this, or, to speak more properly, on account of this, her work is perhaps greater than that accomplished by her great con- temporary ; for she infused into the dead bones of religious dogma and routine a loftier conception of individual duty than it had known for many centuries. Teresa's action was not undertaken merely at the dictates of her own vague aspirations towards a higher spirituality, but was the result of her own personal experience ; she had painfully explored all the wounds which festered in the great religious corporations of her day. If the great monastic orders were an unmixed benefit to the poor and that they were so to the dependants and labourers who lived within the shadow of their gates none shall deny they no longer responded to the spirit of their founders. Their interior discipline left much to be desired. We have an instance of how thoroughly secularised they had become in the case of a convent of Cordova, where the nuns divested themselves of their habits to take part in a comedy, which they acted before a large assemblage of gentlemen and ladies of the town, the convent church being thronged to witness the spectacle. Nay, more, to the purists, the special attention bestowed on scholarship and literature by several of the orders, might seem a perversion of their original purpose. Thus the Augustinians could lay claim not only to saints like the venerable Alonso de Orozco, but to writers like Malon de Chaide, the celebrated author of the Magdalena, and Fray Luis de Leon, the greatest lyric poet Spain has ever possessed, whose profound acquaintance with the Oriental languages made him one of the foremost expounders of the sacred texts, and odious to the Inquisition. Besides the secularisation of the orders, Teresa constantly speaks of the immorality and ignorance of the clergy. Teresa on the one side was but the exponent of the national disgust at the sleek, stall-fed friars, who were fast becoming so much useless lumber, and on the other of the aspirations of a people roused to a positive frenzy of excitement by their self-imposed mission of 48 SANTA TERESA suppressing heresy. It was Teresa and her friars ; the Jesuits and Dominicans, who, throwing themselves into the breach, solved the question of the religious unity of Spain. Fired with all the strange ardour of an older and sterner world, these men suddenly burst on the religious horizon of the age, at the very moment when it most demanded them. Their unfamiliar garb, their bare feet, the unbroken silence in which they lived, their preference for the wildest and remotest spots, the stern asceticism and unobtrusive heroism of their lives, were all calculated to make a profound impression on their contemporaries. The heroic period of the Order of Discalced Carmelites covers a few brief years, for it may be considered to have ended when the masons of Alba dropped the last shovelful of earth on its foundress's coffin ; but during it the Descalzos did for a moment resuscitate the faded traditions of Mount Carmel, and the spirit of the founders blazed forth once more with a glow so bright as to electrify all Spain, and to startle it into a burst of spontaneous and unparalleled enthusiasm. The history of all the primitive Carmelite foundations is the same. A few cowled brothers suddenly appeared in some lonely retreat far from the dwellings of men, where piety had reared some shrine or hermitage, to record a vow or in token of its gratitude. They felled the pines and oaks in the wood and constructed some rude shelter from the weather. Their days were spent in labour and their nights in prayer. The sound of their axes, spades, and mattocks rang through the sunlit solitudes all day long. What they found primeval wilderness they transformed, by dint of ceaseless toil, into a blossoming garden ; and vineyards and pleasant orchards rose where before there had been only rough brushwood and tangled thicket. Their privations were extreme. They lived on the herbs culled from the hillside, their life a constant duel between the flesh and the spirit ; and the spirit conquered. They flitted about in unbroken silence, their eyes fixed on the ground. Physical contentment was unknown to them. Their meagre habits concealed strange and hideous instruments of torture. At the weekly discipline their faces were splashed with the blood which spouted from under the scourge. The slightest impulse, the feeblest assertion of the will or the individuality, were roughly rooted out, and reason was as dead as the will. A novice on his deathbed asks for leave to lift his eyes on high, before they close for ever. Another forgets the use of language. There may be some exaggeration in the chronicler's account no doubt there is but it must be remembered that he is treating of the heroic period of the Carmelites' existence, at a time when this fine INTRODUCTION 49 fervour, this ardent enthusiasm which had inspired the lives of these primitive monks and illumined all Spain with its glow, was already on the wane, and had begun to burn low and dim. But enough remains to show that underneath lay a stern sub- stratum of stubborn fact ; for these weird monks, with faces like pallid ivory, and fleshless hands, whose ecstatic eyes, lost in the contemplation of some other world, look down upon us to-day from the faded canvases of Zurbaran and Ribera, were not the fantastic dreams of a painter's brain a Spanish painter never dreamt : he saw, but a living reality of the age. Their eyes shut to earth so that they might the better open them to heaven, the Descalzos boldly and fearlessly trod the path so many saints and martyrs trod before them. In the consciousness of their faithful discharge of duty, since religion created both, and made the latter limitless, they struggled up to those regions of serenity, where the sounds of life grow hushed and dim, and all space is filled with the pervading presence of the Divinity. Not without reason has San Juan de la Cruz been placed on the altars of the Church. He is the noblest and most elevated type of this history of self-sacrifice. Behind him cluster a serried band of friars, whose obscure names no chronicle has preserved men who entered the Order as unperceived as death removed them from it, but who in the shadow of the cloister kept alive its real vitality and glory, and were truer repre- sentatives of it than those who at its head intrigued and schemed and lied for its advancement. Let us not forget the unnoted struggles of the countless units in whom the force of the movement lies ; and that the strength of the army lies in the soldier who bears the brunt and toil of the battle, and not in the general, all tinsel and glittering uniform, who leads them on. It may be said that it was but a form of egoism, a profitless expenditure of human effort in pursuit of an illusory shadow ; it may be asked what good it did to humanity, or bequeathed to it after their death, that these friars the last sporadic product of medievalism should live on herbs and water, and bare their shoulders to the scourge? What absolute benefit came of their prayers, their mortifications, their deadly struggles with the demon (the only one that exists) of self? The thing that is divine to-day becomes the laughter of to-morrow ; the laughter of to-day becomes divine to-morrow. Who knows with what strange taint of opprobrium our money- getting age shall go down to a later one ? which shall perhaps ask the same question of the world-embracing commerce of the nineteenth century, and shall wonder in amazement how the 4 50 SANTA TERESA sum of human effort, spent on getting and increasing wealth, not to benefit mankind at large, but to limit it every day more stringently to the interests of a few how it profited humanity! and shall laugh to bitter scorn the electro-plated calf constructed by greed amidst the groans of the sweated and the pauper, before which we fall down in the dust and prostrate ourselves as meekly and as fervently as the friars of an older world prostrated themselves before the image of a saint. , , The efforts of these men at least were directed to a noble and transcendental end ; they caught glimpses of something beyond and above themselves, before and beyond the material gratification of self; their vision soared beyond the narrow bounds of earth and time, the limited ideas of country, patriot- ism kinship, brotherhood, to wider and more mystical alliances. Admiration disarms criticism. We are face to face with heroes ; for heroism does not always lie in action. It is not the dogma that bounded and directed these men's lives ; it is not the paltry ambition that leads to the fighting of the battle ; it is the great- ness of soul that both dogma and battle elicit, and which but for them would for ever have lain latent. For, after all, dogma is but a shadow. The friars only kept alive the great thought which philosophy in all ages has proclaimed that the world exists not in time but in thought ; that happiness, if it is to be found must be sought elsewhere than in sensual enjoyment and the fleeting affections of life; that it lies in each mans breast, to cherish it or to cast it away as he will, and not in the fortuitous circumstances that surround him ; that the volun- tary extinction of the old Adam of egoism, the self-imposed tearing out, by the roots and fibres, of that which is above all things most difficult to extirpate the self-assertion of the individual are the only conditions whereby the mind catches glimpses of other horizons horizons of moral beauty and perfection, which must for ever remain veiled to those who have not undergone the same fiery discipline. It is the victory of spirit over flesh, of mind over matter; the just appreciation of the meanness and grossness of the details of a sordid and self-absorbed existence ; a recognition of the moral force which, breathing in us for a moment between the cradle and the grave, links us to the great Spirit which informs the Universe. They asserted the equality of man a lofty socialism. They kept alive that cry which has rung through the ages, and which will never be silenced, that man lives not for himself alone. Whether it be Christian or philosopher a Pythagoras, a Buddha, or a Fr. Juan de la Cruz, who speaks, INTRODUCTION 51 they are but links in the great chain of philosophic thought, who under their specific teachings have lighted the torch of Idealism to be a beacon for the faint-hearted who sink by the wayside of life ; to light each man who comes into the world, and lead him, if he will but listen, to a felicity which none can take away. The lives of those obscure monks, those unknown nuns, have not been lost. They still live : drops lost in the vast ocean of human endeavour, mingled inseparably with the great current which at given moments has purified the earth of its lower elements and shown to what heights man can rise. It was impossible that such enthusiastic self-sacrifice should last long. Little more than eight years saw this first fine fervour greatly mitigated. But short as it was, it was enough to cast over the Order that strange halo of romance which still hangs about it, like a perfume from another age. When the primitive friars had become a tradition, and the torch they had lighted burnt low and dim, the later Carmelites looked back upon these years as the veritable idyll of their Order, and embroidered round them many a charming legend all conceived in the same strain, and discovering a na'if sympathy with nature and animal life, fresh and delightful. Now it is a master who, walking in the orchard with a novice, bids him fetch a little bird they hear singing his soul out upon a tree. It lets itself be caught, and remains motionless in its captor's hands until, fearing its wing is broken, they bid it fly away, whereupon it swiftly flutters back to its perch, thus giving them a lesson in the holy virtue of obedience. The birds and beasts of the field own the sway of the Discalced friars, and live with them in peace and amity. Like Saint Francis of Assisi, a solitary of Bolarque preaches to the trees, and birds, and animals, and they draw near to listen to his sermons. Physical laws are interrupted in their favour, and a friar, bidden by his superior to light a fire, lights it by his breath alone. Miracles are of daily occurrence. Living as they did in the remotest and most savage solitudes, in mountain fastnesses and lonely glens, face to face with nature in her most benignant and her most terrible moods, these simple minds saw in every unwonted occurrence that broke the monotonous current of their lives, the supernatural and the marvellous. Now it is a friar, lost in the snow, who sees a woman where no woman could be, coming towards him with a lighted torch, who silently lights a fire and disappears ; who could it have been but Our Lady of Succour herself? who, descending from her niche, sped through the tempestuous 52 SANTA TERESA nicrht to save her votary's life! Again, a monk returning at itehtfall to his monastery from a neighbouring hamlet is cSt by the snow, which has obliterated all traces of the path Lost amongst the craggy heights and dangerous precipices of Altomira, he sinks down exhausted to await ceS death and thrice a marvellous impulse urges him on ?o fresh exertions. As he wonders whether the strength he feels is neural, and he has merely suffered from a passing weakness? his doubts are solved by his fainting dead away r the snow Thus convinced, and sustained by the same miraculous force, he suddenly finds himself before the convent Wal To-day the ruins of their monasteries, buried in lonely glens where the murmur of a stream alone fills the immense foHtude or perched on the summit of some mountain ledge, add another charm to the wildest and loveliest recesses in Spain The lands they cultivated have again become deserts ; but deserts how lovely! how enchanting! To the chronu: ers of the seventeenth century they were grim and hornd; to Teresa and those strange enigmatic friars, who have faded Iway into dreamland, savoury solitudes stirring the heart most strangely by their sweet loveliness; for these old Spanish fTrs had an exquisite love for the beauties of nature and in i contemp"ation they found the only relaxation that labour and pray^r P allowed them. It was one that remained unex- pressed -like all the profoundest sentiments of our being fror when we begin to prattle about a thing, we may be sure Tt is Mng on its deathbed) - one that was absorbed in ?heir devotion and gratitude to its Author but neverthe- L abated in thl hearts which beat under the coarse Serg As h the t 'dreamer lies on the hillside of Pastrana, the green veea stretched at his feet, the distant sierras of Cuenca wrapped [nfunlTtha Z einthedistance,-as the doves flutter in and out of the pigeon-cote beside him, and the heavy flapping of wing alone breaks the midday silence,-the primitive friars who buHt w* h their own hands the famous Monastery of Pastrana, where the great chapters of the Order were held for three centuries clase to become blurred and misty images in a monastic' chronicle, and live once more n time and f space Here they dug and delved and laboured, and the terrace they raS ar! green with trellised vines above us. Here Mariano soldier, courtier, diplomatist, man of science, displayed allthe mechanical skill for which he was celebrated, making an underground passage in the face of the hill, to connect the INTRODUCTION 53 friars' dwelling with the church, or constructing an ingenious contrivance for bringing water from a spring near the town to water the terraces. Here Fray Juan de la Cruz dreamed and prayed and wrote, and Gracian struggled through his severe noviciate. It is impossible not to feel for this lonely slope something of the same indefinable veneration with which it is still regarded by the inhabitants of Pastrana, the descendants of the contemporaries of the friars. In those days the friars had not become an anachronism as they have now, but were the most vital factor in the national life. As the rude arriero passed that spot at night, he stopped his mule with almost superstitious awe to listen to the deep- toned litanies and matins of the friars as they mingled with the song of the nightingales, the musical croaking of frogs, and all the strange, inexplicable sounds of a southern night, quelled and fascinated by the same mysterious charm to which a grave and learned ecclesiastic confessed, when, questioned by Ruy Gomez as to what he thought of his friars at Pastrana, he answered : " Sir, in the eyes of the flesh they are mad ; in those of faith, angels and ministers of fire in fantastic bodies ; so that we, the weak, may see something of the flame which burns in them." Although the Carmelites have faded out of the national existence, their memory still lives lives and sanctifies with an inexplicable charm the wild and inaccessible spots they chose for their dwellings. At the head of the wildest pass in Estremadura a rude slate cross marks the enchanted boundaries of the Batuecas that spot, the haunt of demons and evil spirits, that every shepherd shunned, whose very existence even was looked upon as doubtful in the Middle Ages, until a lovely lady of the house of Alba, seeking shelter for her illicit love, dis- covered these solitudes, peopled by a wild sylvan race, who spoke an unintelligible tongue mingled with a few words of Gothic, by some supposed to be Goths, by others Alarbes. 1 The league of narrow pathway, made by the friars, along which so many hundreds of them have passed to and fro between their living grave in the Batuecas and the world outside, fringes a brown limpid river walled in with beetling crags and towering peaks, covered with a dense forest of oak oak untouched by the hand of man since the creation. The blanched ghosts of trees dead long years ago, the gray moss hanging from them in long ragged shreds, mingle with the fresh green foliage of early summer, whose trunks and branches seem to fight and struggle with each other for space and light. Here a bough overhanging the stream stoops down to kiss it. Suddenly, without a sign 1 Moors, 54 SANTA TERESA of warning, a distant hermitage gleams from a height amidst the cork-trees ; the narrow glen widens ever so slightly, and the bell-tower of a gateway in the bottom peers from the shadow of huge horse-chestnuts, brought by some brother from the Indies. Above it tower the pyramidal forms of gigantic cypresses. The murmur of the stream, the constant rush of waters, forms a monotonous undertone to the obscure melancholy, the unbroken peace, that hangs over this sweet, secluded spot. It needs not the apocalyptic figure of the saint in the niche above the gateway to tell us that we have arrived at the famous the most famous in Spain Carmelite Desert of the Batuecas. Above the current of the waters, the bell rung by so many friars, so many pilgrims and wanderers and penitents in years that now seem so far away, clangs harshly on the silence, and once more the river takes up the burden of its song. Wooden bars fall to the ground. A rough figure clad in sheepskin greets us in surprise. The images of kneeling saints in the corners of the gateway contrast strangely with the donkey tethered there. A long flagged causeway, lined on either side by lofty cypresses, leads to a garden, from which time has not blotted out the quaint shapes of the box bushes, once so daintily trimmed by tender and delicate hands, nor quite banished the tangled flowers which fall about our feet. Into the carved granite fountain in its midst the water still flows drowsily. Facing us is the church; nothing of architectural curiosity in this plain brick building, roofless and deserted. The little altars in the cloisters are almost intact ; in each a figure of some strange solitary, together with a skull or human bone, caged in a little grotto made of shells, preaches the stern, sad lesson that sooner or later we all must learn. The rude and simple cells built against the walls that encircle the monastery, each with its inclined plank that formed the Carmelite's bed, its hollow for his breviary, a cork cross roughly nailed together, are full of pathetic sadness, an intense abandonment. The herbs and plants still grow in undisturbed profusion in the herb garden, although it is so many years since the hand of the brother who doctored the sick and ailing gathered the last leaf, distilled the last healing essence. Little odds and ends that the friars left behind them in their flight ; a cross lying on a casement ; the wine jars untouched and useless in the cellars ; the buildings once busy with the sound of adze and saw ; the smithy where they forged all the iron wanted for church and monastery ; the neglected vines and olive-trees that still climb sparsely up the hill in the terraces made by the monks; the corn-mill that the water turns no more, ready for use to-morrow ; INTRODUCTION 55 the oil-mill which filled the monastery jars to overflowing, impress one with a strange and weird sentiment of life, abundant, useful, beneficent, petrified and arrested in the midst of motion. So lived this community ; building all, making all for itself, forging its iron, trenching its vines, turning the desert into a flowering and lovely garden ; its labours adequate to its own subsistence and simple wants. They made the narrow foot- tracks that connected their solitude with the outer world. Here sped the peasants to pray at the Virgin's shrine, or to seek alms and consolation in times of necessity, and both were given with an ungrudging hand. Think of the thousands of obscure lives that have been lightened and gladdened by its vicinity ! When the last echoes of the sandalled feet of the expelled friars, brushing through corridor and building, died away into silence, just retribution for the pride and folly of man, the Batuecas sank once more into a wilderness fit only to give pasture to a few herds of goats. Up the little path that winds through the thick cork forest, up heights so steep that a false step would hurl you into the rapid river below, there before you stands the first of the roofless hermitages that, like the Laura of the Cenobites perched one above the other, from the ledge of almost inaccessible crags, look down on the monastery at their feet. The cypress still rears itself into the evening sky ; the stream still runs which supplied the hermit with water before the door. Inside, the altar with its lovely seventeenth-century tiles awaits the footfall of the sad and solemn solitary ; in the cupboard in the wall he stored his meal of dried fruit; the bell hangs in the bell- tower, whose ringing awoke the midnight silence in response to the monastery bell below only the touch of a hand is wanted ! Here then, and in spots like this, at Bolarque overhanging the Tagus, amidst flowering almond-trees ; on the topmost ledge of Altomira, eternally lost in clouds ; on the peaceful hillside of Pastrana ; in the little monastery of Duruelo, in the folds of Castilian plains, did the Carmelite renew the traditions of the stern and monastic discipline of the Cenobites of the Thebais. A legend still exists amongst the neighbouring peasantry, overcome with superstitious awe at the appearance of monas- teries in spots so wild and savage and remote from the world of men, that they sprang up miraculously in a single night, and were likely to disappear again in the same strange way they came. Alas ! it is the friars who made them that have gone, not 56 SANTA TERESA the monasteries ! But even in their ruins we may see the traces of how beautiful, virtuous, and harmonious the existence once lived within their walls. Here, and here only, face to face with the dismantled monas- teries built by Teresa's friars, may we dimly enter into the spirit of the conception framed by her three centuries ago; realise somewhat of the sublimity of the work, that no time shall impair, achieved by the Castilian nun, whose entire career was shaped and moulded by the curious parallelism that existed between her life and the portentous revolution that dismembered Catholic Christendom. Nor is it gratuitous to affirm that to her and her alone it is owing to-day that a convent is still left standing on Spanish soil. Not the least marvellous circumstance connected with this great woman is that, although repeatedly menaced by the In- quisition (the MS. of her Life lay for nearly thirteen years in its hands before sentence was pronounced on its orthodoxy), she managed to save herself from falling personally into its clutches. To write in Spanish on religious subjects was in itself perilous. The policy of the Inquisition was to repress all expression of popular thought that might contain the germs of heresy. In the words of Melchor Cano, the reading of such books had done much harm to women and idiots. He but expressed the general conviction, which condemned the nation to a crass and stultifying ignorance. One of the principal charges against Carranza's Catechism was that it was written in the vulgar tongue, and opened the eyes of the people to see and read what their forefathers had never seen or read. But besides writing in Spanish, Teresa, when she ventured to treat of mysticism, trod on ground which might at any moment have crumbled under her feet, and delivered her bound hand and foot to the flames of the Inquisition. Mysticism and Illuminism for they are virtually one and the same thing were too closely allied to the Lutheran heresy to be regarded with any- thing but suspicion and hatred. The mere fact of having dealt with such subjects in books to-day justly celebrated as the choicest products of Spanish literature, was sufficient to expose their authors, men some of whom have since been placed on the altars of the Church, to suspicion and active persecution. Fray Luis de Granada, Juan de Avila, Fray Pedro de Alcantara, Ignatius Loyola, Francisco de Borja, had either lingered in the dungeons of, or had their books condemned by, the Inquisition. It happened with the Inquisition, what still happens to this day in Spain with any body that finds itself constituted into an irresponsible authority : its decrees, irritating and often injurious, INTRODUCTION 57 and, where not injurious, trivial, were directed as much against those who were disposed to uphold its authority at all risks as against those whose heterodoxy of opinions presented a formid- able danger. Teresa owed her escape in great measure to an exquisite tact which made and retained for her powerful friends, not only amongst the great, but amongst the most learned doctors and theologians (many of whom were Inquisitors) of the age, as well as to a wise and judicious obedience to her confessors in all affairs of conscience and doctrine. She is one of the few of whom it may be said that they never made an enemy. In the reliquary of the Escorial, amongst the most precious and sacred of the relics possessed by Spain, bound in stamped crimson velvet, side by side with an original tract of St. Augus- tine's (between whom and herself there are so many intimate points of resemblance), are four books whose faded characters, so evenly and firmly written, seem to have caught and en- chained, like the magical properties of the triangle, some of the subtle essence, some of the very individuality and inspiration, of the woman who traced them four centuries ago. One of them is that Autobiography which, in the absence of all outside testimony, contains all that we know of Teresa's childhood and life until, when a middle-aged woman of forty-five, she under- took her first foundation. It bears no title, and saw strange vicissitudes before Garcia de Loaysa, afterwards Archbishop of Toledo, reverently laid it at the King's command in its present place of honour. This is the book that was read and approved by the venerable Apostle of Andalucia, Master Juan de Avila ; that was pored over by the Duchesses of Medina Celi and Alba ; that excited the mocking laughter of the fitful-tempered, capricious, and so ill-fated Princess of Eboli ; that lay for more than thirteen years in the power of the Inquisition at Valladolid. She herself called it " The Book of the Mercies of God," and in a letter to Da. Luisa de la Cerda, " My Soul." It is indeed a history of all that is most hidden, of all that fills and vivifies the chambers of an inner life but seldom exposed to the vision and touch of men. For my part, I cannot look at that yellow manuscript, time-stained and faded, at the clear, firm, upright writing, which runs on so evenly, without a blot, barely an erasure to indicate hesitation or doubt, without being moved by strange emotions. It is written on paper which bears the water-mark of Valladolid or Salamanca : a heart, with a cross in the middle, and the two Greek letters Alpha and Omega. It is curious to note that Fray Luis de Leon's commentaries on the Book of Job, and many other contemporary MSS. in 5 8 SANTA TERESA the archives of the University of Salamanca, are written on the same kind of paper. Twice she wrote this History of her Soul. Of the first copy, undertaken at the command of her confessor, the Dominican Fray Pedro Ibanez, in 1561, to which she probably added in 1562 an account of the foundation of San Jose of Avila, no trace remains. Tortured by the same apprehensions which had prompted her to write the first, she again set down her sins and life at the bidding of the Inquisitor Soto. This second transcript must have been concluded in 1565 or 1566, as in the last chapter she mentions the arrival of the Brief of Foundation without endowment for San Jose" as well as Ibanez's death. Such, briefly, is the history of this precious MS., which contains all that we know of her childhood and life in the Encarnacion. The charm of Teresa's style is that she has none. She wrote as she spoke. Her mode of expression is, curiously enough, rather that of a great orator than of a writer. Irregular, often slipshod and inaccurate, flowing off into digressions which the next moment she apologises for, yet full of spontaneity and energy, she appeals powerfully to the imaginary audience to whom she opens the keys of her soul. These very digressions, which in another would be wearisome and irritating, in her are full of fascination and charm. It is as if we are listening to some person speaking, who constantly breaks off from his sub- ject to follow new trains of thought suggested to him by the inspiration of the moment. She never seeks to be what she is not, nor aims at a weary, monotonous consistency. Her every mood is revealed with naive simplicity and frankness. Some- times didactic and moralising, like the thorough Old Castilian she was ; sometimes vague and visionary ; occasionally rising to a lofty strain of lyrism that has never been surpassed, or bursting into a vein of impassioned eloquence, it seems as if the sounds of her voice actually ring through the reader's ears. She has stamped on all her productions the impress of a strong and powerful individuality. A strain of dry humour, a delicate wit, scintillates through them all. No one ever wrote a Castilian more forcible and energetic. At the period when she wrote, the national idiom was in a state of transition. She was the last to mingle the robust and energetic forms of the language of an older century with a more modern style and modes of expression. This, to a Spaniard, gives her writings an ad- ditional fascination and interest. Many of the phrases she most habitually used were, even as she wrote, becoming obsolete and antiquated, and were fast being relegated to the people. But if we want to know how the old-fashioned gentleman of the INTRODUCTION 59 age thought and spoke, we have only to turn to Teresa. Apart from any other merit, she has eternally preserved the outspoken, honest old dialect she had learnt as a child in Avila, and never unlearnt. For this reason, if for no other, no student of the Spanish language can be said to be conversant with it unless he has read the Saint of Avila, whose works undoubtedly take their place amongst the best samples of the literature of the age. There remains to me now to say a few words about her contemporary biographers Yepes, Ribera, Master Julian de Avila, her companion and associate in so many journeys ; nor must I forget the brief, unfinished fragment left us by the hand of Fray Luis de Leon. Yepes was Prior of the Jeronimite convent of the Escorial, and Philip II.'s confessor. He was present at that weird deathbed scene, when Philip insisted on having his hands washed, painful and swollen with gout as they were, and his nails trimmed, in order to receive extreme unction, which was administered by the Archbishop of Toledo, Garcia de Loaysa, Yepes reading the offices. It was Yepes who an- nounced to him the desperate nature of his illness, and it was Yepes who, assisted by a Franciscan monk, clothed him for the last time in the habit of the Third Penitential Order of St. Francis, in which not only he but greater than he, Columbus and Cervantes, alike breathed their last. It was Yepes who placed round his neck the bit of rope from which hung a wooden cross. A gloomy commentary on those trite, trite words : " Sic transit gloria mundi ! " It was Yepes who was charged by the dying King to summon the prince im- mediately after his death and deliver him the paper which contained his last messages and counsels. Besides being a friar, Yepes was a bishop and a courtier. His mild, benevolent face, with eyes peering over heavily- rimmed spectacles, may still be seen in the portrait which exists of him in the Museum of Valladolid. He looks what he was all his life overburdened with a mild plethora of mellifluous words, as becomes a bishop and a courtier. Still, a good man of untarnished character ; for Philip had a peculiar faculty, truly amazing, of scenting out virtue in priest or friar. His prose flows fluidly on, like a stream on a summer's day, elegant, playing with appropriate metaphor, adorned with all those graces of diction that so rouse the admiration of the Spanish critic, Menendez y Pelayo. Fray Diego de Yepes, monk of the Order of San Jeronimo, Bishop of Tarragona, and confessor of the King of Spain, Philip II., and of the 60 SANTA TERESA Holy Mother, so does he describe himself in the title-page of Teresa's Life, which he dedicated to Pope Paul V. Master Francisco de Ribera was a man of a different stamp. A Jesuit and a scholar, for nineteen years he filled the same chair of Lecturer on the Holy Scriptures in the University of Salamanca which had been occupied by Fray Luis de Leon. He devoted the closing years of his life, at the age of seventy-six, to writing Teresa's biography. It went out to the world dedicated, not to a pope, but to a personal friend, who shared with him his deep love and reverence for the Saint. He wrote five years only after her death, when there were still numbers of people living who had known and lived with her in the closest intimacy for many years, ready to solve any doubt, or to point out and condemn the errors that might have crept in through inadvertence. The book is the result of minute investigations which his devotion to her had led him to prosecute long before her death. His conscientious accuracy led him in many cases to set down the names of private individuals still alive who could corroborate or contradict his assertions; no detail, however minute, but what is carefully noted and pre- served. In this conscientious and impartial chronicle, so remarkably free from the superstitious ideas of the time, and written with a greater spirit of independence and absence of prejudice than might have been considered possible in an age of blind belief in miracles, we have a simple and sincere relation of facts which it was important should be rescued from oblivion, told without any attempt at fine writing, in unvarnished although robust and manly language. The transparent simplicity of his narration possesses a note of genuine and touching pathos, which we look for in vain in the polished phrases and elegantly turned sentences of Yepes, and forms a curious contrast to them. It is a book which touches the heart in the same obscure way as the Gospels, and knits together, though it be for a moment, writer and reader in a common emotion of belief and reverence for the woman, "whom, letting alone her sanctity" (they are Ribera's words, not mine), "none of late years has equalled in her valiancy and greatness of heart," and is, in my conception, a far greater and more human book than the example of finished writing, where turgid sentence succeeds sentimental rhapsody, which we owe to the pen of Yepes. Master Juan de Avila, the simple and enthusiastic priest who was associated with Teresa in her first foundation of San Jose, and who accompanied her so often on her long and toilsome wanderings, has left us an able account of some of her journeyings, embedded, I am sorry to say, in a mass of INTRODUCTION 61 weary and troublesome lucubrations on mystical theology, as to which we may agree with the Saint " that he begins well but ends ill." A fragment, too, exists, penned by the great Augustinian Fray Luis de Leon, to which the opening chapters of Yepes bear a strong and perhaps not altogether fortuitous resemblance. Death stiffened the hands of the writer ere it was concluded, and it is left for ever a fragment. What it would have been had he lived to complete it may be judged by the masterpiece of vigorous Castilian, incomparably above any eulogy of her that has been written either then or of later years, which forms the Preface to the first complete edition of her works, published by him at Salamanca in 1688 words of great and generous praise, meted out by a kindred soul able to comprehend in all its fulness the majesty of her mind and life. I knew not, nor did I see, the Mother Teresa de Jesus whilst she was on earth ; but now that she lives in Heaven, I know her and see her almost always in two lively images which she has left us of herself her daughters and her books ; which, in my judgment, are also faithful witnesses of her great virtue. Because the features of her face, if I had seen them, might have shown me her body ; and her words, if I had heard them, might have declared to me somewhat of the virtue of her soul ; and the first was common, and the second subject to deception. It is a new miracle that a feeble woman, so full of courage, should undertake so great a thing ; and so wisely and efficaciously, that she should bring it to a successful ending, and should captivate all hearts to bring them to God, and should so influence people to like that which is unbearable to the senses. And not less clear nor less miraculous is the second, which are her writings and books ; in which, without doubt, the Holy Spirit willed that the Mother Teresa should be a more rare example ; because in the altitude of the things of which she discourses, and in the delicacy and luminousness with which she treats them, and in the purity and ease of style, and in the happy composition of the words, and in a negligent elegance (elegancia desafcytadcf) in the highest degree delightful, I doubt that in our language exists any work to equal them. And therefore, whenever I read them, the more I marvel : and in many parts of them it seems to me that I am not listening to the imaginations of man : and I doubt not that the Holy Spirit spoke through her in many passages and guided her pen and hand, and the light which she sheds on things involved in obscurity, and the fire which her words kindle in the heart of the reader, make this manifest. Strange that her biographers, one and all, in their efforts to magnify the sanctity of the Saint, have overlooked the woman. She has been presented to us alternately as an ecstatic, a narrow devotee, a contemptible hysteric. None seems to have entered into her character in its harmonious whole a character whose strong individuality shone persist- ently through all her mystic reveries, and the cloister was impotent to destroy. We shall follow her daily life, composed 62 SANTA TERESA of the rigid and patient discharge of all the theological virtues inspired by her illusions (would that we all were alike deluded ! it would be a better world !) to undertake and bring to a successful conclusion a vast and laborious undertaking. No detail, however minute, which can bear upon the fortunes of her reform escapes her sharp eye. She brings to her task a patience which has never been equalled, a cheerful contempt of difficulties, an intuitive knowledge of the weak point in the armour of those with whom she is brought into contact. The worldly wisdom which forms such a strange note in her character, she turns to God's advantage, not her own. A shrewd appreciation of the value of money and of powerful friends, whom she fascinated by that majestic influence, as irresistible in old age as when she was still young and beautiful, was a potent factor in her success. A stern dis- ciplinarian in her convents, her nuns, the hourly spectators of her life, surely the keenest censors of it, feel for her an indescrib- able devotion a devotion shared by such widely different personalities as the vague, dreamy, unsophisticated Fray Juan de la Cruz and the erudite and courtly Gracian. Strange that love and veneration for an old woman should have formed the link which bound together in a solid phalanx, subjugated by her innate greatness of character, a crowd of characters so diverse, and often so opposed, whom she won to follow her fortunes ! No poison lurked under her caustic wit, as ready to be tickled to laughter by her own foibles as those of others. In what lay her immense power over the hearts of that obscure old Spanish world ? What is it that thrills us of a later century, critical as we are, into a spontaneous burst of admiration ? What are the qualities that made her so grandiose, and shake us out of our languor into a feeling more akin to personal love and reverence than perhaps any dead person whose voice has been stilled for more than three centuries has ever elicited before? For one thing, she united in a strange and altogether unparalleled degree perhaps none ever more so all the distinctive qualities of a person of action, all the tenderness and idealism of the dreamer. So much so, indeed, that, in studying the one side of her character we often lose sight of the other, and vice versd. So strongly developed are they, and often so violently opposed, that it seems as if we are studying two distinct individualities, and yet the seeming paradox melts away before what seems a greater one. Although she saw visions and heard voices, described the emotions and sensations she experiences in the invisible world of her own INTRODUCTION 63 making a world formed on and always limited by the exterior one Teresa was not by nature a mystic. In her Life, for instance, with all its wonderful psychological analysis of emotion in the Moradas, which she herself con- sidered her greatest work we are principally struck by their strong practical tendency, her marvellous insight into character and springs of motives a practical tendency which culminates in the Camino de Perfeccion. The emotions she describes are familiar to any one who has studied the development of mys- ticism ever so slightly. Her special merit is to have described them with singular force, felicity, and delicacy, detecting a shade, a gradation, with the accuracy of a mathematician and the intuition of a poet. She gilds the well-trodden path with the light of her own genius, striking out all manner of strange lights and transitions undreamt of before ; for she was a great writer : her intellect was singularly acute ; she wrote as naturally as the birds sing. The Vida- and the Moradas are classics, and deserve to be so as long as the Spanish tongue is spoken. Free from all pretension, simple and direct in phrase, simple of speech, dignified and sincere, the spontaneous production not only of the brain but the heart, they are perhaps the most wonderful books that have ever been penned by a woman. I have said Teresa was not a mystic. Let me explain myself. There is no doubt that her abnormal experiences may be mainly accounted for by ill-health (she herself often said so). A young woman, a confirmed invalid, singularly susceptible to outward impressions, she found herself exposed to all the subtle and nameless influences of the cloister, and for a moment was subjugated by them. With returning health, the vague reveries, the efforts to attain a perfection beyond the limits of human nature, departed. For close on twenty years, so she tells us, she led a life neither better nor worse than her neighbours, until a chance accident, in which, perhaps, disillusion was not without its share, revived the old emotions and feelings with renewed vigour. Her mystical experiences, then, are limited to the first two or three years of her convent life, and ten years or less between the age of forty and fifty ; for directly she engaged in the active labours of her life this simulated life of the brain in which her disvirtualised energies had found some outlet in default of all other she ceased to record and analyse them ; perhaps they also ceased to exist. For the last twenty years of her life, at all events, they would seem to have faded away entirely. Thus her mysticism was only the accompaniment, the under-song as it were, to the melody of her life. Happy they who can steep themselves in some such ideal existence of 64 SANTA TERESA the spirit or the brain without having their energies blunted for the colder struggles of reality ! But, although her mystic- ism undoubtedly lends her a strange and potent charm, yet herein is not her greatness. Her greatness is in her life; in her own valour, confidence, and courage; in her boundless activity; in her supreme devotion, not to an Ideal but to Duty! In her letters we see no mystic. Sharp-eyed, sometimes sharp of speech, seeing the world and men as they are and not as she would have them ; for the world does not come forth to welcome the conqueror until he has conquered ; and she con- quered hers by the means to her hand. She had to subdue prejudice ; to disarm opposition ; to (she gives it as a maxim) " accommodate her complexion to his with whom she conversed : glad if he was glad ; sad with the sad. In short, to be all things to all men in order to win them all." It was no easy task she had undertaken to force her reform on the world of Spain. Single-handed she grappled, and was often forced to compound, with folly and ignorance. That she was so able to grapple was her glory. She triumphantly annihilated the eternal duel between idealism and action by combining both, and being equally great in both. Who shall again assert, after reading her life and deeds, that in action the fine perfume of spirituality evaporates ? It is action that puts ideality to the proof; action that shows that there is something more in a man than visionary, idle dreaming. Action demands courage, constancy, tenacity, perhaps often dissimulation ; for right and wrong are not fixed, irreducible terms, but very much dependent on circumstances, often shading into one another so subtly as not to be dis- tinguished. Who then shall not forgive this brave, good woman, if she who was the soul of truth sometimes dissembled she who came of, and had to deal with, a race of past-masters in the art ? Who shall not forgive her if she used the foibles of those around her to achieve an end in which she imagined she saw the regeneration of humanity ? That old Spain of the sixteenth century which canonised her saw deeper. They too were heroic; they too could bear hunger and thirst and privation without a murmur; they too could sacrifice themselves unhesitatingly for an ideal ; and all this and more they reverenced under the habit of that poor old Castilian nun, in whom they saw resuscitated all the fighting instincts of their nation. In her they consecrated their own ideal the ideal of a noble, fighting race, nursed from the INTRODUCTION 65 cradle in poverty and sobriety ; a race not of thinkers or of casuists, but of doers. She was the type of all that was vigorous and healthy in the Castilian character a character singularly simple, straight- forward, chivalrous, and noble. They were touched by that old creaking cart which jolted her over Castilian roads ; they were touched by the tenacity which never gave in ; they were touched by her hungers and thirsts and her old ragged habit. We talk about ideals ; she lived hers, and they knew it. " Whip me such knaves," writes Cervantes in that famous passage where he contrasts the life of the soldier with that of the man of letters (and he was both) : " whip me such knaves as say that letters are more honourable than arms ; for I will tell them, be they who they may, that they know not what they say." And he spoke the national sentiment when he gave the glory to the soldier, " since that institution is to be more highly esteemed which has for its object the nobler end." If then we try her life by the standard laid down by her great countryman, her greatness lies not in the few books on mysticism she left behind her at her death (and they too are admirable), but in what is much greater the living and real reform she instituted. Whatever view may be taken of her spiritual experiences, her active career can inspire no other sentiment but the profoundest admiration and respect. She is the last of the great saints nearest to us in point of time : we can almost touch the hem of her garment. She does not fade away into a thirteenth-century idyll beautiful and touching indeed, but vague and dreamy. She stands out sharp and distinct in outline as sharp and distinct in outline as her birth- place against the searching sky of Castille. And yet from the keen and minute examination of her life and letters, I rise from my task with my love and admiration for her a thousand- fold increased from what they were when she was still to me a floating image. Such the woman whose complex individuality, composed of so many varying lights and shades, flits across the Spain of that day, leaving behind it a luminous trail which is still as bright to-day with the dust of three centuries thick upon her tomb at Alba de Tormes. CHAPTER I TERESA'S CHILDHOOD AS the sun was about to dawn over the distant sierras of Avila, on the morning of the 28th March 1515, was born she whose marvellous personality was to overshadow and absorb its heroic past and glorious traditions, she who was destined to be one of the principal buttresses of religious life and thought of her own age, and even yet of ours, she who was to measure her (humanly speaking) feeble strength in checking the ravages of that portentous revolution, which, commenced seven years before her birth, ran its course parallel with her life, and ended in the dismemberment and disintegra- tion of Catholic Christendom, destroying the unity which fifteen hundred years had consecrated Teresa Cepeda y Ahumada. In her very name Teresa (Tarasia in Greek meaning marvellous) her contemporary biographers have seen some mysterious prediction, some projected shadow of the marvels to be by her accomplished. Her father has recorded her birth, together with that of his other children, in a paper which the Convent of Pastrana once numbered amongst its treasures. " On Wednesday, on the 28th day of March, of the year 1515, was born Teresa my daughter, at five o'clock in the morning, half an hour before or after (it was just about to dawn on that said Wednesday). Her godfather was Vela Muftoz, and her godmother Marie del Aguila, 1 daughter of Francisco de Pajares." A sadder note pierces through the humble entry found written in Teresa's breviary after her death at Alba de Tormes : "On Wednesday, Day of San Bertoldi, of the Order of Carmelites, on the 29th day of March 1515, at five in the morning, was born Teresa de Jesus, the sinner." 1 They were very near relations or connections of Teresa's family. The Condes of Guevara and Ofiate, and the Duques de la Roca, trace their present descent from Vela Munoz or Vela Nufiez. Da. Maria del Aguilar was of the family of the Marquises of Villaviciosa, las Navas, and Villafranca. Her father, Francisco de Paiares, was one of the executors of Teresa's mother's will. TERESA'S CHILDHOOD 67 On the 4th of April, on the same day (curious coincidence) that the first mass was said in the newly-established Convent of the Encarnacion, she was baptized in her parish Church of San Juan. The font stands now, as it did then, in a dusky corner, its brim protected by a narrow strip of thin brass carved in arabesques and covered with a heavy board of olive wood ; at its base the rough blocks of stones, which generations of knees have worn into hollows, on which her godfather and godmother knelt. The room in which she first saw the light is still preserved in the church which has risen on the foundations of what was then a grim old fortress-house. Her parents belonged to the chivalrous and untitled gentry of Castille. Their position in Avila was one of considerable importance, and they were related either by birth or marriage to its most illustrious families. Her father, Alonso Sanchez de Cepeda, came of a Toledan family (he himself was known in Avila as the Toledano) which claimed for its ancestor Sanchez, King of Castille and Leon. His mother was a Cepeda a family which had done good service in the reconquest of Spain. Heraldry served at that time for nobler and perhaps more practical, certainly for far less burlesque uses, than to flatter the pride of some worthy brewer at the end of a prosperous career. It was instinct with meaning. It was all that was most worthy and glorious in the family history indelibly recorded and perpetuated in stone. It was a book a glance at which revealed at once a man's genealogy and a whole labyrinthine list of remote connections. A man regarded his shield with a noble and justifiable pride, for every emblem in it commemorated some gallant deed of his forefathers, and recalled to him his own responsibility in keeping their heroic fame untarnished. Whenever a marriage took place, the new quarterings were at once added. The coat of arms which hung over the sombre gateway of Alonso's house, was the compendium of the history of his family. The three bucklers on a gold field were the arms of the Sanchez, to which family belonged the two famous chiefs Ximen Blasco and Este*ban Domingo, who repeopled the city after the reconquest, and were for long its hereditary rulers. The lion had been granted to the Cepedas for daring deeds in the battlefield, and the eight St. Andrew's crosses, which surrounded it, eternally kept green the memory of that Cross seen by San Fernando and his victorious host gleaming in the sky above them as they swept triumphantly through the horse-shoe gate of the Moorish citadel into the conquered town of Baeza. 68 SANTA TERESA Alonso Sanchez had been twice married. His first wife had borne to him two sons and one daughter. His second wife was Teresa's mother, the gentle and shadowy Beatriz Davila y Ahumada, whose ancestry was no less illustrious than his own. She was descended from one of the great chieftains of Avila, whose successors took the name of Davila in order to distinguish themselves from those who bore the same family appellation as themselves. The name and burning tower of the Ahumadas is said to have been granted to the founder of the family in recompense for a daring deed on the part of himself and his three sons, who defended a castle against the Moors and escaped under cover of the smoke and darkness when they set fire to it. The name, to which the prowess of Alvaro Ahumada in the conquest of Cordoba gave additional lustre, is a punning allusion to the circumstance, meaning " smoked out." Thus wherever Teresa wandered in Avila she was confronted by the emblems of her unstained and illustrious descent. Variously combined and quartered, the arms which figured on the shield above her father's gateway were repeated over every grim old keep and tower of her native town. In the majestic cathedral, where she so often knelt, she saw them sculptured over the tombs which covered the bones of the warriors and statesmen of her race. As she worshipped in the lovely old Romanesque church of San Pedro, the emblazon- ings of Ximen Blasco and Esteban Domingo, her common ancestors, reflected from stained windows, flickered in waves of tremulous light on to the pavement and enveloped her in their glow. They gazed down on her from the boss of every arch and the shaft of every pillar of the great Monastery of San Francisco, where so many of her father's house lay buried. Thus she was related by blood and collateral descent to every family of consequence in Avila families which ranked amongst the noblest of Castille ; and to-day partly, it may be, owing to the lustre, some share of which they fondly imagine is reflected on themselves, which the grandiose figure of a Carmelite nun has cast upon names that might otherwise have sunk into obscurity, partly no doubt because no better proof of a heroic origin and lineage can be adduced, it is the proudest boast of the proudest grandees of Spain to trace, however remotely, some descent from, or connection with, Alonso Sanchez de Cepeda and Beatriz de Ahumada his wife. "Although," says the Padre Traggia, the author of La Muger Grande, "Teresa's nobility and greatness does not consist in her arms and blazons, stars, bucklers, castles, lions, TERESA'S CHILDHOOD 69 and armed hands, but in her virtues," may we not trace some influence of hereditary instincts in a character of which the dominant note, which rings out so true, clear, and strong through the course of her life, is a noble, personal fearlessness and generosity, sublimed to absolute negation of self? She, too, carried on the fighting traditions of her family, and dis- played the same qualities in her defence of the reform of the Carmelites, and in her battles against heresy, as did her steel- clad ancestors, who had helped to wrest their country from the Moors, inch by inch, watering it with their blood. The victories she won on bloodless battlefields in the cause of religious reform a reform which popes, nuncios, and kings had attempted, and from which they shrank back baffled were no less great than theirs, although no waving pennons, no acclaiming hosts, saluted them. The warriors of a past age live again in the frail .woman who grapples with almost insuperable difficulties all odds against her the very heavens seeming as if about to fall and crush her plans with a vigorous, persistent, resolute tenacity, which never for a moment fails her; who watches the patient work of months apparently swept away and destroyed in an instant; confronts peril, danger, defeat, with the same cool, unmoved serenity. The austere virtues which form the groundwork of her character, the undeviating rectitude, her inflexible sense of justice, her pure, healthy, evenly-balanced mind, even that minor one of all, her love of personal cleanliness, conspicuous in the old and ragged habits, thrown aside as useless by the nuns, which she mended with her own fingers, and wore from preference, "accounting it an honour to go patched"; her great dignity, inspiring reverence and awe, mingled with tenderest love, in all who approached her ; the courteous and gracious charm of manner, which magnetised the hearts and wills of men, and exercised on them an inscrutable and mysterious influence ; are the development of the honourable instincts, the subtle hereditary influences, transmitted from generation to generation of fearless progenitors, whose lives were spent in court and camp alike. There is some reflection of a sentiment faint and undefined justifiable in one who cannot quite forget, although they seem like distant echoes, the proud traditions of her house in the words in which she describes Teresa de Layz, the foundress of the convent at Alba de Tormes, as being of noble parentage " Muy hijos de algo, y de limpia sangre " (very much sons of some one and of clean blood). A pride so dignified, so kept in check, makes her more lovable, and binds us to her. 7 o SANTA TERESA In a letter addressed to one of her nephews in Peru, in which she tells him of the marriage of his brother Francisco to Dona Orofrisia de Mendoza y de Castilla, the same indefin- able sentiment pierces through the long list she gives of the bride's connections. " She is not yet fifteen years old, beautiful and very discreet. Her mother is a cousin of the Duque del Albuquerque, niece of the Duque del Infantazgo^and of many other titles ; in short, on both mother's and father's side no one in Spain is better born. In Avila she is related to the Marque's de las Navas, and to him of Velada (the Marquis), and with the wife of Don Luis, him of Mose"n Rubi, closely connected." Feeling that she is dwelling too long on vanities of little weight, she suddenly cuts herself short, and in a rapid transition of mood, breaks out a-moralising on the instability of all things : " Already you see, my son, that everything must end, and that only the good and evil we do in this life is eternal and shall last for ever." But with this pride of ancestry mingled the old democratic spirit of Castille, which in other centuries had formed the surest bulwark of its liberties. She stripped power of its adventitious attributes, and pointed out its emptiness. It is with a touch of bitterness that she dwells on the difficulty experienced by the poor and lowly born to obtain an audience in the palaces of the great. What was royalty, she boldly asked, at a period when it had never been more autocratic, without that artificial pomp of circumstance that hedged it round? And this robust in- dependence of thought she exemplified by her conduct. Thus when the line separating the two classes of society there was little or no middle class was never more sharply drawn than in the Spain of her day, we find that, rising above the prejudices of her epoch, she stands in the breach between the great nobles of Toledo, whose countenance and protection are almost indis- pensable to her undertaking, and whose goodwill it is of the utmost importance for her to conciliate, and with a quiet determination sets aside their wishes, then equivalent to com- mands, in order to give the honours of foundation and the right of burial before the high altar of her Convent Church which was considered as the peculiar privilege of the aristocracy to the humble merchant family of Ramirez. She never, however, forgot that the " clean blood " of Castille flowed through her veins, and never undervalued it in others although indeed, with the exaggerated humility of the cloister, she sternly reproved Gracian for instigating in Avila inquiries into the nobility of her birth and descent. " Father, it is enough for me to be the daughter of the Church, and on me it weighs TERESA'S CHILDHOOD 71 more heavily to have committed one venial sin than to be descended from the meanest people in the world." But saints are full of these inconsequences ! The traditions in which she had been nurtured were dear to her, and to the end of her life she took a justifiable interest in the aggrandisement and well- being of her family. Her father's house was situated close to the Moorish quarter that quarter now so silent and desolate which extended from the great Hospital of Sta. Escolastica to the lofty bridge which spanned the Adaja, at the southern entrance to the town. It looked on a small open square or plaza, opposite to the postern gate in the walls, which to-day is known by antonomasia as the " Santa." Behind it was the Church of Sto. Domingo, with its lovely Norman doorway and bell-tower, which still exists virtually unaltered. Alongside of it was the Hospital of Sta. Escolastica. Some scattered heaps of stone, and formless ruins welded together by time, and masked over with a sparse covering of fine grass, a delicate Gothic doorway, from which the Mother and Child gaze down in divine compassion on the passer-by, as they did on the child Teresa, mark the site once occupied by the great hospital. Of one spot alone, the house where the patron saint of Spain first saw the light and spent her childhood, no vestige remains, or at least but little, in the hideous church, cold, frigid, whitewashed, laden with barroco stucco ornaments ; its churrigueresque altars decked out with tinsel and paper flowers, which is one of the Meccas of Spain. The Conde Duque of Olivares, Philip IV.'s powerful favourite, is responsible for this outrage on good taste, which only a mistaken perception of cult, an entire want of reverence, and a deadened feeling for beauty, could have rendered possible. But the low arch of the gate in the walls opposite, through which the knight Alonso de Cepeda so often rode out into the country nearly four hundred years ago, stands unchanged. Unchanged the wild, tumbled sierras, intersected with silver streamlets, wrapt in the haze of a winter morning, which met Teresa's gaze from summer to winter with varying aspects of loveliness, and over which her father flew his hawk. Happily there is no dearth of houses in Avila belonging to that period, any one of which we might accept as the type of the dwelling of the virtuous Christian hidalgo. The facade, gloomy and gray, irregularly studded with narrow slits which served for defence as well as to admit the light ; the gateway with its circular arch and course of deeply curved stones a gaping hole in the sunlit walls ; the heavy doors, clamped with nails worked by the mediaeval iron-smith, who wrought metal like wax into 72 SANTA TERESA delicate cinquefoils and rosettes, full of grace and elegance. The traveller on arriving passed at once, without dismounting, from the brilliant sunlight into the dusky obscurity of the zaguan, or covered entrance, the walls of which were full of iron rings to tether horses to. On one side were the stables, partly sunk underground for the sake of coolness. Here, too, was the principal entrance of ceremony to the house, the great stone staircase with its heavy balustrade of hewn granite, which seemed built on purpose to echo to the clash of armour and the ring of swords. Below it stood the mounting-block. An inner door opened from the zaguan into the patio, or courtyard, around which the house was built. On these interiors, full of intimate charm, the mediaeval workman exhausted all his art. Round both stories ran open galleries, whose colonnades of Gothic arches were supported by slender columns with delicately wrought capitals, on which were sometimes repeated the arms of the house. The ground-floor was occupied by the kitchen, offices, and servants' dwellings. The rooms occupied by the family were on the floor above. The projecting eaves of the roof, which rested on wooden soffits most quaintly carved, submerged the upper gallery in shadowy obscurity. Wherever the irregular wavy outline of the tiles cut against the sky, it framed a patch of dazzling, glittering light. Perhaps a vine clung limpet-like to the pillars or the walls. A conspicuous object in the centre of the courtyard was the draw-well, with its characteristic brim, buckets, and chains. In the whole building and its accessories there is an indescribable mixture of Moorish and Gothic elements, impossible to separate or define. It is given to us only at brief moments in our lives to realise, with due intensity and vividness, the almost solemn tranquillity, the austerity, dignity, and repose which reigned in the dark, severe, monastic interiors of these mediaeval dwellings. There was no attempt at ornament, because all was art in its purest manifestation of unconsciousness. The roof was low and sombre, the intersections of the heavy beams of resinous pine, forming deeply recessed panels, carved and inlaid with delicate traceries of ivory by the Moorish carpenters of Avila ; the walls were hung with heavy tapestries or the lovely leathers of Cordoba. As in all southern climates, the house was but scantily furnished. The family belongings were stored away in wooden chests clamped with iron, which were placed against the wall and used as benches. There would be a few great leathern chairs; the blackened and dusty image of a saint, perhaps a family heirloom, dating from dim antiquity, or the work of some realistic wood-carver of the age, stood in a niche in the wall ; TERESA'S CHILDHOOD 73 the silver lamps which flickered beneath it were trimmed and kept alive by the devotion of a simple and touching piety ; childish fingers hung garlands of withering flowers before the shrine they had been taught to regard with a mysterious veneration. The patriarchal and feudal authority combined, of the husband, the father, the master, over the lives and destinies of those who composed his household, was unlimited and unquestioned. Behind him the wife sank into a secondary and subordinate place. Wife, children, servants, and retainers were bound together by a common love and reverence for its head, whose interests and theirs were identical. An austerity and almost rude simplicity of manners, not without its charm, was the prevalent characteristic of an age when kings themselves lived an almost ascetic life, and great wealth and extreme poverty were alike unknown. Alonso de Cepeda was a dignified, honourable, and kindly Castilian gentleman, full of noble and tender instincts. His personal presence made such a profound impression on the memory of Master Julian de Avila that, when an old man, he recollected him as vividly as if he had seen him yesterday. We can form some slight and shadowy idea of his venerable dignity and personal authority from the words which flowed from Teresa's tender and loving pen when the worthy knight had faded from the sight of men, and took his rest in the chapel of the Cepedas in the great Franciscan monastery of Avila. She touches on his kindness, austerity, and pitifulness ; his predilec- tion for books of devotion, of which he possessed many in " Romance " (Spanish, in opposition to Latin) for the use of his children ; his great charity for the poor and pity for the sick ; his sympathy for servants, so great that he could never be induced to own slaves, and the pity he felt for them such that he treated one of his brother's, who happened once to be in his house, as one of his own children, saying " that he could not for very pity bear to see a person deprived of freedom " ; his great truthfulness " he was never heard to swear, or speak ill of others " ; his mind and life of untarnished purity. Teresa's mother, whom he had married within the prohibited degrees, she being a relative of his first wife, was much younger than himself, and singularly beautiful. A gentle, delicate woman, afflicted with much sickness and a huge family (she bore him within the few short years of her wedded life nine children) ; a pale, diaphanous figure in the background, round whom seems to float a vague atmosphere of gentle resignation 74 SANTA TERESA and suffering, lives in the recollection of the middle-aged nun a sweet and subdued memory. " Of great beauty, which she was never known to prize ; very gentle and of good abilities, and although she was only thirty-three when she died, her dress was that of one already advanced in years. Great were the sufferings she passed through whilst she lived ; she died a most Christian death." Beyond the wistful and loving sketch which their great daughter has thus dedicated to their memory, the blameless lives of Alonso de Cepeda and his wife Beatriz slipped as noiselessly from the world as if they had never been. Of the outward facts of their life we know nothing, if we except some meagre and scanty details discovered amongst Juan de Ovalle's papers by a simple and enthusiastic Discalced Carmelite friar, who, with 200 reals in his pouch, and a few scapularies and Teresian relics for sale, traversed Old Castille on foot, copying and collecting her letters. Accident has preserved the letter which he wrote to a brother friar in the first flush of discovery. " I will tell you a thing," says the devout Carmelite, the object of whose life and labours was to hunt out the barest details which could throw light upon the life of the great woman, the foundress of his Order, " that will move you. The witnesses to a certain declaration affirm that Dofla Beatriz de Ahumada, besides dying, was also waked in Goterrondura " [a little village close to Avila], "whence they bore her in a cart to be buried in San Juan de Avila; and, says one of them, ' I went to Olmedo to bring the bride, and was present at the ceremony, and partook of the capons at the wedding feast.' There is also to be found here the contract of marriage with the first and second wife, a detailed list of the property which these blessed souls left behind them at their death, and amongst them a book of Gospels and sermons, and various military accoutrements. I find mention of a priest called Lorenzo Sanchez, called in these papers Master Lorenzo de Cepeda . . . and other matters without end most deservedly worthy of our archives." A sad synthesis of a human life : the wedding feast, and the watching of a body before the dimly- lighted altar of the village church of Goterrondura. These details, scant and meagre as they are, possess a strange and suggestive pathos. Those soldiers' arms and accoutrements : what was their history ? Were they worn by Alonso Sanchez himself on some hot battlefield of Andalucia, or were they only in those days the indispensable gear of every knight and gentleman ? What pathetic memories of children's hands clung like a perfume around the pages of that little book TERESA'S CHILDHOOD 75 of the Gospels, which, with the armour, were amongst the most precious of his belongings ? Teresa was one of a large family of nine, seven brothers and two sisters, being the third child and eldest daughter, with- out counting Alonso's children by his first wife two sons and a daughter. She was her father's favourite. She draws a beautiful picture of the harmony which reigned unimpaired in that large and united household. " They were all bound to each other," she says, " by a tender love, and all resembled their parents in virtue except myself!" When the time came for them to leave the family roof-tree, and to fight out their own destinies, they never forgot the bond which had been forged between them in childhood. Those whose fate led them to seek a career and fortune in those distant " Indies," far across the seas, looked forward wistfully to end their days in honour- able repose, and to lay their bones beside those of their fathers in the gray old town which had given them birth. Teresa herself, with all her sanctity, could never sever herself entirely from the tender links which bound her to her family. There was only one career open in those days to the sons of noble families that of arms. Six of her brothers became soldiers, and sought their fortune in the rich and wonderful New World which the discoveries of Columbus had given to Spain, and which swallowed up the most vigorous and adventurous spirits of the nation. Two only of the stout lads who had left their father's home full of buoyancy and hope lived to return to their native country. Of the fate of two others we know nothing, except that one, Antonio, became a monk. In those early days, one alone stands out distinctly from the rest her favourite brother Rodrigo, four years older than herself, with whom she pored over the black-letter Lives of saints and martyrs, until their young minds were filled with the strangest fancies. " When I saw the martyrdom which the saints had suffered for God, it seemed to me that they had bought the enjoyment of God very cheaply, and I longed much to die like them, not for the love I understood I bore him, but to enjoy as soon as possible the great treasures which I read were stored up in heaven. Together with my brother I discoursed how it would be possible to accomplish this. We agreed to go to the land of the Moors, begging our way for the love of God, there to be beheaded : and it seems to me that the Lord gave us courage even at so tender an age, if we could have discovered any means of accomplishing it. But our parents seemed to us the greatest obstacle." The childhood of great men and women is almost invariably 7 6 SANTA TERESA marked out by some special legend in which may be traced the germ of their future celebrity. Thus, in Teresa's case, a legend grew up, more or less founded in fact, that, not content with these great desires, she attempted to put them into execution : that, fired with the history of sufferings and martyrdoms, and with the instinctive spirit of imitation so strong in childhood, she actually, at the age of six or seven, trudged off to martyr- dom, and induced her brother to follow. Full of courage and resolution, bearing with them, like prudent travellers, provisions for the journey, the two children are said to have taken their way down the precipitous street, then full of little Moorish houses, buried in fruitful orchards, which led to the steep, high- pitched bridge at the entrance to the town. Four granite pillars, known as the "cuatro postes," which marked the spot where for three centuries a solemn procession had halted on its way to a neighbouring hermitage to give thanks for the successful issue of one of the many skirmishes between Moors and Christians still a conspicuous landmark on the sandy, stone-strewn Salamanca road, are indelibly connected with this legendary exploit of Teresa's. Here, so tradition affirms, they were espied by an uncle, who happened to pass by on horseback, and took them home, to their mother's great relief, who dreaded that they had fallen into one of the wells of the house and been drowned. The boy, older than his sister, less valiant also, charged with leading her away, laid the blame of the enterprise on the " nina." When Rodrigo left Avila, never to see its gray walls again, who knows what dim, instinctive prevision of the fate which awaited him in those mysterious and shadowy Indies across the sea, induced him to make a will, leaving all he had to his sister Teresa ? A gallant soldier, he bravely faced and met his death in the conquest of La Plata ; " and it was thus," she says, " that his early desires were realised, and his boyish aspirations granted; for he died like a martyr and in defence of the faith." As I stand in her child's-garden, preserved by the Carmelite monks of Avila, where a few crocuses and snowdrops are flowering above the snow (for the month is December), the form of the brown-robed friar at my side fades into space. I see two shadowy figures of children, whose impalpable presence haunts the place. Their quaint mediaeval costumes, a transcript of that of their elders, give them a strangely grave and full- grown look, at variance with their years. I watch them at their childish games, building up little hermitages, which mock their childish efforts and topple down again, or poring over old black- < s: x it o = TERESA S S CHILDHOOD 77 letter books, bound in sheepskin, which contain the lives of saints and martyrs, whose histories their imagination transmutes, in some strange child-dreamland, into their own. The brilliant Castilian sky is reflected in the earnest gaze of eyes whose clear depths have never been troubled by thoughts mean or low ; their dominant expression is wondering surprise at the strange things in the world around them, whilst their dreamy voices murmur slowly, " Siempre, siempre, pena o gloria " (for ever, for ever, pain or glory), weighing in the balance, with a judg- ment beyond their years, an inconceivable eternity of joy, to which their imagination lends gigantic proportions, and colours most beautiful and unearthly, against the brief agony of a fleeting moment. Who can know what the glowing and fantastic outlines of that mysterious Glory shaped by their childish visions ? Perhaps that of some Gothic city in its serene repose (for we measure and compare everything by and with the medium which surrounds us, and the circumstances which envelop our life), of irregular and broken outline, glittering with the fairest colours of jasper and the rainbow, its translucent walls flashing forth from every facet the sparkling brilliancy of precious stones ; a city over which the sun of spring-time never sets; its narrow streets thronged by joyous and fluttering crowds of angels, the radiant beauty of their shining faces beyond the power of even Master Cornelis (the wood-carver of the cathedral) to depict, beyond all telling more beautiful than the faces which looked down upon them from the Apostles' Door of the cathedral, when awe-struck and hand in hand they entered its central aisle. And awaking out of my dreamland, I find beside me, in this year of grace 1889, an aged, decrepit, and blear-eyed old woman, who has on foot travelled forty leagues (120 miles) to see her son, who, she tells me, by the blessing of God, has become a novice in the blessed Order of Carmel, to the edification of prior and brethren. So Teresa's happy and radiant childhood slipped away amidst the memories and deeds, noble, heroic, and generous, of the Gothic town which had given her birth. She was nurtured on the miraculous legends and tender beliefs which, originating in pious fraud, had become part of the popular conscience. She lived in an atmosphere peopled by the strange and apocalyptic figures of saints and martyrs which loomed upon her from the mysterious shadow of the past. The images which one sees to- day carved round cathedral doors, were fraught to her with meaning and vitality. The dreams and aspirations which struggled for life in the dead brain of him who carved them were hers also. 78 SANTA TERESA In a little church down by the river-side, she had often gazed with awe and curiosity on the granite coffin which contained the body of the first saint and bishop of Avila, the companion of Santiago, San Segundo. For centuries it had lain hidden in a hollow of the church wall near the altar, being discovered by a mason only two years before her birth. From the lips of one or other of the bystanders, who had witnessed that weird scene when the venerable relics were exposed to view for the first time, she had heard how the skeleton brow of the martyred bishop was still encircled by the shapeless form of what had once been a mitre, whilst beside him lay a chalice, the episcopal ring, and a common stone on which was graven the inscription, Sanctus Secundus. At her mother's knee she drank in the history of the unbelieving Jew, who was converted whilst gloating over the mangled bodies of the youthful martyrs, Vicente, Sabina, and Cristeta, which had been flung out on the rocks just outside the town, to become the prey of wild beasts and vultures. Whilst thus absorbed in his unholy glee, he was attacked by an enormous serpent, which, crawling suddenly out of a fissure in the cliffs, twined itself round his throat and body, and released him only when in his despair he cried out to the Christian's God. Whereupon, in token of his gratitude, he buried the martyrs with his own hands, and reared over the spot the magnificent shrine of San Vicente. In this church, the print of a mule's hoof on the pavement remained a living proof of the miraculous manner in which the body of San Pedro de Barco (a celebrated hermit of the fourteenth century) had been brought to Avila. At the death of this sainted man, who had passed his life in the hollow of a rock, the bells of all the towns in the country-side suddenly set a-ringing of their own accord. Avila, and Barco his native town, as well as several others, disputed which should have possession of the sacred relics. At the suggestion of the Bishop of Avila, the coffin was strapped on the back of a mare, 1 which was then blindfolded, and lashed to make her go, and her destination left to the choice of Heaven. Leaving Barco behind her, and avoiding'^Piedrahita, to the admiration of the immense concourse who followed her she made straight for Avila ; nor did she stop until she reached the tomb of San Vicente, the doors of the church having previously been left open, upon which she fell down dead with her precious burden, leaving the print of 1 The pious chroniclers have omitted to mention whether the mare was born in Avila or Barco, as also the reason for her sudden and mysterious decease, and why it should have occurred rather in a church than the more probable stables to which she was most likely to have repaired. TERESA'S CHILDHOOD 79 her hoof indelibly engraven on the pavement, where it may be seen to this day. Nor was Teresa less familiar with the story of Sta. Barbada, the village maiden of extreme beauty, who, to escape the pursuits of a rich and noble youth of Avila, prayed Heaven to send her some disfigurement which should deliver her from all danger. Upon which her chin was immediately covered with a thick and bristly beard, which effectually protected the virtuous maiden from further molestation. This history formed the subject of the retablo of the altar of San Lorenzo, which was afterwards removed, on the destruction of that church, to the neighbouring temple of San Andres, where the curious may still visit the sepulchre which purports to be her tomb, and meditate on its pious inscription : " Be to us a good intercessor and advocate, glorious Paula Barbada." Such, amongst a thousand others equally fantastic and fanciful, were the legends which entered into the life of the period in a way of which we have now no idea. Those colossal figures of the past, which to us have lost all meaning, warriors and kings ; the sound of fighting and the clash of swords mingled chaotically in the brain of the old-fashioned, meditative child, with a mystic world of mitred bishops, bleeding martyrs, and sainted hermits, who owed much to imagination, perhaps more to unconscious or conscious imposture. All these visions of an apocalyptic nightmare were to Teresa fraught with the vividness of reality, and entered into her life as they can never more enter into the life of the world. The world was nearer to the time that had given them birth, and they were still clothed with flesh and blood. It is not strange that a child so nurtured should have already felt oppressed by the vague mystery of eternity. " We were terrified when we read that pain and glory lasted for ever ... we took pleasure in saying For ever, ever, ever." The monastic life had already cast a spell over the young imagination. Now she is a hermit, and piles up little edifices of stone in the garden. When with other children her favourite amusement was to play at being nuns, and to imitate the life of a community. Even the austere, middle-aged woman, ingenious self-tormentor as she was, can find but little to condemn in these records of her childhood, so full of infantine piety and devotion. " I gave in alms what I could ; and that was very little. I tried to be alone to say my prayers, which were many ; above all the rosary, to which my mother had a great devotion, with which she inspired us also. . . . When I consider that, although I was very wicked, I tried in some way 8o SANTA TERESA since I was a child to serve God, and did not do some things I see, which the world seems to consider of no im- portance when I see that I was not disposed to murmur, or to speak ill of others, nor does it seem to me I could dislike another, nor was I covetous, nor do I remember ever to have felt envy . . ." Characteristically she leaves the sentence unfinished. How few of us, searching the half-forgotten record of our childhood, can, like Teresa, affirm it to have been free of all envy, malice, and uncharitableness, or recall no subject for remorse no pain given to loving parents through wilful ness or caprice ! The first rude shock which brought her face to face with the stern realities of life was the loss of her mother, who died when she was about twelve (1527). She fled instinctively to the same little chapel by the bridge, where tradition asserts that she had knelt six years ago on her way to martyrdom. " As I began to realise what I had lost, I went in my affliction to an image of Our Lady, and with many tears supplicated her to be my mother. Although a childish thing to do, it seems to me that my prayer has been granted ; for whenever I have commended myself to the Sovereign Virgin I have found her, and at last she has drawn me to herself." One other characteristic incident which relates to this period of her life, and shows how vividly her imagination was acted on by external impressions, is preserved by her biographers. A picture of the meeting of Christ with the woman of Samaria at the well, a story which had ever a peculiar fasci- nation for her, hung on the walls of her chamber at home, and she delighted in repeating the words of the Latin legend under- neath : " Da mihi hanc aquam," although ignorant of their meaning. It is probable that we owe her marvellous treatise on Prayer, in which with inimitable grace and delicacy she symbolises the mystic life under the form of water, to some lingering reminiscence of the image so familiar to her childhood. After her mother's death Teresa was left to the charge of her eldest sister, Maria, who took his wife's place at the head of Alonso's household. She seems to have been an unimagina- tive and excellent woman, earnestly anxious for her young sister's welfare. Probably, however, owing to the disparity of their ages, there was little in common between them, Maria being already engrossed by her courtship with Martin Guzman y Barrientos, whom she shortly afterwards married, whilst Teresa, now left greatly to her own resources, became absorbed in the TERESA'S CHILDHOOD 81 strange and fascinating world which the romances of knight errantry opened to her eager mind and delighted fancy. Un- known to her father, she spent many hours of the day and night in this enthralling pursuit. The books of knight errantry took the place of the Lives of the Saints. She had imbibed the taste from her mother, who read them partly to cheat the cheerless tedium of a dull and monotonous life, and partly to amuse and keep her children out of mischief. These books, however, had always been care- fully concealed from the austere Alonso, who had a hearty distaste for, and dislike of, them a distaste that was not altogether unreasonable. The main features of the literature then so popular amongst all classes of society was not only a certain delicate flavour of idealism, but an unrestrained licen- tiousness of thought, together with a coarseness and brutality of expression, only to be realised by one who has read them. It may be doubted, however, whether the honest robustness and outspoken language of these old romancers was more baneful than the alembicated novel of the nineteenth century. How- ever this may be, it is certain that they exercised a powerful influence on Teresa's intellectual development. If her fancy invested these improbable heroes, seen through the haze of her own enthusiastic imagination and inexperience, with the same glowing colours which it had formerly flung around the figures of obscure saints and martyrs, they left behind them, long after her illusions concerning them were dissipated, many real and positive benefits. From them she learnt to write that forcible and energetic Castilian which was the popular language of the day. The first production of the pen which was afterwards to compose the Moradas, was a book of knight errantry, in which her brother Rodrigo collaborated. " And as her genius," to quote Ribera's words, " was so excellent she had so drunk in their language and style the result was such that it excited great attention." A strange education truly, this jumbled mixture of saints' lives and knights errant ! And yet, although it was all this singular woman received, it neither blunted the keenness of her intellect nor distorted her shrewd views of life. Although perhaps not the best, if we take into consideration the low standard of education of the time, especially in regard to women, it was still a form of culture for an ardent and lively intellect to which the prejudices of the age denied any other, and but increases the debt owed by the Castilian saint to these romances which in after years she so bitterly reproached herself with reading the opinion of the Spaniard of that day being, what it still remains to a less extent, that though perhaps a 6 SANTA TERESA little knowledge was not prejudicial, too much of it savoured f irreligion. Contemporary writings teem with contemptuous allus onfto the mujer parlilatina" made to rhyme, in defiance of Jrules of Spanish prosody, with the insulting epithe of "gallina" and the like. Education for a woman was limited to spelling out a breviary, and working one of those elaborate pices ^embroidery which were once so often to be seen in the decayed old houses of Spain, before the prowlings of the "'ir^^ to be boi r rt had little or' no social position. According to the Spanish proverb, "Una mujer honrada, la pierna quebrada y en casa. Teresa herself had to fight and overcome innumerable prejudices in her career as a reformer. In the matter of education how- ever she remained a truly narrow Castilian. Although her intelligence was far too acute not to appreciate learning at its rue vllue, she would have confined it to its proper and orthodox channels-the friars and clergy. She was no lover of Bibles or those who read them. "Away with you, wench and your Bible!" she exclaimed on one occasion to a would-be novice in Toledo, who incautiously brought amongst her belongings , Bible She disclaimed all knowledge of the Assyrians, to whom her Hterary prioress of Seville had inadvertently alluded in one of her letters, evidently thinking that they were infidel dogs, tLchron cling of whose doings betokened a certain levity on he part of the writer of the Book of Kings "God deliver all my daughters," she wrote in sharp rebuke, "from presuming to telatiiL. Let it not happen to you again, nor be a party to it. Much more do I wish you to be proud of appearing ignorant, which is most proper for saints, and not rhetoridans.^ ^^ ^^ ^ ^ ^ affection for these enthralling romances, she sinned in good company. The greatest minds of the age were not insensible to their fasci- nadon Miguel de Cervantes, who a century later laughed them into HmboTad loved and studied them during a chequered life "more versed in misfortune than in verses, and his uehter contagious as it is, contains a ring of sadness. A chancenor of Castille bewailed the time he had lost over the Sle fancies of Amadis of Gaul. Nor perhaps were those pleaslnt hours when, shut up in the almost Moorish seclusion ^father's old gray tower, Teresa avidly followed a crowd of wild and impossible adventures, the least fruitful of ^BuT the austere nun of the Encarnacion was destined to TERESA'S CHILDHOOD 83 chronicle graver shortcomings than these. Teresa is now approaching maidenhood. She already gave indication of that singular beauty which, if we can judge from the portrait left of her by her most trustworthy biographer, she still possessed even as an old woman worn out with fasting and mortification. "It is often seen," says Ribera, and the obser- vation is a profound one, " that to those men on whom the Lord chooses to bestow superior favour, and greater supernatural gifts, he also gives a more perfect and excellent appearance ; as can be seen in the Mother Teresa de Jesus." She was tall and well proportioned ; her brow fair and spacious, encircled by an aureole of black curling hair ; her eyebrows rather straight than arched, and somewhat thick ; her eyes black and round, with rather heavy lids, although not large, well placed, lively, and so full of merriment that when they laughed, their laughter communicated itself irresistibly to those around her: at other times their gravity imposed silence and respect. Her mouth was neither large nor small, and the upper lip thin and straight, the lower one thick and slightly drooping. Her teeth were good, and her chin sweet and dimpled. Her hand small and very beautiful, with the long tapering fingers and filbert nails of the idealist. Her manners possessed an indescribable fascination, which charmed and magnetised all who came within the circle of their influence, and over whom she rarely failed to wield that power which was afterwards such a potent instrument in the Reform of the Carmelites. At sixty her walk was still so graceful that all eyes were moved to follow her with admiration. At this time of her life the mysticism and the reveries of her childhood seem to have faded away. She had arrived at that critical moment when life begins to open all its flowers, hiding all its thorns. Teresa de Ahumada, in the first flush of maidenhood, awakening to the consciousness of her own beauty and physical attractions, " which, according to what they said," she is careful to note in her Life, perhaps not altogether without a sentiment of retrospective vanity, " were many," endeavoured to enhance them by all the means in her power. " I began," she writes, " to wear fine clothes, and to wish to please by looking well ; and to bestow much care on my hands and hair, and to use perfumes and every other vanity I could procure, for I was very curious." We shall see how this same attention to her person, and what she calls her " curiousness," or scrupulous neatness and cleanliness, endured to the end of her life, and how, more than once, g 4 SANTA TERESA when she was quite an old woman, they were a grave cause of scandal to the good Bishop Yepes, her biographer who no doubt missed that complete odour of sanctity which was associated in his mind with monks and nuns. But these weaknesses, if weaknesses they were so natural and allowable in a young girl in the first dawn of youth and beauty, already concealed a strong character and a sharply accentuated personality. To a solid substratum of honesty and straightforwardness, which made concealment to her an intolerable* and guilty burden, was added all the punctilious [ignitv of the Castilian, which she would more willingly have fafed death than imperil. She had a blind devotion to points of honour. She could not bear anything that seemed like humiliation, or tended to lessen her in the esteem and considera- tion of others. She would fain excel mall she undertook. At this momentous period of her life this deference to the world's opinion and dread of its criticism which all her future efforts were directed to root out fibre by fibre, proved her ^ThfTonly men who were allowed to cross the austere thres- hold of Alonso de Cepeda's household were some gay young cousins of her own, about her own age or a little older, just awakening like herself to the vanities of life They brought with them all the perfume of laughing and careless youth into its dusky and severe atmosphere. The girl, full of fun and laughter, brought up in almost ascetic seclusion, eagerly welcomed this diversion, which lent light and colour to her monotonous and uneventful life, and entered heart and soul into their schemes and confidences. "We were always together ; they were very fond of me, and I kept up the talk in everything in which they were interested, and they told me of their love affairs and childish folly, in no way good ; and, what was worse, my soul began to be accustomed to what was the cause ^Trfe^musements, of which she afterwards spoke with unfeigned horror and contrition, were encouraged by a relative whom her mother, whilst alive, had endeavoured to discourage from coming to the house, but without success, " so many were the reasons she had for coming. I began to be fond of her society ; to chat and talk with her because she hebed me to carry on all the amusements I loved and even suggested others to me 6 , and imparted to me her own taste for conversion and Van Until I associated with her, which was when I was about fourteen and peLps more" (I mean until we became friends, and she made me TERESA'S CHILDHOOD 85 her confidant), I do not think that I had left God through mortal sin, nor lost the fear of God, although I feared more for my honour. This was strong enough to prevent its being altogether lost ; nor do I think that anything in the world, nor love for any person in it, could change or make me yield in this. So I might have had strength not to act against the honour of God, such as I had by nature, not to lose that in which it seemed to me the honour of the world consists, without considering that I was losing it in many other ways. In vainly seeking it I went to extremes ; the necessary means to preserve it I altogether overlooked, only taking great care not to lose myself entirely. My father and sister were much grieved at this friend- ship ; they reproached me for it often. As they could not prevent her from entering the house, their watchfulness was useless, for much was my cunning for anything bad. I am sometimes frightened at the harm done by evil company, and had I not experienced it, could not believe it. In the season of youth especially greater must be the evil it works. I would that parents might take warning by me to pay special attention to this. And so it is that this intimacy changed me in such a manner that it left behind scarcely any trace of my virtuous disposition and soul ; and it seems to me that she and another who was given to the same kind of amusements stamped on me their own nature. From this I understand the great benefit of virtuous companionship, and I am sure that I should have remained steadfast in virtue had I at that age frequented virtuous persons ; for if I had then had some one to teach me the fear of God, the soul would have gone on gathering strength against temptation. This fear having completely left me, I feared only for my honour, which tormented me in all I did. Thinking it would never be known, I dared to do many things both against it and God. The things I have related harmed me, in the beginning, not through her fault (so it seems to me), but mine, for afterwards my aptitude for evil was quite sufficient, together with the servants about me, in whom I found a good disposition for everything bad. Had one of them given me good advice, perhaps it would have done me good ; but their interest blinded them, as inclination did me. And since I never was inclined to much evil, for I instinctively abhorred anything impure, but only to the pastimes of a pleasant intimacy ; still, the occasion being there, danger was close at hand, and to it I exposed my father and brothers, from which dangers God delivered me in such a way that it seems indeed that against my will he ordered that I should not lose myself entirely, although it could not be kept so secret as to prevent my honour suffering, and the suspicion of my father being aroused. For it does not seem to me I had continued in these vanities three months when I was sent to a convent there was in Avila, where young people like myself were brought up, although none so wicked in conduct as I ; and this with such secrecy that I and one relation alone knew of it, as they waited for an opportunity in which it might not appear strange ; for after my sister's marriage it was not well that I should be left to myself without a mother's care. So exaggerated was the love my father bore me, together with my dissimulation, that he could not believe much evil of me, and so I did not incur his displeasure. As the time was short, although something was suspected it could not be affirmed with certainty ; for as I feared so for my reputation all my efforts were to keep it secret, forgetting that it could not be hid from him who sees all. . . . One thing, it seems to me, might be some excuse were my faults not so many, and 86 SANTA TERESA it is that the intimacy was with one who might have ended well in marriage, and, consulting my confessor and other persons, they told me that in many things I did not act against God. From this obscure reference to a vague and troubled love- story, the greatest mischief of which seems to have been its concealment from her father and her sister, we may find the motive which induced Alonso, instinctively conscious of the dangers to which his daughter was exposed, to place her for a time with the good sisters of Sta. Maria de Gracia, in the old Augustinian convent affirmed by tradition to have been once a Moorish mosque which stood on the face of the hill overlooking the sunny valley of Ambles, close to the postern gate of the house. Her sister's marriage with Don Martin Guzman y Barrientos, which took place at this time (1531), and left her unprotected and alone, afforded a valid pre- text, if any was wanting, to divert the curiosity of the malicious. Strange that the girl whose honourable instincts at this moment of her life preserved her honour intact, was soon to shine conspicuous for those very virtues, the antitheses of the aberrations of a few short months which haunted her until her death ! Over and over again she harps on the same string, the secret, unhealed sore of her conscience, when the fear of God had been secondary to the care for her own reputation. " I am certain," she writes, " that great evil would be avoided if we could only understand that the point is not to defend ourselves from men, but to keep ourselves from offending God." Again: "Let us remember the time when we held it an honour to sin against the honour of God," " Oh ! Valame Dios, if we could only understand what honour is, and in what the loss of it consists ! I consider within myself the time only in which I prided myself on honour. I did what I saw others do. Oh! what offence I took at things which to think of now makes me ashamed ! And how well he spoke who said that honour and profit cannot go together; and it is literally true, for the profit of the soul and that which the world calls honour cannot exist together." "Considerations of honour," she writes unconsciously conjuring up before the reader's mind the great tawny plains of Castille, strewn over with bunches of rosemary and silver sage "are the dried stalks of rosemary which break and wound him who leans on them." Her morbid self-accusations would almost lead the cursory reader of her Life to conclude that she had sunk into mysterious and terrible abysses of sin, so harsh and uncompromising is her TERESA'S CHILDHOOD 87 indictment of her conduct at this period of her career. It must, however, be borne in mind that she judged the irreflective actions of her youth after twenty years or more of life in the cloister, and that when she wrote she had scaled the altitudes of sanctity. It is probable that the same false standard of humility which led so many saints and recluses to accuse them- selves of sins which they had never perpetrated, acted in her own case, and led her unconsciously to blacken and exaggerate actions which arose at most from thoughtless levity and inexperi- ence. On the other hand, her biographers, in their endeavour to prove the supernatural perfection of the patron saint of Spain, have fallen into the opposite error, and have so tortured the words in which she relates her pen steeped in sadness and remorse the bitterness of her first disillusion, that they have divested them of all meaning. Twenty-three years in the chilling atmosphere of the cloister were not calculated to make the austere nun to whom it was little less than a crime to have faltered, even for one instant, in her devotion to her mystic spouse, judge with too much leniency the irreflective errors of her youth. And yet it was only some pitiful little love-story, innocent enough, no doubt, nipped in the bud by her father's severity, which seemed to have sullied the fine pure robes of her pristine innocence. That her purity remained intact we know most definitely from her own assertions that she had never known what desire was. It is well, in considering this episode of her life, to bear in mind the words of San Francisco de Sales, that " the saints, in their striving for perfection, regard the defects scarcely perceptible to the ordinary run of mortals as most grave sins." The same sentiment of true or false humility prompted her in after years to request her confessor to publish her " life and sins," so that those who had formed an undue estimate of her virtues might be undeceived, whereas she desired that all that bore on the great and signal favours she received in prayer should be suppressed. We must remember that her Life is not an autobiography, but a searching analysis of her spiritual progress. If she touched in so tenderly the characters and virtues of her parents, it was merely to prove that the faults for which she so bitterly reproached herself were not the consequences of their example or a defective bringing-up. In like manner the remin- iscences of her childhood are merely set down as data in the history of her soul, for the guidance of her confessors in solving those doubts which beset her to the end of her life. Many others which assaulted her memory, and on which she dwelt wistfully as she wrote, were thrown aside as extraneous to the 88 SANTA TERESA central purpose of a book which was rigidly subordinated to a definite object. That the description of her childhood and its surroundings, scanty and unsatisfying as it is, shows traces of having been closely modelled on what she had read in the history of the saints, is a fact not without significance. CHAPTER II VENITE POST ME A CCORDING to the legend, piously chronicled by the /~\. historian of the Order, and which probably only attained its full maturity and consistency long years after Teresa had become famous and every circumstance of her life had come to be associated with a marvel, her entrance into the Convent of Sta. Maria de Gracia was presaged by a brilliant star, which, after circling above the nuns' heads in the dimness of the choir, finally alighted on, and disappeared in, the breast of Sor Maria de Briceno, the mistress of novices, whose task it was to teach and train the future foundress of the Carmelites. Teresa was just sixteen when she became an inmate of the Augustinian convent, which was still fragrant with the memory of its chap- lain, the sainted Tomas de Villanueva. She was in that frame of mind most susceptible to the soothing influences around her. She had had a rude awakening to somewhat of the passion and tragedy underlying life. The white armour of the knights, the armour of purity, glitters no longer with its pristine brightness, but seems smirched and dull. Her idols have turned from night to morning, into lumps of coarse misshapen clay. Like a tired child whose illusions and vanities have been rudely dispelled, she abandons herself to the vague charm and sense of security which broods over tranquil and sunlit cloisters ; the gentle and monotonous lives of the nuns whose draped figures flit through them breathe the same impalpable perfume of placidity and peace. In less than a week, when the fear of discovery wears off, and those out- side have ceased to disturb her life with messages, she feels happier than in her father's house. Teresa bore about with her a talisman which quickly won all hearts, and, sure of the love and confidence of those around her, the echoes of the passions and the emotions of the world she had left outside the convent walls faded from her ears, and she became once more the dreamy child who read the lives of saints and martyrs in the garden of her house at home. Again overshadowed by 89 90 SANTA TERESA the idea of dim Eternity, she listened entranced as Sor Maria Briceiio related how, through reading the words " For many are called but few are chosen," she had been drawn to enter religion. With all the ardour of her nature the impressionable girl abandoned herself to the subtle atmosphere around her, with its glimpses of infinite possibilities. " If I saw one of them shed tears when she prayed, or possess other virtues, I longed to be like her, for, as regards this, my heart was so hard that I could not shed a tear, even though I read the whole Passion through : this gave me pain." She had entered Sta. Maria full of aversion to the religious life. It now seems to have been borne in upon her for the first time that it might be her own destiny. " I asked them all to commend rne to God, that he might give me the state in which I was to serve him ; but still I wished that it might not be that of a nun, and that God might not be pleased to give it me, although I also feared matrimony." In this peaceful retreat she remained a year and a half, until the first of those severe illnesses which later on threatened her life, and in which we may perhaps trace the final motive which led her irresistibly to the cloister, forced her to return to her father's house. We can fancy the tender leave-taking which took place between herself and the nuns, whom she had subjugated by the sweetness and gentleness of her disposition. No one ever bade farewell to Teresa without feeling regret. As she wistfully looked back upon the spot where she had spent so many happy hours of undisturbed peace and contentment, which she was so soon to leave behind her, and stood once more on the threshold of that world whose dangers a bitter experience had revealed to her, much of the repugnance she had hitherto felt for the religious life melted away. Nevertheless it had cast no glamour over her mind, as is often the case. She made herself no illusions. She hesitated indeed as she left behind her the tranquil seclusion of Sta. Maria de Gracia. Like all intensely emotional temperaments she was strongly acted on by her immediate surroundings, and she may have mistaken the regret and sadness at leaving the friends endeared to her by the constant associations of close on two years for a yielding of the repugnance she had felt to the monastic life when she entered it. It was still quite possible that these fleeting thoughts which went and came, these mysterious suggestions roused into being by peculiar influences, might die away and find their grave in marriage. It was still quite possible that Teresa the Saint might never cast a gentle radiance over the religious annals often so terrible of her country. VENITE POST ME 91 A visit she paid during her convalescence to her sister Maria, the wife of Martin Guzman y Barrientos, at Castellanos de la Cailada, a country house about two days distant from Avila, decided the current of her life. Halfway between Castellanos and Avila was Hortigosa, a little hamlet of some forty houses, situated in a hollow at the base of wild and wind-swept sierras, where a brother of her father, Pedro de Cepeda, lived in rural state. This uncle had a vocation for the religious life. In his old age he abandoned all and became a monk. The road to Hortigosa is singularly beautiful. The ascent into the mountains commences directly one leaves Avila. From the summit of wild moorlands the traveller instinctively turns back to take a last look at the old gray city clustering around the gigantic mole of its cathedral, bathed in the soft haze of a summer's morning. Before and around stretches the wildest and most diversified landscape : distant woods and mountains ; great wastes full of herds of cattle; little towns and villages, lost amongst the undulations of the ground. Here and there immense blocks of stone speak to the tremendous convulsions of nature which in prehistoric ages rent this region. The last part of the way lies through natural pine woods, from which one looks down upon the little church and red roofs of Hortigosa glittering in the sun in the hollow. One building, of more importance than the huts which cluster near it, stands alone facing the gorge, surrounded by mountain slopes, where great blocks of marble gleam whitely amongst the oak scrub. This is the house where Teresa broke her journey, and the sojourn in which had such a momentous influence on her life. It is what is called in Spain a "casa solariega," that is, the feudal and hereditary house of an old and noble family. The " mayorazgo," or entailed estate, was founded in 1 504 by Pedro Nuflo del Aguilar, who was closely related to the Cepedas. Pedro, who must have been the head and representative of the family, had succeeded to it by right of primogeniture. He belonged to a class then very common in Spain, the country gentleman of noble and distinguished birth. His retainers and labourers inhabited the little cluster of huts beside it, and looked up to him as their lord and master, whose authority over them was absolute and unquestioned. The crumbling dismantled grange, with its sunlit galleries and arcaded courtyard, full of an old-world perfume of rusticity and solitary calm, standing alone in its immense solitude, is still known to the villagers as the " Palace." A gray shield above the arched gateway of the principal entrance bears unobliterated the lion and the St. Andrew's crosses of the Cepedas. Under- g2 SANTA TERESA neath the house is stabling for more than thirty horses, for in those days riding was the only means of travelling. It is only a shadowy silhouette that she leaves us of the dis- illusioned country hidalgo, at heart already an ascetic, whose thoughts had concentrated themselves, in this lovely solitude, on the eternal and mysterious problem of human life. The vanity of the world was his favourite theme, and his favourite occupation reading books of devotion, and these he made his niece, who concealed her own distaste for them in order to give him pleasure, read aloud to him, "for in this," she adds, " of wishing to give other people happiness, I have done my utmost, however irksome to me. So much so that what in others might have been a virtue, has been in me a grave fault, for it made me sometimes very indiscreet. O vala me Dios ! by what means was his Majesty disposing me for the state in which he wished me to do him service, for against my will he forced me to do violence to myself." When she started for Castellanos the same thoughts which impelled her uncle at the close of his life to end it in the cloister had already germinated, and were fermenting in her own active mind. Although the days I stayed with him were few, such was the effect the words of God I read and heard had on my heart, and the good companion- ship, that I began to understand the truth of my childhood : that all was nothing, and the vanity of the world, and how quickly everything ended ; and to fear, if I was to die, that I should go to hell. Although my will could not subject itself to be a nun, I saw that it was the best and surest life, and so, little by little, I began to constrain myself to take it. From Hortigosa to Castellanos the path lies on the edge of the canada, cordel, or great sheep track, which connects Salamanca with Estremadura. Almost a day's journey through wild and beautiful forests of evergreen oak, interspersed with pleasant glades and intersected with limpid streamlets, lay between her and the wild, wind-swept house which was her sister's home. She would probably meet the great flocks of sheep going down into, or returning from, the aromatic pastur- ages of Estremadura, followed by knots of armed and mounted shepherds. She would pass through the little village of Hortumpascual, so pleasantly situated on the brink of a rivulet, and farther on, the lovely farmhouse of the Revilla. The few allusions to scenery scattered in her writings show that Teresa was not insensible to the natural beauties around her. She speaks feelingly of the beauty of the river which she skirted going from Palencia to Soria, and she took a strange delight VENITE POST ME 93 in the view from her cell window at Alba, which looked over the poplar-lined banks and the verdant pasturages which line the tranquil course of the river Tormes. But now her mind was working out the solution of her own destiny. She saw life under a new aspect. A few days of solitary communion, in the rustic and solitary calm of a country hamlet, with an elderly and disillusioned man, whose sombre tastes had deepened the shadow cast over her by ill-health, had preached a stern sermon to the wavering girl. From that moment her fate was virtually decided. The books she read, as we have seen, affected her vividly, and she brooded on those which she, disliking, had read to give him pleasure. The harsh moralising of St. Jerome and St. Gregory took possession of her imagination in another way, as powerfully as the Lives of the Saints and the Romances of her earlier years. They allowed but one outlet. Behold the skull and bones and dust ! The pleasures of this world must be atoned for in the next, either in purgatory or an interminable hell. What the sacrifice of that which is at best a transitory and wretched life, if it ensures a future of unending joy ? Safety alone is to be found in the shadow of the cloister here alone, within a narrow path of daily duty and observances, may the will of man be kept from straying. Nevertheless it was a severe struggle. The world still seemed very fair and beautiful. She might justly hope that to her might be allotted, together with the sorrows of life, many of its joys. The devil suggested that I could not bear the discipline of the religious life, because I was accustomed to delicate living. From this I defended myself with the sufferings borne by Christ : that it was not much that I should undergo some suffering for him ; that he would help me to bear it (I must have thought, for the last I do not remember). I went through many temptations in those days. But a feeling of despair seems to have swept over her. She could not forget that in the first strong flush of youth she had touched too closely the rose of pleasure, and its thorns still rankled in her conscience. Ill-health lent its tinge of pessimism. She was never very strong, and lately had been subject to severe and prolonged fainting fits. She felt absolutely nothing of what is commonly called a vocation. Her aversion to the cloister was only equalled by a tremendous dread of hell. She had, reasoned this girl of seventeen, well merited hell, and the trials and sufferings of a nun's life could not be greater than those of purgatory. It was not much to pass her life, as it were, in purgatory, if she 94 SANTA TERESA went straight to heaven, " for this was my desire, and in this movement to take this life it appears to me I was more moved by servile fear than love." It was a sort of spiritual book- keeping by double entry, with the balance (as is proper in such cases) carefully brought out on the side of the sinner. Three months ended the struggle. She then told her father of her unalterable resolution. He refused to grant his permission. One cannot but feel an immense sympathy for the old knight whom the cloister was about to rob of the child who, of all his children, had been his darling. He promised, indeed, that she might do as she liked when his days were ended. " But I was so scrupulous that when I had once said a thing" (a characteristic which time intensified) "nothing would make me go back." Already the shadow of the cloister hovered over Alonso's hearth. " Licet in limine pater jaceat, per calcatum perge patrem, siccis oculis . ad vexillum crucis evola." Such are the words of St. Jerome words of iron words so hard and inhuman as to account at once not only for all the horrors of the Inquisition in Spain, but the no less barbarous discipline of Geneva, together with all the aberrations of the human intellect that fanatical religion has ever inspired. Evidences of their action can be traced even in Teresa herself, in the harshness which seemed at times to proceed from some influence other than her natural disposition. The same note is to be seen intensified in the gentle St. Francis of Assisi, whose undutifulness as a son presents a curious contrast to the treasures of seraphic love which he poured out on all creation. About half a mile to the north of the city walls stood a long, low pile of conventual buildings the Carmelite convent of the Encarnacion. Around and beyond it a wild, aromatic, stone- strewn waste stretched to the horizon. The valley between the convent and the steep, abrupt hill crowned by the mediaeval walls of Gothic Avila, was broken up by rough stone dykes and clumps of gray-stemmed trees, into labourers' plots and little patches of cultivation. To the left of the convent walls a sudden dip of the ground concealed the silvery stream and poplar-lined banks of the Adaja. It had not always been a convent. Even now, after the lapse of ages, were it not for the walled orchard which slopes down towards the valley, and the slender bell-tower, its aspect is rather that such the air of rusticity which hangs over it of some unpretentious, rambling country grange, belonging to an old and noble family whose fortunes are not equal to their nobility, than of a nunnery. The site occupied by the Encarnacion had been the Jewish burial-place ; close by stood their synagogue. Then a country VENITE POST ME 95 grange, surrounded by labourers' rustic dwellings, rose upon the spot, which, on the last days preceding the execution of the fatal decree of 1492, had witnessed those strange and pathetic scenes when the exiled Jews, tearing their hair and weeping, took leave of their dead for the last time. In 1513 it passed into the hands of a newly constituted community of Carmelites. The farmhouses needed but little alteration to transform them into a convent ; the Jewish cemetery became the convent garden ; and the nuns of the Encarnacion sang the first Mass in their small and poverty-stricken church on the same day that Teresa was baptized in the parish church of San Juan. The entire edifice was so miserable, the church and choir so bare and unfurnished, that the breviaries of the kneeling sister- hood were covered with the snow which fell down through the roof in winter, whilst the fierce light that poured through its chinks in summer was almost unbearable. Although their poverty was extreme, the community grew in power and numbers, until it shared with Sta. Ana of the Bernardines the preference of the noblest maidens of Avila, who elected to take their vows within its walls. The discipline was not severe : in its atmosphere of relaxation and secularism, worldly rank was as potent as in the century ; no strict, demure sisterhood like the Augustinians that of the Encarnacion, where nearly a hundred merry, noisy, squabbling, sometimes hungry, chatter- ing, and scandal-loving women made the best of a life forced on them by the exigencies of a society two-thirds of which were either monks or nuns. It was inevitable that, regarded in the light of her celebrity, an event so remarkable in the annals of the Order as Teresa's entrance into the Encarnacion, should have been traced to a transcendental origin, as being the fulfilment of a long fore- ordained disposition of Providence, and not the result of accident or chance. So the legend grew that, long years before she became an inmate in its walls a prophecy (although as to the person who uttered it there was considerable divergence of opinion ; some attributing it to an aged nun, who had seen the convent founded, others to a treasure-seeker who, hunting for buried treasure around the convent, discovered with prophetic eye a greater treasure than that which he sought with his eyes of treasure-seeker) foretold that it was to be inhabited by a saint of the name of Teresa. Ribera, probably of opinion that two are better than one, suggests that it was foretold by both, so that there might be two witnesses to such a true prediction ; naYvely adding, " that it is certain there was such a prophecy ; 96 SANTA TERESA for the Mother, being so full of wit, used laughingly to ask another of the same name whether one of them might not be the predicted saint." On the 2nd of November, the eve of All Souls 1533 (the precise year has been disputed, and indeed is not of vital importance), Teresa, then in her eighteenth year, upheld alone by a stern sense of duty no love of God to fill the aching void in her desolate heart left her native town behind her, clustering serene and smokeless within its walls against the cold translucent sky of early morning, and resolutely took the road which led down to the Encarnacion exactly the same to-day, to out- ward view, as when its gates closed upon her more than three centuries ago. Her choice of this convent had been determined by the presence there of a very dear friend, Juana Suarez. The severe discipline of Sta. Maria de Gracia had filled her with dis- may. She had induced her brother Antonio to take the same resolution as herself, and after leaving her at the convent gates, he was to retrace his steps alone, to seek admittance to the Dominican monastery of Sto. Tomas. I do not think that when I die, the wrench will be greater than when I went forth from my father's house ; for it seems to me that every bone was wrenched asunder, and as there was no love of God to take the place of the love of father and kinsmen, the struggle was so great that, if the Lord had not helped me, my own resolutions would not have been enough to carry me through. Thus, without a trace of what is commonly called vocation, impelled by "servile fear, not love," she consummated the sacrifice of her life with unfaltering resolution and serenity. Her father was sent for, and arrived in time to see her take the habit. The previous tension was followed by a strange reaction : a great contentment that she had chosen the better part, an ineffable tenderness that banished all the former aridity, and shed its glamour over the monotonous duties of the cloister, which filled her with delight. As she swept the convent corridors in the hours which had been formerly devoted to pastimes and the adornment of her person she was thrilled with a mysterious joy, which came she knew not whence. But amidst all the meekness and docility of the newly- fledged novice, who gathered up the nuns' cloaks in the choir and restored them to their places, or lighted the sisters through the dark and draughty corridors, there lingered a spice of the dignity and true Castilian punctilio a respect for the " punto de honor," that last infirmity of a noble nature which it was VENITE POST ME 97 long years before she confessed to have vanquished, but which, I prefer to believe, she never quite rooted out. Her tears and love of solitude were misinterpreted for the symptoms of dis- content ; she was often blamed when blameless, " which I bore with great pain and imperfection. I was fond of all religious observances, but not of those which seemed to bring contempt. I delighted in being thought well of; I was neat in all. I did ; everything seemed to me a virtue." However it may be with her sense of dignity, at all events her " curiousness " and neat- ness lingered to the end of her life, to the great scandal of Yepes, who protested against the perfumed towel with which he wiped his hands in Medina del Campo, as a grave abuse Teresa wittily excusing her nuns from the imputation of a too scrupulous cleanliness and refinement by alleging that it was an imperfection they had copied from herself. But besides these " little straws " it is Teresa who speaks which she threw on the fire of divine love, the unconscious heroism of her nature manifested itself by the bedside of a dying nun, whom she nursed through a terrible and loathsome malady, when her companions shrank away in horror and disgust. But was she happy? Did the cloister fulfil all her aspirations ? Had she found the mysterious felicity which had so attracted her in Sta. Maria de Gracia? Not yet ! One would almost say that the long perspective of years, unbroken by a flush of hope, which stretched before her in the chill monotony of the cloister, oppressed and tortured her. By the sick nun's bedside she prays for patience at the price of any infirmity and suffering. All finite things appear of little worth compared to the supreme and eternal felicity which they might open to her. Already by a few unconscious touches, scattered here and there, she paints for us a vivid portrait of her character : her childish and naive vanity and pride, sensitive to her own deficiencies, flinching from everything that seemed to bring contempt, and delighting in the good opinion of those around her; the unselfishness which made her desire to give pleasure to others at the cost of her own inclinations ; a loyalty to friends (a toda prueba) which afterwards appeared to her, by the light of an uncompromising religion, as an undue complac- ency born of the blind levity of youth, but which, unsoured or distorted by creed, endured as one of the most intimate charms of her character until death. A fine and noble virility mingles with the sweet and tender graces of her loving and feminine nature ; a scorn of what is mean and base and unworthy, which made her presence in the Encarnacion a sanctification 7 9 8 SANTA TERESA for its inmates ; the absence of those petty foibles (vices too strong a word) considered by men the prerogative of women, but in which both can claim an equal share; a rigid respect for others' reputations "with me other people's backs were safe" a respect which her intimates and those most with her were bound to observe ; the inviolable sanctity she attached to her word and promises ; the stern determination and force of will with which she carries out a resolution, and the invincible tenacity of purpose which enables her in after life to conquer all difficulties these as yet still in embryo, their development only a question of time. On the 3rd November 1534 Teresa de Ahumada became a professed nun, after a terrible struggle with the flesh and the devil a struggle only comparable to that which battled in her heart when she wakled down to the Encarnacion with her brother to seek a refuge from her doubts and lookings-back in the shelter of the cloister. Still she made it, as she is careful to chronicle, " with great resolution and happiness." The year following her profession, which set upon her the final seal of the cloister, her health gave way. Her prayer had been granted. The sparse nourish- ment and privations of the monastic life had told upon a frame already delicate and sensitive. The fainting fits, from which she had suffered before, became more frequent and prolonged, and were complicated with severe pains of the heart. For long intervals she lay in a state of unconsciousness painful to witness. In this condition, in the autumn of 1535, accompanied by her faithful friend Juana Suarez, she returned to her father's house. The doctors of Avila (medical science was then barely out of its infancy), powerless to give relief, but unwilling to own their incapacity, shook their heads and pocketed their fees. The anxious father, resolved to try other remedies which perhaps commended themselves to him as likely to prove more efficacious (and they could not well prove less so), decided on taking her to Becedas, a little village two leagues from Barco de Alba, famous for the cures worked by its classical curandera, or healing woman. As the cure, however, was not to take place until April of the following year, she spent the interval with her sister Maria at Castellanos. It is a mistake to suppose that the gentle people of Spain at this time lived, as they now do, clustered together in towns. The country around Avila is full of houses which were then inhabited by rural hidalgos and people of family. Castellanos de la Caflada lies close to the edge of the great sheep-track VENITE POST ME 99 which stretches from Salamanca to Estremadura a wild, wind-swept, solitary country grange, midway between Avila and Alba, with its chapel, its courtyards, its massive well, sur- rounded by one or two labourers' cottages, overlooking billowy oak forests, which stretch away uninterruptedly into the far distance, until they melt into the blueness of distant mountains. The shield of Martin Guzman y Barrientos still hangs over the doorway. It was here, in this lonely house, which is now, owing to its distance from a town, its weird loneliness and solitude, abandoned to desolation, but was then, when journeying was difficult and painful, the permanent dwelling of the family, that Teresa felt the first faint tremors of mysticism. No spot could be imagined more likely to encourage the broodings of a morbid and sensitive mind. Here in some little dark chamber, with its casement open to the light, she lay prostrated by sickness, listening to the vague rumours without, the lowing of cattle, the rhythmical murmur of the breeze as it swept over the distant forest, watching a ray of sunlight as it flickered and lengthened on the wall. Her sister would bustle in now and then, the Castilian housewife, cumbered with much serving, filling the chamber for a moment with activity and kindliness. During the long hours, as the hot summer's afternoon wore towards evening, in her enforced and often painful solitude, she read and pored over the Abecedario E 'spiritual, given to her by Pedro de Cepeda when, on her way to Castellanos, she again broke her journey at his house in Hortigosa. It exercised over her imagination the same inevitable influence which all her reading had done. She felt in herself the same mysterious and inexplicable move- ments she read of in its pages. It was not hard to assign to mysterious spiritual influences the vague tremors, the sudden thrills due to natural and physical causes alone ; all the obscure psychological workings of a mind whose faculties were preter- naturally sharpened and their sensitiveness increased by severe illness. The body, not the soul, or rather the body reacting on the soul, was the seat of the emotions for which the Abecedario provided her with a complete nomenclature. She learned to class and define them in the vague terms used by the Franciscan mystic, which might mean anything or nothing. In those moments of unwonted tenderness, when she was moved to tears, which solaced and refreshed her overburdened nature, and acted on the conscience like a healing and beneficent balm, it seemed to her that she was vouchsafed the gift of tears. In those moments of hushed tranquillity, when the soul seems to soar above all created worlds, spurning them in its flight, ioo SANTA TERESA she felt that she attained the Prayer of Union. She brooded, fascinated, over the wonderful personality of Christ, and lost herself in ineffectual endeavours, vainly stimulating her sluggish imagination to bring him present within her. She was rapt away in the Prayer of Quiet and Union momentary and fugitive barely lasting the time of an Ave Mary, but leaving behind it unmistakable effects. She felt herself carried away to supernal heights, whence she looked down with ineffable pity on the world immeasurable beneath her, and on "those who follow it even in its lawful things." Amongst the most precious and touching of her relics, pre- served by her nuns of Avila, is the venerable tome by Francisco de Osuna, whose yellow pages bear the traces of constant study. Whole passages are heavily scored and underlined, whilst on the margins a cross, a heart, a hand pointing (her favourite marks), indicate the quaint thoughts and tender conceits which seemed to her the most worthy of notice in the Gothic text. In the spring of the year she was taken to Becedas, to undergo the awful ministrations of the curandera, whose treat- ment was perhaps but little more terrific than that in vogue with the Purgones and Sangrados of the period, with their hot oils, actual cautery, and poultices of split chicken. Some idea of the perversion and ignorance which, in spite of all Isabella's wise reforms and Cisneros' denunciations, still reigned rampant amongst the priesthood, may be gathered from her account of her relations there with her confessor, who made her the con- fidante of an impure and guilty secret. The priest, whose "disposition and understanding were," she remarks, " good enough, and who was not without some smattering of letters, but not much," formed an attachment for his attractive and interesting penitent, whose purity and innocence filled him with confusion. " It might have been purer," she adds significantly, "and was not without danger, since, if God had not been present, there were opportunities when he might have been offended more gravely. For seven years he had carried on an illicit intimacy with a woman of the place, which had destroyed his reputation, and none bold enough amongst his flock to censure." Mock modesty has never flourished in a country of plain speaking like Spain, and, instead of pretending to be shocked, the guilty story he poured into her ear roused the young nun's warmest pity. " I had great compassion on him," she says, " for I loved him much," and adds as if the warm and tender instincts of a generous nature needed palliation "for so frivolous and blind was I VENITE POST ME 101 that it seemed to me a virtue to prove my gratitude and loyalty to any one who loved me." She had recourse to a ruse to save him from perdition. He wore round his neck some little copper charms which had been given him by his mistress, and although " I do not," says Teresa, " absolutely believe that there is any truth in this of love charms," still to them she mainly attributed (for people were superstitious in those days) the guilt of his unhappy infatuation. Wilily, and under a show of great affection, she lured them from him, and had them thrown into the river. " My intention was good ; the deed evil." His repentance was immediate. It was as if he awakened from a deep sleep. He completely abandoned the unfortunate cause of his aberration, and died within a year from the day on which he first saw Teresa. (Pity that converts should be so short- lived.) But the three months at Becedas, although not wholly fruitless, as the foregoing history proves, failed of restoring her to health. The curandera faithfully exhausted all her barbarous remedies (" I know not how I was able to bear them, and indeed although I bore them my constitution could not ") and left her almost lifeless. Sharp teeth seemed to gnaw incessantly at her heart ; her nerves shrivelled up with intolerable agony ; she knew no rest day or night ; and, consumed with disease and fever, she became the prey of the profoundest sadness. The treatment had resulted, as might be expected, in the complete prostration of the sufferer. In remote corners and mountain districts of Spain the saludador (health-giver) and curandera still linger, their methods in no wise changed, their powers as implicitly believed in as when they practised their diabolical remedies on the Castilian nun. Tails of lizards boiled in water of rue, horse flies fried in oil, allowed to settle under the waxing or waning light of the moon, medicines as weird and unhallowed as the ingredients of the witches' cauldron of Macbeth, are still drunk eagerly, their efficacy unquestioned. If the saludador fails, the curandera by sheer brute force stretches and pulls the sufferer's limbs until the bones crack in the sockets, and his frame is left bruised and sore and stiff. Such was the regime to which Teresa was subjected. Small wonder, as she remarks drily, that, by force of remedies ("d poder de medecinas "), her life became almost extinct. " With this gain," she adds ironically, she returned, accompanied by her watchful father and Juan a Suarez, to her father's house in Avila. The doctors there despaired of her recovery, and pronounced her to be in a consumption. After three months of intense suffering, enlivened by the reading of the History of Job 102 SANTA TERESA in the Morals of St. Gregory, a crisis took place on the night of the Feast of Our Lady of August. Her father, anxious to save her pain, believing her desire to arise from her apprehension of approaching death, had refused that day to allow her to make her confession. That very night, after a violent paroxysm, she fell into a deep trance, which lasted four days. The sacrament of extreme unction was administered ; those around her repeated the Creed ; nuns were sent from the Encarnacion to watch over the body of one whom they already looked upon as dead, and bear it to the grave which lay open day and night to receive its burden ; the Carmelite friars of Avila chanted the last solemn dirges for their sister's soul. Her father's tenacity (" que sabia mucho de pulso ") alone saved her from being buried alive. " This my daughter," he said, " is not yet for the grave ! " When she returned back to life her eyes were full of the wax which had guttered down into them from the candles which had burnt around what had seemed a corpse. Long afterwards probably not until the girl over whose sickbed they then bent had lived to become famous for her sanctity it floated through the honest, muddled, superstitious brain of one or other of those watchers, that, amongst the distraught utterances of wavering consciousness, they had caught strange fragments of prophecy. They remembered how she had asked them why they had called her, and that she had said that she had been in heaven and visited hell, how that she should be the means of saving Juana Suarez, and had seen the convents she was to found, together with the great things which afterwards came to pass in the Order prophesy ing that she should die a saint and her body be covered with brocade. Ribera is, however, careful to mention that when her friends referred in her presence to these mysterious utterances to which their honest imaginations and the lapse of years, together with her increasing fame, gave a strange meaning, the Mother dismissed them as the incoherent ravings of delirium, and expressed her shame that a man so grave as her father should have listened to them. Her first act on the return of consciousness was to make her confession ; as she communicated her tears fell thick and fast. Her tongue was bitten to pieces ; her throat so weak as to be unable to swallow anything but water; her body as if it had been violently wrenched limb from limb ; her senses weak and wavering ; her nerves shrunk up with pain into a coil like rope ; her body like a corpse ; unable to move hand or foot with the exception of one finger of her right hand. She could not bear to be touched, and was moved in a sheet. VENITE POST ME 103 On Palm Sunday she was, by her own desire, taken back to the Encarnacion. She probably now despaired of recovery, and at most hoped to await the death which did not seem far distant, in the quiet of its cloisters. " She whom they expected dead, they received with life, but the body worse than dead, and pitiful to look on. I cannot describe the extremity of my weakness, for only my bones were left." Of what nature, it may be asked, was the mysterious malady which deprived her so entirely of the use of her limbs that she " gave thanks to God when she could crawl about on all-fours"? Of what nature the paroxysm which preceded the trance which the watchers around her bed mistook for death, and which left her (in her own words) weak and delirious, her tongue bitten to pieces, her body contorted like a coil of rope, so com- pletely deprived of movement that she could only raise one finger, and so sensitive that she had to be moved about in a sheet ? Were they hystero-epileptic convulsions which left her a paralysed and helpless invalid for three years in the Encarnacion, as has been affirmed by one incapable of appreciating her greatness and genius, who finds in her infirmities the only explanation of her marvellous life, and relegates her, with offensive and unappreciative criticism, to the same category of hysterical visionaries as those who expiated their aberrations at Llerena ? At this distance of time it is impossible to say. Neither her visions nor her locutions impossible and strange as they may seem to us impossible and incredible as they seemed even to many of her own age, whose religious othodoxy was unquestioned bear the slightest trace of a disordered imagination, or of being the wild and incoherent fancies of a distraught and hysterical temperament. The calm manner in which she relates them, the subtle and penetrating distinctions with which she classifies them relegating each to its special sphere the complete control which she possesses over both her feelings and her modes of expressing them, are as far removed from this charge as any writings that were ever penned. No one born was less hysterical than Teresa. Her life was calm, orderly, full of discipline ; her actions free from precipitation and haste; her mind clear, shrewd, and sharp. And this same clearness, sharpness, shrewdness is as discernible in her relation of a vision as in her narrative of the foundation of a convent. She herself ascribed the maladies from which she suffered io 4 SANTA TERESA to the end of her life to the effects of quartan ague. To some strange attacks which convulsed the body she was certainly subject. " When she had the ' perlesia ' " (sic), testified one of the nuns in the expedientes for her canonisation, " I sometimes went near her to hold her, but she answered, ' Leave me alone, daughter, this body must bear it.' " With that great good sense, however, which has been so obscured by those whose advantage it was to make the most of all that savoured of the supernatural, redounding as it did to their own interests and the fame of their convents and Order, she found in her weakness of the heart and constant fainting fits the origin of many of her visions adding that no importance should be attached to them, the solid and homogeneous exercise of virtue being alone worthy of attention. A keen observer, she constantly refers to the reaction of the body upon the mind. We should, however, fall into a grave error if, whilst taking this into consideration, we attributed to epilepsy and physical causes alone, what passes our compre- hension in the strange psychological history of Teresa. In an age of materialism we are too apt to make little of, if not entirely to ignore, those transcendental influences for which we can assign no rational cause to overlook the share which the Ideal has in the formation of the World. Mohammed owed his power to something other than epilepsy. The world swarms with epileptics and victims of hysteria ; how few of them have made their voices heard, or their influence felt, in its history ! Indeed there is something in the very nature of the disease which has always been repugnant to the innate good sense of humanity. Humiliating as it is, with all our vaunted science, no rational cause has as yet been found to account for the something which sobs through the music of a Beethoven, or constitutes the mental difference between Cervantes or Shakespeare and the rest of mankind. What is this impalpable, intangible something that we cannot chain down, or submit to a cold analysis, and which Teresa also possesses ? One other hypothesis remains. Teresa wrote her Life at that period of her career when it was already beginning to be whispered around her that a saint had appeared within the walls of the Encarnacion. A saint without his or her visions and revelations was too strange an anomaly even to be con- templated at that period. She had been nurtured on miracles and supernatural dealings from her cradle : she was saturated with lives of saints and the incredible histories in which they abound. Did she unconsciously mould the narrative of her Life to suit the taste of the period? Did she, despising all VENITE POST ME 105 these excrescences which credulity affirmed to be the essence of sanctity, feeling herself moved to undertake a mission little less than divine, and knowing its difficulties, and confident in her genius, use it to etherealise moods and fancies of which she herself was not very sure, but which a little exaggeration of phrase, a little accentuation of sentiment, could transform from a dim abstraction, faintly perceived because she wished to perceive it, into a concretion ? One curious characteristic of her visions is that she analyses and describes them rather with the penetration and calm judgment of an observer chronicling events to which he is a stranger, or which, if not, would seem to have taken place in some other sphere so far is his point of view removed from them than in the fervid and broken phrase of a person who has actually experienced them, and writes with the impression fresh upon him. So great is the disparity between the genius which reveals to you a whole train of psychological emotions, the loftiness and force of the argument, the sublimity and transparency of image and conception, and the feeble and futile motive around which all this delicate embroidery is woven. But no ! Teresa is nothing if not honest and sincere. Wasted and fevered by fasting and vigil, it is possible that in the obscure recesses of her brain, phantasmagorias sharp in outline, swift as a lightning flash, to which she lent the form and hue of the images most familiar to her, fleeted across her inner consciousness. These things, these glimpses, nothing in them- selves, filtered through her strong and eminently practical brain, and under the touch of her magic pen became flushed with life and reality, assumed shape and consistency. It cannot be too strongly insisted on that she herself doubted to the end of her life as to their reality ; and if she doubted it was because there was good reason for it. Whether she had been merely a deluder and deluded tormented her to the end. Perhaps she was haunted by some such apprehension when she murmured brokenly on her deathbed, over and over again : " Corcontritum et humiliatum, Deus, non despicies." Deluder and deluded she may have been ; deluders and deluded have been, even greater than she ; but happily her grandeur, like theirs, rests on a far other basis. If delusions of an overwrought and ardent temperament, we forget the fact in the marvellous genius of the woman. If delusions, her life was none, with its ceaseless activity and sacrifice of self, its purity of aim, its unfaltering cheerfulness, its candid truthfulness ; her rectitude was no delusion ; no delusion those thousands of leagues she travelled over, oblivious of sun and snow; no 106 SANTA TERESA delusions those distant convents of hers, lost in hamlets of La Mancha and folds of Castilian deserts, if founded on them ; and she still remains, in spite of all, unshorn of any tittle of her glory, the noblest, most unselfish, most heroic, and the cleverest woman that Medievalism ever produced. CHAPTER III , THE ENCARNACION IT is impossible to look without emotion on the long, low pile of conventual buildings which stand alone amid the stone- strewn waste about half a mile to the north of the city walls of Avila. It is as if in the dumb stones were chained by some subtle and mysterious process some essence of Teresa's in- dividuality, some echo of her voice, some touch of her hands, as of those of the generations of nuns who have passed un- marked away to their eternal rest under the cloister slabs. As they have watched the centuries fade into the past and preserve the secret, so those massive embattled walls shut in thirty years of her life, and seal the record in immutable and eternal silence. The landscape around, its component parts, are the same she knew and loved. In this trickling water, from which the sun strikes gleams of silver, in these trees, in these flowers, she found " the record of the Creator, and an open book." Time and change have not been busy here. A gray fountain in the bottom of the valley close to the convent gates bears on its angles the same cannon-ball ornaments as the cathedral. The water bubbling from it trickles through the clefts in the boulders, and runs a stream across the sandy road, as it did in the time of the Catholic Kings. Landscape, man, and animal, the same she fleeted past with fixed unobservant eyes on that 2nd of November, three centuries ago, when she took the decisive resolution of her life. The chivalry is gone and the knights are gone. They lie asleep on their alabaster beds in the cathedral ; but the peasant, his peculiar modes of life, his tongue, his woolly donkeys, his antiquated system of agriculture, his proverbs, his dress, have remained fixed, immovable, unchanging as the fields he cultivates and the pasturages he roams over with his cattle. The pastoral, patriarchal life, the shepherds and goatherds, their cattle and flocks, have remained stationary, as inseparable a portion of the landscape now as then. The bare, aromatic waste, strewn with misshapen boulders, 107 io8 SANTA TERESA as if capricious Titans had been at play, unfit for cultivation although here and there a few furrows remind us of the labourers' poverty which stretches behind and around to the horizon, what change can there be in that? What change in the sudden broken dip of the ground to the left, where we feel rather than see the presence of the river, the Adaja ? What change in the poor labourers' dwellings which cluster humbly under the convent walls ? in the acrid scent of burning straw ? What change even coming to the work of man in the irregular, picturesque outlines of the convent? The slender bell-tower has perchance replaced an older one. Teresa planted the tall cypress which pierces the translucent sky, and watched it grow. The homely pastoral landscape: that withered, melancholy, impressive landscape of Castille, baked and calcined by the merciless glare of the sun in summer, the colour faded out of it by the rigorous winds and frosts of winter. A sun and landscape which reflect each other. In the one no nebulous transition of mood ; in the other no outlines melting into hazy vagueness. A perfervid, scorching glare in summer ; a broad, clear, searching light in winter. The sky metallic in its glittering blueness, vibrating with merciless light. No Castilian landscape is complete without its donkeys, that important factor in the life of Castilian man. Donkeys, woolly-coated, eat in the parched and dried-up plots of cultivated ground, divided from each other by rough stone walls and clumps of gray-stemmed trees. A donkey turns the Moorish water-wheel, the creak of which drones lazily on the ear. The silence is intense ; the sense of solitude unbroken. A swineherd in hide sandals drives a herd of black pigs through the tall dried thistle-stalks and fennel umbels, which grow under the convent walls, above whose pyramidal battlements rise a few tall trees. A wild charcoal-burner, returning to the mountains on his donkey, patters past the square gateway of the convent, round which climbs a stunted vine. A bob-tailed dog blinks in the glare of the February sun. An old woman washes brilliant rags at the fountain. In green corners, more in shadow than the rest veritable oases in the arid wilderness brambles twine about, clinging to the walls, and forming trailing masses amongst the silver trunks of elms and poplars. Looking back at the old walled town, lying serene and smokeless on the summit of the hill in the pure translucent light of evening, girt about by medieval walls, perfect and unbroken ; and at the red Romanesque towers and arcaded walls of San Vicente, it is impossible not to linger wistfully on such a scene ; impossible to turn away without a sigh, in which admiration and intense o THE ENCARNACION 109 sadness alike mingle an involuntary homage to the outward symbols of a dead life and an Ideal vanquished, faded into nothingness. Probably little change took place in the interior arrange- ment or exterior aspect of the convent as Teresa knew it until her fame had reached the bounds of the civilised world after her canonisation in the seventeenth century. Little even then ; for in essential particulars it remains unaltered, the change limited, probably, to such partial reparations and rebuilding as the lapse of time made necessary, and the erection of the walls which to-day bound the convent enclosures. Until the seven- teenth century her cells were preserved intact the one that she had occupied for the first thirty years of her life as one of the community, and that which she inhabited as its prioress. Until then the fragrance of her presence seemed still to haunt the walls which had been the mute witnesses of her life. Her two cells, situated one above the other, were looked upon as sacred ground, and consecrated to her memory. In the cell which had been her oratory, her picture hung in the niche where she had formerly kept her images, and before it a light burned day and night. That above it, where she had slept for thirty years, was converted into a little chapel, before whose tiny altar, adorned with a picture of the " Transverberation," Mass was constantly celebrated. The walls were covered with paintings representing various scenes of her life. These dark and obscure rooms, illumined by the flickering flame of oil lamps, which were never allowed to become extinguished, were the sacred Mecca of the convent. It was felt that they still conserved some faint aroma, some subtle emanation, of the woman whose bones lay in Alba. Here on the Tuesdays throughout Lent the com- munity thronged to sing solemn Misereres to the strain of the organ, before the image of that Christ which the saint herself had caused to be painted in memory of her celebrated vision. It was one of the stations where halted that solemn pro- cession, first instituted by Teresa, which on the night of Holy Thursday, after complines, started from the dim and shadowy choir, leaving it wrapped in mysterious repose, and filling the gloomy, echoing passages of the Encarnacion with the light of burning tapers and the sweet vapours of swinging censers, bore aloft before them in triumph and rejoicing the image of Our Lady of Clemency. Here, alone with her impalpable presence, generations of nuns who followed her into the mystic silence of the cloister have unbosomed themselves of obscure griefs and woes, and no SANTA TERESA here let us hope that in the example of her life they have found consolation and help. Alas ! those cells, perfumed with so many memories of her presence, so many intimate traces of her individuality, no longer exist. They have made room for a cold and frigid chapel, which the simple devotion of the nuns does its best to beautify, but in vain. It seems impossible that the community, so jealously conservative of their great sister's memory, should have consented to their demolition, even though it was to glorify a bishop's last resting-place. The popular resentment, wounded by what simple and pious souls must have looked upon as little less than sacrilege, may perchance be traced in the legendary and mysterious voice, which it is said warned the workmen to desist in their work of destruction. "The place whereon thou standest is holy ground." Nevertheless, although Teresa's cells with their vague and poetic charm have gone, the entire building is sanctified to her memory. One would almost say, so indelibly has she set her seal upon it, that she has absorbed into her own strong and potent individuality not only that of the convent, but of the successive generations of nuns who have peopled it since. In the courtyard is still to be seen the heavy old wooden door through which she entered to take the habit, and whence she sallied forth to found the Reform. Here in this shady locutorio, full of a rural, quaint simplicity, mingled with I know not what dignity and stateliness, when the sun streams in through the wooden casement and sleeps on the red brick floor through the long drowsy afternoon, the visionary figure of Teresa might still take its seat in the old leather arm-chair, in which she has so often sat before, for all the change it has undergone. The coro alto (raised choir), in whose mysterious gloom she heard the voice which bade her not converse with men but angels, is unaltered from what it was when Teresa de Jesus, sitting at the feet of the image of Our Lady of Clemency, which occupied the priorial stall, celebrated her first chapter, and quelled (mysterious conquest !) her turbulent and unruly subjects by the depth of her humility. Unaltered that little dark, narrow grating, submerged in obscurity, to the left of the high altar where she communicated, sanctified by tradition as the spot where Christ showed her the nail in his side, and celebrated his espousals with Teresa de Jesus. No succeeding prioress has ventured to remove that wooden image from the seat where Teresa's hands first placed it ; for on the Eve of San Sebastian, in the first year of her office as prioress, as the first strains of the Salve broke the stillness, she THE ENCARNACION in saw the Queen of Heaven herself descend amidst a cloud of angels, and take its place in the priorial stall. Before it, every Saturday after complines, the nuns chant the antiphony of the Conception to Our Lady, using the prayers appointed for that purpose by Teresa. The crucifix, so like the famous Christ of Burgos, which she sent to the community from Toledo ; the little wooden image of San Jose", affirmed by the nuns to have kept her informed of all that went on in the convent walls ; a few blackened and dusty oil paintings, full of that spirit of realism and pathos, and treated in the same archaic fashion, so peculiar to the early Flemish painters ; every little relic, every little vestige of her passage through the Encarnacion, is pre- served by the community with jealous care and solicitude as the chiefest of their treasures as perhaps their only raison d'etre in the nineteenth century is to be their guardians. In the ceremonies which almost daily commemorate the fragrance of her presence amongst them, in the daily lives of the nuns of this convent which Teresa ever looked upon as the Mother of the Reform, she still lives, and will live until the Encarnacion of Avila is abandoned to the fate of San Francisco (a monument of art as fine and impressive as the famous Church of Sto. Tomas) and becomes a stable for cattle and donkeys. It was she who instituted the confraternity in which each nun dedicates a Mass to a dead sister ; the observance of the feast of Our Lady of Sorrows on the first Friday of Lent ; the fast after communion on Palm Sunday, which lasted until four of the afternoon. Hers the example they still follow in the ceremony of the Lavatorio (the washing of feet) on Holy Thursday, which, before she became its prioress, was celebrated with great pomp and splendour, and for which she substituted a common jug and basin of Talavera ware. Hers the im- memorial custom of gathering together the capes that the nuns left behind them in the choir, and hanging them in their places. In all this still live the gentle unselfishness and rigid austerity of Teresa de Jesus. Other shadowy figures indelibly connected with the birth of the Reform group themselves round the Encarnacion. The aged St. Peter of Alcantara, knotted and gnarled like roots of wood, a grandiose figure from one of Zurbaran's canvases ; San Francisco de Borja, once known in the century as the Marquis of Lombay and Viceroy of Barcelona, gay soldier and courtier, and greater saint ; Fray Juan de la Cruz, the site of whose humble hut, inhabited by him for five years whilst chaplain of the convent, then outside the convent boundaries, is now marked by a little chapel built of the wood from Teresa's ri2 SANTA TERESA demolished cell ; the simple and guileless Julian de Avila ; and a cloud of Jesuits and Dominicans, black-robed and tetrical the conscience-probers of the age. Now can it be forgotten that it was in its seclusion, in the intervals " snatched from the spinning-wheel " and humbler duties, that she composed the most famous of her books, the Vida. How should it be, then, that she should not love the home in which youth had insensibly melted away into middle age, a home sanctified by the successive steps of that severe mental and spiritual training which her pen has described so sublimely? Years after, when she had become a great and famous woman, as the nuns expressed their gratitude at her having chosen the Encarnacion to rest in after one of her journeys, she replied : " This convent is my mother, and as such I love it, and so I came to be with my sisters." Impressive always, more especially so when the weird, flickering light of evening melts all the details of its grave and tranquil interior and fuses them into a shadowy tint full of mystery and charm, is the coro bajo (choir on the ground-floor) of the Encarnacion. The low wooden ceiling, traversed by heavy beams, black with age, where in the angles generations of spiders have spun their webs ; the whitewashed walls, on which dusky oil paintings form vague blotches of shadow, assume a dignity and a solemnity impossible to analyse or describe. A rustle in the choir above, the shutting of a book, the slamming of a door, the hushed tread of many feet ; and as the silent and solitary church is filled with an undertone which rises and falls in waves of monotonous and enormous sadness, and the gloaming falls over the tall carved stalls which line the wall, until they seem to me to retain something, I know not what, impalpable and diaphanous of the ghostly forms of communities long passed away : I gaze wistfully into this simple and dignified interior, over which broods such a mysterious peace, to me still haunted by Teresa's presence. Teresa returned to the Encarnacion on Palm Sunday 1537. She was then about twenty-two, and twenty-five years of her life were destined to be spent within its walls. It is often difficult to disentangle, from her long and often rambling autobiography, the various phases of her spiritual history. It is impossible to define moods, often changeable and contradictory, with any clearness. Nevertheless we may roughly classify this period of her life into three distinct epochs : the time her illness lasted, eight months in its acute stage (she speaks with rejoicing of being able to crawl about on her hands and knees), three years before she was able to resume her active life ; THE ENCARNACION 113 the interval which intervened between her recovery and what her biographers term her final conversion, extending over eighteen years ; and a third term of seven years, in which she laid the outward visible foundations of that sanctity without which it would have been impossible for her to found. During the three years she lay paralysed and helpless in the convent infirmary, alone with her books and prayers, the " servile fear" that had moved her formerly had given place to love. She had risen high in the esteem of the good-natured, garrulous nuns, who were filled with wonder at her resignation, cheerfulness, and edifying discourse, and at what perhaps amazed them still more, on the part of a lonely and crippled invalid, her resolute discouragement of scandal and gossip. " For I never forgot that I must not say of others what I should not like to have been said of me . . . and of this were those who were most with me so persuaded, that it became a habit with them. It came to be understood that, where I was, other people's reputations were safe, as also with those who were my friends and associates, and whom I influenced." This freedom from meanness is one of the intimate traits of the Castilian saint, and in itself may offer the explanation of the love and great respect she never failed to inspire. But still as yet she was like a thousand other nuns. She longed (if only to serve God better than she could do shut up in a convent infirmary, " so do we deceive ourselves ") to recover her health, and once more take an active part in the little world of the convent. Still no sign of impatience (and if any such there had been she would inexorably have set it down) ; " it was better to remain ever thus," she thought, if renewed health were to bring with it condemnation. Nevertheless it was hard at such an age to be laid aside a hopeless and helpless cripple. " So as I saw myself so paralysed and so young, and how I had sped at the hands of earthly doctors, I resolved to have recourse to heavenly ones. I began to have masses said . . . for as to other devotions and ceremonies used by some, especially women, and which, it has been agreed on since, are undesirable on account of their superstitious nature, I could never abide them." Teresa betook herself to St. Joseph, causing his festival to be celebrated with all possible splendour and solemnity " fuller," she adds, " of vanity than spirit." She never doubted, when at last she rose from her sickbed, that she owed her cure to the saint's intercession, " who," in her own words, " acted like himself in enabling her to rise and walk about, and ridding her of the paralysis." She never ceased to manifest throughout her life her gratitude 3 114 SANTA TERESA to and predilection for, St. Joseph, whose guiding hand she discovered in all her after successes and triumphs. She saw him in her visions ; to him she dedicated many of her convents ; and it is she who, resuscitating that devotion for him which had been allowed to fall into abeyance, restored him once more from the shadowy background to which he had been relegated, to his rightful place beside the refulgent figure of the Virgin Mary. " For some years," she writes, " it appears to me that I ask him something on his festival and it is always granted ; if my petition goes somewhat crooked, he redresses it for my greater good I know not how one can think on the Queen of Angels at the time when she suffered so much with the Child Jesus, without giving thanks to St. Joseph for his great assistance. In spite, however, of her restoration to health, Teresa never again quite recovered her strength, although she found a substitute for it in her tenacious will and nervous energy. To the end of her life she was an ailing and a feeble woman, subject to constantly recurring attacks of paralysis ("perlesia") and fever whilst for more than twenty years after her recovery, she could take no food until after midday on account of violent vomitings, which she was forced to bring on over-night the days before she communicated. We have now arrived at the second period of her life in the Encarnacion a period which carries us over the long space of eighteen years. We shall see how, during that time, she struggled between inclination and her high standard of duty. We shall see how impossible it was for her ever to be contented with anything short of perfection. And, watching her swayed alternately by her weaker nature, which prompted her to seize and make the most of such delights as entered into her meagre life alternately by those higher instincts of inexorable rectitude and honesty which she had inherited at her birth, we shall see how she found happiness and rest in neither, until she took the supreme resolution, and sacrificed herself, her affections, passions, all she was and ever was to be, to the celestial and visionary spouse, full of wounds and sadness, to whose side she crept contrite and sorrowful never again to leave it, and whose cross, stumbling and falling, she helped to bear to the end of her life. For Teresa did not leap into sanctity ; she only approached it when she had sounded all the imperfections, all the pitfalls of humanity ; when she had learnt by her own backshdmgs to be piteous to those of others ; when she had fought and wept, and despaired for eighteen years, and youth had been consumed in attempt and failure. Not until after eighteen years of painful w 3 2 -a THE ENCARNACION 115 and valiant effort did she attain that eminence, glowing with the serene and diaphanous light of evening, whence she gazed for the first time with tranquil eyes, never again to be crossed by the troublous shadows of vain unrest and desire, over the desert she had traversed, and the long and tortuous road she had travelled. In proportion as the exterior world around her resumed its just dimensions, the spiritual world dimly discerned in the solitude of sickness faded behind the horizon. Life was still so full of hope and charm to the young nun, who once more felt the strong generous blood of health coursing through her veins. At that time (the Council of Trent had yet to commence its memorable sittings and promulgate its strict edicts of clausura) a great convent like the Encarnacion presented a very different scene from what it does to-day. The convent parlours were open to all comers, and thronged with visitors, great ladies and shabby " beatas," brought thither by pleasure or business. Nor was the jingling of swords an unfrequent sound on the red brick floors of the Encarnacion, the resort of the gay and idle young gallants of the town, who had nothing better to do on the long summer afternoons than to loiter down to the gray old convent in the valley, to visit some sister or relative who happened to be amongst its inmates. The nuns themselves enjoyed an amount of liberty altogether at variance with our modern ideas of the strictness and repose of monastic life. They went and came, and mingled freely and without restriction amongst their visitors, with whom they were closely connected either by the ties of relationship or a lifelong intimacy. The strong sentiment of fraternity and friendship which binds together the inhabitants of one town in a kind of league offensive and defensive against those of another, still remains one of the characteristics of Spain. It is, however, but a shadow of the bond which then knit together the inhabitants of old- world Avila, practically isolated from the rest of the world by the extreme difficulty of communication, a bond intensified and rendered closer by the intricate and minute relationships which ramifying through all classes, their social relations with one another characterised by the same simplicity which was the feature of the life of the age, welded them together in a complete community of interests. Thus the visitors to the Encarnacion were all well-known and familiar faces. Teresa knew them all ; had played with them in childhood ; some of them had been her brothers' friends. It was only natural that the young and fascinating nun, whose restoration to health was looked upon as little less than miraculous, to whose beauty illness had but n6 SANTA TERESA added a more delicate and winning charm, marvellous witty and shrewd of tongue, born to attract, should have inspired and reciprocated with all the force of her loving and generous nature some ardent attachment or attachments (for she speaks of more than one), the details of which she has left shrouded in mystery, and which she afterwards dwelt upon with such profound remorse and contrition. What wonder if the friendships so contracted, or perhaps only renewed, at the lattice-screen during these long sunlit hours, so absorbingly pleasant in the beginning, grew too warm and strong, or that the confidence and esteem which her patient resignation on a bed of suffering had gained for her in the convent became in itself a danger inasmuch as it was the cause of her being allowed " as much or more liberty than the oldest nuns in the convent." As these intimacies grew on her and rooted themselves into her life, that other life which had dawned on her in illness vanished below the horizon. What wonder that the young nun turned away somewhat wearily to go through her ceaseless round of monotonous orisons and religious duties ? Her prayers grew chillier. It was enough that her voice should rise and fall, swelling the monotonous and rhythmical undertone of the prayers that formed the business of her life. Perhaps none noted the change, for it was too obscure and intangible to rouse the attention of the good nuns of the Encarnacion, most of whom no doubt were content to do the same. She writes : It appeared to me best to do as so many did, although I was the worst of them all, and to pray those vocal prayers which were obligatory, rather than to seek mental prayer and intimate communion with God when I deserved to be with devils, and was deceiving those around me ; but in this of hypocrisy and vain glory, glory be to God I never remember to have offended him rather did it weigh heavily on me that I was held in good esteem when I knew what was secretly the truth. In that interior world, known only to herself her con- science a terrible struggle was taking place. Agitated and dismayed, now endeavouring to free herself from influences which were fatal to her peace, now responding to the lure of the charmer, irresolute, wavering from one extreme to the other ; too honest and scrupulous of nature to conciliate (as many in like circumstances would have done) what she felt could never be conciliated duty and inclination she knew no rest. Her conscience, perturbed and irresolute, forged strange terrors. Admonitory phantoms, stern and reproving, flitted before her eyes. Christ himself stood before her with such stern severity that twenty-seven years were powerless to blot the recollection THE ENCARNACION 117 from her mind. At noontide a loathsome toad crawled quickly towards her from a place where no toad could possibly have lurked, at the very moment when she was deep in conversation with that shadowy person whose intimacy she found most absorbing of all an intimacy which that part of her which had gone below the horizon feebly asserted itself at intervals only to condemn. How far these intimacies went may be gathered from the following passage : For as to taking any liberty or doing anything without leave, I mean speaking through doors or indulging in stolen interviews or at night, never does it seem to me that I could have brought myself to act in such a way in a convent ; nor did I, for the Lord held me by the hand. It seemed to me (for with deliberation and on purpose I considered many things) that to imperil the honour of so many by my baseness, they being guiltless, would have been very ill done ; as if other things I did were innocent ! In truth, the evil, although great, did not go so far as this. It went, however, so far, that an old nun, a relative of her own who had grown old in the cloister, incurred Teresa's anger by her repeated warnings : " It seemed to me that she was scandalised without any reason." But the surest guardians of her honour, in this most perilous period of her life, her own innate rectitude and love of truth, and hatred of hypocrisy. She could not feign sentiments she no longer felt. Although she managed (perhaps it was not difficult in that bubbling, seething, scandal-loving community of the Encarnacion, which she herself describes as " ten worlds rolled into one," with its cliques and petty jealousies, and points of honour and struggles for pre-eminence) to maintain an " outward appearance of virtue, and keep the nuns in their good opinion," yet the deception was repugnant to her. She no longer dared to draw near to God in an intercourse so intimate as that of prayer. "This was the most terrible mistake the devil could impose on me under the guise of humility, that, seeing how far I had gone astray, I began to fear prayer ; and it seemed to me that it was better to do as the most did, since in wickedness I was one of the worst, . . . than that she who merited to be with devils" (it is Teresa who speaks), "and deceived every one, should draw near to God in such intimate converse as mental prayer." This, to a mind whose ideal of duty was as lofty as it was inexorable, seemed little less than a profanation. The thought of the deception she was practising on her father was no less intolerable to her; she could not bear that he should linger under any misconception as to her spiritual state. During her n8 SANTA TERESA illness, " before she scarcely knew how to help herself," impelled by a feeling of responsibility, she had endeavoured to guide others towards the mystic regions of prayer. Amongst them had been her father. She had lent him books, and he had now attained a high state of contemplation. " It was hard to me to see him so deceived, and that he thought I still conversed with God as before, and I told him that I no longer had recourse to mental prayer, although not the reason." Her health furnished a plausible pretext, which the old knight, the soul of truth himself, and incapable of doubt- ing the veracity of one of whom he had reason to think so highly, willingly accepted. " I told him, so that he should the more readily believe me (for I indeed saw that there was no excuse for this), that my choir duties were more than enough for my strength." Alonso, now growing old and feeble, was full of pity, but, probably ceasing to find that similarity of aspiration which had hitherto formed such a bond between them, his visits grew shorter ; and when he had seen her he went on his way alleging waste of time. Nor was her father the only person she benefited. Even at the season of her greatest aberrations Teresa could not resist the impulse to guide those whom she observed to be fond of prayer, and draw them after higher things, pointing out the way of meditation, and lending them the books she had found most useful in her own case. Although her own desires were blunted, she was loath that the experiences gained in that brief period when she had climbed the steps of prayer, and caught some passing gleams of higher spirituality, should be entirely lost and infructuous. " It seemed to me that as I no longer served the Lord as I ought to do, that what his Majesty had given me to understand should not be lost, and that through me, others should serve him in my stead." But help was at hand. " Sicker in soul than he in body," she once more left the Encarnacion to nurse her father in his last illness, and to repay in some measure the tender devotion he had so often lavished on her in the like circumstances. As she watched his last agony, she gave proof of that indomitable will which had already stood her in such good stead when she entered the Encarnacion. Although her heart was rent asunder, and in losing him she felt that she lost everything that made life precious, she repressed all signs of grief or discomposure that might have disturbed the sick man's last moments. He suffered without respite from terrible pains in the back ; in the paroxysms of his agony his daughter comforted him by the thought that it was the Lord's desire that he should suffer some- what of what he had suffered when he bore the cross to Calvary. THE ENCARNACION 119 No further moan was heard to escape the lips of the brave old knight, inspired with the heroism of the Cross, who wished, with tears in his eyes, that he had only been a friar of one of the strictest Orders. After a period of unconsciousness which lasted three days, his senses returned to him with amazing clearness and lucidity. Towards the middle of the Creed, which he repeated aloud, he fell back dead, leaving it, on earth at least, for ever unfinished. To Teresa his dead face seemed like that of an angel " as indeed to me," she adds, " it seemed he was, in soul and disposition." A death that only good men die! And so Alonso de Cepeda, the brave, gentle, austere gentle- man of Avila, rejoined his fathers, " leaving behind him those trials and very great labours which he bore with such patience," let us hope to be rewarded in some other world ! Amongst the shadowy figures who stood round the deathbed of Alonso de Cepeda, soothing his last moments with ghostly counsel, was his confessor, a Dominican monk, Fr. Vicente de Barren. To him, in those first dark moments which follow a bereavement when the floodgates of the heart are opened, Teresa laid bare her soul. It was the fate of this remarkable woman to struggle all her life with incompetent confessors. And even when she found good ones, whose direction she felt safe in following, they marvelled at, rather than understood, experiences which soared so far above the difficulties of ordinary consciences. She led them, drawing out of them all that was best and highest in their nature, filling them with her own enthusiasm. Barron, scholar and councillor of the Inquisition, admirably fitted as he was to guide her footsteps to surer ground, felt this inexplicable domination. He attributed the great sanctity and perfection of his life in after years to this intercourse with Teresa. He pointed out to her where and how she had gone wrong, and bade her communicate at least every fortnight. Presently, when greater confidence was established between them, and she confessed to him how she had almost abandoned prayer, he bade her resort to it again, as it could never be but beneficial. And from this time henceforward, to the end of her active, troublous life, she found in it her refuge and pillar of defence. It is impossible to know how long the conflict lasted between the world on the one hand and God on the other. She speaks of it herself as eighteen years or twenty ; but whether it com- menced from the date of her recovery, or that of her confession to Barron, is uncertain. From what we have already discerned 120 SANTA TERESA of her character, we can form some dim idea of the tremendous nature of the struggle in which she was then engaged. I passed a most troublous life, for prayer only made me realise my faults more. God called me on one side ; on the other I followed the world. Everything of God gave me happiness. The things of the world held me in bondage. It seems that I wished to reconcile these two opposites, so inimical to each other, as are the spiritual life, its contents and satisfactions ; and sensual amusements. Prayer was a great labour to me, for the spirit was slave rather than master, and so I was not able to shut myself up in my heart, which was the only way of proceeding I used in prayer, without shutting up at the same time a thousand vanities. . . . When I saw how little I improved, the many tears with which I bewailed my fault filled me with great anger, for neither resolution nor effort sufficed to keep me from falling when the occasion of sin was there ; they seemed to me deceitful tears, and only served to make my sin appear greater, because I saw how great a mercy the Lord did me in granting them with such a deep repent- ance. Of a truth, thou didst take, my King, the most delicate and painful punishment that could be for me, as one who well understood what would pain me most. With great gifts didst thou chastise my sins. ... It was the more painful for my nature to receive mercies, when I had fallen into grave sin, than to receive punishment ; one of them it seems to me certain, melted, confounded and (fatigaba] troubled me more than many infirmities, with many other trials added to them ; for I saw that I merited the last, and it seemed to me that I paid somewhat for my sins, although all was little, according to the number of them : but to see myself receiving mercies anew, after so ill requiting those I had received, is a species of torment most terrible. Thus I passed many years, and now I marvel how any one could have borne it without leaving the one or the other ; well do I know that to leave prayer was no longer in my hands, because he who loved me upheld me with his in order to bestow on me greater mercies. Fray Luis de Leon (and I shall be forgiven for making such a long quotation on account of its beauty and majestic swing) says : The Devil put before her those persons most sympathetic by nature, and God came, and in the midst of the conversation discovered himself aggrieved and sorrowful. The Devil delighted in the conversation and pastime, but when she turned her back on them, and betook herself to prayer, God redoubled the delight and favours, as if to show her how false was the lure which charmed her at the grating, and that his sweetness was the veritable sweetness ; and that, if she loved a pleasant and discreet companionship, his own was more discreet and most sweet. And as rivals for affection make every effort with greater demonstrations of love and extraordinary service to estrange the wills of those they love from the rest, and incline it to themselves, so did it seem that God exerted himself to discover himself more abundantly to her, whilst the world and the Devil entangled and tempted her most. So that these two inclinations warred with each other in the breast of this blessed woman, and the authors who inspired them each did his utmost to inflame her most, and the oratory blotted out what the grating wrote, and at times the grating vanquished and diminished the good fruit produced by prayer, causing agony and grief, which disquieted and perplexed her soul : for although she was resolved to belong entirely THE ENCARNACION 121 to God, she knew not how to shake herself free from the world : and at times she persuaded herself that she could enjoy both, which ended mostly, as she says, in complete enjoyment of neither ; for the amusements of the locutorio were embittered and turned into wormwood by the memory of the secret and sweet intimacy with God ; and in the same way when she retired to be with God, and commenced to speak with him, the affections and thoughts which she carried with her from the grating took possession of her. Nor did she find that exterior force in the resolution of another's will that enables us to cut so many Gordian knots, in which, left to ourselves, we should flounder helplessly all our lives. If men like Ibaflez, Alvarez, and even Banes, versed in all the sophistries of the Schools, could not follow her as, minute and scrupulous, she laid before them the tangled labyrinths of her conscience in this maze of conflicting emotions, sentiments, lights, and shadows, some of them almost intangible; the ordinary director of the period a man generally imperfectly educated, media letrado, accustomed to face no difficulty in the confessional more serious than breaches of virtue or religious observances, tangible and positive lost his footing in a world of bewilderment, and ascribed what he imperfectly understood to the foolish scruples of an over-sensitive conscience, and as being rather a proof of sanctity than otherwise. They could see nothing incompatible between the occasions and con- versation, which she found such a stumbling-block, and a " high state of contemplation." Sin which seemed to her venial, they said was none, whilst mortal sin of the gravest kind seemed to them venial. ... I desired to live, for well did I understand that I did not live, but fought with a shadow of death, and there was no one to give me life, and I could not take it ; and he who might have given it, was right in withholding help, since he had drawn me to himself so many times, and I had left him. The subtle change that was creeping over her was noted and criticised (perhaps bitterly) in the convent. She had risen above the somewhat commonplace standard of duty which formed the ideal of the major part of the nuns of the Encar- nacion. A life based on higher aspirations than those around it, to which it forms a tacit reproach (and none more eloquent), is condemned in the majority of cases by its very lofty ideal to solitude and absence of sympathy. Hence the battle of genius and sanctity! In Teresa's case it excited a stealthy under- current of opposition. She had many friends to help her to fall : she found herself alone when she strove to rise. It is her own experience that dictates these significant words : " The friar and the nun who in very truth begin to follow their vocation have more to fear from those of their own community than from all the devils combined." No other the reason, she 122 SANTA TERESA says elsewhere, which drove the monks and solitaries of old to the desert. But, whatever the pricks of wounded self-love, the nuns could not but admire and respect her life. It is God " who conceals her evil works, making patent some small virtue, and magnifying it in every one's eyes so that they held her in esteem." If her vanities transpired, they did not believe them, so blotted out were they by the good things they witnessed. It is, she writes, profoundly convinced that an invisible God has determined the minutest incidents of her life, because Supreme Wisdom had seen that so it was necessary, the better to accredit in the future her words and actions in his service. CHAPTER IV TERESA THE MYSTIC AT last this period of gestation, this long interval of aridness and despair, is ended by one of those supreme crises so frequent in the history of the saints. Teresa has passed the limits of youth : she is now forty-one. It is hard to say how far it may have been predetermined by lassitude and weariness. " My soul was weary," she writes, and " although she would fain have been at rest, her evil habits gave her no peace." One day as she entered her oratory, her eyes chanced to fall upon the image of a wounded Christ, which had been stored there in readiness for some convent festival. A mixture of crude realism and tender idealism, these life-sized figures of the mediaeval wood-carver are full of a strange dignity and pathos that imposes powerfully on the imagination. As I gazed on it my whole being was stirred to see him in such a state, for all he went through was well set forth. Such was the sorrow I felt for having repaid those wounds so ill, that my heart seemed rent in twain ; and in floods of tears I cast myself down before it, beseeching him Once for all to give me strength not to offend him more. About this time she read the Confessions of St. Augustine : " It seems that the Lord ordered it, for I did not try to get them, nor had I ever before seen them." His mental struggles seemed to her to bear a strange analogy to her own. She loved him not only because of the associations of her youth it was in a convent of his Order that the first obscure springs had been set working that drove her to the cloister, but because he had been a sinner. For in the saints who after being sinners the Lord had turned to himself, I found great consolation, as it seemed to me that in them I should find help ; only one thing afflicted me, that God had called them but once and they never fell again, and he had called me so often that it distressed me to think on it ; but when I considered the love he bore me, I began to take heart, for I never doubted of his mercy ; of myself often. . . . When I began to read the Confessions, I seemed to see myself in its pages ; 123 124 SANTA TERESA 1 began to commend myself fervently to this glorious saint. When I came to his conversion, and read how he heard the voice in the garden, it was just as if the Lord called me, so did it thrill through my heart. Strangely enough the parallelism that Teresa fancied to exist between her own struggles and those of St. Augustine continued after death between their books. In the reliquary of the Escorial the faded MS. of her Life lies side by side with that of an original tract in the handwriting of the Bishop of Hippo. The air is full of the hush of expectation ; we feel that we are standing on the threshold awaiting the passage of some great event. Teresa as we have hitherto known her the weak, impulsive, loving woman, struggling between God and the world, plucking such flowers of life as she can in the aridity of the cloister is fading away. We see instead an ecstatic penitent her eyes full of a strange rapture, her troubled brow glowing with a mysterious beauty. The unsatisfied longings for some object on which to lavish the treasures of her love have found their centre in the idealised abstraction at whose feet she now immolates her heart. Writing years after, she herself is dimly conscious of some such significant pause as she pens the prelude which ushers us into the strange psychological world into which we are now about to follow her. Before she abandons herself to the ecstasies of mysticism, she briefly recapitulates the steps by which she reached it, thus aiding us in following and reconstructing the workings of her mind at this most critical and significant moment. She is careful to premise that she had never sought for that tender delight in prayer which suffuses the soul in delicious tears of repentance and love: to be allowed merely to enter the Divine Presence was more than enough for her humility. Her understanding and imagination were alike dull and heavy. " I was only able to think of Christ as man." Neither images nor written descriptions of his beauty stimulated their torpidity. She was powerless to summon up, as others did, the shadow of his presence in the stillness of the oratory and to " represent him within herself." If she feels his presence it is in the same way as a blind person, or one in the dark, knows that the person he is speaking to is close beside him, although unseen. Still she feels nearer to him in those moments of utter loneliness when, deserted by the world, he drank the dregs of woe whilst the disciples slept, oblivious of the agony of the morrow. She would fain draw closer to him and wipe away the drops of sweat which pour from his haggard brow, but her hand is TERESA THE MYSTIC 125 stayed by the memory of her sins. For years before she became a nun, her last waking thought had been dedicated to the agony in Gethsemane, until it had become a habit as instinctive and unconscious as to make the sign of the Cross before she slept. More than once she reverts to the complete torpor of her understanding and imagination, as if anxious to impress on the minds of her confessors her want of participation in the mystery which follows. Her object is to annihilate her own share ; to show her own incompetence to bring it about; to remove any doubt they might entertain as to its being a delusion of her own fancy, a figment due to some momentary distortion of the senses. " In heavenly things, and in cosas subidas, my understanding was so gross that never in any way did I arrive at imagining them, until the Lord showed me them in another way." This premised : In this representation I have already described of drawing close to Christ, and even sometimes when I was reading, there came suddenly upon me a sense of the presence of God, which did not allow me to doubt that he was within me, or that I was entirely engulfed in him. This not after the manner of a vision : I believe it is called Mystic Theology ; it suspends the soul, which seems altogether beside herself. The will loves, memory seems to be annihilated, the understanding ceases to reason, but retains her consciousness : she is as if amazed at the grandeur she perceives ; for God wills her to understand that she understands nothing of that which his Majesty represents to her. Words are not adequate to deal with abstractions so fine and beyond the reach of ordinary experience. Teresa, profound analyst as she is, is oppressed by their unsufficiency and loses herself in vague expressions and unmeaning utterances. From this moment Teresa commences to live in that super- natural world, or in other words to abandon herself to those states of peculiar sensitiveness where the mind becomes to itself both subject and object, which, real or unreal, she has described so admirably : His Majesty commenced to give me very ordinarily the prayer of quiet, and often that of union, which lasted a considerable time. As at that time it happened that the devil had deluded and deceived several women with false visions, the very greatness of the suavity and delight that I experienced, often without being able to prevent it, began to make me afraid ; although on the other hand I had in myself the firmest persuasion that it came from God, especially when in the state of prayer, and when I saw that it left me much improved and strengthened. Hut directly my attention was a little distracted, I began again to fear and wonder whether it was not the devil who, making me think it good, suspended my understanding to prevent my 126 SANTA TERESA resorting to mental prayer, and thinking on the Passion, or making use of my understanding, which last, so little did I understand its nature, seemed to me the greatest loss. . . . This fear increased to such an extent that it forced me to look out anxiously for some spiritual persons with whom I could take counsel, and although I already knew of some (for the members of the Company of Jesus had come to this place) . . . still I did not account myself good enough to speak with them, nor strong enough to obey them ; . . . for to take them into my confidence, and still remain what I was, was repugnant to me. I went on like this for some time, until, after a great struggle with myself, and many fears, I determined to take counsel with some spiritual person, in order to find out from him what was the nature of the prayer I experienced, so that he might enlighten me if I was mistaken. ... I was told of a learned priest there was in this place, whose charity and exemplary life the Lord had begun to make apparent to all, and I took steps through a holy gentleman of this place (to procure an interview with him). Although married [she refers to the gentleman] his life is so exemplary and virtuous, and his prayer and charity are so great, that his goodness and perfection shine through his entire being, and with much reason ; for, on account of his great gifts, he has been the means of doing good to many souls, since in spite of the impediments of his condition, it is impossible for him not to use them : of great understanding, and very gentle with every one, his conversation far from being wearisome, so pleasant and entertaining and straightforward, and holy at the same time, that it gives great pleasure to those he converses with : he orders everything to the greater good of the souls he treats with, and his only study, so it seems, is to do everything he can for every one, and content everybody. Inimitable portrait painter ! Time may do its best to efface the arms on the slab under which the good knight lies buried, but the tender and delicate sketch penned by Teresa's hand lives for ever. The priest was Master Caspar Daza; the holy gentleman, Francisco de Salcedo. The founder of a society for the salva- tion of souls, a man of rigid virtue, Daza spent his life wandering about amongst the mountain hamlets around Avila, preaching, converting, and teaching the Catechism. Salcedo was one of a class of individuals that must have abounded in that age of religious fermentation. A "principal gentleman" of Avila, he devoted his life and fortune to charity and good works. His wife, Da. Menci'a del Aguila "whose chanty rendered her rather a help than a hindrance to his spiritual career " of the great family of the Aguilas, was a near connection of Teresa's. A Maria del Aguila was her godmother. For twenty years a diligent student of theology in the Dominican monastery of Sto. Tomas, Salcedo was eminently qualified to act as a sort of lay director in religious difficulties. Both Daza and Salcedo were pre-eminently distinguished for their piety. " Indeed, outside the religious orders," writes Master Julian de Avila, who knew both, " none were so conspicuous as these two for virtue and prayer the one in his condition of matrimony, the TERESA THE MYSTIC 127 other as a priest." After his wife's death, the good Salcedo exchanged his sword and cloak for the black cassock of the Society of Jesus, built the chapel of Teresa's first convent, in which he is buried, and spent the remainder of his days acting as chaplain to its inmates. Would you see him clearer ; catch some more certain glimpse of this stately pious gentleman who, more than three centuries ago, stepped through the grass-grown patio of that gray old house at the shoulders of the Jesuit College of San Gil l on his way to the Encarnacion, there to confer with one of the nuns on the state of her soul ? turn to the letter Teresa wrote him from Valladolid. Strange that a few slender details floating down to us somewhat waveringly, impregnated with all the perfume of the past should bridge the enormous chasm between Francisco de Salcedo and oblivion ; and conjure up, as by a magic spell, the image, if somewhat faded, of the self- respecting, dignified Castilian household over which he once ruled, together with Da. Menci'a del Aguila, his wife. The letter in question was written several years after the events I am about to relate. She playfully and tenderly bewails his absence. He also hers would indeed give six ducats to see her. " The exaggerated sum of six ducats," she answers merrily, " seemed not a little to me, but I could go a good deal further to see your grace. It is true that you are worth more ; for who sets any value upon a poor wretched nun ? You who can give ' aloja ' (a kind of mead) and cakes, radishes, and lettuces from your garden, and well do I know you are the lad to bring apples, must be estimated at something more. They say that here the aforesaid aloja is excellent, but as I have no Francisco de Salcedo, we know not how it tastes, nor have we the means of knowing. I kiss the hands of my lady Dona Menci'a, and Mistress Ospedal " Mistress Ospedal being their old and valued housekeeper, "of the type," notes the commentator, "once so common in the homes of our ancestors, and of which scarcely any vestige remains, who was always, even by the members of the family, respectfully addressed as Senora Ospedal." Such, then, were the men to whom Teresa in her anguish unburdened her soul. She was still so far from giving a precise terminology to her sensations that she had recourse to La Subida del Monte, the work of an obscure Franciscan friar, to find something analogous to that " thinking of nothing," which was as yet the best definition of what she afterwards knew as the suspension of the soul. 1 Now the parish church of Sto. Tome. ia8 SANTA TERESA The priest, with honest zeal, would fain have torn out the lingering imperfections that twined their fibrous roots into her life. He- Began with holy determination to treat me as one already strong in virtue (which it was natural I ought to have been, according to the manner of prayer he saw I practised) so that I should in no way offend God. When I saw his prompt determination about failings (for as I say I had not strength enough to support so much perfection), I was exceedingly sorrowful, and as I saw he treated the things of my soul as something that could be accomplished once for all, I saw that I required much more care. . . . And certainly, if I had had recourse to him alone, I believe that my soul would never have thriven, for the affliction I suffered when I saw that I did not and could not carry out his directions, sufficed to make me lose all hope, and abandon all. The treatment proved too radical. In her own graphic phrase, she was like one plunged into a river, who is almost drowning, and yet dreads to strike out in any direction for fear of fresh danger. They seem to have parted from each other in mutual disgust, Daza refusing to take charge of her soul in the confessional. In Salcedo she found more sympathy and en- couragement. She looked forward to his visits as the most restful moments of her life. If he was late she dreaded lest her unworthiness prevented him from coming. He told her of his own shortcomings, and urged her to have patience, as little by little God would accomplish all. It was then that, by his and Daza's advice, she took a step which was destined to exercise a momentous influence on her career. About 1521, when Teresa, a child of six, trudged her way to martyrdom, on the dusty road to Salamanca, a gallant young captain of the noble Guipuzcoan family of Loyola, whilst fighting at the siege of Pamplona under the banners of the Duke of Najera, happened to have his right leg shattered by a cannon ball. Passionately devoted to books of knight errantry, during the agonies of a long and painful cure he beguiled the enforced tedium of confinement by composing one. The cure was barely completed before he caused himself to be conveyed to the paternal castle of Loyola. Here in the absence of his favourite books he betook himself to the Life of Christ and the Flos Sanctorum. His ardent and active mind, transferred to other objects than feats of arms, inspired him with the strangest aspirations. A year later, cured of his wounds, he hung up his sword and shield before the shrine of the only lady he vowed henceforth to serve our Lady of Monserrat. After watching his arms all night before the altar, he exchanged his gay TERESA THE MYSTIC 129 clothes for the coarse sacking of a beggar, made a present of his mule and trappings to the monastery, and, binding an esparto cord round his waist, made his way, staff in hand, to Manresa. It was here that, as he nursed the sick in the hospital, the idea that was thenceforth to dominate his life took shape and form, an idea which his mind unconsciously tinged with all the glamour of knight errantry and the military training of his youth, that of forming a spiritual knighthood to fight against the enemies of the Church for the love of Christ an army of devoted men whose mission should be to battle under their general Christ for the salvation of souls, what in very truth, in the military phrase of the day, should be a Company of Jesus. For the next eighteen years of his life we find him a pilgrim to Jerusalem an unwearied and assiduous student at the universities of Barcelona, Alcala, Salamanca, and Paris. On the festival of our Lady's Assumption 1534, a little band of students whom he had attracted to follow his fortunes, seven in all, met together in a subterranean chapel of the Church of Montmartre, where, after taking the Sacrament, they solemnly vowed to abandon everything they possessed, and on a certain day within a year's time, bearing with them the Viaticum, to rejoin each other at Venice, thence to start on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, where they resolved to live and die. Amongst those who then took the vow were a noble young Navarrese knight, known as Francisco de Xavier ; Laynez ; and Salmeron. In 1537 the seven, now increased to ten by the accession of other three members Claudio le Gay, John Cordure, and Pascual Brouet, Frenchmen set out from Paris on foot, each with his portfolio and rescript of his studies under his arm, to beg their way to Venice. A peasant, who was gazing open-mouthed at the strange poverty-stricken little band, on being asked who they were, replied : " Ce sont Messieurs les ReTormateurs, qui vont reformer tout le monde." And even so it was ! Arrived at Venice, finding it impossible to pro- secute their journey to Jerusalem, as, owing to the war with the Turks, no merchant boat was allowed to leave the port, they scattered themselves amongst the universities and towns of Italy, preaching and converting, intent on gaining fresh members for the Company. Loyola, Lefebre, and Laynez proceeded to Rome. Within two leagues of Rome, as they rested in a deserted hermitage by the roadside, Ignatius told his companions that he had had an ecstasy, in which he had no SANTA TERESA o seen the Eternal Father recommend His Son to accept their mission, whereupon He had turned to himself and said : " I will be favourable to thee in Rome." In Rome, after the Company had concentrated its scattered forces, they addressed a memorial to the Pope, Paul III., then at Tivoli, in which they bound themselves by a special vow to give him and his successors their undivided obedience. As he read it, the Pope exclaimed in the memorable words Digitus Dei est hie ("this is the finger of God"); and two years later, in 1540, not without some opposition from the conclave of cardinals, the Pope issued the formal Bull of Institution known as Regimini Militantis Ecclesice. A year after Loyola was unanimously elected general ; and two years later all limitations imposed by the Bull were entirely withdrawn. Thus was instituted that spiritual order of knighthood, modelled by Ignatius on the military training of his youth ; which exacted from each of its members as its principle of cohesion the unhesitating, blind obedience of a soldier to his general. Their further development, how they gradually overspread Italy and Spain; the extraordinary influence they soon acquired at the Spanish court, where they became the chosen confessors of the most powerful grandees of the kingdom, from the President of the Council of Castille and the & Cardinal of Toledo downwards, does not belong to the province of this history. At the time I write of, they were still a young and struggling order, mostly viewed with sour dislike, as is the case with all new things since the world began. They had founded two small and poverty-stricken communities in Alcala and Salamanca. Barely two years before Teresa was brought into personal contact with them in 1553 two Jesuits, Avileses by birth, had extended the Institution to their native town, where the Bishop of Avila made over to them the ancient Jeronimite monastery of San Gil, now the bishop's palace, and aided them with large sums of money. It is to them that the two friends, unable to reconcile Teresa's imperfections with the favours she receives in prayer, now hand over the soul of their great penitent. They advised her to send for some member of the Company of Jesus. It is from the moment that Teresa abandoned herself to the guidance of the Jesuits, an Order then rapidly rising into influence and power, that we may trace the gradual and slow formation of the central idea of her life. Who could look into the future and see that the nun who then sought their aid at this decisive moment of her career should TERESA THE MYSTIC i 31 eventually eclipse the fame of Ignatius Loyola himself? She writes : It troubled me that it should get wind in the convent that I had any- thing to do with such holy people as the members of the Company of Jesus, for I feared my own baseness, and it seemed to me I should be forced to change, and leave my amusements, and that, if I did not, it only made the matter worse ; and so I persuaded the sacristana and the portress not to mention it to any one. This, however, was of little use, for some one happened to be at the door when I was called, who soon spread it over the whole convent. Fray Juan de Padranos was young and zealous. To him Fray Francisco de Borja had entrusted the task of making the first Jesuit foundation at Avila. He possessed that precious learning, those "letras," to which Teresa attached so high a value. Deeply imbued in the Exercises of his founder, he saw nothing extraordinary in struggles and mani- festations which bore such a close resemblance to those of Loyola himself. He fulfilled his task with firmness, gentle- ness, and judgment. It was Padranos who first inspired her with the sentiment of the part she was destined to play on the stage of religious life. " He bid me take courage, for what did I know whether through me the Lord intended to do good to many, and other things (for it seems he prophesied what the Lord afterwards fulfilled in me)." Her first confession to Padranos, she notes, " left her soul so tractable, that it seemed to me there was nothing I feared to undertake." Under his guidance she took rapid strides on that thorny path of mortification and penance, from which she had hitherto held aloof. She now walked serenely and firmly in the mystic regions of contemplation, assured that her prayer rested not on sliding sand which slipped from under her feet, but on the firm foundation of penitence, mortification, and prayer. It was now that she commenced those rigorous mortifica- tions, " no muy sabrosas para mi," which she continued un- remittingly until old age and increasing infirmities made it necessary for her confessors to exercise their control, or, as she expresses it, God himself commanded her to desist. The chronicler of the Order dwells with complacency on the horrible tortures she inflicted on herself: the tin shirt pierced with holes like a grater which she wore next the skin, and which left wounds wherever it touched ; the bed of briars on which she rolled herself with as much delight as if they had been roses ; the self-inflicted scourgings with nettles and keys until the walls of her cell were splashed with blood, and persisted in till the wounds were full of matter. In Segovia, 132 SANTA TERESA she sent her nuns to the choir, and, rising from the bed where she lay consumed with fever, scourged herself until she broke her arm. She slept on a straw mattress ; her meals were frugal ; she drank no wine. For some time the tunic she wore next the skin, her sheets and pillows, were of the coarse blanketing used for horse-cloths. The year of 1557 was a remarkable one in the annals of Spain. It saw the prior and friars of the Jeronimite monastery of Yuste in the Vera of Plasencia, go forth in solemn procession, chanting the Te Deum, to receive within their walls a broken- down, gouty old man the greatest emperor in the world, whose constant rivalries and thirst for universal power had ravaged Europe with war for nearly half a century. In this same year also two of the most vivid and extraordinary personalities of a century which teemed with curious personalities, crossed each other's life for a moment, and passed on their separate ways Francisco Borja, late Duke of Gandia, 1 and Teresa de Jesus. It can have been no ordinary interest that she had roused in her director's mind which led him to procure her a personal interview with Father Francisco the Sinner as he passed through Avila on his way to or from Plasencia, where he was then engaged in founding a college. It is certain that the saint saw him more than once each must have possessed for the other a powerful attraction but whether at other times, or during this same visit to Avila, she does not say. Avila lies on the direct road to Plasencia, and it is probable that in his frequent goings and comings between Plasencia and Valladolid he would rest a few days in the College of San Gil of Avila before or after a long and fatiguing journey over wild mountain passes. His romantic history and character must have invested him with an extraordinary interest to the simple nun of the Encarnacion, for few, even then, had been called upon to renounce so much. If we are to believe the sober chronicler, even as the gay and graceful courtier, in the midst of his triumphs as a soldier, he felt the impulses which led him at thirty-eight to renounce one of the most brilliant careers and positions in all Spain. As he flew his hawk, he cast his eyes to the ground in voluntary mortification at the critical moment when she swooped down upon the prey. If we may believe the verses of the great modern poet Campoamor, verses that resemble the pale and fantastic light of the moon which gives them their title, a soul of fire 1 It is a curious fact that the only two men she mentions by name in her Life are Fray Francisco de Borja and San Pedro de Alcantara. TERESA THE MYSTIC 133 and ardent temperament still smouldered under the ashes of asceticism ; the embers of an unstilled passion, of an unforgotten memory, lit up for a brief moment the extinguished eyes of him who was known as the " holy duke," and who it is said had nourished, nay reciprocated, a hopeless passion for the Empress, the lovely and gentle Isabel of Portugal. However this may be and sober history and poetic dream may join each other in truth it fell to the lot of the then Marque's de Lombay to accompany her body from Toledo to its burial-place in the Royal Chapel of Granada. Six days Lombay rode beside the litter borne by two black baggage-mules decked out in trappings of cloth of gold and crimson plush, on which, under a covering of black brocade, lay the body of his mistress. For six nights, in lonely country churches, kneeling at the coffin foot he alone kept watch and ward over his strange burden. Those thoughts on the mystery of death, which had flitted across a splendid and triumphant life, gathered a new intensity and significance. When he delivered up his charge, and the wooden shell was opened at Granada so that he might take his solemn oath before witnesses and notary that it was in very sooth the body of the Empress ; so changed and unrecognisable were the features of her whose beauty and grace he so vividly remembered, that he dared not swear to its identity. What he swore was : that according to the care with which he had conveyed and guarded it, he was sure that it was the Empress and no other. The courtiers, unable to bear the smell of corruption, fled in horror and disgust. Lombay remained to the last, rooted to the spot, his eyes fixed on what remained of the face which had been but yesterday the loveliest and most honoured in Spain. It was then, before a warning so profound, that he took the unalterable resolution which nine years afterwards he carried into effect. The death of his wife and of his dear friend Garcilaso de la Vega having severed the last links which bound him to the world, the Duke of Gandia, Viceroy of Catalufta, Admiral of the King against Barbarroja, whose princely house (he came of a branch of the royal line of Aragon) had given popes to Rome, sank his name and titles in that of Father Francis the Sinner, of the Company of Jesus. He was still comparatively young, not being more than forty-seven, and Teresa was forty-two. The verdict of such a man, himself eminently favoured with the same sublime mercies and favours, could not but cause a reaction in Teresa's favour. The holy knight above all " was overjoyed, and helped me always, and gave me counsel in what he could, which was much." 134 SANTA TERESA Teresa remained under Padranos's direction for two years. At the end of that time, to her great grief, he was removed to another place. 1 " My soul was left as in a desert, exceedingly afflicted and fearful." The hardest lesson to be learnt by a great and generous nature is to live alone. As yet she had been powerless to break off the friendships and intimacies which had rankled so long in her conscience. " It seemed to me," says the saint, whose loyalty was so extreme that she confesses that the " gift of a sardine could suborn her," and who prayed to the end of her life for a poor man who once offered her a cup of water, " ingratitude to leave them." She was now to accomplish the final renunciation ; to tear asunder the last ties that bound her to earth. A visit to a cousin who lived close to San Gil (the Jesuit College) gave her the opportunity of watching the life of its inmates more closely, and her friend, Dona Guiomar de Ulloa, a noble and virtuous widow, of whom more anon, made her acquainted with her own director, also a Jesuit, whom the Bolandist fathers conjecture to have been Father Araoz. Teresa responded quickly to generosity and confidence. As to the friendships, with rare discretion the Jesuit refrained from all dictation and pressure, perceiving that here was one who must work out her own destiny between her soul and God. He told me to commend it to God for a few days, and to repeat the hymn of Veni Creator, that I might be given light as to what was best. After having been deep in prayer one day, and supplicating the Lord to help me to please him in everything, I began the hymn, and whilst I was saying it, I was seized with a rapture so sudden that it almost carried me beside myself, and of this I could not doubt, for it was very palpable. It was the first time that the Lord had done me this favour. I heard these words, " I no longer wish thee to converse with men but with angels." A moment accomplished what years of weary effort had been powerless to effect ! Never more [she adds] have I been able to fix my friendship, nor to feel consolation, or special love, but for those who, I know, love God and try to serve him, nor has it been in my power, nor does it matter to me, 1 It may be objected that I have not assigned any date to these experiences of Teresa's. As all we know of this period of her life is from her own autobiography (and she gives no date and keeps no sequence), it is impossible to do so, even approximately, without sinning against truth and exactitude. I have therefore preferred to treat this part of the narrative even as she did (and as it was all but impossible for her to do otherwise, treating as she does of psychological moods and emotions), and leave it as she herself left it in the "vague obscure," rather than fix definite periods dictated by fancy. The chronology relating to this epoch adopted by the chronicler of the Order and by the latest Spanish editor of her works, Lafuente, is purely hypothetical. TERESA THE MYSTIC 135 be they relatives or friends, if I am not assured of this. It is a wearisome cross to me to converse with any one unless it be a person who treats of prayer. The Rubicon has been crossed. Henceforth her love is centred on God alone. The first step in sanctity has been won ! Such is the first of that series of divine " locutions " which henceforth she hears directing and guiding her in all the actions of her life. She describes them as " words very clearly formed, not heard by the bodily hearing, but impressed on the under- standing much more clearly than if they were so heard, and in spite of all resistance it is impossible to fail to understand them." She is careful to distinguish between the illusory voice, caused by an evil spirit, and that which we ourselves forge ; in the latter case the soul becoming both agent and recipient speaking to itself as it were. Experience alone can distinguish between the two. The words fabricated by the imagination are indistinct and their sound is muffled ("cosa sorda"), entirely devoid of the clearness which belongs only to those of a supernatural and divine origin. The operation of the latter on the soul is instantaneous : they prepare, redress, soften, give light, rejoice and soothe ; it seems as if her dryness, fear, and restlessness were dissipated by an invisible hand. In this case they are no longer mere words, but operate with the potentiality of action. Between them and the illusions of the imagination there is the same difference as between hearing and speaking. In the latter the understanding is actively engaged arranging what it is going to say, whilst in the former she is inactive and absorbed in listening. The one is like a vague conversation heard in sleep. The other a voice so clear that it is " impossible to lose a syllable it utters, and it comes at times when the understanding and soul are so restless and distraught that it would be impossible for them to succeed in concocting a single good idea." It must be understood, however, that it is impossible to see visions and hear locutions in a state of ecstasy, for in such a state the soul is so totally deprived of all her faculties that she can neither see, understand, nor hear. In divine locutions It is as if we were listening to some very holy or learned person of great authority, whose words we know that it is impossible to doubt : and even this is but a lame comparison, for sometimes these words bear with them such majesty that, even without remembering who it is that speaks, we tremble if they are ones of reproof ; if of love they make us melt away in love ; and, as I have said, their nature is such, and the length of the sentences we suddenly find ourselves listening to so great, that it is impos- 136 SANTA TERESA sible unless it had taken them a long time for the memory to have repro- duced them, or for the understanding to have arranged them, and it seems to me that we can in no wise be ignorant that we ourselves have not fabricated it. It is impossible to assign a date to Teresa's spiritual ex- periences, or even to indicate more than summarily the period when those events took place of which we are now about to treat. She herself conserves little or no chronological order in her Life, and often interrupts the thread of her narrative to chronicle events which either preceded or were subsequent to the one she actually chronicles. One spiritual phase suggests another, which she immediately sets down, without reference to time or sequence. Thus often her very spontaneity and naturalness form a stumbling-block to our following with clearness the analysis of her spiritual growth. It would seem, then, that after Padranos's removal from Avila she was again tossed to and fro on the same sea of mental perplexity and doubt he had for a moment soothed and laid to rest. The little knot of friends, we can discern amongst them the rigid and inexorable Daza, and the gentler- natured and vacillating Salcedo, looked on with gravest con- cern at what was passing within the walls of the Encarnacion. They sat in junta on a case which threatened to rival that of Magdalen de la Cruz, or the deluded nun of Lisbon. It is impossible at this distance of time to realise the extreme excitement caused by Teresa's visions ; the keenness and acrimony with which they were debated ; the bitterness and animosity of the criticism they aroused. To do so we must plunge ourselves entirely into that extraordinary century when religion governed politics and tinctured all life, when men disputed as warmly on a controversial point of theology as they do nowadays a political problem involving the fate of empires : a century strange and weird, indeed, with its fervid enthusiasm, its grim but sincere idea of Life and Life's duties. In court and camp, in peaceful hamlets far from the world, the same fierce clinging to a fierce creed ; the same eagerness of belief, the same longing, the same craving, the same universal sigh for the Lethean repose of the cloister. As we lift the curtain which hangs over mediaeval Spain, and live a life, and are moved by aspirations and struggling throes so remote and different from ours, it is impossible not to feel an immense respect nay, even reverence for the robust virility, the clearly defined and lofty purpose, which stamps every phase of the national existence. I am not enamoured of the Inquisition; I consider it to have been a most unmitigated TERESA THE MYSTIC 137 curse ; but neither have I any particular affection for the Creed that brought it into existence. What I love and admire in this dead generation is its intense reality : its absence of all sophistry which, when a soul was believed to be at stake, made them burn the body gladly. For given the one, and the immense issues involved, and sincerely believ- ing in the existence of both, what other course could an honest self-respecting, intolerant Spaniard pursue? His fervour of belief was surely not a crime although it led to crime. The memory of Charles V.'s great deeds is eclipsed, and justly, by his retirement to the Jeronimite monastery which a monastery no longer glimmers so whitely amongst the chestnut forests on the mountain-side above the Vera of Flasencia. Strangely enough, it is on Yuste, the peaceful retreat where, alternately swearing at the friars (hi de putas verntejos) whose false notes jarred on his accurate ear and soothing his soul with masses and penance, he spent the closing days of his life, that he has left his personality most indelibly stamped, and tinged it with all the vague charm of romance. Nor was his an isolated case if so noteworthy as to attract the attention of all Europe. Great ladies in their vast palaces lived as far as possible the life of nuns. The Princess of Brazil, who acted as Regent of Spain during Philip's absence in Flanders, gave audience covered from head to foot with a black veil, which she never lifted, unless to gratify the curiosity of some ambassador who wished to look on her wan and pallid face. When she stole a brief rest from the cares of government, it was to spend it in penance amongst the nuns of the Convent of Abroja. Don Juan of Austria, the curled darling of royalty, at one time of his life nourished the intention of burying it in the cloister. It was a time too for fear and disquiet. Men's minds were perturbed, and the religious world shaken to its centre, by the spread of heresy in Germany. Imposture is the necessary and inevitable outcome of all such seasons of mental and moral effervescence. In the sixteenth century Spain teemed with impostors. Imposture ate deep into the heart of a society formed of elements and individuals as heterogeneous and picturesque as their clothes, habits, and rags. Disabled or disbanded soldiers roaming about the country, generally unpaid ; thieves, card - sharpers, light women, poor and necessitous cadets of noble families, welcoming any shift to procure a living ; needy adventurers returned out at elbows from across the Spanish main ; priests and friars such are the characteristic types that elbow each other across the 138 SANTA TERESA shifting kaleidoscope, and are crystallised to all time in Guzman de AlfaracJie, El gran Tacafto, the Novelas Ejemplares of Cervantes. Small wonder, then, against such a background, dark enough, but crossed with rare gleams of light and beauty, that in her native town extreme importance should attach to the Carmelite nun who, if she had become an object of sus- picion, was also one of observation. That mysticism was but as yet a rare plant on Spanish soil may be seen as much by the suspicious attitude of Daza and Salcedo, and the little knot of spiritual people who con- stituted themselves into a sort of commission on Teresa, as by the immense sensation excited by the few sporadic cases of it which had so lately found their condemnation at the hands of the Inquisition. Spain still rang with the imprisonment of Magdalen de la Cruz, a nun of the Order of Clarissas, in the Inquisition dungeons of Cordoba. Before the discovery of her impostures she had lived thirty-eight years in the odour of sanctity, and was thrice elected abbess of her convent. The Inquisitor- General of Spain travelled purposely from Seville to see her and commend himself to her prayers. The Empress sent her her portrait, and besought her to bless the swaddling clothes of the infant prince (the unfortunate Don Carlos). She foretold the imprisonment of Francis I. and the sack of Rome. Like the nun of Lisbon, who imposed upon one so venerable for his learning and the sanctity of his life as Fray Luis de Granada, the ornament and glory of his Order and his country, she feigned wounds on her hands and feet. And yet her aberrations were in no whit different from those of Teresa, and like her, at the mandate of her confessors, she wrote her life and a relation of the spiritual mercies she had received. From the long list of absurdities and tissues of lies, forged by enmity (and how dangerous convent intrigues are, and to what consequences they can lead, we know from Teresa's own experience), or wrung from terrified nuns under threats of torture and the awe-inspiring machinery of the Inquisition, it would be a bootless task to endeavour to disentangle now how far she really carried her impostures. The Inquisition was comparatively lenient : in consideration of her old age and infirmities she was allowed to make a public abjuration a rope of esparto round her neck, and a lighted taper in her hand. She was then condemned to perpetual seclusion in a convent of her Order, where she was to be the last of the TERESA THE MYSTIC 139 community in choir, chapter, and refectory. She was deprived of the Eucharist for three years, unless in danger of death, and, except with her superiors and confessors, was bound to perpetual silence. The impostures of the Prioress of Lisbon were more flagrant. She painted her hands and feet with red ochre to simulate wounds. She at least was so humiliated that she " came to be in very truth a saint " ; and we are glad to learn, " ended her life happily." The sharp line which separated such illusory manifesta- tions from the Lutheran heresy had not as yet been clearly defined by the Spanish Inquisition. A wholesome terror existed in the minds of all men of any doctrine which seemed new-fangled or suspicious. His sanctity did not preserve the venerable Juan de Avila, the eloquent apostle of Andalucia and the honour of the Spanish priesthood of his day, " whose words were like fiery arrows shot from the heart," from a few days' imprisonment in Seville on suspicion of preaching the doctrines of Illuminism. His great disciple Fray Luis de Granada did not escape from having his books placed on the Indices of the Inquisition (one of them the famous Guia de Pecadores, Charles V.'s favourite companion in his retreat at Yuste), so dangerous was the tendency to mysticism con- sidered ; so dangerous for the use of the generality, books written in the vulgar tongue which touched some of the more mystic points of theology. In 1526 inquiry was instituted into the doctrines of one Ignatius de Loyola on account of their suspicious resemblance to those of the Alumbrados. Although at the time the persecution went no further, he was afterwards, for the same cause, laden with chains and fetters and thrown into prison in Salamanca. If, bearing these facts in view, we transport ourselves to this gray old walled town of Avila, we shall catch some of their echo in the persecution which greeted Teresa's visions, and of the dread she herself entertained of them. Had not Magdalen de la Cruz, with a rope round her neck and a taper in her hand, done public penance for delusions or impostures many of which were not one whit less likely or more absurd than those of Teresa herself? Had not the Prioress of Lisbon deceived one so famous for his sanctity and religion as Fray Luis de Granada? Daza and Salcedo were both good men. Who shall blame them if they shrank back in horror from the strange history placed before them by the nun of the Encarnacion daily growing stranger and more suspicious ; and if at last, smelling in them the burning faggots of the Inquisition, they arrived at the I 4 o SANTA TERESA verdict that it was the devil himself? Who shall blame them if they quoted triumphantly the irrefragable example of the "poor evangelical," Marf Diaz, 1 the hermit of San Millan, whom Daza, at least, may have regarded with the more partiality inas- much as he numbered her amongst his penitents, whose life, more perfect than Teresa's, presented none of the marvellous manifestations so difficult to reconcile with her as yet compara- tively small progress in the purgative virtues ? Above the fierce clatter of tongues and the laughter of the profane (for I trust that there were profane and that they did laugh even in those days), rose a sinister rumour sinister, indeed, when the Inquisi- tion unfolded its tentacles over every man's hearth, silently sucking in its victims ! The words " exorcism," " possessed by the devil," sounded ominously on the ear. The pious knot of friends were seriously alarmed. Good Francisco de Salcedo was kept running nay he did not run, but walked gravely like the pious Castilian gentleman he was between the convent and the town, conveying decisions on the one side and explanations on the other, which left the solution further off than ever, and both sides more firmly rooted in their opinions than before. During the next four years of her life, Teresa already stands out against the obscure background of the Encarnacion a distinct personality. The observation of the city was centred round the nun whose extraordinary visions and revelations could no longer be concealed nor confined to a few chosen persons sworn to secrecy. Through the folly or carelessness of those 1 Born in the year 1495 in the little town of Hita, now Vita, Mari Diaz, the daughter of well-to-do labourers, from her earliest years aroused her mother's im- patience by her frequent and fervid attendance at church. "Awake, betake you to church," exclaimed the mother, one day, unconsciously prophesying her daughter's future ; " and stop there all day, for it will provide for you.' Betrothed at fourteen to a youth of her own station in life, she was fated to mourn his eternal absence, for he fled from the town before the marriage, and never showed his face there again. When on the death of her father and mother she found herself alone in the world, she sold the little that belonged to her, and betook herself to Avila, that being the place where she could best accomplish her desire of consecrating herself to God. Here, at the recommendation of San Pedro of Alcantara, she was received into the family of Da. Guiomar de Ulloa ; but, anxious to adopt a stricter life, she obtained the bishop's permission to take possession of a narrow cell or hermitage close to the pulpit of the church of San Millan, where she lived a life of such penitence as to merit the appella- tion of the poor evangelical. Alms flowed, in in such abundance that she was able to succour crowds of poor people who flocked to her hermitage for bread. Her own wants may be measured by her words : " Eating makes us ill ; it is necessary to fast." She was now sixty, and united to Teresa by a tender friendship. It is said that on the occasion of one of her visions to the Encarnacion, Teresa, forgetful of the emblem of her life, Attt pati, aut tnori, begged her to pray God to put an end to the troubles which afflicted her by death. " I will indeed do so," replied the hermit, "but on one condition : that you shall in your turn ask him to send me many trials, and a long life in which to suffer them." Before this noble reproof Teresa lowered her head, comprehending the grandeur of the rebuke so gently administered. TERESA THE MYSTIC 141 whose advice she had sought in her extreme perplexity (inference points to Daza and Salcedo as the culprits), her confidences were divulged and became the common talk of Avila ; " for they were not meant for every one, and it seemed that I myself had published them." Let her townsmen receive the name of the visionary nun with jeers and derision, as many of them did, or murmur with bated breath the dreaded words " Inquisition," " Delusion," " Snares of the devil " ; nevertheless it was to her visions that she owed that prominence without which she might have lived and died an obscure nun in an obscure Castilian convent. It was her visions and revelations which first gained for her that character for sanctity without which it would have been im- possible for her even to dream of undertaking the work which was to be the idea and dominating reason of her life. She might have practised for ever, swallowed up in the shadow of the Encarnacion, all the heroic virtues of the Christian, and no one a whit the wiser that a rare flower had blossomed in and spread its fragrance through those sunlit cloisters. I can imagine her smiling in after years, as only the great can smile, with a touch of derision and sadness, on the enthusiastic multi- tude which thronged to the foot of the pedestal whereon their imagination had placed her, not for that which constituted her veritable grandeur alas ! it would have left them cold and unresponsive enough, but for what she herself accounted least, and, it may be, would fain have blotted out. What, it may be asked, was Teresa's motive at this period, as throughout her entire life, for thus laying her conscience before the most learned men and competent directors of her day ? Was it that she sought to find in their opinion the con- firmation of what she desired, yet doubted to be true? Or had she so forced herself to believe in those states of peculiar sensitiveness in which the mind becomes at the same time both subject and object, that in sheer terror lest the suavity and delight she experienced might conceal the cloven hoof of Satan, she fled for protection to the very persons most likely to divulge the communications she made to them ? It must be remembered that she wrote her autobiography when she had already over- stepped the threshold which lay between her career as a con- templative and that of a reformer. She was already in the thick of her first foundation at Avila. Is it not natural that in such a document she should indirectly, perhaps unconsciously, answer the objections which had been levelled, and were still levelled, against her sincerity of purpose and frankness ? She did not write in all the agonies of doubt and hesitation that i 4 2 SANTA TERESA must have made her earlier relations so strangely interesting. She now wrote from a different standpoint that of the critic and apologist. Had that unconscious hypocrisy which distorts the minds of the most single-hearted people when entirely under the influence of religion people of whose honesty it is humanly impossible to doubt something to do with the request she addressed to Ibanez at whose instigation she wrote her Life that he would publish her life and sins, so that the world might be undeceived in the false estimate it had formed of her character, but keep silence on all that concerned her revelations and supernatural dealings with the Almighty? Or was it her own good sense, still struggling for the mastery, which would willingly have thrown off what she perhaps felt was fictitious and unreal, if the exigencies of the time had not compelled her to go forward in the path once taken ? These inquiries are not without interest. Of one thing I am certain : she was of herself most true and loyal. Her director at the time when all this was going on in Avila, was one Master Baltasar Alvarez, a young man but lately ordained, second in command of the Jesuit College of San Gil. " He was well versed in spiritual things," so runs the brief eulogy Ribera dedicates to the memory of a brother religious of his own order " a man of great prayer and penance ; his words were powerful in entering hearts, and he was very skilful in directing souls to God. He died holily, as he had lived, in the college of Belmonte, being provincial of his order." Wavering himself between incredulity and belief, kept in a perpetual fever of apprehension by the doubts and scruples of the pious friends on the one hand, and Teresa's own doubts and scruples on the other, if Alvarez quailed before the warning, with all its tremendous consequences, that he should beware of the dangerous nun, who was leading him straight into the meshes of the Inquisition, he was nevertheless honest and loyal. In spite of his slender sympathy with her strange spiritual history, however much he distrusted and disliked it, so convinced was he of her inherent truth and honesty, that for three years he stood bravely in the breach between her and her tormentors. If his nervous tremors imparted to his direction that harshness and asperity which so often tempted his great penitent to leave him, he consistently soothed and banished her scruples. And if, as she adds drily, he shielded her from her own doubts by "making them greater": telling her cold comfort enough that the devil could do her no harm so long as she did not offend God, to whom he bid her pray to rid her of his company, it but increases our respect for the conscientious Jesuit, who, TERESA THE MYSTIC 143 years after in Salamanca, told Ribera, as they were discussing the merits of different books, that he had read them all to understand Teresa de Jesus. Nor did Teresa like him less for it. " Well do I love my father," she exclaimed laughingly in her turn to the same confidant, " although he is so ill-tempered." But there came a moment when Alvarez also seemed to have deserted her, " although," she carefully notes, " according to what I afterwards knew, it was only to prove me." It was after an interview with him which had deepened her despair that she heard the second of what it is customary to term, for want of a better expression, her divine " locutions." She had been to confession in the Church of San Gil. It will be remembered that the nuns of the Encarnacion enjoyed an amount of freedom strangely at variance with modern con- ceptions of the strictness of monastic life, and that she was paying a visit to that friend, Da. Guiomar de Ulloa, who lived near San Gil. In this affliction I went from the church and entered an oratory. I had been forbidden to communicate for a long time, and deprived of the solitude which was my only consolation. I had no one with whom I could converse, for every one was against me ; some seemed to me to jeer at me when I spoke of it ; others warned the confessor to beware of me ; others said that it was clearly the devil. . . . Well, being alone without any one I could confide in, unable to pray or to read, I was like one amazed with so much tribulation and fear whether the devil had deceived me, troubled, worn out with weariness, without knowing where to turn. ... I remained thus four or five hours, for there was no consolation for me, either in heaven or earth, but the Lord let me suffer, fearing a thousand dangers. . . . Well, being in this so great trouble (as yet I had not begun to have visions), these words alone sufficed to banish it, and to tranquillise me quite : " Have no fear, daughter, for it is I, and I will not desert thee : fear not." There is a retrospective ring of triumph in the words Let all the learned men rise up against me, let all created things persecute me, let devils torment me, but do thou not fail me, Lord, for I know the gain with which thou deliverest him who alone confides in thee. . . . Behold me with these words alone, quietened with strength, courage, security, tranquillity, and light ; for in a moment I saw that my soul was changed, and it seemed to me that I could maintain that it was God against all the world. ... I often remembered how the Lord bade the winds to cease when the tempest rose at sea, and so I said : Who is this whom the faculties of my soul (" potencias ") obey thus ; that lights up in an instant an obscurity so great, softens a heart that seemed like stone, and sends the rain of soothing tears on the spot which seemed destined to a long drought? Who inspires these desires ? Who gives this courage ? What do I fear ? What is this ? I desire to serve this Lord, I only long to please him : I desire not content nor ease, or any other good thing, but to fulfil his will. . . . Well, if this Lord is powerful (as I see and know he is), and the devils are 144 SANTA TERESA his slaves (and this cannot be doubted, since it is an article of faith), I being a servant of this Lord and King, what harm can they do to me? Why should I not have resolution to fight against all hell ? I took a crucifix in my hand, and it truly seemed to me that God had given me courage to wrestle bodily with them, for it seemed to me that with the Cross I could easily vanquish them all ; and so I said : Now come on, all of you, for being a servant of the Lord I want to see what you can do to me. These eloquent words, palpitating with devotion and abne- gation, the outpourings of her great and valiant heart, which flowed irresistibly from her pen as she dwelt, years after, on favours she firmly believed she had received, are not those of a weak and hysterical nature, or of a deluder who seeks to build up a fame for sanctity on pretended revelations and visions, but those of the enthusiast and visionary, whom it is impossible to judge by the poverty-stricken standard of ordinary criticism. If at times her shrewd good sense got the upper hand and she questioned the origin and reality of the visions she saw and the voices she heard vibrating through her con- science, she believed as honestly at others that she actually communicated with the world in which her thoughts habitually dwelt the first condition, perhaps, of all the great movements the world has ever seen the first condition, perhaps, of all great men. If Columbus discovered America, it was that he had shadowed forth the mysterious continent in his dreams long before he saw it. If men live and die for an Idea, it is because they foresee its embodiment as radiantly clear as if it actually existed in the flesh. We must remember that Teresa heard these words which pierced the darkness of her heart with the startling vividness of a ray of light, on this as on other occasions when she heard them, at a moment of great mental excitement. She was worn out and exhausted by a long period of opposition and persecu- tion, which had lasted for two years, and which now seemed to her to have reached its culminating point. The petty animosity to which she had been subjected by the members of her own community its self-love wounded by what it looked upon as unjustifiable pretensions added to her suspense and perturba- tion. Her feeble frame was weakened by prolonged and severe fasting, by long and cruel vigils, which, added to her frequent illnesses, were of themselves capable of predisposing hallucina- tions. Moreover, she had come straight from the confessional, where it seemed that her last support had deserted her, and that every one had abandoned her, and had been on her knees for more than five or six hours without moving, " almost beside herself with grief and terror." But are we to leave entirely out TERESA THE MYSTIC 145 of account the nobleness of nature, whose exquisite purity and sensitiveness of fibre not only made such illusions possible, but impressed on them such vivid reality and sublimity that we feel at times that we are listening to a person who addresses us from some higher level than our own ? are we to leave entirely out of account the conditions which governed and moulded her life and intellectual development from childhood? that strange mixture of fiction and superstition, gross and material, transcendental and dreamy at the same time, on which she was nourished? Any absolute judgment would be altogether at fault in treating of one whose mind was often so complex and contradictory. Belief in the possibility of a thing is the first step to make it possible. Compared with the puerile table- turning and the childish faith in spirit-rapping which even to-day seems to find believers, Teresa's mysticism is pure and noble. All who will can have visions any hysterical girl or distraught woman : the imitators of Teresa number thousands ; but how many have described them with the pen of a genius, which invests all it touches with interest? And how many at the age of sixty, without money and without friends, have sallied forth to reform a great Order and to found convents, and accomplished what they set themselves to do, in response to the real social needs of a period ? Moreover, her mysticism is robust and healthy when compared with the unhealthy and sickly sentimentality which seems invariably to form the domi- nant note in the religious literature of to-day. Is it strange, in an age when man was supposed to be con- stantly in communication with the supernatural, that, thirsting with Divine Love, she thought she had cleared the mysterious abyss which separates humanity from the shadow of the Divinity? And if it was but a false and fallacious dream, like so many others that have consoled and strengthened genera- tions of the living a dream as unreal as Christianity itself what of that, if thence she brought that strange radiance which clung to her in life, and in death refused to leave her that rare perfection and purity and humility of life, on which the most sceptical have never dared to cast a doubt? who would wish her dream undreamed, who would wish the illusion dissipated ? To judge aright of the century which produced Teresa, we must constantly shift our standard of criticism. An abyss rolls between our thought and that which produced the strange apocalyptic figures of apostles, prophets, angels, which, wrapped in the rigid folds of their stone draperies, keep watch over the doors of San Vicente, or gleam from painted Gothic windows on to cathedral floors. To us they are but the faded symbols 10 146 SANTA TERESA of a faith, and leave us supremely indifferent an indifference perhaps most pronounced amongst the religious people of to- day, to whom even their artistic beauty and picturesqueness has ceased to appeal. To Teresa they were beings fraught with all the terrors or all the benignity of life. The legend, poetry, history of the day relate with all good faith instances in which they descended from their niches to intervene in the afifairs of men, to chastise injustice and oppression, to shield the humble and the meek. What is legend now was then a popular and deeply-rooted belief a belief that could remove mountains, even those insuperable ones of common sense. Thus to the nebulous and shadowy creations which she fancied she saw flitting before her mental vision, following the tendency which led her to give a concrete form to pale and impalpable abstractions, she unconsciously gave the shapes of those majestic productions of mediaeval art with which she was most familiar, and around which floats an atmosphere of such unmoved serenity and celestial repose. It is into this mysterious region of her mind, peopled with the phantoms and spectres which she herself placed there by some strange psychological process, which must ever remain unexplained and unexplainable her own creations which im- posed themselves upon her as tangible realities that we are now about to enter. Let Teresa speak, and let us follow her to the border of that strange world which the old mystics assert each one may find in his own bosom. She is still floating in agony, at one moment tormented with the dread that her visions are of the devil, at another full of radiant confidence that their origin is divine. I put myself in the hands of God ... in order that he might fulfil his will in me in everything. ... I sought the intercession of devout saints to deliver me from the devil. I offered up " novenas " (neuvaines}. I com- mended myself to St. Hilarion and St. Michael the angel, for whom, on account of this, I felt a fresh devotion, besides many other saints whom I importuned to intercede for me that God would make manifest the truth. At last, after spending two years in which this was my constant prayer, as well as that of others to the same end, namely, either that God would lead me by some other way or declare the truth (for the locutions which, as I have said, the Lord made to me were very constant), this happened. Being in prayer on the Festival of the glorious St. Peter, I saw close to me, or rather felt for I saw nothing either with the eyes of the body or the soul but it seemed to me that Christ was close beside me, and I saw that it was he himself who was speaking to me, at least so it appeared to me. As I was entirely ignorant that it was possible to have such a vision, it filled me at first with great fear, and I could do nothing but weep, although he had only to speak a single word of encouragement for me to remain as usual, soothed, refreshed, and fearless. Then, greatly troubled, I went to relate it to my confessor. He asked TERESA THE MYSTIC 147 me in what form I saw him. I said I did not see him. He asked me how then did I know it was Christ ? I said that how I knew not, but that I could not help but understand that he was close beside me, and that I saw and felt him clearly. ... I did nothing but seek comparisons to make myself understood ... for as it is one of the most sublime [of visions], so it is one with which the devil can meddle least of all. For if [she argues] I say that I see it neither with the eyes of the body or the soul, since it is not an imaginary vision, how do I understand and affirm with most clearness that he is as close to me as if I saw him? For to say that I am like a person who is blind or in the dark, who does not see another close beside him, does not express it. Some similarity there is, but not much, for such an one feels with the senses, or can assure himself of the other's presence, by hearing him speak or move, or touching him. There is nothing of this, however, here. Nor is there any darkness, for he repre- sents himself to the soul by a notice clearer than the sun. I do not mean that one actually perceives either sun or light, but a light which, without our seeing it, enlightens the understanding, and enables it to enjoy a benefit so great. ... It is clearly seen that Jesus Christ the Virgin's Son is here. Then the confessor asked me, who said it was Jesus Christ ? He told me so himself many times, I replied ; but before he told me so, it was im- pressed on my understanding that it was he, and before this he told me so, and I did not see him. If a person I had never seen, but of whom I had only heard, came to speak to me, and told me who he was, I being blind or in great darkness, I should believe him, although I could not with such absolute certainty affirm him to be the same as if I had seen him. Here, yes ; for, without seeing, it is impressed with so clear a notice [the " intelli- gence " of the schools], that it seems there can be no doubt ; for the Lord wills it to be so engraven on the understanding that one no more doubts ot it than of a thing we actually see, nor indeed as much ; for sometimes we are doubtful as to the latter, as to whether it was not fancy ; here, although at first we may doubt, on the other hand a deep certainty remains, which deprives the doubt of all efficacy. So also in another way does God teach the soul, speaking to her without uttering a word. She subtly defines the difference between a divine locution and the communication which in this kind of vision takes place between the soul and God. In the words of which we have spoken before, God forces the under standing (in spite of herself) to attend and listen to what is said, but now it seems that the soul has other ears to listen with, which force her to hear, and concentrate her attention : just as, if some one with sound hearing was not allowed to cover his ears, he would hear any one shouting close to him, whether he wished or not. And even so such an one does something, since he pays attention to what is said to him : here there is nothing of this, for even this little, which before was only to listen, the soul is now deprived of. She finds everything cooked and eaten, there is nothing more to do but enjoy. It is as if one who has never taken the trouble to learn to read or study anything should find all known science contained within himself, without knowing why or how it came, since he had never troubled even to learn the ABC. This last comparison seems to me to declare something of this celestial gift ; for in a moment the soul finds herself possessed of wisdom, and the mystery of t 4 8 SANTA TERESA the most Holy Trinity and other divine truths are made so clear to her, that there is no theologian with whom she would not dare to dispute the truth of these grandeurs. After a few days, in which it seemed to her that this cloud- like enveloping Presence never left her, and was the constant witness of her actions, it becomes more defined. Being one day in prayer, the Lord showed me his hands alone, with such exceeding beauty as is beyond the power of words to describe. A few days afterwards I also saw the divine face, which left me entirely absorbed in wonder and admiration. I could not understand why the Lord showed himself thus by slow degrees . . . until afterwards I knew that his Majesty was leading me according to my human weakness. These imperfect glimpses of Christ's Humanity culminate in a crowning manifestation of the Divine Presence. On the Festival of St. Paul, being at Mass, this most sacred Humanity was completely represented to me, as he is painted after the Resurrection. I never saw this vision, though imaginary, with the bodily eyes, nor with any others, except the eyes of the soul [the imagination]. 1 They, who know better than I, say that the former one [that seen neither with the eyes of the body nor of the soul] is more perfect than this, and this very much more so than those seen by the bodily eyes. This last named, they say, is the lowest, and most subject to the deceptions of the devil, although at this time I could not understand this, and desired, since this mercy was vouchsafed me, that I might see it with the bodily eyes, so that my confessor should not say that it was my imagination. These imaginary visions are sent by God, but they may also be fabricated by the imagination itself, or, worse still, they may be illusions of the devil. How are we to tell the difference? It seems to me [she speaks of visions produced by the agency of the devil] that in this way he has endeavoured to represent the Lord himself to me in a false representation ; it takes bodily shape, but he cannot counterfeit the glory which belongs to it when it is from God. He re- presents things to undo the true vision which the soul has seen, but so does she resist them ; so do they disturb, torment, and disquieten her, that she loses the devotion and pleasure which she felt before, and is left without ability to pray. . . . He who has had a true vision of God may distinguish the difference almost at once ; for although it begins with pleasure and delight, the soul flings it away from her, and to my thinking even the delight must be different, and is not like pure and chaste love. A vision fabricated by Imagination, apart from the absence of the great 1 Teresa and I Famlet seem to have seen their visions in the same manner, viz. in the "soul's eye." As this is so, as, vide the expressions "in the eyes of the soul," and "in my mind's eye," I leave it to the schoolmen and the modern believers in visions, to determine what they really saw, and how they saw it." TERESA THE MYSTIC 149 and mysterious operations which alone belong, to the pure Imaginary vision leaves the soul unrefreshed, weakened, tired, and unsatisfied, like a person who, still awake, does all he can to induce sleep, and sometimes succeeds in falling into a doze ; but if it is not real sleep, he receives no benefit from it, nor does it relieve the giddiness of his head, but rather increases it. Different, indeed, from these vain simulacra of the Imagina- tion or the Devil, the Imaginary Vision sent by God ! In some things, indeed, it seemed to me that it was an image which I saw, but in many others that it was no other than Christ himself, according to the clearness with which he was pleased to show himself to me. Some- times it was confused, so that it seemed to me to be an image, not like earthly images (" dibujos "), however perfect, and many are the good ones I have seen ; it is folly to think that there is any resemblance between them, any more than there is between a living person and his portrait, which, however well executed, is never so life-like that we cannot see it is an inanimate object. . . . But this, if it is an image, is a living one : not a dead man, but a living Christ ; and it gives us to understand that he is Man and God, not as he was in the sepulchre, but as he rose from it after the Resurrection. And he comes sometimes with so great a majesty (especially immediately after communicating, where we already know him to be present, for so Faith tells us) that none can doubt but that it is the Lord himself. Its Beauty. It will seem to your Grace that it needed not much effort to see hands and face so beauteous ; so extreme is the beauty of glorified bodies that the mind is stunned with the glory of a sight so supernaturally beautiful ; and so fearful did it make me that I was entirely bewildered and fluttered, although afterwards I was convinced and reassured, and its effects were such that soon all fear vanished. . . . Though I were many years endeavour- ing, I should not know how to set about to figure forth a thing so beautiful, for its whiteness and resplendence alone are beyond all that we can imagine here not a splendour that dazzles, but a soft whiteness, infused with radiance, which gives most great delight to the sight, which is not tired either by it or the clearness by which we see this beauty so divine a light so different from that we see on earth that, after it, the clearness of the sun loses all its lustre and our eyes would never more care to reopen to that of earth. It is like a very clear stream running over crystal, which reflects the sun, as compared with one very muddy, covered with mist, which runs over an earthy bottom. Not that it is like the sun, nor the light like sunlight ; in short, it seems the natural light, and the other artificial. It is light which knows no dark night ; but as it is always light, nothing ever troubles it. In a moment things which the imagination would take long to put together are unfolded to us, for it goes beyond all we can understand here below. So does that Beauty and Majesty remain stamped on the soul that nothing can drive it from her memory, except when the Lord wills that she should suffer dryness and great loneliness, at which time she even seems to forget God. The soul is no longer the same, always enraptured (embebida) ; to her it seems that a living love of God in a very high degree springs up afresh ; for although the former vision which represents God without shape or form is more perfect, it is a great thing that the Divine Presence should be made manifest and placed in the imagination, so that, according to our weakness, i 5 o SANTA TERESA it should endure lastingly in the memory, and the mind be well employed. And these two kinds of visions [the pure intellectual and the imaginary] almost always come together, so that -the eyes of the soul may see the Excellency and Beauty and Cilory of the Most Holy Humanity, and that by the first we may understand how he is God and powerful, and that he can do everything, and command and govern all things, and fill them with his love. Such is the analysis she has left us of her visions visions which it is probable were moulded on the recollection of the vivid and realistic pictures of the early Spanish painters, full of force and emotion, which then abounded, as they did until very recently, in every old house in Spain pictures which she had gazed at for hours, absorbed in devotion (note her expression, " This most sacred Humanity was represented to me as he is painted after the Resurrection "), until they had so engraven themselves on her imagination that, when the strains of the Mass rose through the silent church, and the censers filled the air with heavy vapours, and the figure of the priest with arms uplifted in the solemn act of consecration was out- lined against the altar, like some ancient prophet of old, the kneeling nun unconsciously reproduced them, flushing them with such life and vigour that she believed she was embracing the supernatural having long ago forgotten the predisposing cause. Perhaps the supremest difficulty Teresa encountered in her life was to make others accord to her visions the same faith which she herself was far from always entertaining. If she worsted her antagonists by her keen and subtle wit, they replied by what was then indeed a cutting sarcasm applied to a woman, that she wanted to teach and display her learning. It was not, they said gravely, a good sign. The very process of argument led her to give firmer and more decided outlines to the specula- tions which filled her mind in the vacuity of the convent. We can well understand that the great woman .who was more than a match for the greatest theologians of the day drove the worthy knight and his friends, confused and dazzled by her reasoning, from their last intrenchments and forced them into such feeble retaliations as " torturing her words without considering that she spoke unguardedly, and when they perceived a fault in her, it seemed to them a proof of her want of humility." They so magnified the slightest fault their lynx eyes discovered in her, that it was made to obscure all her virtues, and straightway went to shut themselves up with poor Master Baltasar to add to his bewilderment and perplexities by their complaints and warnings. The one whose doubt of her she felt most keenly of all was the kind-hearted Francisco de Salcedo. TERESA THE MYSTIC 151 But she opposed to them an argument much more powerful and positive than psychological subtleties the irrefragable argu- ment of her life. She remonstrated gently with those whose terrors and doubts darkened her life, as she beat herself against that wall of suspicion which had grown up around her If they who said this, told me that a person who had just finished speaking to me, and whom I knew well, was not that person, but they knew that I had fancied it, doubtless I should believe them rather than what I had seen ; but if this person left behind him some jewels as pledges of his great love, whereas before I had none, and I found myself rich being poor, I could not believe it, even if I wished to. And these jewels I could show them ; for all who knew me saw clearly that my soul was changed ; and my confessor confirmed it, for the difference in everything was so great and palpable, that every one could see it with the utmost clearness. For whereas before I had been so wicked, I said that I could not believe that, if the devil did this to deceive and lure me to hell, he would take such contrary means as to remove my sins, and replace them by virtues and fortitude. The petty and irritating martyrdom she was now exposed to only drove her more completely to take refuge in the inner life of prayer. Threats of exorcism fell idly on the ears of one absorbed in visions so radiant that one of them was worth more than all the treasures and pleasures that the world can give. She felt the Divine form clothed in all the glory of the Resur- rection ever beside her, and watched the Divine and beauteous lips as they moved in speech of ineffable sweetness or rigorous reproof. His presence never left her, unless when, unable to bear the Divine compassion of his gaze, her soul was suspended in rapture so sublime, "that she lost this beauteous vision in order to enjoy it more," or when, as she was consumed with desire to note the shade and colour of his eyes, it melted into space. In the Host she saw the Presence which the dogma of her faith taught her to believe was there in very truth. The vision changed according to her mood. In her hours of dark- ness and despondency, Christ showed her his wounds, his suffer- ings on the Cross and in the garden ; his brow pierced with the crown of thorns ; or himself bearing the Cross to Calvary, " but the flesh always glorified." Although she now felt contradiction to be useless with those who only used it against her as a proof of her want of humility, she still deferred to their scruples and terrors. When bidden in the confessional by a priest, who sometimes took the place of Alvarez in the direction of her conscience, to dar higas (a gesture of contempt, an old-world preservative against witchcraft and the evil eye, still implicitly believed in i 5 a SANTA TERESA and practised in the remoter parts of Spain) which he assured her would infallibly scare away the devil, who is clearly at the bottom of her visions, she never dreams of questioning his counsel, although, as she performs the superstitious mandate, she hides the offending hands under her scapulary. To me this was most painful ; for as I could only believe it was from God, it was a terrible thing for me to do ; and neither could I wish to be deprived of it, but, in short, I did what I was bid. ... It gave me the greatest pain to make this gesture when I saw this vision of the Lord ; for when I saw him before me, I could not believe he was the devil, even if they tore me in pieces, and so it was a sort of great mortification to me. To avoid crossing myself so often, I held a cross in my hand. But as she thus holds out the crucifix of her rosary, Christ takes it from her fingers ; and when she received it again, she finds the four large beads of black ebony transmuted into precious stones, in comparison with whose surpassing brilliancy and effulgence the diamond itself appears counterfeit and dim, and on them engraven the five wounds " of very lovely work- manship." " He told me that so I should see it from now henceforward and so it was, although," she adds nai'vely, " none saw it but I." Incidents like this abound in the history of the Saints. St. Cecilia's brow was crowned with an angelic garland, invisible to all but herself and her husband. Had not Christ himself placed a golden ring set with pearls on the finger of Sta. Catalina of Siena ? whose Life was one of Teresa's favourite books. Well versed as she was in the history of the Saints, deeply imbued with the spirit of legends in which she devoutly believed, so completely absorbed in the supernatural that her mind had become incapable of separating truth from fancy, there is no impossibility that the Castilian nun, who felt herself already in such intimate communication with the Almighty, should go a step farther, and imagine herself to be the recipient of favours akin to those which had been extended to others. More than this, she probably looked on them as the necessary and indis- pensable accompaniment of sanctity. Her confessor's mandate had filled her with deep distress and agitation : it needed only a little bonne volontc' for a highly-strung imagination, already strained to its tension point, to see through eyes blinded with tears the actual accomplishment of a miracle. She had now entered entirely into the realms of the marvellous and the super- natural, where both truth and falsehood are annihilated. To me it is more a matter of wonder that she did not lose her footing altogether on this dangerous precipice, on the very brink TERESA THE MYSTIC 153 of which her own inherent good sense stepped in and saved her from utter destruction. Nor can we ascribe such things entirely to her own inventive powers ; for, whatever we do, we can never accuse her of disingenuousness ; although it does seem strange that she should have allowed her sister, Juana, " however great her dissimulation," to wheedle out of her during her life a relic so consecrated. Many were the miracles ascribed to it after Teresa's death. An aged nun, the aunt of no less a person than D. Francisco de Fonseca, Lord of Coca and Alaejos, had only to place it across her eyes, blinded with cataract, to recover her sight instantly and is this not most solemnly attested by Fray Nicolas de San Cirilo, Prior of Mancera, under his hand and seal? Ribera testifies to having seen it several times in Juana's house at Alba de Tormes, who, when Teresa was lying embedded in the wall of her convent church at Alba, showed it to him as a great treasure ; " as such," piously exclaims the devout Jesuit, " indeed it is." Thus the efforts of her opponents were as powerless to control this strange spiritual life as to catch and stifle the strange clear note of some wild song-bird, whose song grows louder and sweeter as it soars into the depths of space, far above the persecutors who would have caged and killed it. When they bid me make these trials and resistance, the favours increased much more abundantly. ... I was always in prayer, even in my sleep ; for so did the love and the plaints I made to the Lord increase, and so im- possible was it for me not to make him the subject of my thoughts (in spite of my wishes, and still more of my endeavours) : withal I obeyed as much as I could, which in this was little or nothing. . . . Not long after, his Majesty began, as he had promised, to signalise more clearly that it was himself. So great a love of God increasing in me that I knew not who placed it there, for it was indeed supernatural, nor did I procure it. I saw myself dying with desire to see God, and I knew not where to seek this life if not in death. I was seized with such great impetuses of this love . . . that it seemed to me that my heart was breaking. Oh, sovereign artifice of the Lord, how delicately didst thou work with thy miserable slave ! Thou hiddest thyself from me, and constrainedst me with thy love, with a death so sweet that the soul would never wish to be freed from it. There is no connection, however, between impetuses such as these, and that restlessness and those uncontrollable impulses of devotion which sometimes seize a pious person, and rather oppress the spirit than relieve it. The latter is like the passionate weeping of children, which seems about to choke them, whose excess of passion ceases when they are given something to drink ; or like a pipkin which boils over on account of too much wood having been piled up underneath it, and spills all the contents. 154 SANTA TERESA But these impetuses are widely different. It is no longer ourselves who heap on the fuel ; rather, the fire being already made, are we thrown suddenly into the midst of it to burn. The soul does not procure the wound which the absence of the Lord produces ; rather does it seem that an arrow darts through the innermost entrails, sometimes through the heart, until the soul neither knows what ails her, nor what she wants : well does she understand that she loves God, and that the arrow seems to have been dipped in the juice of some herb, which fills her with self-abhorrence for love of this Lord, for whom she would willingly lose her life. It is beyond the power of words to express or describe the manner in which God draws close to the soul, and the exceeding pain of it which deprives her of consciousness : yet so sweet is this pain that no delight of life can give more content. The soul would willingly lie dying for ever of such a hurt. So dazed was I with this pain and glory together, that I could not understand how it could be. Oh, what it is to see a wounded soul. . . . Wounded, I mean, by so excellent a cause ; and she sees clearly that she had nothing to do in procuring this love, but rather that it is a spark from the most great love which the Lord bears her, which, falling suddenly upon her, sets her altogether ablaze. Oh, how often I call to mind at these moments that verse of David's : Quemadmodum desiderat cer:>us ad font es aquarum. No penance, even to the shedding of blood, can slake this devouring thirst ; for the body has become insensible to all physical torment. Sometimes the pain [of unsatisfied longings] is so sharp, . . . that it suspends the action of the body, which cannot move arm or foot ; indeed, if standing, it feels like a thing transported, for it is impossible even to breathe. It can only give utterance to groans not loud ones, for it cannot, although the feeling which prompts them is overpowering. These vague, mysterious sentiments of unquenchable love and longing are the prelude to a greater mystery, known as the Transverberation of her heart, when as in the case of St. Catherine of Siena, whose heart was extracted by Christ, who replaced it with one most beautiful ; like St. Gertrude, whose heart was pierced with a golden dart and received the impress of the five wounds; like St. Francis, who miraculously received the mysterious stigmata, Teresa's devotees contend that the seal of sanctity was fixed indelibly on the physical being of the last great saint that medievalism produced. Her heart, so pierced, in which a wound charred and blackened at the edges, as if by the action of fire, is distinctly visible, is still to be seen in its reliquary at Alba de Tormes. But how that wound came there is another question. After her death, her body, as we shall see, went through strange vicissitudes. It was cut and hacked mercilessly about, to satisfy the insatiable greed of her convents, and, later on, of TERESA THE MYSTIC 155 popes and kings, who desired to possess some shred of the cast- off clay which had enshrined the great and noble Teresa de Jesus. Trickeries which we should consider as highly culpable were then resorted to, and looked upon as perfectly justifiable, if the result was to shed lustre on an Order, or confirm the sanctity of a saint, nay, are even now resorted to with the relics of her body, as I myself have seen. During the taking of the evidence for her canonisation, for so long pending, we shall notice a significant recrudescence of miracles supposed to be worked by her relics; and then, too, in order to lend a still more marvellous and supernatural tinge to her history, it may have occurred to some friar, or prioress, to effect by material means what Teresa had affirmed to have taken place in a mystic and non-material sense. It is strange, if not, that we do not hear of this wound a physical fact so extraordinary as even then to have excited immense attention until 1726; that Fr. Francisco de Sta. Maria, the able chronicler of the Order, writing in 1644, and whose business it was to make himself minutely informed of all that took place in it, although he dwells on the incorruption and sweet odour of her body, and was present at its exhumation in Alba in 1603, makes not the slightest mention of the miraculous heart, which had never left the keeping of the nuns of Alba, and was in their possession at the time. However this may be, it is in memory of this impalpable wound, which was not enough to content an age credulous and avid of miracles, that Teresa owes the title given to her by the Church, of the seraphic Teresa, the seraphic doctor. 1 The Lord willed me sometimes to see this vision. I saw an angel in bodily form, close beside me at my left hand : which I do not use to see, but very seldom. Although I often see angels, it is without seeing them, as in the vision I spoke of first [the intellectual vision]. In this vision the Lord willed that I should see him thus. He was not large, but small, and very beautiful, his face so resplendent that he seemed to be of the highest order of angels, who appear to be all ablaze : they must be those they call cherubim, for they do not tell me their names. [Here on the margin of the original MS. of her Life the exact Banes has added the following note : " rather of those they call seraphim."] In his hands I saw a long dart of gold, and on the iron tip it seemed to me was a little fire. With this he seemed to me to pierce my heart several times, and that it penetrated to my very entrails ; it seemed to me that it bore them with it when he drew it out, and left me all aflame with love of God. The pain was so great that it made me give those moans, and so excessive the sweetness caused by this 1 Teresa, by a definitive decree of the Tribunal of the Rota, is formally declared a Doctor of the Church. The " seraphic doctor," the antonomasia by which she is as often as not referred to in Spain, relates to this, and not to the Doctor's degree bestowed upon her, after her death, by the University of Salamanca. The adjective " seraphic ' is applied to her from the circumstance given above. 156 SANTA TERESA exceeding pain, that one cannot desire it to go, nor can the soul content itself with less than (iod. It is not a bodily but a spiritual pain, although the body fails not to share in it somewhat, and indeed a good deal, It is a love-passage which passes between the soul and God, so sweet that I beseech him of his goodness to let him who may think I lie, partake of it. Almost a century and a half after, a copy of verses was found in her convent of Seville, and it was then remembered that it had been affirmed by those who had known her best, that words similar to them had formed the burden of the song she was heard to sing softly to herself as she busied herself about her homely household tasks, or went through the convent corridors En las internas entranas ,3 Si mata, como da vida ? Senti un golpe repentino : Y si vida, como muere ? El blason era divino, i Como sana, cuando hiere, Porque obrd grandes hazaiias. Y se vd con el unida? Con el golpc fui herida, Tiene tan divinas mafias, Y aunque la herida es mortal Que en un tan acerbo trance, Y es un dolor sin igual, Sale triunfando del lance Es muerte que causa vida. Obrando grandes hazanas. Which may be roughly Englished thus : In my inmost heart If death it gives how life ? I felt a sudden blow. If life, how should one die? Its blazon was divine, Howshould it heal where it doth wound? So great the things it worked. How can such things unite? Though wounded with the blow, Such art divine it hath, A blow that causeth death, That in extreme so sharp, And is a pain unmatched, She triumphs over pain This death doth give me life. Which worketh things so great. CHAPTER V FERENDUM ET SPERANDUM IF Teresa felt that she communicated with the Divinity in her moments of rapture and gladness, so does she struggle with the devil himself in her periods of depression. In that age the poor devil was blamed for very much for which a later generation has ceased to hold him responsible. Demoniacal agency was firmly believed in ; that people were possessed by devils was as incontrovertible an article of faith as the dogma of the Trinity. The quaint and terrible monsters which grin from the angles of the watercourses of mediaeval churches, through whose contorted and furious mouths the rain pours down on the flagstones below, were only the embodiment of a deeply-rooted belief. We must draw closer to the dark and terrible thoughts which haunted the imaginations and guided the hands of the old artificers who made them, if we would understand, however dimly, this part of the workings of Teresa's mind. Accustomed to find in the psychological and obscure emotions, and the rapturous expansions of her own conscience, the direct action of the Divinity, she pursued the same process in the contrary direction with her doubts, fears, and moods of depression. As in the case of her more delicate abstractions, so these became materialised into bodily shape and form. It is only owing to the strange mental balance she conserved even in those moments of high tension and extreme exaltation, when the boundary line between fact and fancy is so slender as hardly to exist at all, that she still found it possible to distinguish between imagination and reality. For again let us note with these visions, as with those in which she personified the Divinity, that she never once asserts to have seen them with the eyes of the body. They either come to her moulded into shape and form by the imagination, or she feels and sees them clearly beside her in the same way as she felt the brooding presence of Christ's glorified humanity, and this, by the time she writes her autobiography, she has learned enough of the terms of mysticism, to define as the Pure Intellectual vision. That is to say, they 167 r 5 8 SANTA TERESA were nothing more than images without substance or reality, which had no existence beyond her own imagination, as Spinoza has pointed out was the case with the pretended revelations of the prophets. The subtle way in which she guards against attack is as remarkable in its way as anything she ever wrote. She left the Inquisitor in much the same position as a person to whom some friend confides the fact that he has seen a vision. The only answer is : Oh ! For if a vision is neither imaginary nor assumes bodily form, who so bold, even if an inquisitor (whose efforts were generally directed against the more tangible aberrations of illuminism), as to judge and condemn a man for what he avers passes in his soul, and which can be neither proven nor denied. Her descriptions of her strange and unhallowed conflicts with demons are impregnated with all the grotesque colouring and outlines which a mind steeped in the fantastic and superstitious legends and beliefs of her age would naturally give to them. To read them is like turning over the yellow pages of some old monastic chronicle of the thirteenth century ; the impression left on the mind by both is virtually the same. Now it is a hideous monster, with a transparent and shadowless body, vomiting flame, whose grinning mouth gives vent to terrible menaces. A little black imp howls close beside her and rains a storm of blows on her body, head, and arms for five hours, which left her as stiff and sore as if she had been severely beaten, whilst, strange to say, those around looked on in horror but gave no assistance. She delivered a priest who commended himself to her prayers from mortal sin of a most abominable nature. His temptations could only be compared to the pains of hell, and she prays that the devils that torment him may be sent to her instead, if that will mitigate his sufferings. She suffered their tortures for a month. The nuns who entered her cell after one of these conflicts affirmed that it smelt of brimstone. In the choir she felt herself seized by a sudden impulse of recollection, and the assembled sisterhood heard loud blows on the spot where she had been, and she herself, a confused jabbering of voices, as if in consultation. Then it seemed to her that invisible hands tried to strangle her; and when holy water was sprinkled on the spot, she saw a great multitude of demons rush away, as if flinging themselves down into some bottomless abyss. Their fury increases when she rescues a soul from their claws. On the night of All Souls, that most terrible night of the year, when, according to Spanish legend, the departed dead come back to visit us, as she was FERENDUM ET SPERANDUM 159 praying in an oratory, and had just finished the office for the dead, a devil alighted on the pages of her Breviary. At that moment she saw some souls released from purgatory. In a trance on Trinity Sunday she is the spectator of a fierce combat between devils and angels, which seems to her to portend trouble. A fortnight afterwards a dispute occurred which was productive of much harm to the convent. She sees herself surrounded by devils, but a great light encircles her, beyond which they cannot pass. In her descriptions of these unhallowed combats I fancy I can discern a grosser, more material note, a note which is unworthy of her. But even this we can understand. In a community of superstitious women, incapable of appreciating her real grandeur or the pure flame of inspired genius which she has cast about her spiritual experiences, but few could be found who were not ready to smell brimstone or see demons at any moment. There is something that is not Teresa in the description of them. The fears and terrors of idle and superstitious minds reacted on hers. They could not follow her into the veiled sanctuary where she saw the CelestiaJ Radiance; but they could follow, did follow her into the realm of superstition, with all its marvels and horrors, so dear to imperfectly educated minds. Thus it is not strange, and here we find her again, as the pen which has, as it were, materialised for dissection the realms of ecstatic and intangible joys and emotions, sounds and fathoms the stormy and tragic undercurrents of despair and night, that she should discern the dark and lurid form of the tempter of men in the gloom which at times takes possession of her soul. Listen a moment to the brilliant and delicate analysis of these terrible moods when God hides his face, and there is nothing real or vital but Doubt : I forgot all the mercies that the Lord had done me ; only a memory as of something I had dreamt remained to give me pain ; for the under- standing is so obscured that I am left at the mercy of a thousand doubts and surmises. It seemed to me that I had been mistaken, and that perhaps it had been all a fancy, and that it was enough to have deceived myself without seeking to deceive good people. [Always this same wail of doubt ! Was it ever entirely stilled ?] My own wickedness appeared to me so enormous that I looked upon my sins as the cause of all the evil and heresy that had sprung up. So did the devil invent this false humility to torture me, to see if he could bring my soul to desperation ; and I now have so much experience that it is his doing, that now that he sees I am aware of it, he no longer torments me to such an extent on this point as he used to do. That it is his doing is clearly seen in the restlessness and disquiet with which it begins, and the agitation to which the soul is subject until it is over, together with the darkness and affliction, the aridity and repugnance to prayer, which seize 160 SANTA TERESA upon her and seem to choke the soul and bind the body, so that nothing can help them. ... In this false humility inspired by the devil there is no light for anything good ; God seems to use violent means in everything ; one thinks on justice, and in spite of faith in his mercy (for the devil is not so powerful as to deprive us of this), it gives me no consolation, rather does the sight of so much goodness increase the torment, for it only serves to remind me of the extent of my debt. These seasons, in which (in her own graphic phrase) demons seem to play at ball with the soul, and faith is deadened and asleep, and love itself is cold, last sometimes a day, at others a week, a fortnight, or even three weeks. Then suddenly, before or after communicating, sometimes in the very act of drawing near to the Sacrament, she feels both soul and body mysteriously healed and lightened. " It seems to me just as if all at once the shadows of the soul melted, and the sun came out, and I saw how foolish I had been. At other times, one word alone spoken by the Lord, such as, Be not afflicted ; be not afraid, or the sight of some vision, cured me as completely as if I had had nothing the matter with me." And then by the Divine light which gilds all that was before so dark and storm-tossed, she perceives that the soul emerges from these past tortures like gold from the crucible, only the more affined and glorified, to see God within herself. There are many minor trials to be battled with by the contemplative. Sometimes, when all external conditions are favourable, it is impossible for the soul to fix her thoughts on God or engage in prayer, owing to the difficulty of controlling the understanding and imagination, the former running riot like a madman whom none can bind. At others the insensibility of the soul is such that it seems to the contemplative that he does neither good nor evil, and only follows in the wake of others, indifferent to considerations of reward or punishment, as if neither death nor life can give him either pain or pleasure. In this state Teresa compares the soul to a young ass, who eats almost unconsciously because he finds food before him ; in like manner must she be sustained by Divine favours, since, when the misery of existence is so great, it is no longer a pain to live, and she endures everything with equanimity, although un- conscious of either feeling impulses or effects. This, she adds, is to sail with a calm wind, for one makes great speed without perceiving how ; for in those other states the effects are so great that the soul perceives her improvement at once, for the impetus of her desires gives her no rest, nor can she ever feel satisfied : such is the operation of the great impetuses of love on him on whom God bestows them. FERENDUM ET SPERANDUM 161 It is like those little springs [she continues, using one of her inimitable similes] which I have seen gush forth, keeping the sand perpetually moving upwards. This example and comparison seems to me the exact counterpart of souls arrived at this stage : love is constantly bubbling up, and thinking on what it can do ; it is too full to contain itself, just as the earth cannot hold the water, and flings it up from it. So very often it happens with the soul which cannot rest, so flowing over is she with love : now that she is saturated with it herself, she longs that others should drink, since there is enough and to spare, so that they may join with her in singing God's praises. Oh ! how often do I dwell on the living water of which God spoke to the woman of Samaria. ... It seems also like a great fire, which must be constantly fed to prevent its getting low; so are the souls I speak of ; for they would fain, whatever it cost them, pile on wood to keep this fire alive. And such am I that, even if I could only throw on straws, I would be content. . . . The interior impulse stirs me to serve in somewhat, for I am unfit for more, even if it be only to place boughs and flowers before an image, or to sweep and put an oratory in order, or to employ myself in other things so worthless that they filled me with confusion. . . . Indeed, to souls on whom God in his mercy bestows this his love in such abundance, it is no small trial to lack the bodily strength to do somewhat for him. It is a very great distress ; for, as the soul lacks strength to throw fuel on the flame, she burns away to cinders within herself and dissolves in tears, . . . which is torment enough, although a sweet one. Thus it is by slow degrees that Teresa, absorbed in herself, seeing in herself the centre around which the great world of her day moved, referring everything to the narrow interior world in which she lived, rises above the narrow egotism fostered by religion and the cloister, into a loftier sphere of thought and sentiment. Slowly she is emerging from the self-concentration of the mystic to a nobler idea of her own place in the world, to a truer and fuller notion of her responsibilities as a unit to the thousands of others around her. Not for long shall this great and valiant heart consume itself away in self-torturings, often futile and puerile. A greater work is reserved for her than to lose her time and waste the forces of a fine and powerful intellect in the subtle refinements and vain imaginings encouraged by the sterile vacuity of the cloister. Not for long shall she, inflamed with a love that has ceased to be individual, and longs to pour out its treasures on mankind, beat her wings against the bars of her cage, condemned to inaction by a double cause, her sex and her vocation. She who, for want of a better occupation, has spent so many years in the contemplation of self, is now to rouse our attention by the grandeur, the immensity of the spiritual compassion which, losing sight of self, perceives other objects and aims, and leaves her own salvation aside to attend to that of others. " Satan would not be Satan if he could love " is perhaps her best-known phrase. A vision of hell, which took place about this time, confirmed ii 162 SANTA TERESA her in the magnanimous resolve to devote her life to the rescue of souls and the extirpation of heresy. Teresa's hell bears but little resemblance to the pale and melancholy, spectre-haunted abode of Dante. It is an unmistakable product of the Castilian mind, positive, hard in outline, crude in conception, the hell, in short, as shaped by the mediaeval imagination, grotesque and gloomy, fantastic and material. The entrance to it is a long narrow lane, low and dark and close like an oven, whose floor, covered with filthy mud of pestilential smell, swarms with horrible and sickening reptiles. At the end of the wall is a narrow cavity like a cupboard, into which she feels herself squeezed. If this description rouses a smile rather than a thrill of horror, she recovers all her power when she relates the moral anguish of the victim. No earthly suffering, either mental or physical, can give any idea of those horrors, the memory of which still thrilled her to the marrow when six years after she committed her vision to writing. The constriction of the soul tearing itself in pieces in miserable despair ; the gloomy and suffocating atmosphere ; the darkness through which no light can ever penetrate ; the diabolical appearance of the walls and their infernal power of closing in upon the victims immured in them, possess all the horror of reality. It was [says Teresa] one of the greatest mercies that God ever bestowed on me ; for not only did it make me lose all fear of the tribulations and contradictions of life, but it gave me strength to suffer them and give thanks to the Lord for having delivered me from such eternal and terrible suffer- ings. ... I also gained from it the profound pain which fills me at seeing such numbers of souls bent on their own perdition (especially those of Lutherans, already members of the church by baptism), and the strong impetuses to help them ; for certainly it seems to me I would willingly suffer many deaths to deliver one of them from such unutterable torment. If our natural disposition invites us to compassionate the trials or griefs of any one for whom we feel a special affection ; who can bear the sight of a soul eternally condemned to the greatest suffering of all ? No heart can suffer it without great pain. Since earthly suffering although we know that it will end with life, and has its limits can move us to such great compassion, I know not how we can rest before the sight of numberless souls every day being borne away by the devil to that which is endless. In what way, however, can an obscure nun, bound hand and foot by social trammels and the cloister, put her magnanimous desires, which aim at no less than the redemption of humanity, into execution? What can this woman, already forty-three, lost to the world in the wild, bleak upland town of her birth, who has risen above minute conscience-siftings to that sentiment of responsibility, that sublime unconsciousness of self, which is FERENDUM ET SPERANDUM 163 the distinctive mark of all the great prophets and reformers whose history is that of the world what can she do to arrest the progress of heresy and aid in the salvation of souls ? Little indeed ! How inadequate is any action when brought face to face with the idea which gave rise to it ! As Teresa herself observes, to attain the smallest, one must aim at the highest ! After seeing other sublime things, and secrets, relating to the glory reserved for the good and the torments for the wicked, which the Lord willed to show me, I went about seeking some way and manner of being able to do penance for so much evil, and of doing somewhat deserving of gaining so great a treasure. I longed to flee from people and to separate myself entirely from the world. ... I pondered on what I could do for God, and I decided that the first thing was to follow the religious vocation to which God had called me, by keeping my rule as perfectly as I could. . . . During this long season of contrariety and suspicion excited by her visions, but which the real sanctity of her life was slowly and steadily breaking down, there was one amongst Teresa's friends, whose devotion to and admiration of her had never faltered Da. Guiomar de Ulloa. To this lady, whom the death of her husband, Franciso de Avila, a noble and wealthy gentle- man of Avila, had left a widow early in life, Teresa now owed the opportunity of laying her doubts and scruples before the greatest saint of the age, then commissary of his Order, Fr. Pedro de Alcantara. That she might meet him with less constraint than in the Encarnacion, her friend obtained per- mission from the Provincial of the Carmelites for her to spend a week in her house. The strange interest which the chroniclers could not but feel centred around this first memorable interview when the barefooted Franciscan Reformer of the past, and the barefooted Carmelite Reformer of the future looked on each other's face for the first time in the Church of Sto. Tome", has translated itself into the legend, not without its charm, of a brilliant star which hung over the city of Avila during his stay within its walls, and only disappeared when he departed. Born at Alcantara in 1499, he now numbered one year more than the century. Of noble and ancient lineage, son of the governor of Alcantara, he had entered the Order of St. Francis, which it was to be the labour of his life to reform, when still almost a boy. He had now founded or reformed forty monasteries, many of which he had helped to build with his own hands, in his native province of Estremadura. Amongst others, Palancar in the flowery desert of Pedroso ; Cadahalso in the Sierra de Gata ; Paracuellos, in New Castille ; and San Andre's de Arenas in the province of Avila where he died, still remain !6 4 SANTA TERESA to testify to the unremitting and laborious toil to which they owed their existence. An instantaneous sympathy established itself between the two saints, one of whom was but beginning her active career on earth, and the other ending his. The "estrado" on which she knelt before him for confession is still preserved. " Anda, hija, que bien vais, todos somos de una librea : Go on, daughter, for you are on the right road we all wear the same livery," was the energetic expression of the aged saint, who had travelled it so long and was now fast nearing its close. For Teresa his personality had a profound and invincible attraction, which seems to have been mutual. In the long and intimate con- ferences which took place between them, he poured out his soul unreservedly into the willing ear of his ardent disciple, intermingled with many precious details of his long and chequered career as a founder. It is not impossible that her first project of foundation was either undertaken at some chance suggestion which fell from his lips, or, if not, indirectly owed its origin to him in that vague instinct of imitation with which he had unconsciously inspired her. To encourage her in the path which, he foresaw, still lay before her a path of which he had himself measured all the difficulties and suffering he related to her what his own life had been for more than forty- seven years. In the finished portrait she has painted of him in her Life, when his body, impressed with all the strange mystery of asceticism, macerated out of the semblance of humanity, had ceased to form part of the world of men, from which his spirit had long been sundered, she has firmly fixed him on the canvas of the past, with all the sombre colouring and force of the brush of a Ribera or Zurbaran. And what a good man God has taken from us at this time in the blessed fray Pedro de Alcantara. . . . The world cannot suffer now so much per- fection. They say that people's constitutions are weaker, and the times are not as they used to be then. . . . This holy man was of this time, his spirit was strong as in other times, and thus the world was under his feet. . . . For forty years (he told me) he had slept but one hour in the twenty-four, and that the worst penance he had suffered in the beginning was to conquer sleep, for which purpose he always remained standing or on his knees. When he slept, it was in a sitting posture, his head against a wooden board fixed in the wall : his cell, which was not, as is known, more than four feet and a half long, not admitting of his lying down. During all these years he never wore his hood, whatever the heat or rain, nor anything on his feet, but only a habit of rough serge next the flesh, and this as scanty as possible, and a cape of the same stuff over it. This, he told me, he removed in cold weather, and left the door and casement of his cell open, so that, when he shut the door and put it on again, his body might feel comforted with the extra shelter. He very often ate only once in three FERENDUM ET SPERANDUM 165 days. And he asked me why I was astonished ? saying that it was very possible for one accustomed to it. His companion told me that it happened to him sometimes to go without food for eight days. It must have been when he was absorbed in prayer, for he was rapt away in great ecstasies and impetuosities of love of God, of which I myself was once a witness. His poverty was extreme, and, during his youth, such his mortification that he told me he had been three years in a house of his Order, and only knew the friars by their voice ; for he never raised his eyes, and he did not know the way to the places where he was obliged to go, but followed the friars. The same on journeys. Women he never looked upon ; this for many years. He told me it was the same to him now whether he saw or not ; but he was very old when I first knew him, and so extreme his weakness, that he seemed made of roots of trees, more than anything else. With all this sanctity he was very kind, although of few words unless he was questioned. And these were very delightful, for his understanding was very fine (" muy lindo "). . . . And thus I leave him ; for his end was, like his life, preaching and admonishing his friars. When he saw that the end was near, he repeated the Psalm Laetatus sum in his quoe dicta sunt mihi, and died kneeling. It is probable that the first of her " Relations," at least the first that has come down to us (for by her own showing she had already once or twice sought to facilitate the task of her confessors by writing down for them what she knew of her " life and sins "), was made for St. Peter's guidance, and laid before him at this time. It contains her celebrated vow of perfection, the "seraphic vow," the "Teresian vow," affirmed by the Church to be Deo edocta, and which she kept rigorously for five years of her life (Deo fidelis reddidit), until, on account of the innumerable perplexities and scruples it gave rise to as to what was the most perfect course to pursue in the multiple and complex variety of actions which began to fill her life, she was counselled by her confessors to change its form if not the sub- stance. It was " a vow as yet unexampled in the Church," exclaim her biographers ; " the most arduous of vows," says the Bull of Canonisation ; the " rarest of rare things," adds the Sacred College of Cardinals; "so angelical that it fills all with wonder," affirms Fr. Juan de Jesus ; whilst Ribera remarks, " This is a vow that I never read or heard of any saint ; and the resolution alone to make it is the clearest sign of the highest perfection, and more so with a person of such tender conscience, for it could not take place without a great renouncement of all created things, and a no less fervent desire to please God, and a great command over every passion." For Teresa is already a saint, although the world will not acclaim her such until nearly a hundred years later. Henceforth, lost in mysterious and glorious abstractions, to which they are but " as filth," the beauty of the world, its "water, fields, odours, and music," will 166 SANTA TERESA charm her no more, " the first impression over, I would fain shut them out from sight and hearing." Henceforth she rises above humanity, its joys and its sorrows ; insensible to the ties of kindred and affection, the conversation of friends and relatives has become a burden and a slavery. But no ! Teresa never becomes the stony idealist whose character she paints in this " Relation " as her own, and hence her charm. Ever the most human and warmest-hearted of women, she never freed herself entirely from those truly noble weaknesses which a false idea of religion had taught her to deplore as flaws and failings. The beauties of nature never failed to touch a responsive chord which lay latent in her breast. Withered and old, and fast nearing the goal of her desires, the windings of the river which she skirted on one of her last journeys on earth from Plasencia to Soria, the loveliness of the valley of the Tormes and the tall poplars which lined its banks, roused her admiration to the last. However earnestly she who, at an earlier period of her career, lamented as a failing that in her moments of solitude she cannot help dwelling on the endearing qualities of those she loves, and fixing their faces upon her mind as in a looking-glass, to pore over their beauty and sweetness, endeavours to crush out the warm and loving impulses of a loyal and affectionate nature, they will assert their mastery through life: to the end her sister's griefs and anxieties will touch her more nearly than a neighbour's ; to the end she never ceases to display a devoted interest in the well-being of her family. Yet, if she deceived herself in this part of her " Relation," it contains abundant indications of the real grandeur of the nature that was already, unconsciously to itself, chafing against the inaction of the cloister. She feels herself inspired with a celestial courage, and there is no trial, martyrdom, or death that she would not brave with gladness ; her helplessness and uselessness fill her with indescribable pain. Desiring poverty for herself, she would fain possess the wherewithal to give to others. The ordinary routine and sordid cares of life fill her with impatience; she would fain leave herself and the future entirely to God. As she follows in the footsteps of the " Man of Sorrows," she cannot, even if she tries, desire ease or rest. A beautiful note in her character is her tolerance towards the faults of others ! If she remembers their sins, it is but to counterbalance them with their virtues. She is troubled and afflicted by the ravages of heresy, which "seems to her the only trial worthy of being felt." It is still a constant source of mortification to her to restrain herself in that exquisite love FERENDUM ET SPERANDUM 167 of neatness and cleanliness which has troubled but few saints, but which also, in spite of her endeavours to root out a failing so obnoxious, will endure to the end. But human nature cannot long be kept at such a tension- point without exacting its revenge. Dark moments obscure the radiance which lights up her life, when her visions and desires fade so entirely from her memory that they seem but the unsubstantial shadows of a dream. Her understanding clouded and oppressed by bodily ailments, her great courage melts away, and leaves her at the mercy of the first breath of temptation or slander. Then she asks herself in all the darkness of despair and abandonment, " Who bid her put herself into things beyond the ordinary ? " and feels that she has deceived all who have believed in her. Still she prays, not that a struggle so full of anguish should be ended, but rather that it may endure for ever if God so wills it, and will only hold her by the hand so that she may not offend him. But again these periods of depression vanish like mists before the sun. A divine word, a vision, a short period of recollection, restores serenity and peace to the clouded mind and troubled sight. Her ecstasies, she notes, are followed by a marked improvement in her bodily health, which sometimes lasts for more than three hours, sometimes for a whole day. She would fain that all who know her should also know her sins. She can arrive at but one conclusion : it cannot be " the devil that has sought out so many ways of doing good to my soul ... for he cannot be so stupid." If he was at the bottom of her visions, it is impossible that God should have disregarded her own cease- less prayers and those which have been offered up to him on her account " by so many good people for the last two years, or that he would have allowed these things to go any further." In Teresa's case these inevitable mental reactions were complicated by the physical one of a frail and ailing frame. Throughout her life we shall see how, upheld by the enthusiasm of her idea, she faced and conquered insuperable difficulties, her bodily sufferings and infirmities being superseded by a new life and vigour which was a constant source of amazement to those around her; these periods of intense mental pressure and excitement being invariably followed by seasons of the blackest despondency and gloom. Amongst her papers at the Encarnacion was found one which Yepes attributes to some Jesuit father, her confessor, and Fr. Francisco de Sta. Maria, with more likelihood, to Fray Pedro de Alcantara. It is unlikely that Ribera, always eager to assert anything to the credit of his Order, would not have 168 SANTA TERESA rescued the author's name, if (as some passages of its contents would almost seem to indicate) he had been a Jesuit. These thirty-three reasons, whose similarity of style and composition to that of St. Peter of Alcdntara, together with the difficulty of pointing out any one so intimately associated with Teresa at this time, "possessed of such experience and complete acquaintance with things mystical," have led the chronicler unhesitatingly to ascribe them to him, are possibly the very reasons adduced by the saint to calm Teresa's doubts, and to bring the obstinate knight and more yielding confessor to a juster and more reasonable decision. But whoever the author, whether St. Peter or not, it is of supreme interest as being written by an eye-witness of more than ordinary judgment and penetration, and as corroborating her own testimony, besides throwing side-lights as to how the world around her viewed and received her life. From it we learn (what her deep humility forbids her to mention) how "the powerful odour of the flowers of virtue in the garden of her soul " had attracted others to follow her example, and how forty nuns of her own community had been moved by her "to practise great recollection." Again we hear of her vow So firm is her resolution not to offend God, that she has made a vow not to do anything that she, or those about her, do not understand to be most perfect. And though holding them of the Company for saints, and believing that the Lord through them has done her so many favours, she has yet told me that if she knew it would be greater perfection not to con- verse with them, she would never again speak to them, although to them she owed her tranquillity and direction in these things. She cannot hear God spoken of with devotion and wisdom without being rapt away in an ecstasy impossible to resist, do what she likes, and then her appearance is such that it inspires great devotion. God has given her an amazing strong and valiant soul. She used to be timid, now she treads deviis under foot. She is much above the childishnesses and sillinesses of women, very much -without scruple, most straightforward and honest. These things [her visions] cause her to have a clearness of understanding and an admirable intelligence of divine things. If San Pedro de Alcantara wrote this paper, as is most probable, he confesses that he himself has not escaped her marvellous influence. " And I say certainly she has benefited many people, and I am one." The barefooted saint, with that sight which he had long weaned from the things of earth, saw far into the future as he counselled this woman, so humble and yet so valiant, who sought his help, and who was but commencing the road of difficulty and affliction which he himself had travelled from FERENDUM ET SPERANDUM 169 his boyhood. The greatest trial of his life had been, he told her, the opposition of good people. He brought the weight and influence of his great sanctity to bear on Alvarez and Salcedo. The former needed but little convincing, but the knight "who for very love and the holiness of his fearful soul" had persecuted her most bitterly, still doubting and fearing, ceased to torment her. As for herself, he bid her banish all distrust ; except Faith nothing was more certain or more surely to be believed than that she was animated with the Spirit of God. She had found her champion, as was most meet, in the greatest saint of his age and Order. When the hoofs of the donkey which bore him away from Avila rang through its Gothic streets in the gray of the morning, if he had not left behind him complete security in the mind of his great penitent, his warm espousal of her cause had at all events deprived the irritated opposition of Salcedo and Alvarez of much of its bitterness. The former, forgetting his timorous- ness, ever afterwards "helped her, and gave counsel when he could." Francisco de Salcedo and Master Caspar Daza take their rest in the humble chapel of her first foundation at Avila. The timidity of the one and the conscientious scruples of the other were very soon silenced, even in this life, by the growing sanctity of the woman, whose sublime inspirations they would have thwarted, whose spiritual career they had very nearly nipped in the bud. In a very short time they will account it the highest honour that life can bestow, the one to officiate at the first Mass in her Convent of Poverty, the other to act as chaplain to its thirteen inmates. And they lie content, their supremest ambition fulfilled, under the shadow of her Personality and Fame. CHAPTER VI QUIEN NO SE ESCONDE NO LUCE TERESA is now forty-three. Like Christ, who was silent for thirty years, and preached two, it was fated that her brief and brilliant career of activity should be preceded by close on half a century of obscurity. She is one of the few great people who, maturing late in life, suddenly emerge from the gloom in which their abilities have hitherto lain latent and concealed, although in it they have gathered concentration and intensity, to find the attention of the world suddenly fixed on them, and themselves the centre of a great movement. For more than twenty years, in the absence of any exterior event to mark her passage through the world, our interest is forced to concentrate itself on the successive gradations of her interior life as a contemplative. It is in the Treatise of Prayer, which she has interpolated into her Life, that we shall study best the progress of her advance in spirituality, ever broadening and deepening as she ascended one by one the " steps of prayer " the only landmarks which for us, as for her, broke the march of time. Perhaps no stranger or more wonderful book has ever been penned than this guide to prayer of the Castilian nun, who bares her breast and lays open the secrets of her soul in the hushed silence of the confessional. For, whatever she thought afterwards, when she had become great and famous, she never dreamed that she was writing a world-famous book, or that her words would ever be seen by any other eyes than those of her confessor, or perhaps of that little body of persons immediately around her, who had bound themselves to love each other in Christ. With wonderful power, force of imagery, and fervour, she explores the hidden recesses of her soul, and follows the subtle working of complex moods and sentiments, whose origin and nature she may often have misunderstood and misinterpreted in the interests of the supernatural, but which she has defined and analysed with rare skill. She obeyed the same necessity of materialisation of giving QUIEN NO SE ESCONDE NO LUCE 171 shape and vitality to vague dreams, dimly perceived visions, rays of light which flash for a moment across the inner con- sciousness with the rapidity of lightning; of embodying impulses, aspirations, fleeting impressions, and obscure sensa- tions in an external form perceptible to the rest of humanity which forces the poet and artist to exteriorise an inner world seen by himself alone. None before her, none after her, has dared to transform psychological phenomena phenomena as nebulous as they are inscrutable into concrete and tangible realities, the only condition of her making them perceptible to others. Such a process, necessary though it was, if she was ever to lift the veil which shrouded her strange spiritual history, was full of pitfalls and dangers. There are mental states and experiences so fine and diaphanous that any attempt to define them or to crystallise them into language results in a distortion or a gross travesty. Teresa herself was fully alive to the fact : the difficulty of the task often dismays her. An inevitable tendency is evolved towards unconscious exaggeration, and the wonder is that she has avoided this so much as she has done, and not that she often succumbed to it in her desire to accentuate by sharp outlines what her delicate intuition per- ceived was almost beyond the power of words to express. The following passage will perhaps make my meaning clearer : The flight of the spirit is something (I know not what to call it) which rises up from the interior of the soul. It seems to me that the soul and the spirit are one and the same thing ; like a fire which, burning quickly, throws up a flame which ascends on high, although it is the same fire as that which burns beneath, and although the flame leaps up, the fire below ceases not to burn. So the soul seems to generate from within herself a thing so volatile and delicate, which leaps above with a movement so rapid, going whither the Lord wills, that I know not better how to compare it than to flight. It seems that this small bird (the soul) has escaped from the misery of the flesh and prison-house of the body, and is able to employ herself better in that which the Lord gives her. [Again she describes another method of prayer which is usual with her, as being] a sort of wound inflicted on the soul, as if the heart were pierced by an arrow, which causes a pain so great as not to be borne without a cry, and still so sweet, that one would wish it to remain there for ever. This pain is not of the senses, nor is it a material wound, but it is in the interior of the soul unlike any bodily pain. It can only be described by these coarse similes, which indeed are gross in com- parison with that which they would set forth. For this reason, these things can neither be written nor described, for it is impossible to be understood by those who have not had experience of them. For the wounds and pains of the spirit are different from earthly ones. Considering the enormous difficulties in her way, Teresa accomplished her task in a masterly manner. If her book has i 7 2 SANTA TERESA remained, from that day to this, the surprise and admiration of theologians, who saw in it that "infused science" above man's genius to acquire without the mystical operations of grace ; the marvellous and spontaneous revelation it contains of a character so original, so complex as her own has aroused the attention and profoundest interest on the part, not only of philosophers and men of letters, but of all who would possess some key to probe the mysterious depths of human nature. It is as difficult to analyse the charm of Teresa's writings 1 a charm which disarms and subjugates the coldest and most incredulous criticism (that very criticism, indeed, which is the sworn enemy not only of the supernatural but of religion), and forces the critic, fascinated, to her feet as to resolve the perfume of a flower into its component parts. Something, no doubt, is due to the quaint, matter-of-fact Castilian, which she wrote as she spoke, sprinkled with homely proverbs, heard in childhood and youth beside the blazing hearth of a winter's night, or from the mouths of rude muleteers as they travelled over the sultry roads. The quaint turn of a phrase suddenly transports us back to the patriarchal and rural simplicity of the manners of mediaeval Spain, forcing us for a moment to enter an old-world atmosphere, and live a life so different from our own. The very incorrectness, the lapses of memory, the often long digressions so characteristic of the woman, but deepen the strange impression that we are listening rather to her voice speaking to us in intimate colloquy than reading a cut-and-dried disquisition carefully prepared for publication. It would be rare to find in the writers of any age such a mixture of simplicity of language and quiet unreserved dignity of expression, together with a precision and clearness of phrase and metaphor that a metaphysician might envy; such a mixture of filmy idealism and credulity with shrewd observation, caustic irony, and practical sense, as is to be found in Teresa, whilst a rippling undercurrent of humour, playful and sharp by turns, shows that she possessed that last fine touch of genius, which few even of the world's greatest women have possessed. If words were made to convey, and not to conceal, thought, 1 The charm of Teresa is her materialism, the positivism of her intellect, her intense realism, her sympathy with common life, common things, and actuality, exactly as it is the charm of all the great Spanish writers, viz. Cervantes, the Archiprestc dc Hita (note his description of the entry of Love in the Coplas, and his curious reference to Arabic musical instruments) ; the author of the famous mediaeval romance of the Celeslina ; the Marques de Santillana, as in the lines "En el verde prado de rosas y flores Guardando ganado con otros pastores," etc. QUIEN NO SE ESCONDE NO LUCE 173 then is Teresa a past-mistress of style ; then is she one of the most splendid stars in the literature of her age. " Thus," says Ribera, speaking of her books, " their style is not laboured nor nice, but that of her ordinary speech ; yet simple, pure, grave, appropriate, and suitable to the things she wrote of." A good criticism. But Fray Luis de Leon, the best judge of literature of his century, was nearer the truth when he said that it was " elegance itself." Strange that the tongue so forcible, so energetic, so incisive and fascinating of a Teresa should have degenerated into the fulsome hyperbole, the weak overloading of obtrusive adjectives, the heaping up of unmeaning epithets, which is now so much in vogue and so greatly admired by Spanish writers ! Yet there is something more than a mere question of style in the unaccountable fascination which Teresa exercises over the minds of her readers. It is that she never attempted to write : that she wrote as naturally as birds sing. It is that the yellow paper was but the canvas, her pen the brush, with which she all unconsciously traced her own portrait ; touching in all the inconsistencies, all the lights and shadows, all the varied and complex emotions, which flit across the human face. This it is which (to quote Fray Luis de Leon) has " electrified the wills of men from that day to this." This is the secret of the strange power she still wields over intellects so different from, and often so at variance with, her own. This is why the devotion of her votaries is characterised by such a peculiar note of personal affection. This is what Palafox, the venerable Bishop of Osma, felt when he wrote, a century after she had been laid to rest in Alba, and his words are as true to-day as then : What I admire in her [says he] is the peace, the sweetness and consola- tion, with which in her writings she draws us towards 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 devoted to, and in love with, the Saint. I have not seen a spiritual man who, if he reads her books, does not become a passionate votary of Sta. Teresa. But her writings do not alone impart a rational, interior, and superior love ; but one at the same time practical, natural, and sensitive, and such that it persuades me, and my own experience proves it to me, that there exists no one who loves her but would, if the Saint was in the world, travel over far and distant provinces to see and talk and communicate with her. This the strange attraction which moved a king's daughter to lay aside her royal robes for the sake of the humble garb of Teresa ; which induced the Duke and Duchess of Montalba to 174 SANTA TERESA leave their rank behind them to become, he a Jesuit, and she a Carmelite nun. Rodrigo Calderon, the proud Marquis of Las Siete Iglesias, condemned to death by Philip IV., sought and found in his lonely prison, consolation and courage to meet his death at Teresa's feet. Heretics and Protestants, responding to her mysterious call, abjured their errors, and returned to the faith of their fathers. This is why gay young cavaliers, careless of all but the hang of their sword and the set of their velvet doublet ; world-dried priests, grown old and withered in indiffer- ence although still young in ambition, one and all laid their gauds, their learning, their aspirations for mitres on Teresa's altar, and became the humblest monks of her Order. And this is why to-day in Spain great ladies in their palaces and humble seamstresses at the touch of sickness and distress assume Teresa's habit. It is not wonderful that it has almost become an article of the Catholic faith to believe that her books, defined by the Church as the "celestial pabulum of doctrine," were written under the direct inspiration of the Holy Ghost. To one accustomed like Teresa to attribute in all good faith all she was or ever was to be, to the direct action of the Divinity, it was easy to see in the mysterious power which alternately possessed or deserted her, a personal revelation from the Almighty, and to look upon herself as the instrument only for its transmission. Together with genius, she inherited all its fluctuating moods. Her moments of greatest intellectual brilliancy and clairvoyance were followed or preceded by periods of sterility and torpor. Thus she was led to affirm that the manner in which she was to give expression to many of her sublimest experiences was only mysteriously revealed to her before or after communicating, and that then she suddenly felt her tongue loosened, and found the language for what, until that moment, she had been utterly powerless to declare. As she is rapt away in the prayer of quiet, she perceives herself drawn closer to the intense brilliancy of Divine Light, and feels transformed into another being. It was in the act of communi- cating that the Lord gave her the third grade of prayer, which is " more than the prayer of quiet and less than that of union," and " gave me," she says, " these comparisons, and showed me how to explain it, and what the soul must do in this state, and certainly I was amazed and understood it in a moment." That she wrote under the strong influence of what for want of a better term, we are accustomed to call inspiration, is proved by her very inequality. At times halting and diffuse a diffuseness which she herself recognised, attributing it to her QUIEN NO SE ESCONDE NO LUCE 175 own dulness and mental deficiencies, which forced her to " use many words to express her meaning" the wings of her inspira- tion trail heavily on the ground ; whilst at others, lit up with the divine enthusiasm of her devotion, devoured by the greatness and majesty of her subject, she finds a clearness and simplicity of diction, of almost crystalline transparency, and a happiness and precision of metaphor rarely if ever equalled. She un- ceasingly complains of a dulness of comprehension, an insuperable difficulty in giving expression to her thoughts, that made it for long impossible for her to grasp, in spite of the efforts of many spiritually-minded people to explain them to her, the nature of the mercies bestowed on her in prayer, or to interpret them to others. Perhaps the Lord willed, she adds simply, that she should owe nothing to any one but himself, and so gave her the ability to understand and express in a moment what had hitherto been so obscure. For years, she writes, she read of things of which she understood nothing, and it was only when God himself had dispelled the grossness of her understanding that she found that gift of expression so long denied her. Many of the things she writes are not of her own head, but the inspiration of her celestial Master. She was but a mere instrument, powerless to write aught else but what she had been taught : like those birds trained by their masters to speak, which can only repeat over and over again the phrases they have learned, knowing no others ; or like one who copies a piece of embroidery from a pattern before him. She often writes whilst rapt away in the very state of prayer she is endeavouring to describe, and then she sees clearly that her pen is guided by a higher power to set down conceptions which are not her own, and whose aptness fills her with wondering astonishment. If Teresa mistook for the action of supernatural power the unaccountable vagaries of genius that state of brain-illumination in which the thoughts well into the mind so fast that no pen can keep pace with them (which drew from her the exclamation, " Oh that I could write with many hands, so that some of them were not forgotten ! "), her nuns did not fail after her death to deepen and substantiate into a settled and rooted belief, the impression to which her own words had first given rise. No sooner had the great figure passed away from amongst them than her daughters began to weave an aureole of legend about her memory, composed in equal parts of fact and fancy, inextricably entangled together. The most trivial action or circumstance connected with her, and which they had witnessed, when seen in the light of Death and of her rapidly increasing 176 SANTA TERESA celebrity, acquired a strange importance and significance. What those whose glory it was to have lived in the charmed circle of her presence had actually witnessed of her life, and what they at last brought themselves to believe they had witnessed, became one and the same thing. Their imaginations forged a thousand tender exaggerations, which became more and more accentuated as the facts themselves which gave rise to them faded away into the past. Those who had seen her in the act of composing her great works maintained that, at those moments, her face was illumined by an unearthly splendour, as of one in colloquy with the Holy Ghost. Ana de la Encarnacion, sometime prioress of Granada, affirmed in her evidence for Teresa's Beatification, that, whilst she was writing the Moradas in her convent of Segovia, she (Sor Ana) stationed at the door of Teresa's cell in case she wanted anything, had seen her face illumined by a glorious light, which gave forth a splendour like rays of gold, and lasted for an hour, until twelve at night, at which time Teresa ceased to write and the resplendence faded away, leaving her in what, in comparison with it, seemed like darkness. "When she wrote," she added, " it was with such rapidity, and without stopping to erase or correct, that it indeed appeared miraculous." Maria de San Francisco of Medina declared that, entering into Teresa's cell whilst she was writing the same Moradas, she found Teresa so absorbed in contemplation that she failed to perceive her presence, her face being most radiant and beautiful. After hearing the message, Teresa said, " Sit down a little, my daughter, and let me write what the Lord has given me, before I forget it," which she continued to do with great speed and without stopping. It is an instinctive and perhaps natural process to make the actions and circumstances associated with a remarkable and unique personality realise our ideal of what they should have been, rather, perhaps than what they were. In the interval which elapsed between Teresa's death and the taking of the evidence for her Canonisation, it was no longer possible to disentangle truth from fiction, even if there had been any wish to do so ; whilst the fiction itself, which seemed to the minds of that age to shed an additional and supernatural splendour over Teresa's memory, was regulated by that inscrutable law which leads us to shed a glamour over the past at the expense of the present, proving how she had seized and fascinated the popular imagination. Let us follow the growth of the legend. In the sixteenth century, scarcely twenty years after Teresa's death, Maria del QUIEN NO SE ESCONDE NO LUCE 177 Nacimiento testified to having seen her, whilst writing the Moradas in Toledo (which she generally did after com- municating), surrounded by a brilliant light, noting at the same time that she wrote with great velocity, and was so absorbed in it that " even if we made a noise close to her, she never left it or complained of being disturbed." In 1610, when the Mother Maria del Nacimiento had long rejoined Teresa in the grave, her evidence, comparatively sober, if credulous, had received a startling enlargement by the addition of sharply defined outlines which brought it up to the taste of a century infinitely more puerile and credulous than the one which had preceded and produced it. Probably the good old nun may have hesitated to place on record as undoubted evidence, what she felt no difficulty in relating in the intimacy of the cloister. Or it may be that the Mother Mariana de Angeles, who professed to have heard it from her lips whilst she was still alive, gave it the embellishments she conceived it wanted. According to the Mother Mariana de Angeles, when Teresa was writing her Moradas in Toledo, Maria del Nacimiento, on entering her cell one night to deliver a message, had seen lying on the table some sheets of blank paper on which Teresa had just begun to trace the first letters. In the very act of taking off her spectacles to hear what she had to say, Teresa was carried away in an ecstasy which lasted several hours, during which she conserved the same posture in which the message had caught her. When she came to herself, Sor Maria del Nacimiento, who had remained all this time a mute witness of this strange scene, noted with amazement that the sheets of paper which before were blank were covered with the Mother's handwriting. Whereupon Teresa, perceiving that she had seen so much, and desirous to prevent her seeing more, threw the miraculous manuscript with simulated carelessness into a little coffer beside her. Strange that those who hold that Teresa was but an instrument played on by Divine Inspiration, should fail to perceive how a hypothesis resting on such slight and intangible evidence, or rather no evidence at all, lessens and belittles her real greatness, and transforms a lofty and original intellect into a mere automatic machine ! My purpose is to analyse the character of the woman and the writer, not that of the Saint ; although it may be that in doing so I may only bring out her sanctity the better. The nuns of her own Order may well be excused for so firmly believing in the divine inspiration of her writings, when that belief was shared by the most famous men of letters and 12 17 8 SANTA TERESA theologians of the day. However various their opinions as to the advisability of making such revelations public, some, like Fray Luis de Leon, entering the lists in defence of the rights of the human intellect against those who with more zeal than reason held it to be convenient that books treating of doctrines so sublime should not be promulgated in the language of the people ; others as zealously anxious that literature of a nature which seemed to them to involve great dangers to the im- perfectly educated should be confined to the privileged few, all concurred in the opinion which attributed a miraculous and transcendental origin to the offspring of Teresa's pen. With one exception, however. One man, one of the most brilliant scholars of his age, who figured as the leader of a faction in the most celebrated theological controversy of the century, friend and ardent admirer of Teresa as he was, has left us a criticism of her Life, on which he was called to pass sentence by the Inquisition itself, penned with such quiet sobriety and temper- ance of judgment, that it forms a strange contrast to much that was written on the subject then, and much that has been written since. If any one was capable of giving an unbiassed and im- partial opinion on a point attended with so many difficulties, it was Fray Domingo Bafiez. He had followed Teresa's career as a foundress with ardent interest. On more than one occasion he constituted himself her champion. If he erred at all, it would rather be on the side of leniency than severity. But even he was far from ascribing to them that divine origin so ardently contended for by others. "This woman," he writes, "judging by her Relation, although in something she may deceive herself, is at least no deceiver, for she sets down both good and evil with such simplicity, and with such an ardent desire not to mislead, that it is impossible to doubt of the goodness of her intention. ... I have always proceeded, in the examination of this nun's relation of her prayer and life, with circumspection, and none have been more incredulous than I in what relates to her visions and revelations, although not in what concerns her virtues and good desires; for as regards this, I have had much experience of her obedience, penitence, patience, and charity towards her persecutors, along with other virtues that whoever treats with her may see. And this is what can be appreciated, as a more certain sign of the true love of God, than visions and revelations. ... Of one thing I am indeed certain, as far as it is humanly possible to be that she is no deceiver." It was necessary to give some such brief synthesis as this of the general character of her writings ; of the manner in, and the purpose for, which she wrote them ; how she herself re- QUIEN NO SE ESCONDE NO LUCE 179 garded them ; what share in their composition she ascribed to the Holy Ghost, what to herself; the opinion formed of them in her own day, and the general opinion entertained now, if we would follow her into the acute analysis of the four grades of prayer, her experiences of which fill up the last five years of her life under the roof of the Encarnacion, and form (as it seems to me) the most fitting prelude to her active career on earth. We may regard the greater part of Chapter X. of her Life as a sort of preface or introduction to the Allegory under which she shadows prayer. There is as much difference between the nature and degree of the delights enjoyed by those in heaven as between the spiritual ones of prayer. The soul feels amply rewarded by the smallest mercy accorded ; and it almost seems to her that there is nothing further to be desired. Humility must not prevent us from understanding that these favours (tears, tenderness, delight in prayer) are gifts of God ; for if we know not the value of what we receive, how shall our souls be roused into love? Indeed the richer we feel ourselves to be, together with the knowledge of our own poverty, the greater our gain, the truer our humility. The whole wealth of prayer is founded on humility. The more we comprehend the value of the gifts, the jewels, within our possession, the contempt of the world and ourselves, the more we shall feel the debt, the greater will seem our obligation. This treasure is entrusted to us not to use for ourselves only, but to help others. How shall he who has not realised his riches, use or spend them liberally ? She does not disguise the difficulties of those who begin to be " servants of love," or the vastness of the price to be paid. Well do I see that there is nothing on earth that can buy such great wealth, but if we were to do what we can by not attaching ourselves to any- thing in it, but place all our care and desire in Heaven, I believe that very soon it would be given us. ... A pleasant way, indeed, to seek the love of God (and immediately we would have it poured out on us without stint, and at once so to speak), to keep our affections even though we do not endeavour to gratify our desires ; and longing at the same time to receive many spiritual consolations, never to succeed in raising them above the earth. The two cannot be reconciled. In the same way as we cannot make up our minds to give ourselves entirely, so neither is this treasure given us in all its fulness. The devil stands at the entrance to the upward road, which must be travelled by him who would follow Christ, anxious not only to send his soul to perdition, but that of many others along with it. For, if the beginner perseveres in his struggle towards the summit of per- fection, he never travels the road to heaven alone, but like a good captain he bears along many others in his company. The difficulties to be faced are so great that it needs not a little courage to persevere, and much and great help from God. It is a Calvary from the beginning. Christ himself pointed out the road of perfection, when he said, "Take thy cross and follow me." : 8o SANTA TERESA The beginning is most full of trials, but all the states of prayer possess special trials or crosses peculiar to themselves. I must now avail myself of some comparison, which I would, as a woman, and writing simply what I am ordered, fain have avoided ; but this language of the soul is so difficult to declare to those who, like myself, have no learning, that I must seek some other way of making myself understood, and it may be that I shall but seldom succeed in finding an apt comparison ; the sight of so much dulness will serve at least to amuse you, if for nothing else. [It must be remembered that she is always addressing Ibanez.J Now it appears to me that I have either read of or heard the following com- parison, although my memory is so bad that I do not recollect where nor to what purpose it was used, save that it suffices for mine at present. Such is her prelude to the magnificent simile by which under the image of water, she typifies the four grades of prayer. Teresa's memory on this occasion had not played her false. It was a simile much in vogue with the early doctors of the Church, notably St. Augustine, but perhaps no doctor of them all had ever used it with such force and delicacy as Teresa herself. If she cannot lay claim to complete originality, her genius has stamped on it an individuality all its own, and given it the character of the country and race which gave her birth. I have already said that Teresa's charm is that she forces us back into the past. The central thought of her treatise on prayer is taken from the rural and idyllic life of the peasant, whom she had so often watched labouring in his orchard oppo- site the gates of the Encarnacion through the long summer afternoon. The garden plot where a few flowers and sweet- smelling herbs mingled with such grains and vegetables as formed its staple crop ; the water-wheel, or noria, with its forked sticks, the legacy left to the soil by the Moors, from which the thirsty ground was watered in little rills such were the familiar and rustic objects which furnished her with the theme on which she built her sublime and masterly treatise of prayer. The image of water to shadow forth the prayer that fructi- fies the arid human heart had possessed for her from childhood a peculiar significance, and, years after she had written her Life, it still haunts her memory as the aptest comparison she could use. Our soul is the garden, rude and unfruitful, out of which God plucks the weeds, planting the herbs and flowers of virtues in their stead. It is our duty so to tend and water them by our prayers and efforts that they may grow and send forth sweet-smelling flowers for the delight and recreation of the owner of the garden, so that he may often visit it, and regale QUIEN NO SE ESCONDE NO LUCE 181 himself with their fragrance. There are four ways of watering it : to draw it ourselves from the well, the most laborious of all ; or by means of a water-wheel, its outer circle hung with little earthenware pots, which every successive revolution fills or empties, whereby not only is the labour lessened, but the quantity of water drawn up is more than in the former ; or it may be watered from a river or running stream ; or by the rain which falls from heaven itself, which effectually waters the ground without any effort at all on the part of the husbandman. In the first state of prayer the beginner draws the water from the well with labour and trouble, struggling to recall and collect contumacious senses and thoughts accustomed to wander. If we go to the well and find it dry, we must still struggle on and do our best, leaving it to God to preserve the flowers and increase the growth of our virtues without water. What shall he do who sees his efforts end in aridity, distaste, despair? who feels such reluctance to go to the well, that if it were not for the thought of the service and pleasure he is doing thereby to the owner of the orchard, together with what he himself hopes to gain by his wearisome labour of lowering the bucket to draw it up empty, he would abandon it in despair? who very often is unable even to do this, so powerless his arms to raise it, so helpless his understanding to think one good thought? What then must he do ? Shall he give way to discouragement ? And here Teresa's words ring out with a clear and valiant note : No ! he will rather be joyful and comforted, for his purpose is not to please himself. Let him praise the great Emperor of the garden, who sees how, without payment, he is careful of his trust, for the confidence he reposes in him ; and resolutely de- termine, although the dryness be lifelong, not to leave Christ to fall down under the Cross alone. The time will come when he shall be repaid for all. As for evil thoughts, even Saint Jerome himself in the solitude of the desert did not escape the tempta- tions of Satan. Although these trials are very great, and it requires more courage to meet them than many other worldly trials, they have their value. God gives these torments and temptations to prove his lovers ; to see whether they can drink the chalice and help him to carry the cross, before he entrusts them with greater treasures; to show them by experience the extent of their nothingness, so that they may escape the fate of Lucifer, until losing sight of self, they can say, " I wish to suffer, Lord, since thou didst suffer ; let thy will in all ways be fulfilled in me." Together with this sense of our own nothingness, this deep distrust of ourselves and all humility, our desires must be great and magnanimous, i8 2 SANTA TERESA We must aim at the highest to attain the lowest. Had the saints never been inspired by great desires, and little by little begun to execute them, they would never have risen to a state of perfection. Although the soul lacks strength at first, and, like a little bird whose feathers are not yet fledged, tires and stops short, yet when she flies, she soars high and arrives at much. St. Peter lost nothing by throwing himself into the sea, although he was afraid afterwards. Out of pity for those who, like herself, have to begin to travel the road of prayer dependent on books, she dwells at length on the importance of wise and judicious direction, the want of which had been such a hindrance in her own spiritual life ; on the difference between false and true humility ; on the common temptation with beginners to induce others, who can only be hurt by the want of harmony that they cannot help but perceive between the doctrines and the lives of their teachers, to begin the spiritual life that they themselves are endeavouring to lead ; the tendency to occupy ourselves with, and bewail the sins of others, instead of rather fixing upon their virtues and goodness, and covering up their defects with our own great sins. Above all, in every state of prayer, the memory of our sins and knowledge of ourselves is the bread without which there is no sustenance, that we must eat with all the other meats, however delicate. Teresa's mind is too great, her intellect too clear, her judgment too keen, to consider the pleasures and delights bestowed in prayer as an indispensable accompaniment of the Religious Life. As they do not form its basis, neither are they its necessary outcome. She bids us note that the foundation of the religious character is built of sterner, stub- borner, more inflexible things ; it is like the granite backbone of a Scottish mountain ; the rest are but the flowers which blossom on its slopes, the fleecy summer clouds which bend down to kiss its ridges. For weak women like myself, of little strength of perseverance (" fortaleza "), it seems to me fitting, as God now does, to lead me with gifts, so that I may bear some trials which his Majesty has been pleased to send me ; but as for servants of God, men of weight, letters, and under- standing, whom I see so much concerned that God does not give them devotion, it displeases me to hear it. I say not that they should not take it if God gives it them, and hold it in high esteem, for in that case his Majesty sees that it is suitable. But let them not be distressed when it is denied them, but rather understand that, since his Majesty does not bestow it on them, it is not necessary, and let them be lords of themselves. The soul which reluctantly commences to journey on the road of mental prayer, and is neither consoled nor depressed < ~ X -=: H k QUIEN NO SE ESCONDE NO LUCE 183 by the presence or absence of these delights and tendernesses, has accomplished a great part of its journey, and there is no fear of its turning back, because the building has been raised on a sure foundation. Indeed the love of God does not consist in being able to weep, nor yet in delights and tenderness, but in serving with justice, fortitude of soul, and humility ; the other seems to me rather to receive than to give. With the same perspicacity and rectitude of judgment she touches on the reaction of the body upon the soul : for we are so miserable that this poor little prisoner of the soul shares in the miseries of the body ; and the variations of weather and changes of humours often, without any fault of her own, cause her not to be able to perform what she wishes, but to suffer in all ways. At these times she must not be forced or overwhelmed with business ; it must be understood that she is ailing ; the hour of prayer must be changed, and that often for some days together. Let them suffer this exile as they are able ; for it is bad enough for a soul that loves God to see that she loves in this misery, and that she cannot do as she wishes, from having to entertain such a bad guest as is this body. The body has claims that cannot be overlooked without danger : It would not be well for a weak and sickly person to fast and do severe penance, or retire to a desert, where he could neither sleep, eat, nor the like. In the succeeding grades of prayer the labour of the gardener (the soul) is gradually lessened until it ceases altogether. In the second state of prayer when the water is drawn up by means of a Moorish wheel and jars, the gardener with less labour draws up a greater quantity, and thus, freed from the necessity of continuous toil, finds time to rest. This is the prayer of quiet. Here the soul begins to retire within herself ; here she already touches something supernatural, for in no way can she herself acquire it, however great her efforts. It is true that for some time it seems that she has been tired with turning round the wheel and working with the understanding, until the jars were full ; but in this state the water is higher and the labour much less than when she drew it from the well ; I mean that the water is nearer, for the soul has a clearer perception of grace. This is a gathering of the faculties within themselves so as more thoroughly to enjoy that great content, although they are neither lost [suspended] nor do they sleep ; the will alone is occupied in such a way that, without knowing how, she is taken 184 SANTA TERESA captive, and can only consent to her own imprisonment by God, as one who knows well that he becomes a prisoner of him he loves. Oh, Jesus, my Lord, how powerful is thy love now, which holds our own so fast enchained that in that moment we are powerless to love aught but thee. The other two powers [the understanding or imagination and memory] aid the will to become better able to enjoy so much wealth ; yet sometimes it happens that even though the will be united, they hinder her ; but when this happens let her not pay any attention to them, but remain in her joy and quiet. For if we endeavoured to recall them, both she and they will be lost, because they are then like doves, who, not satisfied with the food, which they have not laboured to obtain, given to them by the owner of the dovecot, go forth to seek it elsewhere, and have such difficulty in finding it that they return to see if the will will share her joy with them. In this state, everything passes with the deepest consolation, and with so little labour, that prayer, although it lasts a long time, ceases to tire, because the understanding works slowly and draws very much more water than it did from the well ; the tears that flow are joyful ones and come without effort. The soul already feels a foretaste of the delights of Glory, and under its influence she grows, and draws closer to the Fountain of Virtue, God. She loses her longing after earthly things, and small thanks to her ; for she sees clearly that riches, lordships, honours, or delights are utterly powerless to give one moment, one glimpse of such perfect joy. She understands that God is so near to her that she need no longer send him messengers ; she can talk with him herself; and it need not be with clamorous cries, for he is now so close that he can understand the movement of her lips. We know that our Emperor hears us, we feel the effects of his presence, in the great interior and exterior satisfaction felt by the soul, and in the difference which exists between this delight and the delights of earth. Let us now return to our garden or flower-pot, and see how these trees begin to fructify so as to blossom, and afterwards yield fruit, as likewise the flowers and pinks to send forth sweet fragrance. This comparison [of a soul to a flower garden] delights me, for often in the beginnings [of her spiritual life] it was a great delight to me to think on my soul as a garden, and on the Lord as walking in it. I prayed him to increase the perfume of the little flowerets of virtues which began, so it seemed, to wish to peer [above ground], so that it might be to his glory ; and to nurture and cut those he wanted (since I wanted nothing for myself), for I already knew that they would only come up stronger for it. The soul is made sensible of the quiet and recollection she enjoys, in the satisfaction and peace accompanied by the unspeakable content and rest of the faculties, and the sweet delight which fills her. She dares not move nor stir, for fear QUIEN NO SE ESCONDE NO LUCE 185 of frightening it away; sometimes she would not wish to breathe. She does not understand, poor thing! that since of herself she is powerless to procure it, still less can she detain it longer than what the Lord wills. And this prayer, great as it is in its effects, is but a spark of the Divine Love, lit by God in the soul, a spark which, unless by our sins we extinguish it, is to kindle the burning flaming fire of the Love of God, possessed by more perfect souls, and is a sign or token that God chooses her for great things, if she will but make ready to receive them. When in this prayer, the soul must act with gentleness and without commotion, i.e. she must not accompany the under- standing by looking for words and thoughts wherewith to give thanks for this benefit, nor seek the aid of memory to pile up sins and faults to show how little she merits it. The will must understand that it cannot deal with the Lord by dint of merit and labour, for these are the big logs laid without discretion which would extinguish the spark. Let it rather say, " Lord, what can I here ? What has the servant to do with his Lord ? and earth with heaven ? " She must pay no attention to the understanding any more than to a tiresome intruder, and, if she endeavours to recall it without success, let her leave it alone, and give herself up to the delights of the favour bestowed upon her, like a wise bee in the shelter of its hive ; for if none should enter the hive, but all had to leave it to bring each other back, little would be the honey made. In the first state it was pointed out that those who begin to travel the road of prayer must absolutely abandon all earthly pleasure, determined alone to help Christ to bear his cross like good knights who serve without payment, their eyes fixed on the true and perpetual kingdom they are struggling to conquer. It is important, especially at the beginning, not to lose sight (afterwards we see it so clearly that it is almost necessary to forget it in order to live) of the short duration of everything, and the little account in which bodily ease must be held. It seems an unworthy consideration, and those in a higher state of perfection would be insulted, and would call shame on each other, if for such a reason as their short duration they should abandon this world's goods. Although they were to last for ever, they would rather be glad to abandon them for God ; and the more perfect they were, the greater their joy; and the longer they lasted, greater still. Still, such considerations are needful even to those who have attained the heights of prayer ; for, in this life of ours, the soul does not grow like the body : a child after he is grown up and becomes a man cannot decrease and become a child again ; 1 86 SANTA TERESA the soul can. It must be in order to humiliate us for our great benefit, so that we may never relax our vigilance during our exile, since he that is highest must fear most, and confide least in himself. To conclude, this prayer is the beginning of all wealth, the flowers being now in such a state that little more is wanting than for them to blossom. The third way in which this soul-garden is watered is with the running water from a stream or spring, which necessitates still less labour than before, although some still is necessary in order to direct the water. Here the Lord himself becomes, as it were, the gardener, and does all the labour, whilst the soul does nothing: the will alone consents to the favours it enjoys, and must resign itself to all that Divine Wisdom wills to work on it ; and for this courage is needed. All effort of the under- standing ceases, the soul is amazed to find how good a gardener the Lord makes, who refuses to let her labour otherwise than to delight herself in smelling the perfume of the flowers. For in one moment of these visitations of the Lord, however short, the gardener being the creator of the water, pours it out without stint, and what the soul has been unable to perform in twenty years of effort of the understanding, this Celestial Gardener accomplishes in a moment, and makes the fruit grow and ripen. It is a sleep of the faculties, which are not entirely suspended, nor yet do they understand how they work. The delight, sweetness, and joy are incomparably greater than in the last state ; it is as if the water of grace was poured down the soul's throat, so that she cannot go forward nor turn back, but rejoices in unspeakable glory. She is like one about to die, who already holds the candle in his hands, and lies rejoicing in his agony, separated by a few moments from the death he longs for ; so completely does she die to the things of the world, and enter into full fruition of God. She is possessed by a glorious frenzy, a celestial madness, in which she learns the true wisdom ; her joy is so great that she seems about to quit the body. She is not her own, but completely given up to God. It is not a complete union of all the faculties with God, although they are clearly more united than in the former state of prayer ; for although they are all but completely united, they are not so engulfed that they cannot act ; and although they are able to occupy themselves in God alone, it seems that none of them dare to stir, nor can we move them. The soul is beside herself with a sweet unrest, she longs to break out into loud thanksgivings. Unable to bear such rapture, she burns with desire that all should witness and QUIEN NO SE ESCONDE NO LUCE 187 comprehend her glory, so that they may join her in singing God's praises, and share her joy ; like the woman in the Gospels who called her neighbours to rejoice with her. Such celestial joy must the admirable mind of the Royal Prophet David have felt when he sang the praises of God to the harp. I know a person [says Teresa, and it is of herself she speaks], who, although no poet, could quickly make very moving couplets, which well declared her pain ; not framed by her understanding, but in order to rejoice more in the glory which filled her with such sweet pain, she complained of it to God. Her whole body and soul she longed to rend asunder to manifest the joy which this pain gives. What are the effects such prayer leaves behind it? The virtues remain strengthened, so that the soul can no longer ignore them ; the Lord has willed that the flowers should open and give forth powerful fragrance. The humility it leaves behind it in the soul is immeasurably greater and deeper than before. Teresa makes two subtle subdivisions in this third grade of prayer, neither of which is so complete as the one I have described almost in the very words she uses. In the first, the will alone is bound and in a state of bliss, whilst the under- standing and memory are left free to occupy themselves in business or works of charity. In this state the soul unites within herself the activity of Martha and the holy inaction of Mary. It is as if we spoke to one person at the same time that we listened to another. In the second, both will and under- standing are cast under God's spell, and the memory alone remains free to disturb their union ; deprived of the help of the understanding, the memory cannot remain quiet, but flits about from one to the other, and flutters hither and thither like a moth of the night, importunate and restless. No more attention must be paid to it than to a madman, but like him it must be left to pursue its theme. Sometimes God himself takes pity on it, and allows it to burn itself out in the flame of that divine candle, where the other faculties are supernaturally enjoying such great bliss. And lastly, in all these modes of prayer the glory and peace enjoyed by the soul are so great that the body participates in the joy and delight ; and the growth of the virtues is great. May the Lord teach her words, she prays, to describe the fourth grade of prayer ! In the former modes of prayer the gardener (the soul) has laboured something. Now the garden is swollen and filled with the rains from heaven which come when he least expects it. Now all sensation is lost in joy which 1 88 SANTA TERESA the soul is not able to understand ; she knows that she tastes a bliss in which all others are ciphered. All the senses are occupied in this joy, so that none remains free to busy itself in any other thing exterior or interior. Understanding and memory, the disturbers of the soul's complete union in the former states, are in this completely lulled. Teresa knows not the difference between mind, spirit, and soul \ it appears all one to her, although the soul seems sometimes to go out of herself, like a burning fire which sends forth flames, and sometimes to increase with aludden leap ; the flame ascends far above the fire, but still it is the same as that below. As she commenced to write, it seemed as impossible to her to describe this last mode of prayer as to speak Greek. Upon this I left it and went to communicate. God lightened my understanding, sometimes with words, at others by showing me how I was to say it. ... I was thinking (when I began to write this after I had communicated) what the soul did in this last state of prayer. The Lord said these words to me. She unmakes herself, daughter, to put herself more in me ; it is no longer she who lives but I ; as she cannot comprehend what she sees, understanding she ceases to understand. Now as regards this water which comes from above, to fill and saturate this garden with its abundance, if the Lord never failed to send it when it was needed, what ease would this not afford to the husbandman ! and if at the same time there was no winter, and the weather was always temperate, then what would not be his delight in the perpetual succession of flowers and fruits! But whilst we live this is impossible ; care must always be taken when one water fails, to procure the other. This heavenly rain often comes when the gardener least expects it. It is true that at first it almost always follows a long period of mental prayer ; for from one grade to another the Lord comes and takes this little bird (the soul) and puts her in the nest to rest ; as he has watched her fly for a long time, procuring with her understanding, and will, and all her strength to seek and please him ; thus does he reward her even in this life. And what a reward ! one moment of which is enough to repay us for all the troubles it can make us suffer. Whilst the soul is thus seeking God, she feels herself faint and die with a most great and sweet delight ; breath fails her, all the bodily movements are stilled, she cannot without great difficulty move her hands ; the eyes close involuntarily, and, if they remain open, see nothing ; she hears, but without understanding what she hears ; speech is superfluous, for she cannot form a word, and, if she could, she wants strength to pronounce it ; all exterior strength seems gone, and goes to swell that of the soul, to help her to enjoy her glory more. This suspension of the faculties only lasts a very short time ; the favours it leaves behind it testify how great the clearness of the sun that has been there. It leaves behind it an aversion for the things of earth and an inseparable pain. It is a pain to return to life ; in the state of trance the wings grow for flight, and the callow feathers fall off. Now we raise the banner entirely for Christ ; since the castellan of the fortress mounts up, or is borne, to the highest tower, to raise God's banner. He looks on those beneath, as one already in safety ; the fear of dangers gives place to the desire to meet them, so certain is he of victory. He who surveys all things from a height sees QUIEN NO SE ESCONDE NO LUCE 189 much. The gardener has become the governor of the fortress ; hence- forward he seeks not his own profit, but the will and glory of God. It is a flight the spirit takes above itself and all created things, a sweet, delicious, and noiseless flight. Now not only does she spy out the cobwebs, but the grains of dust, so clear the sun. She is like water in a glass, which seems clear until we put it in the sun, and see it full of motes. So does the Sun of Justice open her eyes to see so many motes of imperfection, that she longs to close them ; for she is not yet so sufficiently a child of this powerful Eagle that she can gaze on it in its splendour without being dazzled, and when she looks on herself, the dust disturbs her sight and this little dove is blind. When a soul arrives at this stage, she does not remain satisfied with desires ; God gives her strength to execute them. There is nothing the soul would not venture on in his service. The trial is that nothing offers itself to those who are of such small account as I. Mayst thou be pleased, my wealth [thus she prays], that the time may come in which I may pay some tittle (cornado) of the much I owe thee ; order, Lord, according to thy pleasure, some way in which thy servant may serve thee in something. Women were those others, and they have done heroic things for love of thee ; I am only fit to chatter, and thus thou wilt not, my God, entrust me with works ; all my service goes in words and desires. . . . Strengthen thou my soul, and dispose her first, wealth of all wealths. . . . Order soon the ways in which I can do something for thee. . . . Here is my life, my honour, and my will ; all have I given to thee. Thine I am, dispose of me according to thy will. Well do I see, my Lord, how little I can do ; but close to thee, aloft in this watch tower, where truth is seen, if thou dost not leave me, I can do everything. Here the veil which lends a flattering semblance to things of earth falls off. The soul has learned to reckon riches and honours at their true worth, and laughs at herself for having ever valued them ; she is so accustomed to understand the nature of what is really true that the rest seems to her like child's play. Oh, if all would join in holding them for useless earth, how peaceable would be the world, how without traffic ; with what friendship would all treat each other, if the interest of honour and money was wanting. The soul laughs within herself sometimes, to see how grave, prayerful, and religious people esteem the points of honour which she treads under foot. They say it is discretion and the authority indispensable to their condition, which enables them to do more good. But she knows that one day in which they postponed the authority of their condition for love of God, would do them more good than ten years with it. The souls have now become strong, and are chosen by God to benefit others. ' Little by little the Lord communicates very great secrets to them. Years after she had attained these four grades of prayer, Teresa felt the highest mercy that God can give in the pain igo SANTA TERESA which was to abide with her for the rest of her troublous life, until it was calmed in death. She speaks of it as an impetus of desire, a pain which suspends the soul between Earth and Heaven, and, in its excess, brings the body in peril of death. Such is the pain in which the soul is wrought and purified like gold in the crucible, until it is fit to receive the fine enamellings of his gifts ; in it are purged those sins which must be purged in purgatory. It is different from the pain left behind by ecstasy, in which both soul and body seem to share. It is a pain we have no part in procuring. But often unexpectedly comes a desire, for I know not how it moves, which pierces through the soul in a moment, filling it with such desolation that she rises above herself, and all Created Things. God strips her of everything, so that, do what she may, nothing on earth can be her com- panion. Nor would she wish for any, but only to die in that loneliness. Although God seems most distant from her, he communicates his grandeurs to her in the strangest way ; instead of consolation, this admirable notice of God, above all that we can desire, makes more manifest the reason she has to mourn her absence from the wealth in which all others are comprised, and serves to add to her torments. The desire and the extremity of her loneliness [solitude] increase with a pain so subtle and penetrating that it takes away all sense of feeling. It seems like the passage of death, were it not for the intense and incomparable happiness this suffering brings with it. It is a sharp martyrdom, full of sweetness ; the soul seems to fling away from her everything of earth, those in which she delighted most. When the soul is in this desert then she may literally say of herself: Vigilavi et foetus sum sicut passer soliiarius in tecto. So does she seem to rise on her own roof top ; so far is she above the most lofty part of herself. As she feels the commencement of this impetus of desire, the soul trembles with fear that she may die. But once rapt away in it she wishes to dwell in this suffering for the rest of her life, although so excessive as to be borne with difficulty by the body. The force of the impetus is such that the pulses cease to beat, the bones of the legs and arms seem to open, the hands stiffen so that it is impossible to close them, and the next day the pains in the pulses are such that the body seems as if it had been wrenched asunder. I think, indeed, if it goes on as it does now, that some time the Lord will order it to end with ending my life ; for to my mind pain so great is enough to do it, only that I do not deserve it. And it was to be even as she said ; her last breath went out in a sweet strong impulse of desire ! As the soul's love is now centred alone in the Creator, with whom she can only be united by Death, she dies in her longing to die, and " truly she goes in peril of death, and sees herself suspended between Heaven and Earth." QUIEN NO SE ESCONDE NO LUCE 191 The soul has grown so great ; so feeble, and yet so adamantine are the ligaments which bind her to the prison of the body, that her exile has become an abiding pain. She is consumed with sweet longings to join her God ; and when she sees that only through the Gates of Death will she be united to the Spirit of Love, she will, like a captive exile, who, far from his home and those he loves most, weeps away the hours of his captivity, bear the burden of her pain until she lays it down before them. ... In ecstasy revelations, divine favours and visions are received by the soul. It must be remembered that it was not until 1555, when she was forty, that Teresa began to wean herself from the occasions to her of sin, the fascinating hours spent in the locutorio, and then not entirely ; that it was not until five or six years before she wrote her Life, that she was admitted into the third grade of prayer, which would make it 1556 or 1557, and herself a woman of forty-one or forty-two ; and that she did not attain to the continuous pain in which the soul burnt itself out in self-sacrifice and love until after the year 1561 or 1562, or more probably towards the year 1565, when, at the age of fifty, she wrote her Life a second time, at the command of Fray Garcia de Toledo. As I have thus followed her spiritual progress my mind has irresistibly reverted to a steep mountain road in the north of Spain, strewed with great blocks of granite and pointed pebbles, hedged in by precipitous banks, covered with masses of broom and trailing brambles, on a twig of which some bird hops and twitters, a lane in summer up which donkeys and villagers climb with their burdens, a tumultuous watercourse in winter, so steep and narrow, so far off the summit that few care to climb it on a summer's day. And even such, it seems to me, was the road Teresa trod. At last the ascent is made. With face and clothes torn by brambles and thorns, feet cut and maimed by the sharp- pointed flints and pebbles, panting for breath, drops of sweat rolling off the brow, the foot sinks silently into a cone-strewn carpet of moss and fine short turf, crackling and dry with the heat of the afternoon sun. A deep, cool forest of pine-trees casts its purple shadow over a gray stone Calvary, and at its foot the weary body sinks down to rest rejoicing. The strong resinous odour fills nostrils and brain with sweetness. Close by are the broad red eaves of a labourer's house, buried in vines. The cloudless sky, wherein the feeble eyes seem to see vague depths upon depths of atmosphere, the slumberous Ig2 SANTA TERESA influences of the place and hour, the acrid perfumes of a thousand blended scents, invite to rest and slumber. But above towers the Calvary, which brings to this peaceful spot the Image of grief and woe, carved by a hand that long ages ago has mouldered to dust, whose unknown name and legend of whose life alone lives for ever in these mountain solitudes. Here has he left a memorial of the thoughts and ideas which filled his brain ; of the thoughts and ideas of his epoch, moulded and shaped by his individuality. The desolate mother bends for ever in the silence over the dead laid across her knees ; in the rigid folds of the drapery which fall over and shadow her face is enchained the strong and subtle spirit of woe. Even such a path as this, was that which Teresa so laboriously and resolutely climbed for twenty years of youth and middle age, until she arrives under the shadow of the Cross with bleeding feet and torn raiment. The climb was long and painful, her mouth was parched with thirst, her limbs aching with the strain, her heart torn by her own im- perfections, before she sank down under the steps of the Cross, and, in the peaceful, mellow light of evening, surveyed, amazed and terror-stricken, the path of difficulty whereby she had ascended. The horizon is already looming; the point is already in sight, although to her as yet invisible, towards which the lines of her destiny are converging fast. As when a stone is thrown into water the concentric circles grow wider the farther they depart from the centre, Teresa's influence has slowly extended its sphere, although as yet it is reserved to her with the luminous inspiration of genius and sympathy, to mentally embrace all humanity within its limits. She has revolutionised the Encarnacion. More than forty nuns practise the rigid austerity and humility of the future foundress. All the world, the little world of Avila, is in a ferment of curiosity and wonder to see the nun whose ecstasies and trances have so vividly excited its curiosity. We would fain believe that it was not her visions or rapts or ecstasies that laid the basis of her fame, but rather that her strict and humble life has at last imposed itself upon her surroundings, and silenced by its mute eloquence the suspicions of the inimical. But let us not ask too much of human nature ! It is probable that the latter passed unperceived, whilst the former alone, welcomed by popular superstition, assured her the admiration and esteem of which she was now the object. Great ladies coaxed or wheedled the Provincial, or sent him messages equivalent to commands, in their eagerness to QUIEN NO SE ESCONDE NO LUCE 193 see the saint produced by the Encarnacion. The frequent absences entailed by these visits were a source of keen annoyance to the shrewd-eyed woman, who, undazzled by flattery and admiration, with a rare penetration that pre- serves her from all delusion in so far as practical matters are concerned, and forms such a curious contrast to her spiritual experiences, has gauged the world as profoundly from the retirement of her convent as could the most seasoned and disillusioned courtier. So fair a wind could bode no good, she thought. Christ and the saints had been nurtured on insult and contempt. She shrank sensitively from the noisy admiration and wonder which she perhaps instinctively despised ; the publication of her visions caused her deep annoyance ; she resolved to escape to a convent far away from Avila, where her notoriety could not follow her. She was tormented by a constant dread, which droned its ceaseless monotone in the background of her conscience, lest she had been allowed for some inscrutable purpose to involuntarily delude and deceive. On this her imagination played a thousand variations. She struggled with an uncontrollable impulse to confess her sins to those who seemed most impressed with her virtues. She experienced a sense of relief in endeavouring to shake her confessor's faith. They were the last morbid whispers of what she afterwards recognises to have been false humility. " What dost thou fear?" whispers the divine voice; "in this there can be but one of two things, either that they will speak ill of thee, or that they will praise me, and both will only be for thy greater good." It is essential that her faith in the celestial origin of her mission shall swallow up these shadows, these feverish scruples, fed by a conscience fertile in self-torment, ere, her entire being interpenetrated by the Divinity, she sees the visible hand of the Almighty shine through all the actions of her life, and hears his voice animating, sustaining, directing. She must cast all that would obscure her path or her resolution resolutely behind her : " Vade retro Satanas," ere she stands forth radiantly, Teresa de Jesus the Sinner, believing in herself and commanding belief in others, from head to foot the handiwork of God ; his thing, his instrument, in which she herself has neither part nor lot. It may be questioned whether her doubts were ever quite stilled ; whether at recurring intervals, in her moments of faintheartedness, these demons of the fancy did not reassert their power : " Still, Lord, I am a daughter of the Church," she prayed repeatedly when the great Wave of Time was fast bearing her into that haven 13 i 9 4 SANTA TERESA towards which her whole life had been directed. But no trace of doubt or bitterness can have lingered in the smile which illuminated the dead face as she lay in her cell at Alba de Tormes. She had seen Perfection too near, her noble nature had soared too far above the weaknesses of humanity, her sacrifice of self had been too stupendous, to leave room for aught but the deepest tranquillity and joy. None have felt more keenly than Teresa the responsibilities involved by the change in her position ; the exigencies of that opinion which insists upon its idols being flawless. There are a thousand eyes for one of these souls, where for a thousand souls of another stamp there is none. . . . Well may a soul which God thus permits to be placed before the eyes of the world, prepare itself to be its martyr, for if of itself it dies not to it, the world will kill it. ... Certainly I see no other thing in it (the world) [she goes on to say] which seems to me good, except that it will not condone the faults of good people, and that the power of its murmurs makes them more perfect. I say that more courage is necessary for one who is not perfect to travel the road of perfection than to suffer martyrdom once and for all, for perfection is not arrived at in a short time. . . . The world seeing such an one begin, will have him perfect and espies one of his faults, which in him perchance is a virtue, and used by the condemner for a vice, who therefore judges it to be one in the other, a thousand leagues off. He must not eat or drink, or, as they say, breathe ; and the stronger their esteem for him, the more they forget that, however perfect the soul, it is nevertheless in the body and still lives on the earth, however it may tread it under foot, subject to its miseries ; and so I say great courage is needed, for they would fain that the poor soul flew before it has begun to walk : it has not yet vanquished all its affections, and they expect that it should be as robust on great occasions, as they read that the saints were after they were confirmed in grace. And it was not courage that Teresa needed, she who (as she says herself) "had more than generally falls to the lot of woman," and that the cool, calm courage of reason, of an absolute and concise apprehension beforehand of the dangers to be faced. Never does Teresa's figure seem invested with a sublimer grandeur than when, serene and unmoved, she meets unflinchingly persecution and bitter antagonism. " My soul is then so mistress of itself that it seems that it is in its kingdom, and has everything under its feet." Her anterior life has been a prelude. We are now about to see her develop those energies, which, but for that " mysterious providence which rules the affairs of men," might have for ever lain latent in the cloister; although the life of such an one can never be infructuous, even if no eye notes the sweetness of the blossom, and it fades away unrecorded and unnoted. From this moment Teresa, penetrated with a sense QUIEN NO SE ESCONDE NO LUCE 195 of her mission, lives to us as a woman. Had her life ended with the writing of her Autobiography, the personality it reveals, strange as it is, would have had but scant interest for future generations. It would probably never have seen the light of day, and if it had, would only have gone to swell the unread volumes of mystic literature in some convent library. Chance passages here and there, not such, indeed, as would be chosen for quotation from preference by the devout biographer might have led some purblind bookworm to pencil some passing note on the margin, as quickly forgotten as penned. Whatever interpretation we may put on her spiritual experi- ences, her active life admits of but one sentiment. And indeed it seems to me that I am bidding farewell to the mystic as immortalised by Gregorio Hernandez, with impassioned face suffused with celestial radiance, to trace on the canvas of the past a far different figure, but perchance, if we read aright, one far more grandiose and imposing. We are about to live with her and accompany her on her journeys over leagues of weary Castilian roads, to share her anxieties and triumphs, and it may be, when we have followed her to the end of that long journey, which was one of her most favourite images, that we shall find ourselves weeping beside her deathbed at Alba de Tormes, and shall feel the wrench at parting company as keenly as any of her nuns. CHAPTER VII WE MUST AIM AT THE HIGHEST TO ATTAIN THE LOWEST IT is worthy of note that Teresa undertook her first founda- tion in the same year in which she first came into contact with San Pedro de Alcantara. It may be that the Reform of the Carmelites owed its birth to some suggestion which fell from the aged Franciscan's lips in those long consultations, when she sought his advice as to how she could best fulfil the aspirations which impelled her to lead a stricter life, and often to leave Avila far behind her, to seek the seclusion and obscurity of some distant convent. It may be that she even contemplated entering an Order more in conformity with her lofty ideal of the religious life. It is certain that already some vague project of founding a small convent, where she and a few others could lead a life more in accordance with their conceptions of duty, had been discussed between herself and Da. Guiomar de Ulloa. This lady, a young and pious widow, was destined to be her coadjutress in the long struggle that terminated in the founda- tion of her first convent. In the declarations for Teresa's Beatification preserved at Avila, one of the witnesses, Don Luis de Avila and Ulloa, son of this same Da. Guiomar, testifies that it was from his mother's house and with his mother's help that she founded San Jose. Like Teresa, of illustrious birth, she was the only daughter of Don Pedro Ulloa, hereditary governor of Toro ; her grandfather that unruly Castilian, who, in Isabella's time, drove forth all the nobles, and virtually made himself possessor of the town. By her mother, Da. Aldonza de Guzman, she was descended from the Royal House of Castille. She was a near relation of that Da. Magdalena de Ulloa, wife of Lufs de Quixada, to whose tender care Don Juan of Austria owed so much. On the death of her husband, Francisco de Avila, a noble and wealthy gentleman of Avila, she was gradually, under the direction of Father Baltasar Alvarez, weaned from the world whose pomps and gaieties had until then filled her life. 190 WE MUST AIM AT THE HIGHEST 197 The ideas and thoughts which have long been maturing in silence, or, if expressed to some kindred soul, dwelt on as an unsubstantial and flattering dream, impossible ever to be embodied, often owe the immediate impulse that determines their realisation to some wholly insignificant circumstance altogether out of proportion to the result which springs from it. So Teresa, tormented with desires of perfection and complete retirement from the world, difficult to realise in the crowded convent of the Encarnacion, might never have dreamed of herself becoming a foundress, had it not been for a conversa- tion, beginning half in jest half in earnest, which shaped her ardent aspirations to a definite end. The great Reform of the Carmelite Order owed its existence to a few nuns, her relatives and intimate friends, who, gathered together in her cell one night, in the unrestrained frankness of familiar intercourse, fell to discussing the difficulties placed in the way of the contem- plative in the overcrowded and worldly convent of the Encarna- cion. Amongst those present were two of Teresa's nieces, Maria de Ocampo and her sister. It was to the remark dropped by this thoughtless girl, conspicuous as yet only for her love of the world and its gay vanities (for she was only a secular or pupil), that Teresa's first convent owed its foundation. " Well, let us who are here," she cried, with unexpected earnestness and warmth, " betake us to a different and more solitary way of life, like hermits." Nor, we may be sure, did the conversation linger for want of guidance on the part of the master spirit amongst them, who saw it take a turn than which none could have filled her with greater delight. Insensibly they found themselves debating the possibility and probable cost of making a small convent, restricted to a few inmates, who might find in a stricter and purer rule those exterior impulses to devotion so entirely wanting in the secularised atmosphere of the Encarna- cion. Maria de Ocampo again offered to devote to it 1000 ducats of her dowry. Few there dreamed that night, as they betook themselves to their cells, that they had inaugurated a world-famous revolution in the Ancient Order of Mount Carmel. Little, indeed, did she who had first set the ball a-rolling dream that by a few enthusiastic words, spoken perchance at random, she had cast the die of her own future, and that they were to be the means of transforming her into the grave sententious prioress of Valladolid, beside whose deathbed a King and Queen of Spain themselves should stand, seeking her last blessing for themselves and their kingdom. Teresa poured all that had taken place into the willing ear of her friend Da. Guiomar de Ulloa. Probably to both women igS SANTA TERESA it came as a revelation. A girl's tongue, matter-of-fact and practical, had cast the light of dawn upon a project which, if often mooted between them, they had never ventured to enter- tain as either likely or possible. So issued the Reform of the Carmelites from the region of dreams and hopes and vague aspirations into potentiality and being. The pious widow charged herself with procuring the necessary dower, although Teresa, averse to taking a leap in the dark, still hesitated ; they agreed, however, to commend it to God. The Encarnacion presented many drawbacks to the life of rigid austerity she felt herself called upon to lead. The Dona Quiteria or Dofta Brianda of noble birth, after the first wrench of separation from her family, soon found that life could slip away as pleasantly and serenely in the spacious convent of the Encarnacion, amidst its sunlit gardens and shady cloisters, as in her father's house, not unlike it in its almost monastic austerity and seclusion, to which a stately and sometimes irksome ceremonial imparted the only flavour of worldliness she knew. Noble birth was as potent within as without the convent walls, and even in the cloister, to those who possessed it, belonged by undisputed and tacit allowance all the small distinctions and privileges possible in a sisterhood. In the parlours, a pleasant lounging place on a summer's afternoon, when the sun slept on the red brick floors, and the sleepy atmosphere lulled to idleness, thronged with gay youths, friends, and relatives, the world still saluted their ears with its news and scandal. The peaceful routine thus varied with echoes from without was not without its charm, and it was not long before they sank into good-tempered, complacent nuns, over whose faces, un wrinkled except by fat or merriment, the cares of life slipped by, leaving no trace of their passage. Before the Council of Trent the nuns could go and come with almost as much freedom as if they were still uncloistered, nay, more, for their habit commanded respect and devotion wherever it was seen. Nor in entering the convent did they sink their style or titles. The Teresa de Jesus of San Jos6 was in the noble convent of the Encarnacion addressed, as the old- fashioned stately courtesy of her time dictated, as the Magnifi- cent Lady, Dona Teresa de Ahumada. She had seen and felt and noted bitterly, in her own case, the dangers concealed in a monastic life whose re- laxed rules of discipline encouraged the world, its dignities and recreations, to enter and dwell within the cloister walls. At one period of her life, as we have seen, the quick- sands on which she trod had well-nigh engulfed her, and WE MUST AIM AT THE HIGHEST 199 annihilated every good aspiration ; and she feared them for others. Something of the banefulness of this atmosphere and its drawbacks may be inferred from the following letter, which she wrote in after years to a nun of another Order, who seems to have suffered from the same obstacles as those which existed in the Encarnacion : Before these convents were begun, I was twenty-five years in one where there were 180 nuns ; and because I am in haste I will only say that, to one who loves God, all these things will be a cross, and for the benefit of his soul, and will not harm it if you are careful to consider that only God and it are in that house. And whilst you bear no office to oblige you to regard certain things, let them in no way disturb you, but try to find out the virtue of each one, to love her for and profit by it, and regard not the fault you may see in her. This benefited me so much, that although their number was what I have said, they troubled me no more than if there had been none, only did me good ; for, in short, my lady, we can love this great God everywhere. May he be blessed that there is none who can take this from us. On the other hand, the Encarnacion was endeared to her by many memories memories of the Dead that she could not replace, happy memories of the living : she clung wistfully to the large and spacious house, the sunlit cloisters, and peaceful gardens which had been the only home she had known for a quarter of a century. In the dearth of human objects on which to lavish them, her affections had centred themselves on those inanimate ones, the mute witnesses of her life. Even the bare walls of the cell, which had shut in her meagre and poverty-stricken existence, possessed to her an intimate and mysterious charm, in the same way as a tree, a plant, a familiar stream becomes by some mysterious process so much a part of our individuality that it seems impossible they should ever lose it ; nay, so strong is the illusion that we imagine they suffer from our absence, and will mourn it to the end of time. On the eve of severing herself from all that time and memory had consecrated and endeared, she became the prey of that instinctive retrospection, which casts an illusive haze over the past, and plunges into shadow the untried future with its dim mysterious, possibilities. Her mind leapt forward to meet the difficulties, the unseen cares and trials into which she was about to plunge; the successes, the triumphs, and the glory Time alone will reveal. It was not long, however, before the misty haze of irresolu- tion which had clouded her sight melted away, and her work, invested by her own desires and fervent imagination with a supernatural and celestial origin, stood before her sharply and 200 SANTA TERESA clearly defined. Christ appears to her in a vision, and commands her to set about it with all her might. It shall be a star which shall send forth a most resplendent light, and Mary and St. Joseph (her favourite patrons) shall be the guardians of its portals. She is to inform her confessor of this mandate, and to tell him that the Lord prayed him not to be against or to hinder her in its execution. Not once, but often, was the Divine Com- mand repeated, before Teresa engaged in this very plain and practical scheme, the object of which was the restoration of the relaxed discipline of the Carmelites to some of its ancient severity and purity in one poor convent. Perhaps such a sentiment was necessary to her own success in the difficult and arduous undertaking, whereon she had concentrated her every faculty, which lay before her. Certainly the more she abandoned herself to the conviction that she was acting in obedience to transcendental impulses, with so much the more assurance would she be enabled to speak, the easier would it be to tread under foot all obstacles of human reasoning and expediency. Such a sentiment was in itself a powerful lever. He who accomplishes the commands of another, in so much as his responsibility is almost nil, acts with more authority than he who issues them. If she doubted of it, as she did in those moments of physical and mental reaction which followed in the wake of her most glorious triumphs, it upheld her in the struggle which rendered such triumphs possible. If Teresa, however, had been merely a mystic, let her be as ardent and inspired as she liked, she would never have founded, and was already doomed to failure. St. Francis of Assisi would never have achieved such triumphant success without his schem- ing sub-lieutenant, Elias. If Teresa was a dreamer and drew from her visions, as from a perennial fount, the refreshment, energy, and courage which sustained her throughout her laborious life, and was the marvel of her contemporaries, she was, on the other hand, pre-eminently a woman of action. It was to the opposite and often seemingly contradictory qualities of her character that she owed her success. Directly she touches the earth she ceases to be the ecstatic. Her clear, incisive com- prehension, her shrewd, practical common-sense, admitted of no delusion when dealing with tangible realities. Her letters reveal to us a woman different indeed from, but infinitely more sympathetic than, the distorted image which Catholics and Protestants have hitherto vied with each other in falsifying. Keen-sighted, astute, didactic, matter-of-fact, almost prosaic, directly she touches the earth she becomes the Castilian gentle- woman to whom convents and souls take the place of eggs and WE MUST AIM AT THE HIGHEST 201 chickens. Absolutely devoid of all interest for herself, she counts her money, and conducts her business affairs with a sharpness and grasp of detail entirely temporal. It is here that we possess the key to her success. Her subtle insight into character, so intuitive that many mistook it for prophecy, placed a powerful weapon in her hands. She used it for the furtherance of the Reform. At times full of a tender cajolery and unctuous flattery for those whose co-operation she needs ; but as fearlessly speaking the truth, regardless of rank or power, when her con- science so dictated. It was no rash impetuous plan, undertaken on the spur of an irreflective moment, but one well deliberated, maturely weighed, which she set down in writing and submitted to Alvarez's con- sideration. She was aware that the difficulties to be overcome were enormous. If she was able to secure her confessor's neutrality by a sort of pious terrorism, and the Divine message was nothing more, his private opinion remained unaltered, that a scheme in which two women without money and without influence set themselves to fight the world was, humanly speaking, impossible of realisation, and doomed beforehand to failure. Whereupon (being a Jesuit) he adroitly shuffled off all responsibility in the matter from his own shoulders on to those of the Carmelite Provincial, Fr. Angel de Salazar. With admirable foresight and knowledge of character", however, rather than risk a refusal, Teresa waited months before she approached Salazar, waited, indeed, until she could place before him the opinions, in truth the most eloquent credentials she could have, from two men of such resplendent reputation for sanctity and wisdom, that it was impossible to overlook them, Fr. Pedro de Alcantara and San Luis Beltran. As seen by the light of what afterwards took place, it is natural that these letters should come to be looked upon as prophecies. The enthusiastic encouragement, the solemn promise in the name of the Lord, of all good success, however men might be against her, made to her by San Pedro de Alcantara, might have been expected from one whose soul was knitted together with hers in the same aspiration, and whose life had been spent in reform. The reply of the learned Dominican Fr. Luis de Beltran of Valencia, afterwards admitted to the honours of Beatification by the Church of Rome, was still more concise and significant. " Mother Teresa," he wrote, " I received your letter, and because the subject on which you ask my advice is so much to the 202 SANTA TERESA Lord's service, I have wished to commend it to him in my poor prayers and sacrifices, and this has been the cause of the delay in replying to you. Now I say to you in the name of the same Lord, to take courage for so great an undertaking, for he will aid and favour you. And in his name I certify to you, that before fifty years shall pass your Religion shall be one of the most illustrious in the Church of God. May he guard you, etc. In Valencia, frai Luis de Beltran." " See," says Yepes (always on the look-out for a wholesome moral), "by the style of this letter, with what frankness and simplicity saints converse with one another ! " Thus having made assurance doubly sure, Dona Guiomar.to whom the delicate negotiation was entrusted, found but little difficulty in obtaining the Provincial's consent. Confident of the permission of the Provincial of her Order, to be as easily retracted, alas! as granted, when the storm raged so high that he preferred to bow to, rather than face it, the two women set about the purchase of a house on the site occupied to-day by the Convent of San Jose". Their purpose had only to get wind in Avila to be greeted by a veritable tempest of laughter and abuse. " It was the devil," says Ribera, "who guessed the harm that might thereby ensue to him, although I never believe that he feared so much as has come and will come to him." Inflated old hidalgoes, with a gravity peculiar to Spaniards, buttonholed each other in grave alarm. "Women's nonsense," they said; "a dream of empty heads; impossible schemes ; attempts of ungovernable ambition ; let her get her to her convent fittest place for women." Little empty- headed officers, whose thoughts soared no further than the next campaign and the gold lace on their leather doublets, joked dully after their kind. As the fat canons walked with slow and stately pace, sunning themselves under the lee of the city walls, grizzled heads were nodded in ecclesiastical reprobation. It was a theme that convulsed all Avila with laughter, bitterness, and biting epigram at the expense of the gad-about nun and her companion. If such the hubbub in the town, tenfold bitterer and sharper, barbed by the stings of offended pride and personal animosity, the clatter of envenomed tongues within the precincts of the Encarnacion, perturbed to the very bottom of its tranquil, easy- going existence by this dangerous nun, who indirectly insulted the purity of their life and discipline. Hatred is never more rancorous than in these societies of recluses. Nor did Dona Guiomar fare much better. Not only did she find herself in open opposition to her family, but on Christmas morning her WE MUST AIM AT THE HIGHEST 203 confessor refused to give her absolution unless she consented to abandon a scheme which was the scandal of the town. " Now might she see," whispered the celestial voice to the afflicted woman, " what the saints had suffered who had founded Orders : this was but the beginning of persecution ; much more would she be called upon to endure in the future, but let her fear not, for he is ever at her side." Thus encouraged, Teresa consoled and strengthened her companion with Divine messages, which straightway filled the valiant hearts with such confidence that (in the vigorous language of the chronicler) they became pillars of brass, like another Jeremiah, to support the foundation whereon all Mount Carmel rested. And they needed all their courage, for the evening before the day which was to have seen the sale concluded on the very eve of success their hopes and plans were suddenly shattered to the ground. Salazar, unable to resist the tumult of tongues, withdrew his permission, under the pretext of the insufficiency and precarious nature of the endowment Sheltered behind his authority they could have faced the obloquy and derision of their townsmen ; Teresa, the enmity of her own community, outraged in its personal dignity and that of its Order ; now, their only defence gone, they were left exposed to all the attacks of calumny and the delighted " I told you so " of their friends. Few but rejoiced openly in their discomfiture. Some of the nuns were for throwing Teresa into the convent dungeons ; others very few took her part. Her confessor, " from whom she looked for consolation," forbade her to meddle more in the matter dearest to her heart, which she might now see had been an idle dream. Nor were those wanting (for the rumour had already sped through Avila that she had acted in obedience to direct revela- tion) who with the candour of friendship warned her to beware of being delated to the Inquisition. "This seemed to me very funny," writes Teresa, " and made me laugh" ; but, as we shall presently see, the officious warning, no doubt kindly meant, was productive of her greatest work. A weaker woman would have faltered. Not so the indomitable nun of the Encarnacion. As opposition grew stronger, her courage waxed greater. She witnessed the downfall of the edifice of plans and hopes so fondly reared, the unceasing toil of months suddenly brought to nought, impavid and unmoved ; and those who had expected to see her shamefaced and dismayed were amazed at her serenity. In the moment of what to those around her seemed complete defeat, she never doubted of the legitimate triumph of 204 SANTA TERESA a cause which she identified with that of the Almighty. Her work but assumed clearer and more definite outlines under the fierce light of persecution. Opposition but develops latent stores of energy which her mysticism has obscured but not impaired. Before the Provincial, however, withdrew his permission, the two friendless women, accused of acting on their own responsibility, had taken into their counsels a Dominican friar belonging to the great monastery of Sto. Tomas. To enlist in their favour the most powerful order in Spain, that of the Dominicans, was surely a master stroke of that diplomacy and admirable prudence which were the main secrets of Teresa's gigantic success. The two friends had hesitated at first between the Jesuits and the Dominicans, but as the former were as yet a young and struggling body, they decided not to engage them in a contest which could only render them odious, and perhaps imperil their position in Avila. Their choice fell on Ibanez, accounted one of the most learned men of the Dominican Order, certainly the most learned man in Avila. The interview took place in the monastery church. Suppressing all reference to Divine intervention, Teresa defended her plan on the grounds of human necessity alone. Ibanez was already pre- judiced against a scheme which seemed to him as dishevelled as to the rest. Few could resist the magnetic charm of Teresa's peculiar influence ; in argument she could baffle the keenest intellects, sharpened by theological subtleties ; the idea which dominated her added a passionate eloquence to her words. She indulged in no euphemistic phrases no mincing of words. If the arguments she used resembled in any way those which she has set down in her Life, she did not hesitate to describe the conventual life as she had known it as " a short cut to hell." Rather let fathers marry their daughters basely than allow them to face the dangers of ten worlds rolled into one, where youth, sensuality, and the Devil invite and incline them to follow things worldly of the worldly. Where [she exclaimed bitterly] was that spirit and fervour, that holy madness, which in past ages had shed so strange a radiance over the early struggles of the Orders, now delivered over to a stupid and deadening routine ? Now have those true lovers of Christ, whose heroic deeds were looked upon as madness, left the world indeed. The priest, the friar, and the nun of these latter days are so weak-kneed that they dare not wear old and patched garments for fear of giving scandal to the weak. Those who should have been examples for the improvement of others in virtue have completely blotted out the labour left by the spirits of the saints of other times in the different Orders. As the grave Dominican listened to words like these, he cannot but have thought that the spirit of the saints was not yet WE MUST AIM AT THE HIGHEST 205 dead, but lived again in the woman whose face, when divinely stirred, glowed with an unearthly and seraphic beauty. Was some chivalrous instinct roused within him by the almost child- like .belief of these two women fighting single-handed against an entire town ? Or was it the missive sent him by a gentleman of Avila, who, hearing of the step they had taken, bid him look out what he was doing, and refrain from helping them, that excited the spirit of contradiction, that broods in all of us ? The springs of minds are very complex ! Or was it the heavenly rhetoric of Teresa's pleading which, after a week's consideration, made him range himself deliberately on their side? Be it as it may, well was it for her cause that her Reform at this moment had won so valiant a champion ! For during the five months which elapsed between the abandonment of the scheme and its resumption (for Teresa never dreamed for a moment of infringing the precept of obedience placed on her by her confessor) it was Ibafiez who, in conjunction with Dona Guiomar, busied himself in procuring the necessary brief from Rome. Moreover his resolute partisanship produced a partial revolution of feeling, converting the fainthearted Salcedo and Master Daza, the mirrors of the town, into firm supporters of that from which they had hitherto held aloof. Nor was this all. Greater results were destined to flow from the intimacy thus inaugurated between the learned friar and the Carmelite nun. Menaced by threats of the Inquisition she was led to take counsel with him as to the nature and origin of her strange spiritual experiences, and these he now urged upon her to embody in writing. It was not the first time that she had consigned them to paper for the guidance of her confessors, but this attempt was more ambitious and sustained than any she had before undertaken. Thus these six months of enforced inaction, when the middle-aged nun sat down to write, with difficulty, in moments snatched from the spinning- wheel and humbler tasks, what, in spite of its often rambling and disconnected style, its want of cohesion, and its lengthy digressions, is perhaps the most remarkable autobiography that has ever been penned, were surely not the least important of her life. Probably neither penitent nor confessor dreamed that it was to be a book for all time. Teresa was extremely diffident of her literary ability ; she sets a higher value on that part of it which treats of her sins and struggles, perhaps because she deemed it more useful, and better calculated to remove the difficulties and pitfalls from the beginner's path, than on the veritable jewel, the Treatise on Prayer, which she intercalates into it, apparently without rhyme or reason. 206 SANTA TERESA With rare good sense, thoroughly alive to the dangers of mysticism, which she never encouraged in her convents or amongst her nuns, the Treatise on Prayer was limited to a very small circle of intimate friends, with whom she was already accustomed to discuss kindred subjects. It is in it, however, that she rises to heights of lyricism truly sublime. Carried away by her subject, her style becomes more concise, more expressive; there is little of the careless, slipshod form of expression which disfigures other portions of her Life; very few lengthy digressions break the progress of the narrative, nor does she, as elsewhere, constantly ramble from her subject. For concentration and form, it may perhaps be regarded as the most finished production of her genius. But if Teresa owed much to Ibaflez, his debt to her was not less great. With them it was not a case of confessor and penitent, but of two intimate friends, each of whom brought to the common store treasures of knowledge and experience, differing only in kind. The learning of the scholar shed light on many technical points that were obscure to the mystic ; whilst the mystic, in her turn, opened to the man of letters and theologian the gates of an enchanted region, where the cold forms of scholastic dogma shone transformed and instinct with strange vitality. It was Teresa's influence which led him at a no very distant date to withdraw entirely from the world, and devote himself for two years, in the seclusion of a distant monastery, to a life of prayer and contemplation. Nor was it the privilege of the great order of Preachers alone to help forward the Reform. The order of Jesuits also had its share in sustaining the soul of the future foundress of the Discalced Carmelites. The Jesuits and Dominicans still dispute Teresa's preference, and the part they took in her spiritual development at each other's expense, for if she was, as she loved to call herself, the " daughter of the Company," she styled herself with equal affection " Dominica in passione." For six months Teresa, forbidden by her confessor to meddle in, or even to speak of, the subject nearest to her heart, obeyed with the same ready obedience and cheerful alacrity with which she always, even at the height of her fame, received the mandates of those whom she regarded as God's lieutenants. The arrival of a new rector of the Society of Jesus was the fortuitous circumstance that enabled her once more to resume the long- interrupted scheme. One of the most stringent constitutions of the Jesuits is the complete submission it exacts, even in matters relating to the confessional, from each one of its members to his immediate WE MUST AIM AT THE HIGHEST 207 superior. Alvarez's opposition to his great penitent may have been mainly owing to the restraint placed upon him by his rector, Vasquez, who was now removed to another place. From the moment that Teresa and the new rector, Fray Gaspar Saldzar, met face to face in the confessional, their souls went out to each other in an instantaneous and mutual sympathy. Under his gentler and more soothing treatment, Alvarez's strenuous resistance, which had clipped her wings so effectually for months, lost much of its bitterness and rigour. To enlist Salazar's support ; to convert the sympathy which had from the first formed a mysterious bond of union between them, into open approval, was equivalent to enlisting in her favour, as in the case of Ibafiez, an Order rapidly increasing in power and numbers. There may have been some remote correlation between these considerations (and Teresa was far too shrewd to overlook them) and the impulse which, at a conjuncture so propitious, made itself again felt with renewed force, to take an active part in the work from which she had for so long been severed. She attributes to divine inspiration the arguments she used with the two Jesuits to win them to her side. The luminous instinct which prompts her to write on a slip of paper the words : " Quam magnificata sunt opera tua, Domine, nimis profundae factae sunt cogitationes tuae," and send it to Salazar with the request to make it the subject of his morrow's medi- tation, came from the Almighty. Strange that a great and practical reform could not be accomplished without pandering (perhaps unknowingly) to the religious prejudices and credulity of the age ! These men, with the facts patent before them, could not doubt but that the Carmelite Order had departed widely from its primitive purity ; that the lives of its members, if not scandalous, were at best unprofitable ; that the monastic rule was in many cases so relaxed as practically to be non- existent. And yet Teresa was forced to play (all unconsciously) on their fears and superstition to ensure their cordial co- operation, in the same way as to-day nothing can be accomplished without conscious or unconscious cant. Now, as then, to arouse interest in an object however worthy, it must always be associated with some hypothetical, inward, spiritual grace ; it is as necessary to-day as then, in order to do practical good, to resort to a divine mission, great sanctity, or some kind of extremely unpractical behaviour. So once more, with her confessor's full sanction, if not his actual co-operation, Teresa takes up the threads of her in- terrupted labours. She no longer staked the fate of her enter- prise on a weak superior's consent. Past experience had made 208 SANTA TERESA her wary, and, to obtain a legitimate and worthy end, she was perforce obliged to resort to dissimulation. In Alba, a day's journey from Avila, lived her sister Juana, married to Juan de Ovalle, a knight whose illustrious lineage contrasted strangely with his poverty. Him she had no difficulty in persuading to' come from Alba and to purchase the house as if for his own use ; and the arrival of Juana herself, on the loth of August 1561, to rejoin her husband, not only gave colour to the rumour that they were about to become residents of Avila, but afforded Teresa a reasonable pretext for her frequent absences from the Encarnacion. From that date until Christmas, her life was a ceaseless struggle against innumerable difficulties. Although Dofia Guiomar de Ulloa was ostensibly at the head and front of the enterprise, in order to divert suspicion from Teresa, in case the news leaked out, it was the latter working in the background, who trudged to and fro between the Encarnacion and her future convent, organising, superintending workmen, painfully gathering together a little money for immediate necessities (for without it even a saint is powerless), Dona Guiomar being able to provide but little, and " so little that it was next to nothing"; now tormented by doubts and fears, as to whether the house was large enough for the needs of its future inmates ; encouraging, directing, praying, sometimes desponding. When tempted to despair at the inadequacy of the building, she heard the divine voice whisper in words singularly beautiful, even if they were but the reflection of her own thoughts shadowed forth with startling distinctness : " Already have I told thee to enter as thou canst. Oh, ambition of humanity, that thinkest that even earth will be wanting, how many times have I slept under the dew of heaven, because I had not where to lay my head ! " I am amazed how I bore it [she says in her Life], Sometimes in my affliction I said : My Lord, why dost thou order me to do things which seem impossible, for although I am but a woman I might compass some- what, if I were but free ; but hampered on all sides, without money either for the Brief or anything else, nor any means of procuring it, what can I do, Lord ? But somehow, in spite of all obstacles not the least of them the trammels imposed on her personal liberty she managed to gather together the price of the house. With a fine, breezy faith in Providence, she hired her workmen on credit, trusting in God to pay them. And lo ! at the moment of her direst need, arrives a present of money from her brother Lorenzo in Peru, a circumstance that she and those around her looked on as little less than a miracle. WE MUST AIM AT THE HIGHEST 209 I believe [was Teresa's reply] that it was God that moved you to send me so much; for, as for a worthless nun ("monjuela") like myself who already accounts it an honour to go ragged, Juan Pedro de Espinosa y Varona brought enough to relieve my wants for some years. . . . This lady Dona Yomar [sic] who is writing to you, is helping me. She was the wife of Francisco de Avila, of the Avilas of the Sobralejo, as you may remember. Her husband died ten years ago, and had a million of fortune ; she also possesses an entailed estate in her own right, besides her husband's ; and although she was left a widow at twenty-five, she has not married, but given herself earnestly to God. She is very spiritual. For more than four years the friendship between us has been warmer than that of sisters ; and although she helps me, for she gives a great part of the endowment, she is at present without money ; and touching the making and purchase of the house, I am doing it with the favour of God. ... I have already received two dowers in advance, and I have bought the house, although in secret ; and as for the building, and other necessities, I knew not where to turn. So that I hired the workmen on credit alone (since it is God's will that I should do so, he will provide). It seemed crazy to do so : when comes his Majesty and moves you to come to my relief ; and what has amazed me most of all is that I was in the greatest need of the forty dollars you added ; and I believe it was St. Joseph (for such is to be its name) that brought it about ; and I know that he will repay you for it. In short, although poor and small, the views from it and the country around are lovely, although even this must end. Long afterwards, every little circumstance connected with this, her first foundation, was dwelt on lovingly, and tenderly exaggerated by the bystanders. Her biographers have in- corporated all the precious memories gathered by Ribera after Teresa's death, from the lips of one of the principal actors, Doiia Guiomar de Ulloa, all tending to enhance the gigantic figure of the Carmelite nun, and to tinge all she did with the miraculous. A wall, to all seeming well and solidly built, fell down during the night, and Juan de Ovalle, justly incensed at what he attributed to the bungling work of careless masons, was for making them rebuild it at their own expense. Where- upon Teresa, to whose exalted mind it seemed most natural that Satan should let loose all the brood of hell to compass the destruction of a convent which she regarded as a bulwark, an advanced outpost to break his power, is reported to have said to her sister Juana: "Tell Don Juan not to strive with those workmen, for it is not their fault : as many devils (God per- mitting it) banded together to throw down the wall ; let him hold his peace, and give them the same wages as they had before, to build it afresh." As for Dona Guiomar, who, with a logic not altogether extinct in Spain, was for desisting from a work which the Almighty himself seemed to discountenance, she was forced to content herself with Teresa's laconic reply, " If it has fallen down, let them build it up again." 4 210 SANTA TERESA Nor was a miracle (her first according to the evidence for her Canonisation) wanting to shed an increased lustre on this her first foundation. The account of Ribera, the most trustworthy and the least credulous of her biographers, who knew intimately several of the actors in that strange scene, not devoid of something grandiose and pathetic, and who had probably often heard it related by Dona Guiomar herself, is that Juan de Ovalle, returning home one day, found his little son, Gonzalo, lying across the doorway, to all appearance stiff and dead. " How this came about, or what it was, was never known, nor whether he was really dead." If we accept Ribera's version (for the story is told with as many variations as the credulity of successive biographers demanded), it seems that the father bore his child in to Teresa, who, taking him on her lap and silencing the clamorous cries of the bereaved mother, covered herself with her veil and bent her head low down until her face almost touched his. The bystanders stood around in hushed suspense. What passed in that moment of absorbed silence, what agonised prayers rose to Heaven from under that black veil, who can say? Presently, when, with the first signs of returning consciousness, he stretched out his hands to caress her face, she handed him to his mother as if he had just awoke from an ordinary childish slumber, saying with tender reproof, " You who were in such grief for your son, behold him ! take him ! " The chronicler relates the same circumstance with the following notable amplifications, although the central fact remains the same : that the child was playing about amongst the heaps of building materials, when a large piece of wall fell down and buried him in its ruins ; whence he was rescued to all appearance lifeless ; that Teresa and her friend were sent for and arrived in all haste ; and that it was Doiia Guiomar who, taking him in her arms, implored Teresa to obtain from God his restoration to life. Thus a superstitious and uncritical age (and never was there such a recrudescence of the grossest superstition as took place during the century immediately following Teresa's death) joyfully accepted as a miracle, giving it all the necessary elaboration, what had originated in the defective knowledge of a few alarmed bystanders, for whom it was easy, in the perturbation of the moment, to mistake for the cessation of life a severe fainting fit or prolonged period of unconsciousness, produced by a heavy blow. If more was wanting to establish a miracle, Teresa's own conduct on this occasion was, to the tender credulity of Dona Guiomar, as to WE MUST AIM AT THE HIGHEST 211 those to whom she described it, more than a sufficient proof that one had been worked in very truth. On other occasions when miracles were ascribed to her, Teresa's attitude was one of amazement and wonder that they could say such unlikely things. In this instance, however, when her friend asked, " Sister, how was this, for the child was dead ? " it was noted that she only smiled and was silent. Such is the evidence, enough, indeed, for the simple and superstitious minds of that century ; more than enough for the often disingenuous process pursued by the miracle-hunters of the one which followed it, on which rests what is set down in the Instructions for her Beatification as Teresa's first miracle. The boy she is thus said to have resuscitated became a gentleman in the household of the Dukes of Alba, and outlived her three years, dying at the early age of twenty-eight. It is said that he often blamed her playfully for having deprived him of salvation in his infancy, and reminded her of the greater obligation she was under to make the Lord take him to heaven, since but for her he would have been there long ago. In connection with children she seems to me to be especially beautiful and touching. Another child was born to Dona Juana during the progress of the foundation, the little Joseph, doubtless so christened at Teresa's request after her favourite saint, who died in infancy. It was remembered that she had said as she took him in her arms, " Please God, child, that if thou art not to be good, he may take thee as thou art, a little angel, before thou canst offend him." When he died, Teresa was holding him in her arms, and gazing intently on the baby face, and her sister, who was watching her attentively, saw her countenance change and become angelically enraptured and beautiful. Teresa was about to go from the room in silence, so that her sister might indulge her first outburst of grief undisturbed, when Juana, calm and collected, bid her stay, for she knew the child was dead. Then said Teresa with a joyful countenance, and as if in deep wonder, " It is indeed a thing to praise the Lord for, to see how many angels come for the soul, when one of these little angels dies." It is hard to judge, for the lapse of time which intervened between these occurrences and the chronicling of them had already made it difficult, if not impossible, to disentangle fact from fancy, how far she had at this period imposed herself upon the imaginations of those around her, or to what extent these honest and simple friends afterwards magnified and 212 SANTA TERESA distorted incidents which, perhaps passing almost unperceived at the time, and but imperfectly remembered, acquired a significant interest when viewed in the light of her increasing fame and sanctity. The very desire to glorify the memory of the great saint, whose veritable grandeur had been displayed in the little and minute details of a laborious life, may have led them consciously or unconsciously into gross exaggerations directed to surround her with a halo of the supernatural, and to regard what had been perfectly natural and explicable at the time, as miracles and evidences of marvellous and mysterious power. Teresa but underwent the fate common to nearly all great people who have impressed their indi- viduality on their century, of having a fictitious character forged for her by the alchemy of time and of a perfectly sincere but enthusiastic imagination. If the following instance is true, it rests solely, however, on Dona Guiomar's testimony, it would almost seem that there were moments when Teresa herself encouraged the idea which lent to her superior powers, although she is careful never to attribute the possession of them to herself. It may have been that, feeling that the supernatural was expected of her, she consciously or unconsciously ministered to the craving. It may have been that, with her rare penetration of intellect, she felt that, to succeed, she must dominate the imaginations of those on whose coadjutorship her enterprise in great measure depended, and for this purpose was led to use information which she alone possessed, to astonish and dazzle them. Thus on one occasion when they were short of money to carry on the building, Dona Guiomar, with but small hopes that her request would be granted, having sent to her mother at Toro, to beseech her to send her the sum they needed, Teresa called her to her one day, and bid her be of good cheer, for she had just seen it counted out to the messenger in the stables underneath the house, and he was already on his way to Avila. The man on his arrival corroborated her assertion, affirming it to have taken place at the very hour that she had said. Teresa was not, however, equally happy in all her predic- tions. That relating to her own death still remains a stumbling- block to her biographers, who, with all their ingenuity, have been unable to elude or explain it. Her sister Maria also (she of Castellanos de la Canada) lived four years after she (Teresa) received the mysterious warning that she should die suddenly and without the consolations of the Church, which she did, although the fulfilment of the latter part of the prophecy is not surprising when it is taken into consideration that she WE MUST AIM AT THE HIGHEST 213 lived in a lonely country house, far away from any town or village. Even greater than Teresa have been inexorably condemned to base their power on the superstition and credulity of the vulgar; have been obliged to resort to trickery to impose themselves, and what is greater than themselves their Mission, their Reform on an age which might otherwise have repudiated them. Pity of humanity ! that those greater and more valiant of heart, of purer and more elevated intellect than their century, should be mercilessly condemned to descend from a level which fringes the skirts of Divinity, to touch and interest one im- measurably beneath them ! If she descended at times to accept a role which, exalted and enthusiastic as she was, she seems rarely to have sought, and never to have liked, it was to a certain extent imposed upon her by the necessities of the case, by the importance her work assumed in her imagination, which made every other consideration subordinate to the central idea of her life. A plain statement of a plain fact, that the Carmelite rule was relaxed, though obvious, would have aroused nothing but resentment; a commonplace attempt to found a new convent in order to restore the old discipline would only have met with ridicule and failure. To fling around it the glamour of the supernatural, and thereby to excite those mingled emotions of curiosity and awe before the vague and the mysterious, must have presented a strong temptation to a less scrupulous and honest mind, considering the difficulties in her path; although all she aimed at was the foundation of one small convent, poverty-stricken and rudely simple, devoid of all but the barest essentials of human life, where thirteen poor women should agree to share their poverty and unite their prayers, a holocaust of sacrifice to the Divinity. But if the stakes she was playing for seem to us so inconsiderable, it is most certain that she was facing a great and menacing danger. If on the one side she was visited by radiant visions of St. Joseph and St. Mary, who assured her of her freedom from sin, and hung around her neck a golden collar and cross in token of their protection of her and her convent, as took place in the Dominican monastery of Sto. Tomds whilst she was at Mass ; and by Sta. Clara, in exceeding beauty, promising protection and help to her sister foundress, the notoriety she had achieved in Avila by her visions and revelations exposed her at any moment to the pursuits of the Inquisition, when she would have figured as one of the many deluders and frantic visionaries with whom the country teemed. The visions of Magdalen de 214 SANTA TERESA la Cruz, as has been already said, were not one whit less likely or more absurd than her own, and yet she had been condemned to perpetual seclusion after being for thirty years prioress of her convent, where she had most likely, in spite of the idle testimony figged up by the Inquisitors, shone as an example of goodness and virtue. The feeling Teresa's visions excited against her in Avila may be judged from the fact that a friar did not hesitate to censure her so plainly from the pulpit that only her name was wanting to point the moral. Her sister Juana, who was present with her at the sermon, being so over- whelmed with shame and confusion that not only did she make all haste to escape from the church, but insisted on Teresa at once returning to the seclusion of the Encarnacion, and, it is even said, refused thenceforward to have anything to do with the convent, which devolved entirely upon Dona Guiomar. The year full of agitation draws to a close. The Bulls for foundation have been sent for from Rome. Her past experience, although she attributes to transcendental inspiration what was rather the result of mature reflection and the sound conclusions of human reasoning and expediency, has shown Teresa the danger of placing her convent under the control of the Carmelites. For she already distinctly foresaw the animus of the older Order to the upstart which had sprung up in its midst, with no less an ambition than to restore to its original purity the rule which the former had perverted and well-nigh abandoned ; she already foresaw that it would be most bitterly opposed by, and find its greatest enemies in, the Order of Carmelites itself, jealous in extreme of prerogatives and privi- leges consecrated by time. There was one person, and one person alone in Avila, who had influence enough to protect it from the attacks of its opponents, and that was the Bishop himself: that the convent should be placed under his control formed one of the clauses in the Bull then being negotiated for at Rome. Her journey to Toledo was to be the means of radically altering her original project in another important essential. She had been acting, it must be remembered, without the consent and knowledge of her Provincial. In spite of the secrecy with which the foundation had been carried on, some- thing of it had transpired in Avila, exciting belief and incredulity by turns. Salazar, who all this time had been absent and knew nothing of what had been going on, was hourly expected in Avila, and Teresa dreaded his arrival lest, when it came to his ears, as it must, it should be followed by a mandate which would have shattered her schemes to pieces like a house WE MUST AIM AT THE HIGHEST 215 of cards, and meant the total collapse of all her plans. On Christmas Eve, however, she received his commands, under precept of obedience, to start at once with a companion for Toledo, her mission being to comfort, in her recent bereave- ment, one of the greatest ladies of Castille, a member of the princely and quasi-royal house of Medina-Celi, and sister of the Duke of that title, Dona Luisa de la Cerda, who had been plunged into such profound affliction by the death of her husband, Arias Pardo, a nephew of the venerable Cardinal de Tabera of Toledo, and one of the richest men in Spain, that her friends despaired of her recovery. At first sight it seemed to Teresa as if her efforts were fated to end in failure. Without her presence to direct and animate, her supporters prophesied defeat and ruin. They urged her to write to her Provincial, and to stay at all costs in Avila. It was impossible, however, to defer compliance with her Provincial's orders, which admitted of no delay. He himself had acted under great pressure ; all the influence possessed by rank and power had been brought to bear on him to extort his consent. The Jesuit rector of San Gil, to whom she betook herself in her doubts and hesitation, urged obedience. As the nuns chanted midnight matins in the dimly-lighted choir, she was carried away in ecstasy, and was warned by the Celestial voice of a great plot being hatched against her convent, by the time of the Provincial's arrival, which made her temporary absence expedient. On the last day of December she wrote to her brother Lorenzo in Peru, the first in that long series of inimitable epistolary correspondence which has fortunately been preserved to us. It is impossible to render the quaint charm of these letters, which are perhaps the best specimens of the kind in the Spanish language ; for the quaint phraseology, the homely turn of a phrase, so enchanting in the original, the very simplicity of it which makes it so delightful in the Castilian, lose all their delicate evanescent fragrance when translated into another language, like a sweet-scented, bright-coloured flower, which has been dried and " hortus siccus'd " by the botanist. It is in these spontaneous productions of her pen, didactically dry, or overflowing with humour and tender witticism, that Teresa is at her best. They reveal her mind in all its curious workings ; her shrewdness about business and money matters; her talent for administration; her intense interest in life and what was passing around her. None of your long faces and "serious views" of life which latter-day saints affect ! No talk of the grave and vast responsibilities of existence. Query Did a good person ever take a " serious SANTA TERESA 210 &1T-M^a to lF.:^ SE^isfiS'TH^SS and calming the litigious insun ^ J abje to keep body illustrious gentleman as , , ^ fashion of those and soul together, as seems to na ^ eldest si ter days, was bent on d^ggm JJ ^ give an account of she of Castellanos) -lore :ine maladm inistered by her her father's property, wastea " Q d keep him in husband, the dead Mar m deGm ^ J ous po i nt heaven '."concludes Teresa pousiy, itions pro per for of irony. Spiritual ^f ^ S oul(without them her letters the occasion and soothing me * \ oro f ane ), free from the Sfcrts^WSHiS i- iP of n laughter, humorous obse ; vatl "' D a Qfta Te resa de Ahumada noticeable that she sigm ; hersel I U Encarnacio n, and which the invanable style of tte nuns^ which ^ , nd more glorious one of leresa c j6 Tn thebeginning of January cold and searching winds, * e /^f a Vompanied by Juan de panion (for nuns never travelled alon^accomp y ^^ Ovalle, set out on their journey towards ; 10 blocked across 'the wild passes of &&****** journey be yond with snow. We possess no de^ls of thi^n e J ^^^ Qn her native province It ma, ^be assumed y ^^ donkeys or mules, the only ^ay d loomy mou n- paths and precipitous heights of tnos wn B weather wag ?ains. It would be three or even five days 1 ^.^ ^ bad, before they arrived in sight of the ha ggy ^ ^ T sombre and threatening above the ^ ng walls wh}c ^ crowned by the citadel and shu : w i by m and v ^ w guard the dark ^ t ^ftem Of mW cupola of ? or the first time, m the p a n below, the ^ T - r a ^ts^t ^ ab ve flat - ^ofed Moorish houses and terraced gardens. re not Teresa found herself P^ff s O f powerful grandees altogether new to her. The great hoi as V themselves were in that age little :less thar ^cour^wn ^^ Q{ _at least that of Spam -P r ^ e " ted . nd the palace of Dona worldliness and monasticism combined , a WE MUST AIM AT THE HIGHEST 217 Luisa de la Cerda, one of the wealthiest and most powerful landowners in Spain, was not likely to be an exception. It is an old tradition of Toledo, and a curious coincidence if true, that the house where she now found herself an honoured guest was that where, in after years, the community of Discalced Carmelites, after many changes, finally took up their permanent abode, and where they have remained to this day. If this is so, it stood on a steep slope almost facing the Church of San Juan de los Reyes, then in its pristine freshness, and overlooked the green and delightful valley of the Tagus which gleams below. In that sombre red building, half Moorish, half Christian, retainers, courtiers, men-at-arms, gentlemen of the household, mischievous pages in the gay livery of the house, brushed against the sweeping robes of grave ecclesiastics and friars in courtyard and corridor, through which a few nuns flit to-day wearing Teresa's habit. And yet surrounded as she was by knightly relatives and courtiers who outvied each other in their desire to do her homage, this great lady who sat enthroned in state on the canopied dais in the midst of her vinegar-faced duenas and waiting-women, had turned aside from them all in the moment of her affliction to seek consolation and help from a little old nun of Avila, rumours of whose sanctity had reached her ears in Toledo. The intrigue, rivalry, jealousy, and syco- phancy, the atmosphere in which the great ones of the earth live and breathe, revolted the honest and independent spirit of the poor Castilian nun, perplexed and wearied by the minute ceremonial and the multifarious forms of etiquette she observed around her. Undazzled in these splendid halls, her keen eyes stripped away the glittering tinsel, and pierced through the outward envelope which veiled the life of the grandee. Where the world saw brocade and jewels, and infinite bowing of the knee and lip-service, Teresa, probing deeper, found a poor woman, alone amidst a multitude of servants and attendants, " in whom small indeed is the trust she can repose, unable to speak more to one than another for fear of exciting envy and jealousy, deprived of personal freedom and spontaneity of action, in a state of servitude, prisoner to her own dignity and station," who filled her with the profoundest pity. The greater the rank [she moralises], the more cares and trials it brings, and an anxiety to keep up the dignity belonging to their condition, which does not let them live. . . . Such is the world now [she writes in the con- cluding chapters of her Life, which she finished under Dona Luisa's roof] that life, if some of it is to be spent in serving God, would need to be made longer to learn the points and new-fangled things, and modes of good 218 SANTA TERESA breeding now in vogue. I cross myself at the sight of what goes on. The thing is, I knew not then how to live ; for carelessness in treating people much beyond their merits is not accepted as a joke, but so seriously do they consider themselves affronted, that it is necessary to make satisfaction when it arises from carelessness, and even so, please God, may they believe it. She is worn out, she. adds, and never ceases making apologies for her constant breaches of etiquette, " which the world esteems no small matter." Her conventual life was little or no excuse: indeed it would rather seem that convents were intended to be courts and tribunals of good breeding. " I certainly cannot understand this," she adds drily ; " I have considered whether some saint has not said that it ought to be a court to teach those who fain would be courtiers of heaven, and that they have understood it to mean the reverse." The changing fashions of the world into which she was now for the first time plunged filled her with dismay. If one could learn them and have done with it, it might be borne ; but even in the superscriptions and addresses of letters, a university chair is needed to teach one how it must be done, for now paper is left on the one side, now on the other, and he who used to be addressed as Magnificent has now become Illustrious. I know not how it will end ; for although I am not fifty, and in my life I have seen so many changes that I know not how to live, please God we may not have to pay for these futilities in the other life which knows no change. No courtier, Teresa ! No mealy-mouthed, flattering nun, intent on her own aggrandisement, and that of her Order ; only a simple Castilian lady, whose old-fashioned modes of courtesy have grown somewhat musty in the shades of the Encarnacion ; only a woman of rare genius and powers of mind, living in an invisible world of such light and beauty that earth and its glitter fall into their proper place. Nevertheless her just appreciation of them enabled her to treat with native dignity, and at same time with the frankness and unconstraint of an equal, which indeed by birth she was, those ladies, " whom she might with honour have served." Teresa had learnt good-breed- ing in a school of which she need not feel ashamed. Her dignity ; the native courtliness and sweetness of her manners ; the inevit- able attraction which she exercised on all who came within her influence, were more imposing than the idle formulas which, whilst despising, she was careful to comply with in order not to give offence. Dona Luisa, a woman of humble and simple manners, conceived for her a warm and abiding attachment. She left a deep impression on a household formed of such multifarious elements. If she did not herself escape from many petty annoyances ; if the prying eyes of the curious WE MUST AIM AT THE HIGHEST 219 household, anxious to surprise her in a moment of rapture and ecstasy, her reputation for which had preceded her to Toledo, watched her furtively as she prayed, through the chinks of her door, no less did she amaze them a moment after by her calm demeanour, in which nothing eccentric or exceptional pointed out the saint. She succeeded in transforming the rancorous envy of dependants, jealous of the love and favour shown by their mistress to a stranger, into admiration and genuine affection. They must perchance have thought [she says] that I sought some private end of my own, and the Lord must have allowed them to give me some trials, like the things I have mentioned, and others of different kinds, so that I should not become absorbed, on the other hand, in the comforts of delicate living ! Nevertheless, her presence acted like a benediction on both mistress and servitors, and she instilled into her surroundings some of her own lofty, uncompromising religious spirit. It was here that she drew to her side, and made a devoted adherent of Maria de Salazar, a waiting-woman and a relative (doubtless a poor one) of Dofia Luisa's. We shall hear more of her anon. A woman of distinguished ability and ceaseless energy, she shall figure in this subsequent history as Teresa's greatest and most capable prioress. Her education had been of a higher standard than was general in those days, and on more than one occasion her inopportune displays of erudition aroused Teresa's ire, whose opinion, strongly expressed, was, that "ignorance was the most fitting for saints." At one time, indeed, there seems almost to have been a spirit of rivalry between the foundress and her prioress, whom Teresa accused of displaying a shiftiness and foxiness (" raposen'a ") that made her admirably competent to treat with Andaluces, for whom Teresa had all the honest Castilian's dislike. Nevertheless a great woman, a devoted adherent of the Reform, and possessed of a fervent devotion to its foundress, which lasted until her death, and, after it, was the cause of all her misadventures, her exile and disgrace, so boldly did she fight for the principles which had been dearest to Teresa's heart. Her personality would have shone out pre-eminently remarkable, had it not been obscured by the greater one of Teresa herself. It was in Toledo too that Teresa was destined to develop the true spirit of the Reform, to lay down those broad lines which formed its basis, as to one of which she was still ignorant. A Carmelite novice of Granada, one of those picturesque figures which flit so constantly over the changing scene of this strange 220 SANTA TERESA period, Maria de Jesus, the daughter of a relator or law-officer of that town, a woman no longer young, for she had taken refuge in the monastic life only after the death of her husband, at the bidding (as she asserted) of the Virgin Mary, had con- ceived, in the same month and year as Teresa herself, the project of founding a Carmelite convent of greater strictness. With the almost heroic contempt of material difficulties which is the dominant feature of the religious enthusiasts of that age, and lends such a strain of grandeur to them, she sold all that she possessed, and travelled barefoot to Rome to obtain the necessary licence. As the Pope looked at her bleeding feet he exclaimed, " Woman of strong courage, be it to thee as thou wilt ! " She had probably heard of Teresa's projects from their common counsellor, Fr. Caspar de Saldzar, and on her return from Rome she made a detour of sixty leagues (close on 200 miles) out of her direct road, in order to speak and take counsel with her sister foundress. The two women spent a fortnight together in intimate communion. As yet Teresa had never seen the original constitutions of her Order, which were now displayed before her for the first time, and was totally unaware that the primitive Carmelites were forbidden to possess personal property or fixed endowments. The greatest obstacle to the foundation at Avila was the almost insuperable difficulty of providing for it a settled endowment. Teresa took in the situation at a glance. To make voluntary poverty the pivot of her reform was to clear the last barrier from her path. Hitherto she had been bent on safeguarding her convent from the unhappy state into which the Encarnacion had fallen, where, as she had herself witnessed, the want of the bare necessaries of life, instead of conducing to greater devotion, repose, and contemplation, rather tended to breed discontent and worldliness in minds destitute of her own strong longing for self-abnegation and poverty. For the first time she perceived her own want of logic, shuffling cause for effect : poverty was not the cause of distraction, it was rather distraction that caused poverty. She submitted her project thus modified in a most essential point to those confessors and men of letters in whose judgment she had the most confidence. It meant a radical alteration in the whole basis of her Reform. Those whom she consulted were divided in their opinions. The majority characterised it as folly. Ibafiez sent two pages of contradiction and theology, the result of much painful consideration and study. " In order," was the incisive reply of the witty saint, "not to follow her vocation, her vow of poverty, and the counsel of Christ in their WE MUST AIM AT THE HIGHEST 221 full perfection, she needed not the help of his theology and learning." The letter of St. Peter of Alcantara was much more to the taste of one who, stirred anew to a divine impatience of wealth even for her convents by the sight of Christ poor and naked on the cross, for herself would have gone a-begging, and deprived herself of house and havings. Jesuits and theologians, said St. Peter (and there could be no doubt as to his opinion, for in order to gratify Dofia Luisa's curiosity, he paid Teresa a visit in Toledo about this time), who, like Teresa, was an unconscious revolutionary within the bosom of the Church, were competent enough to decide on matters of conscience and legal difficulties, but when it came to the perfection of life, those alone could speak who lived it. Had it not been for these enthusiasts who have held aloft the grand central thought round which dogma sinks into a mere jumble of unmeaning words had it not been for these torches which have flamed up in the obscurity of the centuries, casting a glow of glory and heroism on the Church, it could not have lived until now. It is your revolutionaries, your San Francisco of Assisi, your Santa Teresa, with their thirst for poverty, their divine contempt for material wealth, who have held aloft the central power of the Church, have preached the vindication of the poor and the lowly, the divinity of Lazarus's rags. If this thought ever becomes entirely obscured, the Catholic Church is doomed. " But," adds St. Peter of Alcdntara, " there is nothing commendable in poverty for its own sake ; only in that which is borne for the love of Christ." And let us not forget the humble but all-important part in this momentous resolution taken by the obscure and devoted "beata" who laid the corner-stone of Teresa's edifice. In science as in sanctity, the discoveries of many forgotten pioneers are only rescued from oblivion by some mind of transcendental grandeur, who, knowing how to use and combine them, and what results to draw from them, reveals them with a fresh light to an astonished world. Thus the little wavelets of the ocean stirred into being by the breeze go to swell the mighty roller which surges against the rocky barrier of an Atlantic coast. In Toledo Teresa also renewed an acquaintance formed long ago in the confessional with a Dominican friar, whom her biographers conjecture to have been either Barron or Fr. Garcia de Toledo of the noble house of Oropesa. Inspired by a strong desire to speak with him and know the state of his soul, thrice she rose, and thrice she sat down again. The good angel prevailed. Determined to win a man 222 SANTA TERESA of such brilliant abilities to God's service, she felt herself divinely inspired with arguments and messages which for fear of laughter she hesitated to give. At last, unable to resist the impulse, she wrote them down on paper and gave them to him. The truths I set down [she writes] fitted his case so exactly, that he was amazed. And the Lord must have disposed him to believe that they were messages from his Majesty (and fervently did I, in spite of my baseness, supplicate the Lord to turn him to himself and fill him with abhorrence of the joys and things of life), and so, may he be praised for ever, he did it so effectually that every time he speaks with me he holds me entranced, and if I had not seen it, I should have looked on it as doubtful that in so short a time the Lord should have showered on him such signal favours, and turned his thoughts so entirely to himself, that he no longer seems to live for anything of earth. May his Majesty support him, for if he goes on as he has begun ... he will be one of his most distinguished servants, and will do great good to many souls. . . . Let it not astonish you [she addresses Ibafiez] nor appear impossible, all is possible to the Lord; but endeavour to be stronger in faith and humiliate yourself, that God makes a little old woman wiser in this science than perchance you yourself. CHAPTER VIII FOUNDATION OF SAN JOSE IN the beginning of June 1562 the Provincial raised his mandate of obedience. She was now free either to stay on a little longer in Toledo, or to proceed directly to Avila, as she might think best. The election of prioress was drawing nigh in the Convent of the Encarnacion, and, fain to avoid the turmoil of it, Teresa elected to do the former. The general wish of the community that she herself should become its prioress was not foreign to her resolution. The very thought of which to me [she writes] was so great a torment, that although I felt I could pass through any martyrdom with ease for the sake of God, I could in no way persuade myself to undertake this ; for, letting alone the great trial, on account of the number of nuns and other causes, to which I had always been averse, as well as to accept any office, which I had always, on the contrary, refused, it seemed a great danger to the conscience, and so I praised God that I was not there. Thus shrinking from responsibilities which must have proved a serious hindrance to the foundation, to which she had vowed herself heart and soul, she wrote to her friends not to vote for her, and resolved to delay her departure until after the election was over. As with all really great minds, the possession of power gave her no pleasure. In her own convents, at the height of her fame, she was perhaps the humblest nun of them all, honestly accepting her full (and more than her full) share of drudgery, showing her daughters, not by the easy method of precept but by the thorny one of practice, the dignity which underlies the basest office when idealised by a lofty motive. " Whilst I was thus exceedingly contented at not being present during that tumult," she continues, "the Lord told me on no account to fail to go, for, since I desired a cross, a very sufficient one was preparing for me, which I must not refuse ; to set out with good courage, for he would aid me, and to go at once." 223 224 SANTA TERESA Thus irresistibly impelled by the divine voice to be up and doing, Teresa, deaf to the pleadings of the friends who would fain have retained her with them a little longer, set forth for her native town. By a strange coincidence, in which it was not difficult for herself and the little band of enthusiasts who had gathered round her standard to discern the finger of God, the Bull that had been made out in the names of Da. Guiomar de Ulloa and Da. Aldonza de Guzman, her mother, both absent in Toro (the former purposely, so as not to excite suspicion or remark), arrived in Avila the same night that she herself alighted, weary and travel-stained, before the gates of the Encarnacion. Nor was this all : it seemed indeed as if the very people on whose aid she most depended had simultaneously agreed to gather together in Avila at this most important juncture. Her little knot of supporters, Francisco de Salcedo, Master Caspar Daza (all doubts and fears vanished), Gonzalo de Aranda, Fray Pedro Ibanez, now converted into a staunch adherent of the cause of poverty he had but lately so stoutly opposed, and, greater than all, Fr. Pedro de Alcantara, were gathered together in anxious conclave : the Bishop himself, whose presence in Avila was in itself an unusual circumstance, as he generally resided elsewhere, just returned from El Tiemblo, 1 had been won over by the united efforts of Salcedo and San Pedro to accept the jurisdiction of her convent. Not without infinite difficulty. Not only had the heroic old Saint, whose influence had disarmed opposition, excited help from unexpected quarters, and changed the whole aspect of affairs, addressed him an eloquent appeal on behalf of Teresa and her convent, which, closely written without blanks or margins and covering less than half a sheet of paper, proved (as the chronicler observes) his love for poverty even in the minutest things; but, failing of success, he arose from his sickbed in Salcedo's house, whose guest he was, and with declining strength mounted his mule and rode out to El Tiemblo to exert all his great powers of persuasion in a personal interview, to induce the Bishop to accede. The chronicler has it (although neither she herself nor any other of her biographers confirms it, and it may be regarded as extremely unlikely and altogether apocryphal) that, strangely oblivious of the divine admonition which had directed her to vest the control of her first foundation in the Bishop (although, indeed, we shall find these divine admonitions constantly shifting as circumstances or the dictates of human 1 A village close to Guisando, about nine leagues from Avila. FOUNDATION OF SAN JOSF. 225 reason required, with an indecision calculated to impress us with but a poor idea of all-prescient wisdom), Teresa prudently suppressed the clause in the brief relating to the Bishop, and made a last attempt to place it under the jurisdiction of the Provincial of the Carmelites. But without success. For the wily Carmelite, scared by his past experiences, which were still fresh in his memory, if content to wink at the insubordina- tion of his subject, held himself religiously aloof from taking any part in a matter which as yet gave but small hope of fulfilment, and the consequences of which might be as disastrous as before. Indeed, her resolution to found in absolute poverty, and the precariousness of the means of subsistence, had formed the most serious obstacle with the Bishop and one that San Pedro de Alcantara had found it necessary to use all the resources of argument to combat. If, however, the Bishop still entertained any lingering scruples they soon vanished before the charm and power of Teresa's presence. A felicitous circumstance, as it turned out, enabled Teresa personally to devote herself, without exciting suspicion or inquiry, to the completion of her convent. Her sister Juana had returned home to Alba in the beginning of June, when Juan de Ovalle, seeing that Teresa still lingered in Toledo, went thither to bid her farewell, before he too finally left for Alba. As he passed through Avila, however, on his way homewards, he was overtaken by a fever, which forced him to break his journey, and to take refuge in San Jose", where he was now lying alone and untended. Here Teresa got leave to go and nurse him. His illness, it is noted, lasted just so long as it was necessary for her to be absent from the Encarnacion in order to enable her to put the last finishing strokes to her labours, "and as soon as it was expedient for him to get well, in order that I should be free and he should leave me the house empty, the Lord gave him his health, which amazed him greatly." With feverish energy and the most absolute secrecy, hurrying on the workmen ; inducing those who were doubtful to look with favour on her project ; impatient of delay which might prove dangerous ; the devoted woman toiled unremittingly night and day until the modest building, rudely simple, rigidly restricted to the barest essentials of life, was got into a state to receive its inmates. She herself was far from dreaming that she had set on foot a great movement, or divining the vast results which were to flow from it. The sentiment of her mission was, as in most cases, the chance growth of unforeseen circumstances. For 15 226 SANTA TERESA the present this " humble sanctuary," her one little gateway of Bethlehem, amply fulfilled her highest aspirations. And not only was she its spiritual foundress, but much of the material labour of its construction was due to her own manual and un- remitting toil ; and within its walls she no doubt expected to end her days unknown and unnoticed. At last all was ready ; the figures of Our Lady and St. Joseph were in their places over the convent doorway ; the small bell with a hole in it, which only weighed three pounds, and had been probably given to her as useless on account of its being damaged in the foundry, was hung in the slender bell tower. Little did she dream then of the pathetic and tender interest which should attach to it in after years, or that long afterwards, when she herself lay dead in Alba de Tormes, it should summon to conclave in the chapters of Pastrana the heads of a mighty Order, which acclaimed her as its foundress, reminding them with its primitive and humble ringing of their small and poverty-stricken origin, and of the eternal principles of absolute poverty and self-abnegation to which the Discalced Carmelites owed their existence. On the 24th of August 1562 (St. Bartholomew's Day) in the same year, curiously enough, that the last Carmelite convent which still adhered to the primitive life was destroyed by the Turks in Cyprus, in the presence of her cousins, Dona Ine"s and Dona Ana de Tapia, nuns of the Encarnacion ; of Juan de Ovalle and his wife ; and of her three devoted ad- herents, Gonzalo de Aranda, Francisco de Salcedo, and Julian de Avila (brother of one of the novices), Master Daza solemnly consecrated the humble altar, and gave the habit to the four poor maidens, who were to be the foundation-stones of the glorious restoration of Mount Carmel. These her first four novices, who thus heroically dedicated their lives to Poverty and Christ, were: Antonia del Espiritu Santo, a spiritual daughter of Fr. Pedro de Alcantara; Maria de la Cruz, a member of the household of Dona Guiomar de Ulloa, where Teresa had known her and been attracted by her virtue ; Ursula de los Santos, who took with her into the cloister the same name she had borne in the century, the only one of the four destined to end her life in the primitive convent where she now took the veil ; and Maria de Avila, Master Julian's sister, who on that day became Maria de San Jose. As Master Daza placed the Host in the sanctuary in the touching ceremony of consecration, and they waited, clad for the first time in the coarse serge habits, which were henceforth to be the garb of the Reformed Order of Carmelites, their heads FOUNDATION OF SAN JOSE 227 covered with coarse unbleached linen cloths, and with bare feet as became daughters of the apostles, vague indefinite shadows behind the thick wooden grating which separated the choir from the church, to receive their vows, a strange thrill of rapturous joy and ecstasy swept over the kneeling woman, who was to be known to all time as Teresa de Jesus. " And so," concludes Ribera, in almost Biblical language, "was finished the convent of the glorious San Jose, as the Lord had ordered." Can we not imagine the scene which took place in that rudely built chapel on that August day of 1562 ? Master Daza in gorgeous chasuble and cope, consecrating a double festival ; Juan de Ovalle and his wife he in short velvet cloak and sword, as became a gentleman of the period ; she in the gala clothes of brocade, ruffs, and cushioned hair, in which she lies eternally decked on her tomb in Alba de Tormes ; the sombre- hued priests and Salcedo ; the three white-caped kneeling nuns from the Encarnacion, the face of one of them shining with almost unearthly rapture ; a spirit of gladness, a rustle of triumph in the atmosphere, which even seemed to animate the motes of dust floating in the sunlight which fell through the narrow windows. It stirs one's soul to the innermost fibres when we read of the successful issue of any generous enterprise which human thought, anxiety, energy, and heroic self-denial have moulded and sanctified. In a smaller degree, the completion of this small convent and the vows of its four poor nuns thrill the heart as strangely as when Columbus sailed from Palos after years of unsuccessful striving. The dream is at last embodied, the patience of the heroic soul crowned. The weakness, imper- fection, and frailty of the instrument saddens us, so unequal the forces of a weak personality against the active ones of opposition and inert ones of indifference. It is noticeable that Da. Guiomar does not seem to have been present at this interesting and touching ceremony. Nor was he there to whose valiant advocacy Teresa owed so much of her success, and whose life it seemed to her had been pur- posely prolonged until her struggles were brought to a triumphal ending Fray Pedro de Alcantara. During the eight days he had spent in Avila, the tide of life fast ebbing from a frame enfeebled by two years of continuous ill-health, he had cast the benediction of his sanctity and fame over Teresa's work. As the daylight of earth faded fast from his eyes, dim and sunken with mortification, his spiritual vision, possessed of the sight of the eagle, cleaving the future, discerned the full great- ness of the Reform he had helped to inaugurate. 223 SANTA TERESA Almost his last earthly act was thus to bless and consecrate the devoted efforts of one, like himself, great in heroism. It was a fitting end to the long and laborious career of the Fran- ciscan Reformer to usher in the dawn of the reform inaugurated by the great Carmelite, on whose shoulders his own mantle, like that of another Elijah, was so soon about to drop, who shall never again look upon his face on earth, although in her visions she will still hear his voice breathing tender words of counsel and consolation. For in October, the news of his death, or rather " entrance into life," as she serenely calls it (for that it was indeed so, she never doubted), arrived in Avila. " His end was like his life," are her simple and touching words, "preaching and admonishing his friars. As the end drew near, he repeated the Psalm Latatus sum in his qua; dicta sunt ;;///, and then kneeling died." At the very moment that he expired he appeared to her in great glory, and said he was going " to rest." Well-earned repose, oh great and valiant soul ! who first didst conquer the world and the flesh, and hardest conquest of all, self; who hadst annihilated the stubborn human will, and, on its ruins, arrived at the divine serenity of the pure in heart. " And so," she concludes, she who was to be his successor in the same arduous and thorny path, and destined after him to continue the long and stately line of saints and reformers, whose lofty ideal, ever reasserting itself through the centuries, has propped up the ancient fabric which has accumu- lated upon, and often threatened to obscure, the great central thought of its founder, the brotherhood and equality of man, on which it rose to power : " And so was the asperity of his life ended with so great glory ! It appears to me that he con- soles me more than when he was here with me." And so with the clarion note of triumph which ends the swelling harmony of the Nunc Dimittis, he passes from our sight. Even so the death of the saints, and not of the saints alone, but of the just ! Ribera relates how the mother once told him, laughing in her funny way, that she had wished to found her monastery on St. Bartholomew's Day, so that he should protect and deliver it from the devil, and that it only seemed as if he had let loose against it all the imps of hell. And so, indeed, it seemed ; for on that day, surely one of the most agitated of her existence, she was fated within a few short hours, not only to wage a cruel war with the demon of temptation, but, he vanquished, to find herself face to face with the outraged sisters of the Encamacion ; and for the next six months, in open opposition FOUNDATION OF SAN JOS 229 with the authorities and the immense majority of the inhabit- ants of Avila, expecting hour by hour to witness the destruction of her convent. It is the fate of a mind and temperament like Teresa's which combines all the enchanting qualities peculiar to the idealist, and all the worldly wisdom of one whose life lies in action, to be condemned at times to fluctuate irresolute on the boundary line between dispositions of necessity so contrary and opposed ; for her exquisite sense of proportion was so nicely adjusted, that she could not but perceive how much the dream lost by being embodied ; how strangely altered the plot, even the intention of the drama, when placed upon the stage and seen by the cold light of day. Nor was it only the dream that lost ; the loss, she felt, extended to herself; the moment she stepped down from the heights of divine abstractions to engage in the dust and heat of the fray ; the moment she was forced to measure and use all the forces at her command ; to attune the instru- ments at her hands by playing on their foibles and weaknesses ; to meet cunning and opposition by similar weapons ; to control and master the Human in order to give shape and form to the Divine ; to call a truce with folly and baseness, and to direct them to a definite end, the tender reveries of the mystic were sundered and gave way to the cold reality of action. Thus she wrote : Once on a time, as I was thinking with how much purity one lives away from these matters, and how, when I engaged on them, I must often do evil and commit many faults, I heard : It cannot be otherwise, daughter ; endeavour always to act in everything with straightforward intention, and look on me, that all that thou dost may conform to what I did. Did she lose ? Was it a loss to exchange for the calm and diaphanous peace which lapped her round in the brooding presence of the Almighty, the agitated turmoil of a working life ? Yes and no ! The child's face as it lies on its mother's lap is beautiful, but beautiful with the passionless beauty of ignorance ; yet perhaps more beautiful in its wrinkles, when it lies at the end of life having sounded all its tragedy and know- ledge the knowledge of good and evil if throughout guided by a sane intention and unvarying rectitude. So, although I must point out how Teresa controlled, conciliated, flattered, and dominated so many varying minds for the sake of the Reform, how she sometimes sacrificed one standard of duty to another, we shall find throughout that this great and remark- able woman never once deviated from her ideal of rectitude, without doing violence to herself and becoming a prey to 230 SANTA TERESA moments of remorse and doubt, which are not the least interest- ing ones of her career. These psychological moods when she doubts of herself, her mission, and struggles with her powerlessness and the imperfections attendant on her work, follow on the heels of her greatest triumphs. She who has almost accustomed us to regard her as an absorbed and radiant visionary, nourished by an Idea which sheds an almost unearthly splendour and tranquillity around her figure, suddenly shows us herself in all her weakness and frailty, penitent and stricken to the earth, a very feeble woman, exhausted physically and mentally by toil and effort, on whom both outraged nature and sensitive con- science take a tremendous revenge. The rudest moments she passed in her life were those immediately following the foundation of San Jose. The wreaths of incense had scarcely melted away from the newly consecrated altar, when she was asking herself in agony if what she had done had been well done ; if she had disobeyed her Provincial in having effected the foundation without his bidding; if those whose vows she had just witnessed would find happiness in such strait and rigid discipline, if they would want for food, and if it had been all a folly. Who put me in this [she wondered], since I already had a convent of my own ? All that the Lord had ordered me, and the many counsels and prayers which had been almost ceaseless for two years, all were blotted from my memory as if they had never been, and I only remembered my own " parecer." . . . The devil also put before me how it had come about that I desired to shut myself up in a house so limited for space, and how I, subject to so many infirmities, would be able to endure such penitence, I, who had left a house so large and delightful, where I had always enjoyed such happiness, and so many friends, whereas perhaps my new companions might not be to my liking ; I feared that I had undertaken more than I could perform, which might drive me to extremity, and that perchance the devil had brought it about to rob me of peace and tran- quillity, so that full of disquiet I should find prayer impossible, and lose my soul. Some such things as these he put before me altogether, so that I was powerless to think of anything else : and this together with an op- pression, and darkness, and obscurity of the soul, that I know not how to express it. Seeing myself in such a plight, I fled to the altar. . . . But the Lord did not let his servant suffer long. . . . He gave a little light, so that I might see it was the devil. . . . And so I began to remember my great resolutions to serve, and desires to suffer, for him, thinking that if I was to accomplish them, it was not the way to do so, to set about pro- curing my own repose ; and that if trials were in store for me, the greater the meed, and if unhappiness, from the moment I accepted it as a means to serve God, it would only be to me a purgatory ; and, this being so, what had I to fear ? for since I longed for trials, these were sufficient ; for the greater the contradiction, the more one gained by it. ... With these and other considerations, forcing myself by a great effort, I promised before FOUNDATION OF SAN JOS 231 the Most Holy Sacrament to do all in my power to obtain the licence to return to this house, and, as soon as it was possible conscientiously to do it, to take the vow of " clausura." As I did this, the devil fled in an instant, and left me serene and happy. . . . The contention left me very wearied, and laughing at the devil, whom I saw clearly it was ; I believe the Lord permitted it (for I never for a moment knew, during twenty-eight years and more, what discontent with the religious life was) so that I should under- stand the great mercy which he had done me in this, and the nature of the torment from which he had delivered me ; and also so that if I saw one who did, instead of being amazed, I should have pity on, and know how to console her. So, this over, after I had eaten, as I was about to retire for a while to take some rest (for I had scarcely had an instant's repose the night before, whilst for several others I had not been free from occupation and anxiety, and every day completely worn out), it being now well known in my convent and the town what had taken place, it was full of uproar for the reasons I have stated, which seemed not altogether unfounded. Im- mediately the prioress sent to order me to return at once without an instant's delay. The moment I received her message, leaving my nuns in trouble enough, I sent out on the instant . . . firmly convinced that I should be thrown into the dungeon, although it seemed to me that that would give me great content in so far as I need not speak to any one, and might repose a little while in solitude, which I greatly needed, for I was worn out with having so much to do with so many people. The little group of priests who had officiated at that morning's ceremony, escorted her back to the gray old convent across the valley. Amongst them was one who from that day forth followed her fortunes with the unfaltering devotion of his simple and guileless nature Master Julian de Avila, a young and ardent priest, the brother of one of the novices who had that day taken the veil. Associated with her in all her greatest triumphs, the constant witness of her laborious and chequered life, it is to his pen we owe the naif and inimitable descriptions of her journeys, which shine like pearls amongst the often wearisome and scanty records of her foundations. " From this day," he wrote, when the great woman had be- come to him a memory, a memory which he cherished with the same constancy that he had vowed to her in life, " I offered myself for her squire and chaplain, and such have I been until now, and shall be until death, having already been so close on to forty-two years. For whilst she lived I served her twenty years after the foundation of this first house, and accompanied her in all the foundations she undertook in life." Amongst all the figures who flit across the history of the Carmelite Reform, none more fascinating and lovable than this her humble hench- man, whose reward was that reserved to the devoted and magnanimous mind, to " earn a place i' the story." It would seem, however, that Teresa bore about with her some irresistible and magic charm, irresistible even by those 232 SANTA TERESA who had reason to account themselves most insulted and aggrieved by her conduct. A sincere conviction, an unalter- able determination, are always imposing to lesser minds, who feel the greatness which they cannot imitate. The secret of her wonderful success is contained in the following words a true transcript of her soul : It imports much [she says], and in fact everything, a great and resolute determination not to stop until the end is reached. . . . Come what will, happen what may, let the labour be never so great ; let him who will, murmur ; even if one falls down dead on the road or has no heart for the sufferings on the way ; even though the world be destroyed, all is well if the goal is but reached at last. The prioress, the Provincial who was sent for to give judgment, the nuns themselves, outraged in their dignity and that of their house, in the midst of their bitterest invectives, found themselves falter when confronted with the calm dignity of this steadfast woman. It was not the only occasion, as we shall see, on which Teresa vanquished the obstreperous com- munity of the Encarnacion by the greatness of her humility. Perhaps few stranger scenes have been enacted within its walls than when the great culprit stood before the stern sisterhood, who, mummy-like and unbending, lined the carved stalls of the choir, their rigid and inscrutable faces shadowed by their white coifs, their cloaks gleaming strangely in the dimness of the choir. In somewhat I saw that they condemned me for what I had been innocent of [she says with the charitable interpretation she always placed on the motives of her opponents] ; for they said I had done it so as to acquire esteem and notoriety and other things ; but in others, I felt that they spoke truth when they said that I was more worthless than others, that I had scandalised the town, and invented new things. As she listened to their accusations she characteristically simulated a compunction she was far from feeling, " so that I should not seem to make little of what they said." When, in obedience to her superior, she at last broke silence, we can judge of the eloquent and touching nature of her defence by the results it effected. Neither Provincial nor nuns found anything to condemn ; and when presently she found herself alone with him, " and I spoke to him more clearly, he remained exceedingly satisfied, and promised me, when the city quietened down, if the convent still remained in existence, to give me leave to return, for the tumult of the whole city was as great as I shall now relate." Six months, however, were to pass over her head ; San FOUNDATION OF SAN JOS6 233 Jose was to win triumphantly through many difficulties, before she again looked upon her little " gateway of Bethlehem." Doomed to inactivity in the seclusion of her convent, she is now to look on as a spectator, whilst all the forces of her native city are arrayed against her work, and every moment may bring the tidings of its destruction. Did she lose hope? The day she returned to the Encarnacion, " I saw well," she writes, " that a great many trials were in store for me, but as it was finished I cared but little." From this attitude she never once departed ; she never once faltered or lost that supreme confidence in her final success that surrounded her like an aureole. Her friends had but to look on her un- clouded brow to feel themselves inspired with fresh courage and vigour to carry on the fray, which had for its spectators or actors all the little world of Avila, and the noise of which was presently far to transcend the narrow bounds of her native city. All her personality, all her soul, was centred in the little convent without the walls. The tumult in the town was so great [she writes] that nothing else was talked of, and every one condemned me, and ran to and fro between the Provincial and my monastery [the Encarnacion]. As for myself, nothing they said gave me any more pain than if they had not said it ; I only dreaded lest the convent should be undone : this gave me great pain ; and also to see that those who helped me lost credit, and the suffering they went through ; for as to what they said of me, rather does it seem to me that I rejoiced at it. ... And so I was very downcast the two days on which the two assemblies I speak of took place, and being in great distress, the Lord said to me: Dost thou not know I am powerful? what then dost thou fear? and assured me that it should not be undone : this consoled me greatly. . . . Lord, this house is not mine [she prayed at a moment of dire need, when the prioress in the Provincial's absence absolutely forbade her to meddle in the affairs of her convent, a prohibition equivalent to leaving it to its fate] it was made for thee ; now as there is no one to plead for it, do thou, Lord, become its advocate. And I felt as refreshed and confident as if I had all the world to act for me, and I knew that the matter was safe. Who shall say that these visions from which she drew so rare a courage, so unfeigned and marvellous a tranquillity, shed their healing influence over her soul in vain ? Throughout all the long vicissitudes of the struggle, and the battle, though but against passion and prejudice, was as keen and as ardent as any that was then being raged on the fields of Flanders, she maintained the unimpaired serenity and constancy of a general who has measured all the chances, and has the forces under him in complete command. Nor was the devotion of her friends the least wonderful feature of these few months when the fate of San Jos^ hung in the balance. Those 234 SANTA TERESA whom she had charmed to her side by the winning fascination which seemed to emanate from her person, and which none escaped, vowed to her a devotion perhaps unparalleled, and espoused her cause with a fervour, " as if their own lives and honours were bound up in it. It must have been God who inspired them with such fervour ! " And such the magic power of her presence, such the tender persuasiveness of her tongue, that I doubt not that if she could have gathered her townsmen together into the market-place, as she did the nuns of the Encarnacion, the difficulty would have been solved, and that the noisiest and most turbulent of her opponents would have gone away her devoted supporters and adherents. It is hard to conceive now how it was possible that the foundation of another convent should so completely revolu- tionise a whole city ; still harder, perhaps, to conceive the intensity of life which then seethed and boiled in those cities, now so sad and desolate, whose Gothic steeples break the monotonous plains of Castile, and to-day echo, as if wearily, to the footsteps of a few inert and indifferent inhabitants. Severed from the world beyond, the echoes of which broke but rarely against their walls, with no newspapers to supply an exterior stimulus to the imagination, or dilate the horizon of their lives, bounded by the blue line of sierras which girdles the plains of Avila, the interest to-day dispersed on a thousand distant objects was then completely centred on themselves, and on the events that passed immediately before their eyes. It was a town, too, of neighbours in the truest sense. Partisanship and enmity were, from these reasons, very warm or very bitter. Every event, however trivial, which affected a neighbour had its contre-coup on the community at large, and excited immense curiosity, each one feeling that he himself had some share in it. The slightest occurrence spread like wildfire, assuming exagger- ated proportions in the vivid imagination and sonorous language of an excited people, a language which of itself seems to reflect a sort of solemn importance on the minutest affairs of life. Something like this happened in the case of Teresa's convent. Such the rumours and clamour and wild gesticulation of the excited groups gathered at the corners of the sunlit streets or under the cool arcades of the market-place, that one would have thought that nothing less than a decimating pestilence, some signal and universal calamity, had befallen the city. It was as if some wild and terror-stricken shepherd had just arrived with the news that he had seen the tents of the Moors glittering in the August sun in the folds of the neighbouring FOUNDATION OF SAN JOS& 235 sierras. So important was it deemed that the city council was convened and sat deliberating for two days. They came to the conclusion that the foundations of the Republic were tottering, and determined to make short work with the obnoxious and dangerous novelty. The corregidor and his alguaciles appeared before San Jose, and threatened to break down the doors unless its inmates at once came forth ; and would have done so, if they had not been restrained by the close proximity of the Host to the doorway, and by the fact that the convent was under the Bishop's protection. " They thought," adds Master Julian, " as the inmates were indigent women of no great position, to frighten them and so get them out." They had not counted, however, on the quiet resolution of the four novices, who, with the courage of Teresa herself, refused to acknowledge any secular authority, replying that they would leave the convent only at the bidding of him who had put them there : that they were quite willing they should, if they wished to, break in the doors, but let him who did it first consider well what he was about. The king commanded on earth, but God in heaven. The corregidor, not daring openly to outrage the Bishop's authority, left the convent in peace. The day following, the most imposing council probably ever held in Avila, " the most solemn (according to Master Julian) that could be convoked in the world, even though it was to treat on the salvation or perdition of the whole of Spain," was convened in order to compass its destruction. Besides the governors and council of the city, the municipality and the representatives of the people, it included the cathedral chapter, the Bishop's vicar-general, and two of the most learned and influential members from each of the religious orders. The corregidor, smarting under defeat, uttered a bitter invective against the convent and its foundress. His speech, which was probably taken down from memory and afterwards embellished by the chronicler, is remarkable as having used some of the very same arguments which were reproduced three centuries later in the Cortes of Madrid, when the question was no longer the suppressing of one poor convent, but the entire abolition of the religious orders. That the multiplication of monasteries and convents threatened to become a national calamity, and was gradually paving the way to decadence and ruin, was even then perceived as clearly as it has ever been since by those who had the material prosperity of their country most at heart. If Charles v. and Philip II. cleverly evaded the repeated repre- sentations made to them by the Cortes, when its delegates still conserved some shadow of the bold-speaking, democratic 236 SANTA TERESA attitude which had made the power and immunities of the cities dreaded by the sovereign, to whom they rather dictated measures than pleaded for them as a favour, it was widely felt that the gradual absorption of the public revenues and lands by the great monastic bodies, which yielded nothing in return, was a crying evil, and that every fresh foundation added another burden to resources already strained to their utmost limits. If there was much in the corregidor's speech which lent itself to the sharp and derisive criticism of a clever dialectician like Bafies, it was in the main a manly and thoughtful one, dictated by an ardent desire for the welfare of a town already so thickly studded with convents and monasteries that it could support no more, and shows how clear and just a conception existed even then of the dangers to which the exaggerated number of such institutions exposed the national prosperity, dangers which the experience of centuries has only too abundantly confirmed. If he laid stress with an honest conservative dislike, as had the nuns of the Encarnacion, on Teresa's convent being an innovation, the very word itself proving how dangerous and abominable it was, disturbing the peace of the Republic and preventing good customs and institutions from growing old, his energetic and bold defence of the interests of the majority against the gradual encroachments of a swarm of hungry friars and nuns, is in the best spirit of the national character. " This, sefiores," he said, " is to impose on us a tax, to take money from our pockets and food from our mouths. It is impossible to allow a few poor servants of God to die of hunger, and we shall have to deprive our children of bread so as to share it with them. And how do we know, senores," he concluded, " that this foundation is not some deception or fraud of the Devil ? They say that this nun has revelations, and a very strange spirit. This of itself makes me fear, and should make the least cautious ponder : for in these times we have seen women's deceptions and illusions, and in all times it has been dangerous to applaud the novelties to which they are inclined." So spoke the corregidor, giving expression to the old robust Castilian spirit, prejudiced against strange novelties and the whims of visionary women. He was heard with grave approval. If there were any there whom his arguments failed to convince, they took refuge in silence, when a black-robed Dominican, Fray Domingo Banes, a young man of thirty-four, " whose great comprehension and profound and clear genius," to use the words of Araya, " already marked him out as one of the most conspicuous figures of his order," rose from amongst the audience. Teresa was personally unknown to him ; he was himself opposed * i a 5 o = FOUNDATION OF SAN JOS6 237 to a new foundation without some settled means of subsistence. The "hire taken by a brother monk (Ibanez) m the foundation of San Jose may have led him to defend her and her convent with a fire and passionate energy as remarkable as it was unexpected. In after years he looked back with pride on the occasion when he had entered the lists to prop up a lost In the original manuscript of Teresa's Life, , he writes on the margin of the passage where she refers to it: "This happened in the year of 1562; and it was I who gave this ^"SeveHy h^cfeded" "show up all the weak points in the ^^asrbTcondemned on the charge of being a novelty, -well, so had all the Religious Orders been in their day. Such, indeed had been Christianity itself.. Was the restoration to an indent order of the primitive spirit to which it had owed its fustrTin the past to be regarded as a reprehensib e innova- tion? Which, then, was most reprehensible,-to lose its ancient splendour, or recover, it? And if they were not startled by he first, why should they be scandalised by the second ? "Cities," he affirmed with grave irony, "were full of good- for- nothing people; the streets swarmed with vagabonds, nsolent and idle men and wretched women abandoned to vice; and nothing of this is looked upon as superfluous, and no one seeks to change it; and yet four wretched nuns only shut up in a corner-in a hole, commending us to God, are held to be a serious danger to, and an into erable burden on, the Republic. How is this, seflores?" he asked with scathing satire ''what the object of this gathering? What foreign nemies threaten these walls? What fire rages through the itv? What pestilence consumes it? What famine afflicts it? What ruin is imminent? Can it be that four poor bare- foot nuns-poor, peaceful, and virtuous-are the cause of so much commotion in Avila? Give me leave to say that convoke so solemn a meeting for so slight a cause seems to me a lessening of the authority of so grave a city. A profound silence fell on the assembly as Banes concluded his masterly harangue, in which he had managed to coyer the corridor and bisection with ridicule Skilfully evading the corregidor's main argument, he devoted himself to tripping up his antagonist's heels on those secondary points with which the defender of the popular liberties had weakened one at issue. Nevertheless he had succeeded in averting Jhe threatened hostilities, and in prolonging the existence of convent. Master Caspar Daza, as the Bishops representative, 238 SANTA TERESA whether in this or another assembly, for it would almost seem that three or more councils were convoked, all equally solemn and imposing, also withstood the unanimous decision of the assembly to do away with the obnoxious convent. The representatives of the cathedral chapter, secretly in favour of the corregidor, but afraid openly to oppose their prelate took refuge in silence. The corregidor made a final appeal to the Bishop, but in vain. " If the Bishop of Avila," says Master Julian, " had not taken the mother's part so resolutely, I doubt not that they would indeed have finished with her convent that very day; but these are the means God takes, so that what he wills may be accomplished through human agency." It was then resolved to decide the matter by an ordinary appeal to law. The corregidor was legally in the strongest position, and the convent virtually at his mercy; for Teresa, if she had amply provided herself with briefs, had not only contravened the civil law of the kingdom, which decreed that no convent could be undertaken without the sanction of the civil authorities, whose duty it was to examine into the manner in which it was proposed to use the right of association, but had also neglected to secure the consent of the older founda- tions, especially those belonging to the mendicant orders, indispensable in such cases, in order to prevent any prejudice and diminution of their alms and resources that might accrue to them from a fresh foundation. With these formalities, enjoined alike by ecclesiastical and civil law, she had not complied, and she now found herself virtually a prisoner, face to face with an expensive lawsuit against the authorities of the city, which, on that very account, she could find neither advocate nor scrivener to defend, and in which she herself could only take action because her Provincial happened to be indulgent. And yet neither money nor advocates were wanting. If, on the one side, a statement was laid before the Royal Council of Madrid on behalf of the city ; a counter appeal on her behalf was instantly pushed forward with no less ardour by Gonzalo de Aranda, who, backed by the influence and support of the holy Knight, sped to court for that purpose. In Avila Master Julian, her faithful and simple henchman, advocate and notary by turns, went and came to and fro between the convent and the town, faithfully executing her behests. " He who should have acted as lawyer and counsellor," he says, "became the advocate, and she who should have been the advocate became the counsellor." If a visit was needed, or a communication to FOUNDATION OF SAN JOS 239 be made to the corregidor and his party, he was the spokesman. Sometimes Salcedo figured in these missions ; but " as he was a man of such authority," adds Master Julian simply, "it happened that when I entered the room to make some intima- tion to the magistrates, he lagged behind as if in hiding, so that he should not be seen publicly engaged in these con- tentions." Salcedo, Aranda, Julian de Avila, Master Daza, all clung closer to the woman the darker seemed her fortunes. To them and to the Bishop's warm championship she owed it in great measure that she was able to foil and tire out her adversaries in a contest apparently so unequal. A " receiver " was sent to Avila to investigate the evidence on both sides, " which, after taking it with considerable lentitude," as Julian remarks, " he bore away with him to lay before the council." And there, according to the uncertain and dilatory action of Spanish justice in those times, which is no less great to-day, the matter was allowed to drop. " And thus a whole city was not strong enough," gleefully concludes the joyful Master Julian, "to resist a cloistered nun, without money, and with none to speak for or take her part beyond those who, moved by charity and justice, or reason, aided her, some with their persons and others with their money; so that it was a common report that the city ceased to prosecute the suit more on account of want of money than anything else, whilst the servant of God, without belongings or money, or relatives from whom to borrow it, had enough to maintain the suit in Avila and at court, and for want of means need never have abandoned it." Not without many attempts, however, by the worsted corregidor and his party to save their dignity by a com- promise. Of the two proposals they made to her, either that she should admit of a fixed endowment, or leave it to the decision of men of letters and learning, " this last," she says, " being worse of digestion than any of the others," the sight of the anxiety and persecution endured on her account by her friends sorely tempted her to submit to the first. Why, she argued with the casuistry of a thoroughly conscientious mind, a casuistry that seems inseparable from all religious training, why should she not acquiesce for the meantime in a com- promise which would at once rid her and her friends of all the embarrassments of an invidious position, free to throw it over at a more propitious moment? Her innate rectitude, however, reasserted itself on the night before the day on which she intended to signify her consent, sweeping away all such fine- 2 4 o SANTA TERESA spun, Jesuitical cobwebs. Not only did it seem to her that God himself expressed his disapproval, but for the third time since his death, she was visited by a vision of Fray Pedro de Alcantara, not bright and glorious as of yore, but in stern and rigorous displeasure. Salcedo, who, strangely enough, had been firmer on this point than Teresa herself, heard her decision with unfeigned delight, as she urged him to break off the pending negotiations and proceed with the lawsuit rather than yield. The incensed authorities, who saw but small prospect of coming out successful in the suit, the chances of which were all in favour of Teresa, dropped much of their acrity and hostile attitude, and growing accustomed to the intrusive novelty, gradually accepted it as a fact. The arrival of the second brief, to enable her to found without endowment, which the saint had obtained from Rome, coinciding with that of Fr. Pedro de Ibafiez, whom she had converted into as stout an adherent as he had formerly been a strong opponent of the cause of Poverty, and whose character, virtues, and learning were held in great veneration in Avila, may have also con- tributed to allay the tempest. To him she owed the Provincial's permission (for the four novices had pleaded with the Bishop in vain for their foundress's return), which severed her connection with the Encarnacion, and allowed her to take the vows in San Jose", the first offspring of her labours and affections. In the depositions for her canonisation, Fr. Angel de Salazar averred that what eventually decided him was not the Dominican's mediation, but the words she herself said to him, to which it was but natural that a simple and credulous mind like his should afterwards attach a mysterious and hidden import : " Father, consider that we are resisting the Holy Ghost." If she confesses her utter inability to make her readers understand all she passed through in the two years which elapsed between the foundation of San ]os6 and its conclusion, "of which these last six months and the first were the most troublous," she has shown us that her character is one of the rarest temper. Already we perceive her strength in the wise moderation and calm vision which neither attack nor victory can alter or trouble. Although her heart lay in the one small building, the result of two years' constant labour, she is never once betrayed into the virulence of partisanship. Rather would one say that, although actively engaged in it, she viewed the contention from a loftier height, recognising even in their bitterest attacks that her adversaries' motives might be as FOUNDATION OF SAN JOS 241 conscientious as her own. At a moment when to those around her all seemed well-nigh lost, she sat down imperturbably to write a letter to her friend Da. Guiomar in Toro, to send her some missals and a bell, of which it stood in need. Such conduct is marvellous, unless, indeed, we consider her long apprentice- ship to Duty ; the complete control she had achieved over every passion and inclination ; the absolute mastery over her soul, which long and painful years of waiting had placed in her hands. It was not that she had been less great in those years which preceded San Jose 1 ; the opportunity alone was lacking. If she had not been a great woman, a woman of immense mental capacity, of enormous moral courage and tenacity, she was destined to failure not alone when the time came for action, but long before, when she was engaged all unconsciously in impress- ing her personality upon the incredulity of her native town. What man, indeed, is a prophet in his own country? Nature, too, had bestowed on her that most rare of rare things, a charm, a sweetness, a gentleness of manner, an exquisite courtesy and urbanity, which not only conquered the love of those whom she most needed for her instruments, but kept them for ever chained to her allegiance, her willing slaves. The austere Maria de Agreda, in many ways so much more learned than Teresa, through the lack of this nameless I know not what, could never have founded. Regarded in the En- carnacion as a dangerous rebel, when Teresa left it behind her, she left none but friends and well-wishers, for she never made an enemy. And the love she inspired invariably deepened into a tender admiration and veneration, which even during her life formed a link profound and warm between all who possessed her friendship, such as in later days still exists between her votaries. In the month of December three nuns left the square battle- mented gates of the Encarnacion, and took their way up the sandy road which, winding through little gardens and patches of cultivation, leads across the valley up the hill to the church of San Vicente. One of them, distinguished from the rest by her old and mended habit, bore with her a scourge, a piece of straw matting, and a hair shirt, for which, with scrupulous exactitude, she had left a receipt so as to remind the convent to reclaim them. Her two companions were Ana de los Angeles and Maria de San Pablo, who, together with herself, were to train the four novices, and assist them in celebrating the offices. When they arrived before the church of San Vicente, the same nun, so says tradition, passed through the Byzantine doors with their strange apocalyptic figures of creamy stone, so rigid 16 242 SANTA TERESA in the stone folds of their angular draperies, and, descending the steps which led down to the subterranean chapel, sacred to the memory of the unbelieving Jew and the monstrous serpent, knelt in orison before the Virgin. Then, like the Crusaders of old, who, at the sight of Jerusalem, alighted from their horses and uncovered their feet that they might approach the sacred walls like true pilgrims, she took off her shoes so as to enter barefoot into San Jose. Perhaps she looked back once more, as she emerged into the searching winter light, at the austere and snowy landscape stretched between her and the gray old building which lay so peaceful and serene on the stony moor- land, where she had nourished and developed the first germs of a movement which was to carry her name to the ends of the earth. Perhaps for a moment she scanned its outlines wistfully ere, resolutely turning from it, Teresa de Ahumada y Cepeda left the past behind her, to enter on the new life she herself had sketched, to become Teresa de Jesus, the sinner ! When at last she found herself in the gateway of San Jose, before entering the convent she opened the wooden lattice which separated the diminutive choir from the church and prostrated herself before the altar. And thus keeling she was carried away in ecstasy, and Christ himself welcomed her back with the extremest marks of love, and crowned her in gratitude for the service she had done his mother. CHAPTER IX MOUNT CARMEL TO appreciate what Teresa did, how far and in what way she merited the title of Reformer, we must turn our eyes back to the origin and development of the Carmelite Order. No religious order so tenacious of its antiquity as the Carmelite ! One of the most scandalous religious controversies that religious history (so full of them) has ever seen, arose from the publication in 1688 of the three Bolandist volumes, which contained the lives of two Carmelite saints, St. Berthold and St. Cyril. Not only did the Jesuit editors, Hinchenius and Pape- broch, dare to handle the scabrous question of the antiquity and history of the Carmelites, taking as their authority the state- ments of the Carmelite generals themselves, and a treatise of Cyril's on their origin and progress, but unpardonable sin in the eyes of an order jealous of its extreme antiquity, which claimed for its founder no other than Elijah, if not Enoch him- self they asserted that St. Berthold was the first, and St. Cyril the second of its generals. So bitter the deadly feud and the rancorous animosity that sprang up therefrom between the two orders, that if the Carmelites had not lost their heads as well as their tempers, and appealed to the arbitration of the Pope and the Spanish Inquisition, they had well-nigh precipitated by two hundred years the destruction of the most learned and influential order in Europe. For ten years the world was edified with the spectacle of the two most grave and venerated bodies in Christendom vilifying each other and degrading themselves in volumes of rancorous abuse. The Carmelites, all-powerful in Spain, obtained from the Spanish Inquisition the condemnation of fourteen volumes of the Acts, a great and truly monumental work, for the errors supposed to be contained in two. The sympathies of all the learned men in Europe were with the Jesuits, and the Emperor Leopold I. and several other German princes and prelates urged the Pope and the King of Spain, the weak and contemptible Charles II., to induce the Inquisitors to give them a hearing and 243 244 SANTA TERESA submit the works which, true to their policy, they had just qualified as heretical and scandalous, to a fresh examination. This being agreed to, the Carmelites sought to justify the former decision of that tribunal, and denounced the Emperor's letters to the King of Spain as heretical and schismatic. It was years before the Inquisition issued its final decrees, not, indeed, before the Carmelites, again having recourse to Rome, procured a papal Bull imposing perpetual silence as to the origin and succession of their order, and threatening excommunication on all who at any time should renew the question by word or writing. Thus summarily they closed the mouths of their formidable adversaries, with whom they could not hope to compete either in wit or learning. Not, however, before the Jesuits had left the sting of their ironical sarcasms tingling in their ears. How, it was asked, was it possible for them to trace hereditary uninterrupted descent from Enoch, son of Jared, and father of Methuselah, if they maintained that their Order had kept the three essential vows of religion from its origin ; seeing that Scripture made no mention of any Carmelite being shut up in the ark, and that none of Noah's sons could have made the vow of chastity, since they all entered it accompanied by their wives, and had large progenies when they came out ? The controversy ended like all others where superstition and ignorance are ranged against enlightened and intelligent criticism itself not without its full share of superstitious tinge ; both sides, although for ever silenced, remained sourly and devoutly convinced that they alone were in the right. The Carmelites, exaggerating the legitimate pride it is natural all good friars should take in the glory and ancient lineage of their Order, claim for it a precedence before all others, on account of its somewhat dubious antiquity and anteriority. In the inflamed words of passionate devotees, they describe its splendours as so remarkable, so rich its beauty, and so beautiful its fertility that the Spouse, bent on enhancing the perfections of his mistress, found no other expression more adequate to describe the superb bearing of her head than to compare it to the sublime appearance of this Mount Carmel. " Authors are never done " (I quote Fray Joaquin in the Aflo Teresiano) "of declaiming on the lovely luxuriance of aromatic spices, fragrant flowers, fruitful trees, crystalline fountains, and the other amenities which it owes to the influences of heaven ; but the magnificence of its achievements is not so much derived from the vegetable lustre of its plants as from having been the most fortunate refuge of those celestial beings who, despising the MOUNT CARMEL 245 world, invented the monastic life to people the Glory of religious souls (poblar la gloria de las almas religiosas)" They claim to be the descendants of a race of mysterious solitaries who kept alive, in the recesses of Mount Carmel, the traditions of Elijah, Elisha, and the children of the prophets through the centuries which preceded the birth of Christ. They contend that from these solitary dwellers of Mount Carmel sprang the Rechabites and the Essenes, nay, John the Baptist himself, " the principal heir of the sanctity and spirit of Elijah, and the follower of his institute." Moreover, they assert that the presence of the Virgin Mary, dimly perceived by the Prophet in the small and mysterious cloud, hovered for nine hundred years before the Advent of Christ over the summit of the sacred mountain, to whose inhabitants she accorded her special protection. "The lustre of this glorious primacy," writes a Carmelite author, "proceeds from the Carmelite Order having been the first to pay reverent worship to this great lady." Teresa herself refers to this privilege of her Order in more than one passage. Christ, she says, in order to stimulate her to further efforts in the behalf of the Reform, bade her one day to put forth all her strength, " since thou seest how I help thee. I have desired thee to gain this crown ; thou shalt see during thy own lifetime the great progress of the Virgin's order." It will also be remembered how on her return to San Jose, Christ crowned her in gratitude for the service she had done his mother in founding a monastery of her Order. Thus the word Maria from time immemorial has been the device of the Order which fondly terms itself that of Maria of Mount Carmel. In the fourteenth century the Carmelites confirmed and strengthened a prerogative which, although shared with other Orders, they regarded as peculiarly their own, by the invention or the revelation of the scapulary, and the issue of the famous Sabatine Bull, granted by Pope John xxil. at the mandate, it is said, of the Virgin Mary, which limited the pains of Purgatory to the Saturday following their death, to all the faithful who during life had worn the scapulary of Mount Carmel. Although it has been denied that any such Bull was ever granted, and its reality seems dubious, the privilege based on it has been zealously conserved, and, if unconfirmed by papal sanction, has been amply confirmed by time. The Carmelites, in gratitude, were the first to maintain the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, and to raise the worship of Mary to that pitch to which it has attained to-day in the Catholic Church, and which probably more than anything else has contributed to elevate the position 246 SANTA TERESA of women, at all events as far as the narrow limits of Christianity permit of their emancipation. But, be it as it may, whether the Carmelites owe their origin to Enoch or Elijah, as they themselves contend, or, according to the Jesuits and Papebroch, can trace their origin no farther back than the twelfth century, it is unquestionable that the rise of the great Order of Our Lady of Mount Carmel is lost in the night of dim antiquity. It is probable that a mysterious line of solitaries kept alive in the recesses and caves of Mount Carmel the links of the mystic chain which united them to the giant and apocalyptic figure of the " hairy man girt round with a leathern girdle," long before the religious Orders, whose history, with but few exceptions, was obscured for three hundred years by a dense and impenetrable cloud, blazed into light and vigour in the reign of Constantine. Barely had peace been then restored to the agitated world than it saw with amazement and awe, the sands of the Upper Thebaid and Libya, the desert of Nitria, the cities of the Nile, Palestine, Syria, and the gloomy shores of the Black Sea swarm with a population of cenobites and anchorites. St. Antony, followed by innumer- able disciples, restored the rule of the cenobites in Arsinoe (Suez); Hilarion and three thousand anchorites took up their abode in the sandy deserts of Palestine; Basil and the Archimandrites lined the shores of the Pontus; whilst in the island of Tabenne, in the Upper Thebaid, Pacomius and fourteen hundred brethren followed the " angelic " rule of Mount Carmel. Such was the origin of the great Orders which were destined to rule the world of the Middle Ages. Never has the spirit of asceticism had such a marvellous, such a sudden development ! A living army, fighting against unseen enemies, peopled those wastes of sand where to-day the half-buried ruins of their monasteries add another mystery to the desert. Pacomius at his death numbered under his rule 3000 monks ; the monasteries of Tabenne contained 9000; whilst 50,000, according to St. Jerome, attended the annual gathering of the Order. In 412 John Nepos, Patriarch of Jerusalem, gave a written constitution to the dwellers of Mount Carmel, who had hitherto been bound by the rules of a dim tradition. A few years previously to 1185 an aged Calabrian monk, inspired as he said by the prophet, took up his abode with his brethren in the ruins of a building evidently an ancient monastery which stood close to Elijah's cave, then still extant on the slopes of Mount Carmel. Mysterious lapsus that history guards amongst her secrets ! Thus do the Carmelites emerge from the dim night of MOUNT CARMEL 247 tradition into light and being. In 1205 San Brocardo, the superior of the monks of Mount Carmel, and the first Latin general of the order, seeing that the Latin friars had become more numerous and powerful than the Greeks, obtained from St. Albert, the Patriarch of Jerusalem, a rule which, embodying the ancient one, introduced into it such modifications as the needs of a different epoch demanded. These ancient Carmelites, bound together under the Rule of St. Albert, still followed the traditions of the ancient contemplatives who had preceded them. They fasted eight months of the year, Sunday only excepted, abstained perpetually from meat, and supported themselves by the labours of their hands ; whilst each in his solitary cell (for they were debarred from all communication not only with the world, but with one another) maintained unbroken silence, his days and nights devoted to meditation and prayer. In 1229, when the Carmelites were compelled to abandon the Holy Land in consequence of the peace concluded with the Saracens by the Emperor Frederick II., their fifth general, Alain, resolved to leave Syria and found in Europe. He convoked a general chapter, but opinions were divided ; some were for remaining in Syria at the risk of persecution ; others for following the example of their founder Elijah, when he fled from his dwelling- place to take refuge in Mount Horeb, their Mount Horeb being Europe. Alain, irresolute amidst conflicting opinions, was determined by an apparition of the Virgin, bidding him to found beyond the boundaries of Palestine. Cyprus and Sicily first saw the advent of the Carmelite brothers, whence they alighted in England and Provence, Innocent IV. enlisting in their favour the protection of the princes and potentates of Europe. Italy was soon overspread with Carmelite monasteries : from Provence the order extended to Narbonne and Aquitaine ; St. Louis gave them a monastery in France ; and the brown and white habit was then for the first time seen in Ireland. Little more than forty years after St. Albert from Ptolemais (St. Jean d'Acre) had granted the rule to an obscure congrega- tion of solitaries, it was resolved at a solemn and imposing chapter held in the great and powerful monastery of Aylesford, in England, under St. Simon Stock, to send two monks on an embassy to Rome, to obtain the Pope's interpretation of those points in the ancient rule which had become obscure, and to request the mitigation and correction of others. This new rule, as fixed and defined by two Dominican monks, one of them the famous Fray Hugo de St. Victor, Cardinal of Sta. Sabina, and as reformed and confirmed by Innocent IV., differing little in all essential points from that of St. Albert (the differences being 248 SANTA TERESA rather the slight and accidental changes entailed by the progress of time and altered conditions of society), was that which Teresa substituted three centuries later for the Mitigated Rule of Eugenius IV. The old rule had been drawn up for solitaries of the desert ; the spread of the order through Europe neces- sitated foundations in or near cities ; it needed to be adjusted to the requirements of the mendicant friars, who had hitherto been forbidden to eat vegetables cooked with meat, or meat when at sea, which on a journey meant starvation ; the word " extreme " was abandoned before the word " weakness " in those cases where meat was allowable ; silence was to be main- tained from Compline to Prime instead of, as before, from Vespers until Terce of the following day. In other points it was made stricter and more rigorous. To the general vow of obedience to the prior were added those of chastity and poverty, which until then were included and understood, if not expressed, in the former. Not only was all individual, but all collective property, the latter of which had been allowed by the Primitive Rule, severely proscribed, thus excluding them from the posses- sion of lands, farms, and endowments, and restricting them to a few mules or beasts of burden as necessity required, and a few animals or birds for food. The Carmelites did not escape the contagion of the universal relaxation and disintegration which almost ruined the Religious Orders in the fourteenth century. The great plague, which, spreading from Italy, decimated all Europe in 1350, filling all hearts with terror and dismay, carried devastation, riot, licence into the monasteries. The land wasted by pestilence ; the un- holy passions, which slumber in men's breasts under the repres- sion of law, blazed forth unrestrained. The world was given up to universal desolation, and a riot, a licence, an intensity of uncontrolled vice, born of despair, reigned supreme. Abandoned convents, deflowered maidens, havoc and unholiness worse than the pestilence itself, followed in its wake. The schism which divided the Church for eighty years put the last stroke of ruin to the grand fabric which it had taken the genius of a Gregory VII. to plan, much more to execute, and finished what the plague began. If the Christian world was divided between two Popes, the Carmelites in their turn were divided between two generals, elected not for their worth or fitness to govern, but for their resolute partisanship of the Pope for whom the faction they headed declared. At the mercy of a party whom nothing restrained from rebelling against their authority, these generals were forced to grant important dispensations, and to wink at the breaches of discipline, riot, and excess they were afraid to MOUNT CARMEL 249 punish. Little more than the habit was left to those hitherto distinguished by the rigidity of their discipline who had now universally abandoned the rule. So subtle was the poison, so completely had the Carmelites departed from the ancient spirit of their Order, that when, in 1432, an attempt was made by one of their generals, Bartholo- mew Roquelio, to check the most flagrant of the abuses, he was forced to limit himself to proposing various mitigations in the discipline which was now declared too severe for human strength, and which it was alleged deterred many from entering the Order, now in consequence rapidly diminishing in numbers. Not daring to face the storm that any attempt to introduce the sweeping reforms that could alone restore it to its rigid and primitive simplicity would assuredly have provoked, he pre- ferred to conjure it by conforming the Rule to the reigning relaxation and corruption, trusting to time to bring about that which he himself had been powerless to effect. The long fast from September to Easter was reduced to abstinence from meat three days in the week, except in Lent and Advent, meat being allowed on all other days; the perpetual seclusion in separate cells was done away with, and the church, cloisters, and the rest of the monastery were thrown open to the monks and nuns. It was in the observance of this Rule, confirmed by Eugenius IV., that Teresa was brought up and lived until a woman of near fifty. Over and over again did conscientious minds endeavour to wean back the Order to its pristine and rigorous purity, but without success: over and over again did the generals find themselves in conflict with a mitigation they deplored but were powerless to remedy. The twenty-third general of the Order, Fray Juan Soret, who in 1412 endeavoured to renew the ancient discipline in a few isolated convents of France and Flanders, founded by him for that purpose, was poisoned ; and his Reform died a natural death. Under the generalship of Bautista Mantuano two simultaneous attempts were made to restore the original Rule of St. Albert ; one undertaken by a monk, Fray Hugolino, ended in the foundation of a single monastery in the province of Genoa ; the other gave birth to the congregation of Albi, in France ; but both, unable to hold their own against the general opposition, faded from the world without leaving a trace behind them. The thirty-first general of the order, Bernaduccio Landucio, undisheartened by repeated failure, endeavoured in vain to accomplish the Reform which had baffled his predecessors. It was reserved for Master Nicolao Audet " an Elisha in zeal, a 2 5 o SANTA TERESA Jeremiah in tears," so runs the extravagant eulogy of the chronicler to see in a far-away convent in Castille the dawn of a Reform which all his authority and power had been powerless to effect. Small wonder that men looked upon it as little short of a miracle ; that they saw in it the fulfilment of dim mysterious words, spoken in the depths of Egyptian deserts, in obscure convents. St. Pacomius had not only in a vision foretold the decay, but also the glorious restoration of his order. St. Hilde- garde had seen in a dream some strange horses, spotted and striped with different colours, whose progress was first from east to west, and then, the colours of their coat changed, from west to east, which was taken to portend the gradual extension of the Carmelites from the East to Europe, and the exchange of the striped mantle which they had used in Syria, for the brown and white habit worn by the Discalced Carmelites, who in their turn carried the Reform once more from Europe to its cradle in the East Brother St. Peter Thomas, mourning over the decay of his beloved Order of Carmelites, threatened by total ruin, is visited by the Virgin, who assures him that it shall endure unto the end, as had been promised to its first founder Elijah in the recesses of Mount Tabor. As the time draws nearer, the volume of prophecy swells and becomes more continuous. St. Vincent de Ferrer foretells the advent of a community of " the poor, simple, meek, humble, and despised, joined together in most ardent charity, who neither think, nor speak, nor have any other knowledge but of Christ crucified ; careless of the world, forgetful of self, lost in the contemplation of the celestial glory of God and the saints, their only desire (in the words of St. Paul) to be released and be with Christ. Who are these, wealthy with innumerable treasures of celestial riches, bathed in most sweet and mellifluous streams of divine sanctity and joy ; who are these whom thou mayst imagine as singers in the chapel of the angels, who joyfully make sweet music with the instruments of their hearts ? " who but the reformed Order of Carmelites, if the tradition long preserved amongst the Dominicans be true, that this prophecy related to the Reform in Our Lady of Mount Carmel ? The stream of voices waxes louder and louder. Monks in their convents, hermits lost to the world in flowery and inaccessible deserts, virgins, and solitaries, see strange visions, hear strange voices. A lay monk of Andalucia begs leave of each fresh provincial that, when the Reform which thirty years ago he had foreseen should come, he might have leave to join it. Its progress is revealed to a monk of Mantua, to MOUNT CARMEL 251 whom appear two monks of his own nation, Fr. Ambrosio Mariano and Fr. Juan de la Miseria, who had just professed in Pastrana. The future prioress of Yeas, twelve years before, sees in a vision Teresa, her Discalced nuns, her Rule and Constitutions, and a Discalced friar of her order. A Carmelite monk clothed in sackcloth, whose semblance was that of the prophet Elijah, appears to Beatrice of the Mother of God, and encourages her to become a nun of his order. To Catalina de Cardona, lost to the world amidst the tall pine trees and thyme and cistus which clothe the sweet desert of La Roda, appears the same awe-inspiring form, clad in the sackcloth of the Carmelites, foretelling the Reform of the Order of the Prophets. The venerable Ana de San Agustin, she who died prioress of the Convent of Villanueva de la Jara, her stern and beautiful face still looks down upon the pilgrim who explores these forgotten corners of old Spain from above the grating which separates the choir from the church, moved with a desire to become a nun, watches a procession of Discalced Carmelite nuns pass slowly down the aisles of the church where she is praying, and in one of the spectral group she afterwards recognised Teresa. As yet, however, nothing was further from Teresa's mind than to found an order; although, as we shall presently see, she was guided by a loftier motive than the mere fulfilment of her own desires for self-sacrifice and a more rigid discipline. For nearly five years this one poor convent suggested to her by her own needs and necessities, where she and a few others like her, fired with the same zeal and fervour of abnegation, could fulfil the dictates of their conscience, fulfilled her extremest aspiration. She had found the relaxed and worldly discipline of the Encarnacion utterly inadequate to satisfy her rigid conception of Duty; nay, more, of the two evils, a healthy and natural life in the world (a world she regarded with horror as full of dangers and pitfalls), and the enervating and mischievous atmosphere of the Encarnacion, the former, although still an evil, seemed to her the lesser one. The convents, which at first had shone conspicuous as schools of virtue and austerity, had now sunk into asylums for superfluous and idle women, many of whom were the un marriageable daughters of proud and decayed families, who carried with them into the cloister the style and titles which had belonged to them in the century. Far otherwise the Ideal which Teresa had formed to her- self of the duties and responsibilities of the Religious Life, 252 SANTA TERESA and which she embodied in the Constitutions. These, omitted from the earlier editions of her works to serve the malevolent intentions of a faction, owe their resuscitation to the devoted efforts of her latest and best editor, Lafuente. The Bolandists have commented in terms of grave disapproval on the suppres- sion ; and since then they would seem to have been either mislaid or hidden by those whose interest it was to prevent so formidable a weapon from falling into the hands of their enemies. However this may be, the facts that they were still in existence in 1770, and that they were not amongst the papers of the general archives of the Order when they were removed from the Convent of San Hermenegildo in Madrid to the National Library, give rise to the strangest suspicions. One of the questions which rent the Order most profoundly, and caused such scandal and discord when its foundress had hardly been laid in the grave, related to the liberty of the nuns to choose confessors other than the friars of her order. If in her original constitutions she did not, as it would seem, directly insert any such clause, neither did she, on this most important point, impose on her nuns any restrictions. Such then may have been the motive which led some zealot, in the interests of his party, to hide the Constitutions, which from veneration for Teresa he did not dare to falsify by spurious additions. But if the originals have long been lost, a copy of them is still preserved in the Convent of the Image at Alcala, where the community, reformed by Teresa, have kept their original constitution so rigidly as never to transfer their allegiance from the Bishop to the friars of their order; much less to submit themselves to the reforms they, or rather a section of them, inaugurated, for setting their faces against which, Teresa's greatest son, and her two most valiant and capable daughters, became the victims of the narrow and jealous despot who ruled it after her death. 1 In them therefore we are enabled not only to follow step by step the intentions of the foundress, but to reconstruct the life of these few austere and ascetic women bent on restoring to its original purity, as far as the exigencies of the age allowed, the Rule of St. Albert of Jerusalem. The day was portioned out into work (for " if a man work not, neither shall he eat," was a favourite maxim with this practical saint), as well as prayer and choir duties. The little world of the convent rose at six ; the interval until eight in summer and nine in winter was employed in prayer and reciting 1 See Fray Joaquin, Ano Teresiano. MOUNT CARMEL 253 the offices as far as None. Then came Mass, which was chanted only on Sundays and solemn feast-days. As to the meal hour, it was left unsettled, as it depended on whether there was anything to eat, or, as Teresa expresses it, " according to how the Lord gives it." If food was forthcoming, at eleven in winter, and at ten in summer, the bell summoned them to the refectory. Their food, if they were not reduced to dry bread only, generally consisted of a little coarse fish, or bread and cheese. Out of meal hours it was strictly forbidden to eat or drink without permission. Then followed an hour's recreation, during which, amidst the twirling of distaffs and the whir of spinning-wheels, they might converse with each other as they pleased ; then in summer the monastery was buried in silence, whilst some slept the siesta, and the wakeful prayed and meditated in their cells. All particular friendship was rigorously forbidden. No sister was to embrace another, or touch her face or hands. Teresa desired that the same ideal love and harmony should reign amongst her nuns which Christ had inculcated on his apostles. On the stroke of two, except in Lent, Vespers, followed by an hour's reading. Complines were said at six in summer and at five in winter, and at eight both in summer and winter the bell rang for silence, unbroken until after Prime of the following day. The bell was rung an hour before Matins, 1 an interval the nuns could spend either in reading or prayer. The superior is bidden to see that the convent is provided with " suitable books, such as Cartujano * (sic), Flos Sanctorum^ Contentus Mundi, Oratorio de Religiosos, Fr. Luis de Granada, or Fr. Pedro de Alcantara, which is as necessary in its way for the sustenance of the soul as eating for the body." Matins were said a little after nine, and when they were over the kneeling sisterhood remained for a quarter of an hour in the hushed tranquillity of the choir, absorbed in mental self-examination, or listening to the mystery which was to furnish the subject of the morrow's meditation. At eleven the bell was rung, and the nuns retired to rest. No sister might enter another's cell without the prioress's permission. Their work was limited to spinning, or such ordinary needlework as 1 Matins is the office generally said from ten to midnight. Teresa appointed it to be said about nine. * The books here referred to by Teresa are the Life of Christ, by Ludolph of Saxony, called in Spain the Carthusian (Cartujano), a translation of which was made under the auspices of Talavera, Archbishop of Granada. The Contentus Mundi (Contemptus Mundi note Teresa's spelling) is the Imitation of Christ by Thomas a Kempis. The Jesuits Ribadaneyra and Villegas both wrote books entitled Flos Sanctorum ; but the one she mentions here must have been a still older collection of the Lives of the Saints. 254 SANTA TERESA did not divert their attention from the Divine theme which was to be their meditation day and night. Embroideries of silver and gold were to be especially eschewed. There was to be no bargaining as to the price ; they were simply to be sold for what the purchaser chose to give, and, if it was not enough, a work so unproductive was to be discontinued. Personal property was severely forbidden, whether eatable, coffer, cupboard, drawer, or chest. Each one received with the habit all that she required. If a nun was observed by the prioress to like anything better than another, such as a cell or a book, it was at once taken from her. Meat was never eaten except in cases of great necessity. The habit was to be as scanty as possible, of black serge or coarse sayal, innocent of dye, reaching to the feet ; the same condition applied to the cape they wore in the choir, of the same white woollen serge as the scapulary, four fingers shorter than the habit. Their coifs were of the coarsest flax cloth, as were the sheets, their tunics of woollen serge ; and they wore the alpargatas, or hemp-soled sandals, still used by the Spanish peasantry. 1 Their cells rigorously bare ; the bed without hangings ; no sheep-skins, or cushions, except in a case of extreme necessity, when a mat of esparto grass or a piece of carpet or coarse stuff might be allowed. Carpets were confined to the church. They slept on a straw pallet, which Teresa affirmed had not been found to hurt even the delicate and infirm. The hair was worn short, so as to save time in combing it. The nuns could speak unveiled only to a father, or mother, or brother, and that in the presence of a witness. The keys of the grating and the doors were kept by the prioress. Minute and trivial details they may seem to some these rules as to the frilling of a coif, and the length of a habit or a scapulary ; but they were the outward symbols of the lofty Idealism which inspired one of the most wonderful passages she ever penned, a veritable ode to Poverty. The foundation-stone of the fabric of the spiritual life, as she conceived it in all its magnificent breadth and amplitude, was Poverty, with its accompanying renunciation and sacrifice of self; Poverty, which glitters on her lips with a glory unspeakable, and becomes the mystic Rose, hiding in its heart the priceless jewel of human love and sympathy. It is a wealth [she says in words which ring like a clarion] which contains all the wealths of the world ; it is complete possession and dominion. I repeat that he who is indifferent to these is lord and master 1 I remember noticing in Avila that the Provincial of the Discalced Carmelites wore sand-shoes. Other times other manners ! MOUNT CARMEL 255 of them twice over. What are kings and lords to me, if I envy not their revenues nor wish to please them, if to do so I must displease God however little ? Or what to me their honours and titles if I once understand wherein the honour of a poor man consists, which is in being unfeignedly poor? For myself, I hold that honour and wealth always go together ; and he who pines for honour is not averse to money ; and he who abhors money, little does he care for honour. Let this be well understood, that this honour always bears along with it some care for revenues and money ; for it is a marvel to find a man honoured in the world if he be poor. Oftener, although he be honourable in himself, is he held in small esteem. True poverty brings such a distasteful kind of honour in her train that no one can be found to suffer it (I speak of the poverty undertaken for God alone), when it is necessary to content no one but him, and it is a certain thing that he who needs them not has many friends. I have seen this well by experience. I have only spoken what I have witnessed of my own ex- perience. . . . Well, as I have already said, since for the love of God the device on our shield is holy poverty and what our holy Fathers at the beginning of the foundation of our Order held and guarded in such high esteem (for I have been told by one who knows, that they kept nothing from one day to the other) now that we do not keep it outwardly in so much perfection, let us endeavour to maintain it inwardly. It is only for two hours of life, the reward most great : and even were there none but that of following our Saviour's counsels, it is a great recompense to imitate his Majesty in something. On our banners must be inscribed this device, so that in all things we may seek to follow it, in house, clothes, words, and much more in thought. And whilst you fulfil this there is no fear, with God's help, that the religion of this house will perish, for, as said Santa Clara, " Great are the walls of poverty." . . . Very ill does it appear, my daughters, to build large houses with the possessions of the poor. May God not allow it, but, poor and small in all things. Let us appear in something like our King, who owned no house but the stable of Bethlehem where he was born, and the cross on which he died. Houses were these of little comfort and ease ! And as for those who build large ones ! It is their business not ours, for their purposes, although different, may be no less saintly ; but for thirteen poor creatures any corner is sufficient. If as is necessary when the cloister life is very strict, you possess an orchard (and this is even a stimulus to prayer and devotion), with some hermits' grots where you can retire to pray, well and good, but from buildings, a large house, comfort, God deliver us ! Never forget that all will tumble to pieces on the Day of Judgment ; and how do we know that it will not be soon ? And that the falling down of the house of thirteen poor nuns should make much noise is not well, for really poor people make no noise. Socialism has never known a stricter development than in these religious communisms, which have made a vigorous effort to seize the principle of their Founder at its source and reduce it to practice. On no account [Teresa writes] let the sisters possess anything of their own, or be allowed to ; let no sister have anything of her own, but let everything be in common, and to each one be distributed according to her needs. For this purpose [she continues] let great heed be taken with her who has charge of the vestiary and provisions ; neither must the prioress nor those who have been longer in the Order be more considered than the 256 SANTA TERESA rest, but necessity and age alone, and necessity more than age as the rule decrees. . . . The sisters must never have any set task given them ; each one must endeavour to work in order that all may eat [i.e. contribute her share to the general maintenance of the community]. . . . No sister can either give or receive, although it be from her parents, without the prioress's license, to whom she will show whatever she receives in alms. But even communism has its restrictions. No sister may eat or drink without permission outside the hours set apart for dinner and supper, during which meals those who wish to perform penance " must be quick about it, so as not to delay the reading." The needs of the healthy must give way to those of the sick and ailing. Let the sick be nursed with all love and indulgence, and always con- formably to our poverty, and let them praise God when he provides for them well ; and if she should want that which soothes the rich in sickness, let her not repine, since for this they must come resolutely prepared : this indeed is to be poor, to want perchance in the greatest need. Let the mother prioress pay great heed to this ; rather than the sick should want for some alleviations, let the healthy ones go without necessaries ; let the sisters visit and console them ; let her be infirmarian who has most ability and charity for the office, and let the sick then endeavour to display the perfection they have acquired in health, by giving as little trouble as they can. If the illness be not extreme, let her be obedient to the infirmarian, so that she may profit and derive benefit from her illness, and edify the sisters ; and let them be given linen and good beds, and be treated with charity. The prioress, on whom so much depended, is to take great heed that the Rule and Constitutions be observed in every- thing, to guard the purity and cloister-life of the house, and to watch every one in the fulfilment of their duties, as well as to administer to their wants, both spiritual and temporal, with a mother's love. " She who would be obeyed must make herself loved." From the meanest and most trivial acts of life, Teresa directed her daughters to find in them a higher and more transcendental meaning. Even from the humble board, where a few crumbs of bread often formed their only fare, they must cast their eyes upwards in consideration of the heavenly table, and the divine food spread on it, and the angel guests around it, with desire to see themselves there also. Thus did the great woman shed a divine poetry over the religious life ; thus did she cast over intelligences often narrow and prosaic a glamour which still lingers to-day like the perfume of her presence in the countless convents of her order. Great as an administrator, she exacted from others the same unhesitating, unqualified obedience for which she herself was so remarkable. She accomplished more than this : for she impressed on the MOUNT CARMEL 257 sterility and poverty-stricken mental standard of the cloister, the loftiness of her own aims and ardent desires. If she had abandoned her convent and chosen to shut herself up with twelve poor women, it was not that they might while away their lives in idleness or even the conscientious accomplishment of their religious duties. If she insisted on such entire negation, it was but as a preparation to greater work. She impressed on the nuns of San Josd the profoundness of the relations which bound them to the great world of humanity ; the responsibilities these imposed, which, ever widening in concentric circles the farther they departed from the narrow starting-point, embraced at last within their orbit the whole of mankind. Not one of them, however frail and humble, but felt that she was doing good and true service to the army militant fighting for the Church, and to stay the ravages and progress of heresy outside the convent walls. One wonders if these women ever quite penetrated the grandeur of her object ; ever quite realised how she reasserted the claims of her sex to be regarded with some other sentiment than a merely sensuous admiration for its physical beauty, or the contempt of indulgent indifference for an inferior being supposed to be little removed in intellect from other domestic animals. Teresa could not join in the fray, for (in her own pathetic words) she was a woman and powerless. The only weapon she could wield was that of prayer. So implicitly was the sovereign power of intercession believed in that, during the disastrous expedition of Algiers, Charles V., driven from his camp inundated by rain, remembering as he restlessly paced to and fro wrapped in his long white cloak amongst the chief grandees of Spain, that at the stroke of midnight a chorus of solemn supplications arose from every convent of his realm, bid them take courage, for within half an hour, he said, every monk and nun in Spain will be up and praying for us. So the nun of Avila, chafing against her sex and helplessness, was inspired by the same consolatory conviction. What if a cloud of intercession ascending night and day from pure hearts, freed from the world's business and distractions, effected what human strength had as yet been utterly powerless against ? Such, then, was the mission, little less than divine, she held aloft before her nuns. She raised their aspirations to something above and beyond themselves. She was too great to dream (as do many pious people) that the salvation of her own soul was the supreme end of all creation. Teresa and her nuns had elected to join themselves together in voluntary poverty, to spurn all the sweets of life, to save souls ; if they saved their own in the process it was well, although an '7 258 SANTA TERESA entirely secondary consideration. Their love and compassion must be as boundless as the claims on it, must be truly Catholic in the highest and most generous sense of the word. If, on the one hand, they sustained by their orisons the faltering strength of the active Champions of religion, whose position forced on them a double and often conflicting role that of the courtier and the ascetic on the other they embraced the heretics against whom they waged warfare, who day by day drew nearer to the brink of eternal perdition. Every hour of their life must be a prayer. Teresa meant it, indeed, when she said that she would give a thousand souls of her own to save one heretic. Although she never formulated it to herself, no one perhaps of her age so clearly realised the absolute insignificance of religious differences in comparison with the claims of human brotherhood. Strange that these internal reforms, of which hers was perhaps the greatest which took place, as it seemed, almost simultaneously in the very bosom of Catholicity itself and might for one brief moment have bridged over the gulf which even then had become impassable owing to the political ambition of an ambitious pope, were in the end destined to melt away, absorbed by the great fabric, on which they reacted for a time, but not permanently ! Thus, for a definite and generous purpose, was the discipline of the ancient Cenobites, who clustered together amidst the solitudes of the Thebaid, restored in a mediaeval convent of Castille. Instead of the stars of the serene sky of Egypt, and the rustic horn or trumpet which twice a day interrupted the vast silence of the desert, a cracked bell marked out the hours of public worship ; for the wooden sandals and palm-tree mats and baskets, the work of the ancient solitaries, were substituted the spinning-wheel and spindle of the nuns of Avila. These nuns whose frugal and uncertain fare (for they were forbidden to beg except under extremest necessity) consisted of herbs or vegetables, some crumbs of bread, with a little cheese reduced at times to make their meal of vine leaves gathered from a vine which grew in the garden ; to whom an egg, a morsel of coarse fish, a few nuts for supper, seemed sumptuous fare, veritably believed that they not only fought a battle against the flesh, but that of the Church Militant in the noisy world outside. Hunger showed its gaunt face, and these women, wasted by a prodigious fast they fasted from the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross (i4th September) to Easter, besides self-imposed fasts of a day or longer, defied it, consumed by a diviner hunger, a diviner thirst. The skull out of which they sometimes ate and drank, with its ghastly MOUNT CARMEL 259 lesson, sweetened mortification and privation. When, as often happened, there was not enough food for all, the little there was, was left untouched by those for whom, as being most necessitous, it was reserved, until such time as there was enough for all. On the day of the Feast of Corpus there was nothing to eat in the refectory but a morsel of dry bread. They shared it among them, and Teresa broke out into inspired thoughts on the Bread of Life. Illumined by an extraordinary and simultaneous enthusiasm, animated by a single impulse, the nuns proceeded in glad procession to the choir, where before the Host they sang hymns of holy and spiritual joy and thanksgiving for the Holy Poverty that they had been allowed to share with One who had left them the Bread of Life in his Most Holy Body. Their prioress (for Teresa, against her wish, was forced to accept that office for the good of the community), in spite of her literary work ; the constant and severe mortifications that she engaged in to such an extent that she had to be restrained by her confessors, who feared that they would shorten her life ; her constant illnesses, was foremost in every mean and humble office. Her cleanliness and conscientiousness shone so con- spicuously in the kitchen as to draw from her nuns the remark that she might have been born to be a cook and never performed any other duty. The nuns never fared so well as when Teresa's turn in the kitchen came round. There they sometimes found her unconscious, absorbed in ecstasy, her face rapt and beautiful, her rigid hands grasping the frying-pan. So true was it, as she herself wrote, that " God walks even amongst the pots and pipkins." Another world constantly hovered around her who was most active in the meanest affairs of this, and her ecstasies often overtook her as she was sweeping the floor. Her cell and food, the poorest and barest ; her habit, which she was always willing to exchange for a worse one, the coarsest in the convent. The spinning-wheel, the distaff, and the needle were never idle ; nor did they cease their busy whir when the nuns received their visitors in the parlour, the Bishop alone excepted. Great and practical administrator as she was, she founded the discipline of her convent on the soldier's virtue obedience. The obedience she gave and required was unhesitating and unfaltering an obedience not only of the will, but of the intellect. The Egyptian monks were bidden to remove enormous rocks ; to water a barren staff planted in the ground for three years until it blossomed ; to walk into a fiery furnace. Maria de Ocampo of Avila, bidden by Teresa to plant a slice of rotten cucumber in the garden, merely asked how it was to be placed in the earth upright or sideways, and immediately 2 6o SANTA TERESA without a word obeyed. Nor less were the voluntary humilia- tions. Teresa (I do not believe it, however solemnly attested by the chronicler), saddled like a mule, laden with baskets of stones, crawled into the refectory on her hands and knees before her assembled nuns, the sight producing tears from all eyes. Nevertheless it would be a mistake to imagine a community of sour faces, their mouths puckered with sour discontent or grim despair. No words can give any idea of the glad cheerful- ness, the holy joy, the serene composure which reigned in that little world, as it still reigns to-day unimpaired in many of Teresa's convents. Melancholy in the convent ! God forbid ! Teresa dreaded the melancholy as the plague ; a person infected with it was to be refused admittance to her convents, and she sought her nuns with clear and serene understandings and unclouded brows. And there were moments, too, when the bare and poverty- stricken convent was filled with an unwonted animation a rustle of holy gladness. Tapers gleamed red amidst the twilight obscurity of the church, before altars decked with flowers. A current of restrained joy, of celestial exhilaration, invaded the precincts of silence and penitence, banishing the stern asceticism which was for a moment forgotten. Then might one have heard a strange and simple melody, in which the voices of the nuns, voices which, however sweet and fresh, always possess to me a strange under-current of monotonous sadness, mingled with the rustic and patriarchal music of the pipe, the drum, the cymbals, and the tambourine, which the nuns of San Jose" still show to the curious stranger as their most precious relics. The profession of her nuns was celebrated with a flutter of joy and triumph. Teresa herself often penned the verses, which, if the metre is rustic, breathe such a valiant and militant spirit as to linger as long in the heart as on the ear. 1 Todos los que militais Comence'mosle A seguir Debajo de esta bandera Pues que le dimos la muerte. Ya no durmais, ya no durmais, Oh que venturosa suerte Pues que no hay paz en la tierra. Se le siguid desta guerra ; Ya como capitan fuerte Ya no durmais, ya no durmais, Quiso nuestro Dios morir, Pues Dios falta de la tierra. 1 All ye who do battle Since we gave him death Under this flag, Let us follow him thither. Sleep no longer, sleep no longer, Oh ! how sweet his fate On earth there is no peace. Once the war ended. Now like a brave captain Sleep no longer, sleep no longer, Did our Lord die, For God has left the earth. MOUNT CARMEL 261 1 No haya ningun cobarde, Pues Jesus es nuestra guia, Aventuremos la vida, Ye el premio de aquesta guerra ; Pues no hay quien mejor la guarde Ya no durmais, ya no durmais, Que el que la da por perdida. Porque no hay paz en la tierra. Sometimes in a tenderer strain she chants the Divine Espousals : Ricas' joyas os dard Y sobre todo os dard Este Esposo, Rey del cielo Un espiritu humillado. Daros hd mucho consuelo, Es Rey y bien lo podra* Que nadie os lo quitara", Pues quiere hoy ser desposado. 2 The taking of the veil of Isabel de los Angeles in Salamanca suggests to her the lifelong vigil of which it was the symbol : Aquese velo gracioso Tened contmuo cuidado Os dice que esteis en vela, De cumplir como alma fuerte, Guardando la centinela Hasta el dia de la muerte, Hasta que venga el Esposo, Lo que habeis hoy profesado ; Que, como ladron famoso, Porque habiendo asi velado Vendrd cuando no penseis : Con el Esposo entrareis : Por eso no os descuideis. Por eso no os descuideis. 8 On great and solemn festivals the Birth of Christ, the Adoration of the Kings under the magic of these simple ballads, these quaint villancicos and tender songs, written and set to rustic music by Teresa, the choir and white-caped nuns faded away to eyes dimmed by mortification. Children once more, for a brief moment in fancy, they sat around their father's hearth before the blazing logs of a winter's night, and vied with Gil and Bias, the rude herdsmen clad in sheepskin, and the ruddy-faced lasses, in chanting the praises of the new-born Babe, and the joyous amazement of the shepherds fifteen hundred years ago. Great plains arose before them, shut in by the brown, vague shadows of the sierras, where the shepherds 1 Avaunt all cowards, Since Christ is our guide Life we will risk ; And the prize of the battle. He keeps it best Sleep no longer, sleep no longer, Who knows how to lose it, On earth there is no peace. 2 He will give rich jewels, And humble spirit, greatest prize of all. This Spouse-King of Heaven ; Such can this King bestow, Tender comfort, too, that none can rob, Who to wed with you comes down to-day. 3 To you that veil doth say Never relax your heed That you must watch Until the day of death, Like sentinel at post Like valiant soul, to do For the coming of the Spouse, What you to-day profess. For when you least do dream, For if you have so watched Like some great thief he comes ; Thou shalt enter with the Spouse ; So sleep not at your post. So sleep not at your post. a6a SANTA TERESA of Castille, wrapped in ragged cloaks and blankets, guarded their flocks in the midst of its wild pasture-lands, and saw shining above them, in the profound starlit midnight sky of winter, a star which glittered more bright and glorious than the rest. Sometimes these verses were called forth by other occasions. It is said that the nuns of San Jose", molested by the insects which infested their coarse, rough habits, hit upon the expedient of forming a procession, to pray the Lord to deliver them from the unsavoury plague. Bearing the Cross before them, they went to Teresa's cell, whom they found in prayer, and she at once improvised the three following strophes : Pues nos dais vestido nuevo, Hijas, pues tomais la cruz, Rey celestial, Tener valor, Librad de la mala gente Y d. Jesus, que es vuestra luz, Este sayal. Pedid favor : El os serd defensor En trance tal. 1 One would think that this kind of devil might have been as well, or perhaps better, cast out by scrubbing and soap as by prayer. I fancy I can discern in these couplets a point of malice, a fine touch of irony ; a satire on foolish and ill-directed prayers. Perhaps the saint was not averse to allow the chastisement to continue, so as to force her daughters to observe that scrupulous cleanliness so conspicuous in herself, and bring them to a better appreciation of the virtues of the humble household remedy for such plagues, to which at last they seem to have betaken themselves, as we are gravely told that the nuns succeeded in ridding themselves of the pest. Indeed, there is some dispute as to whether all Teresa's convents were not so delivered : the author of the Ailo Teresiano contending that those under the authority of the bishops were excluded from the favour ; whereupon her latest biographer, a man of culture and erudition, writing in the nineteenth century ! gravely adds : " The nuns of the Convent of the Image of Alcala and of Sta. Teresa of Madrid have assured me that it is so, and I believe them more than I do the Father Fr. Antonio, deeply prejudiced on this question." I cannot altogether agree with Lafuente, the editor in 1 Since you clothe us anew, Daughters, since you chose the Cross, Celestial King, Have valour. Deliver this sackcloth And from Jesus, your light, From evil guests. Ask favour. He your defence will be In this moment of trouble. MOUNT CARMEL 263 question, who throws out the most rustic of these songs, as spurious and unworthy of Teresa. " These couplets," he says, " of Gil and Pascual are so slovenly, the conceits so ordinary, the words so rude, that they seem fitter to be sung by blind street minstrels than by nuns." This may be so, but there are those who wonder at Shakespeare for introducing " King Stephen was a worthy peer" in a serious play. His suggestion that they were rather the ballads current amongst the peasantry and the people, who sang them on the occasion of great festivals, does not affect the question. They are not, in their rustic simplicity, dwelling upon the ear in quaint and homely refrain, unworthy of Teresa. Nor less worthy the pen that composed the stanza, which seemed rather a rude eclogue than anything else, wherein the peasant folk of Avila celebrate their joy and triumph, than that which wrote the verses, full of conceits, for which the same editor alone claims her authorship. Let Dominguillo and Bras still with the angels salute the dawn in words which fashion has not altered ; and Bras, Menga, and Llorente, those stout peasant lads and lasses of Avila, welcome the glorious " Lad " who is God omnipotent ! Teresa was destined to transgress every rule for saintship that had been consecrated by time and tradition. She was a constant surprise to those around her, who often failed to recognise how sanctity could be so charming and unconventional. Those who expected to see a withered ascetic, stern and gloomy- browed, were amazed when they were confronted with a courteous Castilian lady, who spoke with urbanity on the topics of the day, as if, instead of convents and foundations, she had been reared in courts and movement. To a narrow brain, this mirth, this joy which beamed from the saint's countenance, and showed her real greatness with which she impregnated the austere discipline of her convents, was accounted a weakness. " The Mother Teresa," says Ines de Jesus, " once gave me some devotional couplets to copy, which I despised and thought unworthy of so grave a person. The saint, penetrating my thought, entered my cell, saying to me (con mucha gracid} in her charming way, before I had spoken : 1 In order to endure life, everything is necessary ; do not be amazed,' and I was confounded, and prostrated myself before her." Nor she alone. A nun, ordered by Teresa to sing to celebrate some festivity, manifested her sour disapproval. " Sing ! " she exclaimed, " at such a moment ! ... It seems to me it would be better to contemplate " ; whereupon the saint, who used but short measure with such refractory dispositions, 264 SANTA TERESA bustled her off to her cell, then and there to contemplate at her leisure ; reproving her stoutly, and keeping her there for several days. It will be easily understood how a commanding and generous character of such a temperament quickly gained a complete ascendency over minds which, perhaps only dimly understanding her on some points, were vanquished by what could not fail to be palpable to all. She practised first and then preached. She herself led the way and brushed aside the obstacles, and faced the spectres which obtruded their grinning faces in the narrow and thorny path trodden by the contemplative. " Be not dismayed, daughters," writes this great heart and most valiant captain, " at the many things you must behold on this divine journey, which is the Royal road to heaven." It is allotted to but few and those the dite of the world to rule with the rod of iron of a stern and strict disciplinarian, and yet never to lose hold of the hearts of her nuns. When necessity required, she was relentless and immovable. Anxious above all things that the atmosphere of her little world should be one of peace and holy charity, she writes in words strangely at variance with her habitual meekness and gentleness : If it should happen that some trivial word should give rise to any dispute, let it be at once remedied, and if not, and it should still continue, betake yourselves to prayer; and if anything of this nature, such as a faction, or a desire to be more than others, or points of honour should continue (for it seems to me that my blood freezes, as they say, when I write, for I see it is a principal evil of monasteries), let them give themselves up for lost, and know that they have cast out the Lord from amongst them. Let them beseech his Majesty and endeavour to remedy it, for unless this is done, however often they may confess and communicate, I fear me that they harbour Judas. Let the prioress, for the love of God, take great heed that it is quickly checked, and, if love should fail, grave chastisement must be resorted to. If one alone should be at the bottom of the disturbance, en- deavour to have her sent to some other convent, for God will assist her to get a dower. Cast out from amongst you this pestilence, use any means to cut away these branches, and, if this should not answer, pluck out the root. And if nothing else avails, let the guilty one be imprisoned in the dungeon ; it is better than that such an incurable pestilence should extend to all. Oh, what a grievous evil it is ! God deliver us from a monastery where it enters. Certainly, I would rather that it and you were all con- sumed by fire. And yet they loved her as never woman had been loved before! She inspired in them the same tender devotion, the same indulgent affection which daughters feel for an infirm and venerated mother. In the bitter cold of a Toledo spring night, they divested themselves of their scanty ^coverings, so that she at least might have some warmth. Sometimes, and the MOUNT CARMEL 265 circumstance is almost pathetic, they sang her to sleep. And what a tremendous power is that of humour to those who possess it ! It too became in her hands a potent weapon to enchain their hearts. On one occasion, it reminds us of the ghastly obsequies which Charles V. is said (erroneously as it seems to me) to have celebrated for himself in life, she was inspired with a desire to begin the religious life afresh. Dressed in the ordinary garb of the day, she once more assumed the habit of the novice. The nuns at her request placed at her feet all their merits, one amongst them who was strong and sound offering up her infirmities. When Teresa received the veil, she assured the assembled community who witnessed the ceremony, that their offerings had been accepted, and singling her out who had offered up her apocryphal ailments, said : " As for you, daughter, you get nothing, for you gave me nothing." This childish delight in trifles almost invariably accompanies a really great character. It has been pointed out to me that if she had only possessed a favourite donkey, it would have enhanced her interest and fascination. But although donkeys play a considerable role in the progress of her foundations, like a true Castilian she has never hinted the remotest predilection for these mute companions of the animal world. It has been reserved to later generations to develop that humanitarianism, and love for and sympathy with animals, of which the Middle Ages seem to have been so generally bereft. What wonder then that the brave and struggling community cast a mysterious spell over the imagination, and quickly secured the sympathies of the world outside its walls? Alms poured in, and San Jose* began to be invested with that halo of rever- ence, which still clings around it, unimpaired by centuries. The bare little church witnessed imposing scenes. A year and a half from the day when the little cracked bell had first tinkled feebly on the air, Maria de Ocampo, she who had proposed its foundation in a jest in a dusky cell of the Encarnacion, laid her dower and her will on the altar of San Jose\ In the following September its doors opened to receive a Bride who, surrounded by all that was noble and gay in Avila, looked her last on the world's pomps and vanities, before, clothed in the coarse serge of the Barefooted Carmelites, she was absorbed into the mysterious shadow behind the grating. Thus she whose haughty pride had spurned all earthly bridegrooms as beneath her rank, after a long struggle watered with many tears, sank her ancestral name, glorious in the history and legends of her town, into that of Maria de San Geronimo. It is of her 266 SANTA TERESA during her term of office as its prioress, that the following anec- dote is told. One day there was no food at all to eat. Night came, the torno l was closed. Maria de San Geronimo, dis- turbed for the sufferings of her daughters, bid them give thanks to God for the mercy he had done them in allowing them to experience the delights of Poverty. I fear me that the prayer would bring but cold comfort to any but those humble and gigantic spirits, inspired with the fever of the Cross. Whilst they prayed, they heard a loud knocking at the convent gates, so importunate and violent that the prioress ordered the torno to be opened, whereupon they found that a poor man, inspired by God, had brought them two large loaves and a little cheese. Dofta Guiomar de Ulloa also, it would seem, for a brief period became a member of the little community, but not thriving on the discipline, she quickly returned to her house and family ; and so Teresa's heroic and faithful friend, who had fought with her through such a momentous period of their lives and seen it crowned with success, fades from our history, and is seen no more. Thus did the number of nuns which was never to exceed thirteen (" if they were good, they were many ; if not, no number was enough ") attain its complement. And still on the great anniversaries of the Order, on St. Bartholomew's Day, Christmas Day, etc., the governor, cathe- dral chapter, and municipal authorities of Avila, wend their way in solemn procession to San Jose", to hear four novices play in concert on those sacred relics, the drum, the pipes, and the cymbals in memory of the four poor undowered orphans who received the habit on that St. Bartholomew's Day of 1562, in the convent their predecessors had stirred up heaven and earth to annihilate. 1 The torno, or wooden revolving shelf, on which all things passing in and out of the convent are placed. When paying a visit to the community one rings the bell in the torno, and the key of the parlour (las gradas) is placed in the torno, and thus handed to the visitor. CHAPTER X CAMINO DE PERFECCION FOUNDATION OF MEDINA DEL CAMPO FIVE happy years of Teresa's life sped tranquilly away in the peaceful seclusion of San Jose*. It is a remarkable feature in her character, and shows its exquisite balance, that in its austere retirement she was as content and happy as if she had never tasted the fever of action and the sweets of triumph. They were the last years of unbroken peace she was destined to enjoy on earth. On them she will often look back wistfully, from the life of stir and travel which, all unknown to her as yet, lies in store for her beyond the dim horizon. During them, at the petition of her nuns, she wrote her second great work, the Camino de Perfection ; l during them she cemented those valuable friendships, not the least important factor in her success. In the same way that we have considered her Life as embracing the long period of her existence in the Encarnacion, so in the present case may we consider this book as the monument of her uneventful and monotonous life in San Jose. To my thinking Teresa is at her best in the Camino de Perfection (a title which seemed curiously enough to fore- shadow her own future career), with its bursts of impassioned eloquence; its shrewd and caustic irony; its acute and pene- trating knowledge of human character (the same in the convent as in the world) from which her keen eye stripped off the disguises in which weak humanity would fain travesty its naked- ness ; above all, its sympathetic and tender instinct for the needs and the difficulties of her followers. As the Constitutions are the skeleton outlines, so does the Camino represent the finished and magnificent fabric of the spiritual life. Even as she wrote, her prophetic instinct leapt forward into the future, 1 It is remarkable as being the only one of Teresa's books published during her life, although she did not live to take an author's pride in its appearance, on account of the first sheets being printed last in obedience to the censures exercised by the Inquisition. 267 268 SANTA TERESA and she saw the generations of nuns she should never see in the flesh, whom the words she was then penning would direct and animate when her voice should be for ever silent, her body dust. Her words ring forth with a strange terseness and earnestness, as she thus pens her spiritual testament as she thus entrusts to the keeping of her readers her frail legacy of Reform. She points out the mischievous foibles, the little meannesses, the spirit of cantankerousness and strife, the petty jealousies, the foolish and often baneful intimacies, 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 of the solemn effect of a commination service. It is the voice of the dead animating and directing from these faded pages ; a voice freed from the trammels of flesh, and worthier of respect than the living one that a mere accident could still. Briefly she touches on the motives which guided her, consecrating them for those who should follow her in the future. In them her whole life and character stand most palpably revealed. It was not her original intention to found in poverty, but: At this time it came to my ears what mischief and ravages these Lutherans had worked in France, and how this unhappy sect was fast increasing. I was deeply afflicted, and as if I could do anything or was anything, I wept with the Lord and besought him to remedy so great an evil. It seemed to me that I would have given a thousand lives to succour one soul amongst the numbers that were there going to perdition. And as I saw myself a woman, and a base one, powerless to help as I should have desired in the service of the Lord ... I resolved to do that little that was in me, namely, to follow the evangelic precepts as perfectly as I could, and to endeavour that these few nuns who are here with me should do likewise . . . and that they being such as my desires painted them . . . and all occupied in prayer for those who are battling for the Church, the preachers and learned men engaged in her defence, we might help this my Lord, in what we could. Heart-broken at the thought of so many souls going to their perdition, she exclaims : Oh, sisters mine in Christ, help me to supplicate this from the Lord, since for this purpose he gathered you together here : this is your calling, this must be your business ; for this your tears, these your petitions ! Raised on the basis of the perfect life, this prayer, this continual supplication, is to be a column of fire rising irresist- CAMINO DE PERFECCION 269 ibly from pure souls to the Judgment-seat of God. And the foundation stone of the perfect life is Poverty. Here, in a passage of almost unparalleled eloquence, in which she still plays as powerfully on every fibre of the heart as she did on those of the simple unlettered nuns of the sixteenth century, striking out of it the best and noblest melody it can afford, she chants a veritable paean of anticipatory triumph. Thus carried away by the chain of thought suggested by poverty, which has for a moment interrupted the progress of her simple, philosophical style, she returns to earth with a stirring re- miniscence of the wild, fierce days of Avila, days whose reminiscences and deeds lived in all men's minds, and which she had so often listened to in childhood around her father's hearth of a winter's night. To check this growth of heresy, against which human strength is powerless, it has appeared to me necessary to act as in time of war, when the enemy has scoured the land, and the lord of it, seeing himself hard pressed on every side, throws himself into a city, which he causes to be well fortified, and whence, it sometimes happens, since those that are in the city are picked men able to do more of themselves alone than any number of soldiers, if cowards, that he is able to retaliate on his foes, and in this fashion gain a victory over them : and even if he is not victorious, unless hunger forces him to surrender, it is impossible for him to be vanquished, so long as there is no traitor. For the first time we find the suggestion of a thought on which she was afterwards to build her greatest work. The Church is the Castle ; the priests and theologians its captains. The mission of the nuns of San Jose", free from business, the world, distractions, is to aid with their prayers the champions who have to lead a double life, who must not only live in palaces and in intercourse with men, and conform with them, but at the same time carry on an interior life of estrange- ment from the world, and act as if they were in exile. In short, they must be not men but angels, in a world which, passing over virtue unnoticed, pardons no fault (where, she wonders, does the world learn its measure of perfection which only serves it to condemn ?). Let them pray, therefore : first, that many of these many learned and religious men may escape unscathed from this great battlefield, and that those who are not prepared may be made fit ; next, that God may support them so that they may escape from the many dangers of the world and close their ears to the song of the Sirens in this dangerous sea. It seems daring to think [she concludes] that I may have some share in bringing this about. I trust, my Lord, in these your servants who are 270 SANTA TERESA here, and who I see and know desire and solicit no other thing but to please thee. For thee have they abandoned the little they had, and they would fain have had more to lay it at thy feet. And then, my Creator, thou art not ungrateful, that I should think thou wilt fail to do what they ask of thee, nor didst thou, Lord, when thou wentest about the world, abhor women, rather didst thou ever favour them and show them pity. [Her concluding words to her nuns are grave and comminatory.] And when your prayers and desires and disciplines and fasts are not employed for the purpose I have said, be sure that you neither do nor accomplish the end for which the Lord brought you together here, and may the Lord of his great mercy permit that this may never be blotted from your memory. It is remarkable that she never once touches on any question of dogma. With instinctive mistrust for which we must blame the age she let the red-hot cinders drop from her ringers without being burnt by them. It is not improbable that, if she had ventured to meddle with them, her keen and conscientious mind would have foundered on the rock of those dangerous questions of grace and justification, which brought such disasters and woe on those very men whose catholicity it was least possible to doubt or dispute ! Never was there such a master of all the stops of the human heart. The whole book breathes a fine spirit of heroism, a constant stimulus to glorious suffering, worthy of the daughter of her house, worthy of the noblest spirit of chivalrous Spain, worthy of the " generous and royal souls " (it is her own expression) she was endeavouring to train. " We cannot," as she says, " stir ourselves up to great things unless our thoughts are high." " Christ is the Captain of love." She deprecates the use amongst her nuns of such ex- pressions as " my life," " my soul," " my love," as only fit for women : And I would not have my daughters be nor seem to be women in anything, but valiant and brave men (" varones fuertes "), for if you only do what is in you, the Lord will give you such strength, that men will be amazed at you. The God of glory will not visit our souls (I mean in union) if we do not strive to gain the great virtues. . . . And it is well that the Lord should see that we do all in our power like soldiers, who, however long they have served, must always be on the alert to fulfil their captain's orders, since it is he who pays them well for it, and how much better will our King pay us than those of earth ! . . . For myself I am convinced that the measure of our ability to carry a heavy cross or a light one is love. Be sure, oh my sisters, that you come to die for Christ, and not to lead an easy life for Christ, for this is what the devil persuades us is necessary to do in order to endure the Rule and keep it, and such is our desire to keep it, together with our anxiety to preserve our health, so that we may the CAMINO DE PERFECCION 271 better observe and guard it, that we die without having fulfilled it completely for a month together, perchance not even for a day. The dryness and causticity of this passage is excelled in the one that follows : Sometimes they [the nuns] are seized with a perfect frenzy of mortifica- tion, without rhyme or reason, which lasts, so to speak, for two days : then the devil whispers in their imagination that it did them harm, and that never again must they do penance, not even that imposed by the Rule, for they have had enough of it. We do not keep the slightest things of the Rule, as for instance silence, which cannot possibly hurt us, and yet scarcely do we fancy we have a headache than we leave off going to choir, which cannot kill us either. One day because our head ached, the next because it did not ache, and another three so that it may not ache ; and yet we are willing enough to invent mortifications out of our own head, so that we can do neither [keep silence nor go to choir] ; and sometimes the illness is slight, and we think that we are not obliged to do anything, and that we do all that can be expected of us if only we ask leave to be exempted. You will ask, Why then does the Prioress grant it ? If she knew what was in your thoughts, perchance she would not ; but as you tell her that it is urgent, and there is no want of a doctor to lend a hand for the same reason that you lend him one, and some weeping friend or relative close by, what can the poor Prioress do, although she sometimes sees it is too much ? If she is wanting in charity she is left with a troubled conscience ; she would rather that the fault lay with you than with her, and she does not think it right to judge you harshly. Oh this constant complaining, valame Dios ! amongst nuns ; may he pardon me, but I fear me it is already a habit. . . . When the illness is serious, no complaint is needed, it complains of itself : then it is another plaint and is at once evident. Often do I tell you, sisters, and now I wish to set it down in writing here, so that you may not forget, that in this house, and it applies more- over to every person who wishes to be perfect, you must fly a thousand leagues from such expressions as, You see I was right; they did me an injustice; he -was wrong to treat me thus ! God deliver us from such evil reasonings. 1 Do you think it was right for our good Jesus to bear so many injuries and "sin razones," or that there was any reason for such being done him ? I know not why she who cannot bear any cross but a very reasonable one should be in a convent at all. So she lashed the small weaknesses of the cloister with tender but unsparing satire. One of her similes she draws from the game of chess. He who knows not how to set the pieces on the board is likely to play but ill, and if he cannot give mate to the king, will certainly not be able to give him checkmate. I know that you will reprove me for speaking, even for such a purpose, of a game which is not played, nor ever will be, in this house. By this you may see what a mother God has given you, who was familiar even with such a vanity as this ; still they say that it is sometimes 1 The whole of the above passage is a fine play on the various meanings of the word "razon," impossible except the sense to render into English. 272 SANTA TERESA allowable, and how allowable for us would be this kind of play ! And if we play at it often how soon shall we give mate to this divine King who cannot escape from us, nor would he if he could ! the queen is his greatest opponent in this game, aided by all the other pieces. No queen can capture him like humility. This it was that brought him down from heaven to the Virgin's womb, and with it we can bring him to our souls by a hair. Although her intention in founding San Jose was to re- suscitate the old contemplative life of the desert " the object we strive for is not only to be nuns, but hermits like our holy fathers of the past " she does not base the ascetic life on contemplation alone. There is no reason why, because prayer is the business of every one in this house, you should all be contemplatives, . . . and since the contempla- tive life is not necessary for our salvation, nor an essential to it, do not think that any one will ever require it of you, or that the lack of it prevents your reaching great perfection : . . . and if there is no want of humility, I do not believe that they (who are not contemplatives) will be worse off in the end, but perhaps equal in every way to those who have tasted many delights ; and in a great measure their position is more secure, for we know not whether the suavity comes from God or is inspired by the devil. ... In humility, mortification, abnegation, and other virtues, there is always more security ; there is no reason for fear, nor to dread lest you should not reach perfection as well as the most contemplative of them all. Martha too was holy, although they do not say she was a contemplative. . . . The test of true progress does not lie in suavity in prayer, in ecstasies, rapts, visions, and such like spiritual favours, for we must wait until the other world to see their value, but in humility and self-abasement of the soul. This is current coin, a rent which never fails, a perpetual annuity, and not a quit-rent which can be as easily done away with as imposed. . . . To conclude ; these are the virtues I desire you, my daughters, to possess, and endeavour to obtain, and which I would have you envy in others with a holy emulation. Be not distressed if those other devotions, which are in them- selves uncertain, should be denied you. For it might be that what in other persons was a gift of God, his Majesty might permit to be a devil's illusion in you, so that he may deceive you, as he has done others. Why be anxious to serve the Lord in things so doubtful, when there is so much wherein you can serve him safely ? Who puts you in these dangers ? With this solemn warning on her lips, dictated by a rare spirit of good sense and moderation, she launches once more on her favourite theme, the contemplative life, endeavouring to smooth away the obstacles and dangers encountered by the novice in mysticism. Again the image of water haunts her mind : When God, sisters, shall bring you to drink this water and you who now drink of it you will delight in this, and know how the veritable love of God, if it has attained to its full strength, and already entirely free from earthly considerations soars above them, is master of all the elements of the world. ... Is it not beautiful that a poor nun of San Jose" may reach at last CAMINO DE PERFECCION 273 to have dominion of the whole earth and its elements ? And can it surprise us if by the favour of God the saints exercise over them such a sway ? Fire and water obeyed Saint Martin, birds and fishes Saint Francis ; and so with many other saints, who were clearly seen to have everything on earth so completely subject to them, on account of their having striven to hold it as nought, and to give themselves in very truth and with all their strength to its Lord. She places her own experiences, acquired through years of painful effort, at their service. I shall always [she says] speak of mental and vocal prayer together, so as not to startle you, daughters, for well do I know the result of these things from which I myself have suffered : and thus it would be my desire to prevent any one troubling or oppressing you with doubts, for it is dangerous to travel this road with fear. It is of great importance to be sure that you are on the right road ; for to tell a traveller that he has gone astray and lost his way, is to make him wander about in various directions ; and whilst he thus goes about seeking for the right one, he tires himself out, loses time and arrives later at his destination. ... To address God in prayer it is first necessary to be thoroughly penetrated with a sense of the dignity of him whom we are about to address. For we cannot draw near to speak to a prince with the same want of ceremony as we do to a labourer or some poor person like ourselves, for whom any mode of address is good enough. It is but right that if, through this King's humility, he does not refuse to listen to me nor to let me approach him, nor do his guards throw me out if on account of my ill-breeding I know not how to speak with him (because the angels that surround him know well the temper of their King, and that he takes more pleasure in the rudeness of a lowly shepherd who he sees would say more if he could, than in the most learned men of letters, however elegant their discourse, if they do not comport themselves with humility), so also must we not take advantage of his goodness to be discourteous. . . . It is well that we should endeavour to know his purity and who he is. It is true that we know him as soon as we approach him, as we do great people on earth ; for after we have been told who their father was, and how many millions they have of revenue, and their titles, there is nothing more to know ; for here it is not the man we pay honour to, however much he may merit it, but his wealth. Oh, miserable world ! [exclaims the high-minded nun] : Praise God greatly, my daughters, that you have left behind you a thing so base, where no consideration is paid to a man's interior worth, but to the possessions of his vassals and tenants ; and should these fail, the world at once ceases to do him honour. A pleasant consideration this to beguile yourselves with during your hours of recreation, for this indeed is an excellent pastime, to think how blindly worldlings pass their time. . . . You can find God when- ever you have a mind to ; he holds the mere fact of our turning towards him in such high esteem, that on his side he meets us half-way. In like manner, as they say, it is the wife's duty, who wishes to live happily with her husband, to be sad when he is sad, and if cheerful (although it may be that he never is) cheerful. See, sisters, from what a servitude you have been delivered. Teresa, highly born and nobly connected, linked lineage in the same category as riches. Both must be trampled under 18 274 SANTA TERESA foot by the humble daughters of San Jose. Again the world rouses in her the same bitter scorn, the same contempt, which we have just seen her express The world has come to such a pitch that if the father is of a more lowly estate than the son, he is ashamed to recognise him for his father. Here this does not enter, for never, please God, in this house, may there be left even a memory of such things ; if not it would be a hell. . . . All must be equal. Oh, college of Christ, where St. Peter, in spite of his being a fisherman, held more command than St. Bartholomew, who was a king's son ! Well did his Majesty know what was to happen in the world as to who was made of the finest earth, which is nothing else than to debate whether it shall be used for unbaked bricks or mud walls. In her description of the prayer of quiet (recollection), she makes use of the following strange passage, in which she approaches perilously near to pantheism : You already know that God is everywhere ; it is clear then that where the king is, there must be the court : in short, that where God is there is heaven ; doubtless, it is not difficult for you to believe that where his Majesty is, there is all glory ! Now behold what Saint Augustine says, who sought him in many places, to find him at last in his own bosom. . . . It is called the prayer of recollection, because the soul gathers together all its powers, and enters within itself with its God. . . . They who can shut themselves up like this in this little heaven of their souls . . . journey far in little time. . . . The soul rises up at the best moment, and like one who enters a strong fort to keep his adversaries at bay, she draws back her senses from these exterior things, and controls them in such a manner that, without understanding how, her eyes close so as not to see them, in order that those of the soul may be wider opened. . . . Let us consider that we have within us a palace of exceeding richness, built entirely of gold and precious stones, in short, fit for such a Lord, and that on you it depends that this edifice shall be such as in truth it is ; for so it is that there can be no more lovely building than a pure soul, full of virtues, which, the greater they are, the more resplendent shine the stones ; and that in this palace dwells this great king, and that he has consented to be your guest, and that he sits on a throne of inestimable price which is even your own heart. . . . There is something else incomparably more precious within ourselves than anything we can see without. . . . The greatest happiness (besides many others) that we can enjoy in the Kingdom of Heaven is, as it seems to me, an absolute severance from all earthly things, their place being taken by a tranquillity and a glory in ourselves, a joy in the joy of others, a perpetual peace, a profound self-satisfaction produced by the sight of all men sanctifying and praising the Lord and blessing his name, and none doing him any offence. Her remarks on the prayer of Quiet and Union are merely brief epitomes of the Treatise of Prayer, which I have already noticed in a former chapter. What I wish most particularly to point out in the Camino is its practical tendency ; the marvellous knowledge it displays of human nature ; and the lights it throws on many points of her own character, which here stands revealed CAMINO DE PERFECCION 275 perhaps more completely than in any of her other writings, if we except her Letters. But see, daughters [she exclaims in the thirty-sixth chapter, a sort of commentary or instruction on the words Dimitte nobis debita nostra of the Lord's Prayer] (for the devil does not forget us), that he also invents marks of respect in monasteries, and imposes his laws whereby one nun is higher or lower in dignity than another in the same way as people in the world, grounding their title to respect on some things that fill me with amaze- ment. . . . He who has risen to teach theology must not abase himself by reading philosophy ; for it is a point of honour with him that he must go higher and not lower ; and, moreover, should he be ordered to do so by obedience, it would in his opinion be an insult, and he will conceive himself affronted, nor will those be wanting to take up the cudgels in his behalf, and to declare with him that it is an insult, and at once the devil discovers arguments that, even judged by divine law, seem plausible enough ! Then amongst nuns, she who has once been Prioress must not stoop to any lower office ; constant consideration must be shown to her who has been longest in the Order, for this we never lose sight of, and sometimes even it seems to us a merit, since it is enjoined by the Rule. It is a thing to laugh at, or rather to weep at, for that would be more reasonable : I only know that the Order does not command us not to be humble. It enjoins it indeed for the sake of order ; but it is not right for me to be so fond of order in things relating to my own dignity, as to pay as much attention to this point of the Rule, as I do to other points of it, which perchance I keep but ill. Let not all our perfection consist in keeping it in this ; others will keep a good watch over it even if I do not. The truth is that as we have a tendency to rise in dignity, even if by so doing we do not rise to heaven none of us will abase ourselves. ... I have conversed with many contemplatives who prize trials as others do gold and jewels. . . . These, far from feeling any self-esteem, are pleased that their sins are known. . . . The same with their lineage, since they already know that it shall profit them nothing in the kingdom without end ; if they take pleasure in coming of a good stock (" buena casta ") it is only in so far as it enables them to serve God better ; when it does not, it troubles them to be accounted more than they are, and it gives them no concern, rather pleasure, to set people right. And this must be because he on whom God bestows this favour of humility and great love of God in everything that appertains to his greater service, is so forgetful of himself that it is even impossible for him to believe that others should feel such things as these, or that they should account it an injury. . . . Love and fear of God are two strong castles, whence we can wage war on the world and the devil. And after all, life is but an inn, ourselves but the guests of a fleeting night : And if, in the case of a person habituated to luxuries, and such are the people who frequent them most, an uncomfortable inn is insufferable even for a night, what, think you, must be the grief of that sad soul which finds itself doomed to dwell in hell eternally ? For we do not seek comfort, daughters ; we are well off here. The uncomfortable inn is but for a night ; let us praise God, let us valiantly force ourselves to do penance in this life. There are minds so narrow and rigid that they would admit none but sour faces, and would fill the convent walls with the 276 SANTA TERESA gloom of their own tortured and cavilling intellects. Not so Teresa. And hence comes another mischief, that, in judging others as they do not travel by the same road as you, but, proceeding with more sanctity, converse freely and without restraint in order to benefit their fellows, straightway you look upon it as an imperfection. Their holy gladness seems to you looseness ; especially to us who have no education and know not how far one can carry such intercourse without sin, it is very dangerous and extremely ill of digestion. . . . Therefore, sisters, do your utmost without offence to God, to be affable, and so to treat every one who converses with you, that he shall love your conversation, and desire to live and act like you, and not be terrified and scared away from virtue . . . the holier you are, the more conversable with your sisters. I have dwelt at some length on the Camino de Perfection, because it is the book above all others that reveals Teresa in her priorial capacity, in that of the administrator and lawgiver. If the Vida shows her to us as the mystic, here we behold her in the everyday life of the convent. We are struck by the remarkable breadth and sympathy of her character; at the soundness of her sense ; at the lucidity and practical nature of her reasoning. If occasionally we can discern the faintest touch of Jesuitism, as, for instance, in the last sentence quoted, it is so slight as to be scarcely perceptible. She speaks of wealth and lineage with honest contempt and repugnance. She perceives too the eternal injustice on which they are based, and they rouse in her the bitterest indignation of which she is capable. And yet, such is the inconsequence of human nature, even the best, that she owed her success not only to the circum- stance of having been born herself in an elevated rank of society, but to her diligent cultivation of the friendship of those high in rank and power, whom fate or accident cast in her path. Nor was this incongruous with her doctrines, any more than to-day it is for a man holding socialistic opinions, and even a propagandist of them, not to share his fortune or estates amongst the people. Not less important than the writing of the Camino de Perfeccion were the results, which she knew so well how to turn to the advantage of her Idea, which sprang from her residence in San Jose". She there won adherents whose influence, from their rank in society, or from their reputation, was to be to her in the future both a lever and a shield. It was then that the warmest intimacy sprang up between her and Banes, the Dominican friar who, when she was all unknown to him, had so boldly defended San Jose before the ruling bodies of Avila. From that time he not only seems to have been the director of her conscience, but her adviser on the CAMINO DE PERFECCION 277 most important concerns of her convent. By his advice, and subject to his revision and approval, she wrote the Camino. The support of such a man, who, although young, was accounted the most learned man of his order, one of the most famous teachers who had ever graced the halls of Salamanca, whose decision was listened to by the Inquisitors with respect, was of inestimable advantage to her. It was, in fact, equivalent to winning over to her side the whole Order of Preachers, the conscience-sifters of the kingdom, in whose hands were vested all the tremendous powers of the Inquisition. Many others too of the most important members of that order she counted amongst her friends and confessors, such as Barren, Ibaiiez, Garcia Loaysa de Toledo, brother of Fernando, the stern Duke of Alba. Among the Jesuits, she had satisfied Borja, the commissary-general of the order, of the genuineness and divine origin of her revelations and visions ; and she could count on the support of many others of its members, from whom at different periods of her life she had sought counsel and direction, such as Alvarez, Gaspar de Salazar, and many others. In Dona Luisa de la Cerda and the Bishop of Avila she made conquests no less important. If her relations with the two most powerful of the religious orders in Spain enlisted for her their co-operation, or, at least, their tacit approval, the rank and aristocratic connections of the former secured her partisans and aid in other and no less important directions. To Dona Luisa de la Cerda, the sister of the Duke of Medina-Celi, and one of the largest landed proprietors in Spain, she owed her foundation of Malagon. And by the prelate, the son of the Count of Ribadabia, a junior branch of the great family of Mendoza, the members of which were then as celebrated for being as debonnaire and good-natured as the Toledos were surly and austere, she was mainly enabled to found at Valladolid, Palencia, and Burgos. The Convent of San Jose owed much to this generous patron, who not only provided it with bread but medicine. We shall find Teresa once, at all events, an honoured guest in the castle where he generally resided, whose ivy-mantled ruins may still be seen close to Olmedo, then a place of such importance as to figure together with Arevalo in the popular proverb, " He who would rule Castille must first win Olmedo and Arevalo." Through him she became acquainted with his sister, Dona Maria de Mendoza (the widow of Cobos, Comendador of Leon, Charles V.'s secretary of state, and mother of the Marquis of Camarasa), and with his brother, who, gay and graceless youth as he was, might often be seen in the little parlour of San Jose, attracted thither by its prioress's 278 SANTA TERESA winning and irresistible charm. When the time came for her to resume her active life, we shall see how much she owed to these and other friends like them, and what a decisive influence they often wielded in those moments when she was obliged to play all her cards to secure the existence of her convents. How far had her speculations led her, what were her dreams during these long sunlit years of prayer and duty in San Jose ? At what stage had she arrived in that grand conception of the restoration of an entire order to the ancient and glorious rule of Mount Carmel, when she listened in the convent church to the eloquent sermon of that Franciscan friar, fresh from the Indies, whose words stirred up in her all her missionary and proselytising instincts, and set the spark to the train, so long forming in the most secret depths of her being, which was fraught with such tremendous and transcendental results to her own Order and the world at large? That she had long been nourishing, perhaps half unconsciously to herself, schemes dismissed as soon as formed, so impracticable, so utterly impossible of realisation did they seem ; of extending the reform inaugurated in one poor convent to monks as well as nuns, the only means by which she could ensure its perpetuity in the future, is evident from the following words : As I considered the great valour of these souls, and their strength, certainly more than that of women, to suffer and serve him, it was often borne in on me that the riches God endowed them with were for some great end ; not that I dreamed of what has come to pass, for at that time it seemed impossible, so difficult was it even to imagine how to set about it, although my desires to help somewhat in assisting souls grew exceedingly as time went on ; and often it seemed to me that I was like one who has in his keeping a great treasure, and desires that all should enjoy it, but cannot share it because his hands are tied. ... At the end of five years, or some- what more as it seems to me, I happened to receive a visit from a Franciscan friar called fray Alonso Maldonado, a good servant of God, whose desires for the welfare of souls were as great as my own, and I envied him greatly the power he had of fulfilling them. He had but a little time before returned from the Indies : he began to tell me of the many millions of souls who were there perishing for lack of teaching, and before he went he preached us a sermon, urging us to greater penitence. The thought of the loss of so many souls filled me with such distress that I was almost beside myself. I sped with many tears to a hermitage, and cried to our Lord, supplicating him to devise some means whereby I also might be of some help in gaining some soul for his service, since the Devil carried away so many, and, even though I could do nothing else, that my prayers might be of some avail. I greatly envied those who were able, for love of our Lord, in spite of a thousand deaths, to employ themselves in this ; and so it happened that, when we read in the lives of the saints that they con- verted souls, they inspire me with more devotion, tenderness, and a greater desire to emulate them, than all their martyrdoms. . . . Well, at the time I was in this profound distress, one night as I was in prayer the Lord FOUNDATION OF MEDINA DEL CAMPO 279 showed himself to me as he was wont, and with great marks of love, as if he wished to console me, said : Wait a little while, daughter, and thou shall see great things. . . . After this it seems to me that another half year passed away, and then happened what I am now about to relate. The indigent, mendicant friar, preaching his mission, who all unconsciously had lit up such a flame in Teresa's ardent breast, had probably trudged with his bare feet and staff half the kingdom over, when a fortuitous circumstance, one utterly unprecedented in the annals of the order, placed the means in her power to execute the great ideas that his words had inspired her with afresh, and to accomplish that without which she might have lived and died the obscure nun of an obscure convent. Mysterious indeed the chain of influences which shape our lives ! at first as slight and as filmy as a summer cobweb woven on the petal of a flower, binding us at last in ropes so strong that no human strength can escape from the toils ; at first free to reject or refuse, at last borne along by an irresistible torrent, which surges on with the gloom of irrevocable fate. Such was the cause, the concatenation of events which decided Teresa's career. But for them, Teresa de Jesus might have been laid to her eternal rest under the cloister pavement of San Jose, and figured at most in a brief paragraph in the annals of her order. A manuscript in large regular writing might have remained, penned by one Teresa, their foundress : that is, if not destroyed by the incurious hand of some succeed- ing prioress, and if the convent itself (which is more than doubt- ful) had been able to perpetuate its existence. A new Pope had just assumed the tiara (7th Jan. 1566), a rigorous and relentless reformer, a man of the purest life and strictest principles, Pius V., who no sooner found himself seated on the papal throne than he turned all his attention to the internal reform, not only of the clergy, but of the monasteries and convents of his dominions. The decrees of Trent, which enforced the strictest seclusion of both monks and nuns, had just been promulgated in Spain. Philip II., who had dabbled in Reform from a lad, still found time amidst the multifarious affairs at home and abroad, which might have seemed sufficient to absorb all his attention, to keep a sharp eye on the internal discipline of the religious orders of his kingdom. His efforts, however, had not been attended with success ; having rather tended to in- crease the scandal and confusion they were meant to check. A new General of the Carmelites had just been elected, the learned and venerable Fray Juan Bautista Rubeo de Ravena. No moment could be more propitious. The King wrote to Rubeo urging on him the propriety of a general visitation of the Spanish 2 8o SANTA TERESA Carmelites. As may be imagined, the Pope willingly undertook to hasten his departure from the shores of Italy on a mission so entirely to his liking. They both hoped that the personal influence and presence of the General of the order would go far to remedy the evils which reigned rampant amongst the Carmel- ites, and expected the most important results from his visit. Rubeo (Rossi) was an old man and an ascetic, a reformer, and a foreigner. From Madrid, where the King received him with all the honours reserved to a grandee of the highest rank, he proceeded to Seville. No worse centre could have been chosen from which to commence operations, having for their object the revival of discipline and the enforcement of a severer rule. If the state of the monasteries and convents was bad in Castille, in Seville their condition almost surpassed belief. The General found himself in a nest of hornets. He held, indeed, a solemn chapter, attended by more than two hundred monks, in which he endeavoured to introduce such reforms as seemed most urgent, and dictated fresh constitutions. Thence he returned to Madrid, to find the royal favour already veered. It was truly a ticklish matter to meddle with Reform in Spain ! The complaints that reached the royal ears from the incensed friars of Andalucia had so angered the King against him that all his attempts to obtain an audience were unavailing. The venerable General, whom Philip had deftly used to carry out his wishes, and then sacrificed to calumny, was like to leave Spain the victim of his own reforms. He next held a chapter in Avila, being the first General of his order who had ever penetrated so far as Castille ; his predecessors having contented themselves, if they ever came to Spain at all, with holding their chapters in Cataluna, which was on the direct road to Italy, and whence they could easily escape from a country so foreign to their genius. The General's arrival in Avila was fraught with profoundly important conse- quences to Teresa. Her first emotion was one of dread lest the daring step she had taken should arouse his displeasure, and she herself be summarily ordered back to the Encarnacion. She conquered the position by one of those happy strokes of audacity which have so often decided the world's greatest battles ; she herself besought him to visit her in San Jose. The old man, whose ordinary fare was sallet herbs, was subjugated and charmed by the frank and straightforward account she gave him of herself and her foundation. " Mia figlia" she became to the old Italian priest, used to the wiles of the most wily and diplomatic court in Europe, who had treated all his life with nuns, prioresses, and Lady Abbesses, but never one like this, so humble and yet so FOUNDATION OF MEDINA DEL CAMPO 281 valiant. Anxious to have so great a subject under his own jurisdiction, mortified that a Reform so fruitful in happy results should have escaped from the control of the Order and been vested in the Bishop, on the strength of various informalities in the Brief which he asked to see, he once more, to the Bishop's deep displeasure, received Teresa into the bosom of the Order she had abandoned, on the understanding that she was neither to return to the Encarnacion, nor was it to be in the power of any superior of the Order to make her do so. But if he was touched into recognition of the strength and loveliness of her nature, he wilily evaded any discussion on the extension of the Reform to friars. The hatred and odium which his attempts to check abuses and restore a purer discipline had roused against him in Andalucia had filled him with distrust. A reform so radical as that she proposed seemed to him impossible for monks. In vain did Daza, Salcedo, Julian de Avila, Aranda plead ; in vain did the Bishop of Avila expostulate with his venerable guest. All they elicited was a refusal. He had, he replied, laid the matter before the provincial chapter, who had received it with aversion, alleging against it a thousand objec- tions and inconveniences. But what the General deemed so im- possible to attempt with his pig-headed friars, Teresa had proved possible for women ; and before he shook the dust of Avila from his feet, after he had solemnly given his blessing to the kneeling nuns, he spontaneously, partly perhaps as some equivalent for his refusal, loaded her with patents which authorised her to make further foundations in Castille, and absolved her from any Provincial's opposition or control. These he again ratified a month afterwards on his return to Madrid. They never met again. The serious misunderstanding which arose between them at a later date, owing to her having over- stepped the powers he now gave her, by carrying the Reform into Andalucia, caused a deep and irremediable breach, which the General's death effectually prevented from ever being healed, and which Teresa counted amongst the gravest sorrows of her life. Teresa's fame had already sped to court. Philip, who took the deepest interest and was thoroughly up to date in any question relating to friars or nuns, had probably already heard of her, when Master Aranda piloted through the Royal Council the plea of the nuns of San ]os6 against the arbitrary action of the regidor. He was destined to hear more of her convent and of the great mother herself from the lips of Rossi, who asserted with conviction that " she alone did more good to the Order than all the Carmelite friars of Spain put together." He 282 SANTA TERESA spoke with warm enthusiasm of the convent he had so unex- pectedly discovered in Avila, which he did not hesitate to style " an abode of angels," and of the heroic virtue and sanctity of its foundress. " Charge her," said Philip, after gravely express- ing his pleasure that he possessed in his kingdom subjects of such eminent virtue, " charge her to pray for me and my king- dom" a message which the worthy General promptly trans- mitted to Avila, where his letter was read out by Teresa to her daughters, so as to remind them all of the renewed obligation they were under to pray for his Catholic Majesty. No sooner did Teresa find herself in possession of the coveted briefs than, with the buoyant enthusiasm so character- istic of her, and which, strange anomaly, only deserted her in her hours of triumph, she saw already concluded what was not even yet begun. The happy years have fled quickly by in the building she so lovingly styles "a little corner-stone of angels." For five years she has been the living exemplar of her daughters, in whom they had found summed up all virtue, all tenderness, all sweetness. It has been a life of seeming inactivity only; the great Ideal which was henceforth to be the ruling power of her life is now elaborated. They were the last years of absolute tranquillity she was to know on earth. Henceforth we shall follow her, patient, enduring, cheerful, in ragged habit and sandalled feet, beaten on by the mid-day sun of June and the snows and sleet of winter, over thousands of leagues of Castilian roads ; until she enters for the last time, tired and weary, the gateway of her Convent at Alba, where the Eternal repose awaited her for which she had so often sighed in life. We shall see her, serene and unmoved, face and overcome what to those around her seemed insuperable difficulties ; we shall watch her, impavid and radiant, guiding and guarding the Ark of her Reform through the Ocean of opposition and jealousy which threatened at any moment to overwhelm it, whilst she writes her greatest work, The Moradas, amidst all the din of persecution, in enforced confinement in the Convent of Toledo. Teresa, it must be remembered, was a woman of fifty, an age when most are glad to welcome repose and a peaceful ending to the cares and labours of life, when she commenced that career of ceaseless activity which ended only with her death. She fixed on Medina del Campo as the next scene of her labours. Her choice of this place may have been influenced by the fact that two old friends her former confessor, Baltasar Alvarez, and Fray Antonio de Heredia, a friar of her own Order whom she had known in Avila were there, one as the FOUNDATION OF MEDINA DEL CAMPO 283 rector of the Jesuits, and the other as the prior of the Carmelite monastery. Medina del Campo was not then the old dead town as we now know it, but the most important commercial centre of Spain. Situated in the centre of the vast wheat districts of Castille, it was the great mart and emporium of the kingdom, the resort of merchants and traders from all parts of the world. Germans, Flemings, Genoese, Frenchmen and Englishmen flocked to its world-famous fairs, stocked with cloths and tapestries the unrivalled products of the Flemish looms. Here wax, French paper, and French gewgaws found a ready market, together with the priceless silks and spices of Valencia; the famous cloths of Cuenca, Huete, Ciudad Real, and Villacastin ; the silks and leathers of Toledo, the raw and twisted silks of Granada ; the harness, saddles, and gilt morocco leather of Cordoba ; the sugar of Seville ; the spices of Lisbon and Yepes. It has been calculated that money to the amount of fifty-three thousand millions of maravedis x passed through the hands of its merchants during one of its fairs alone. Its popula- tion numbered 50,000 souls. An immeasurable distance still separated it from the state of apathy and decay so soon destined to overtake it, when, according to the proverb, "the lark which would go to Castille must take its corn with it." In a town so rich and populous, the apparition of a fresh foundation would be less likely to excite the objections that San Jose* had faced in Avila. Besides, it had the advantage of not being too far away. She fixed upon Master Julian de Avila we have already seen him acting as her devoted henchman in the difficulties attendant on the founding of San Jose to conduct the embassy; and with him, as he is now to take a prominent part in this history, it is meet we should become better acquainted before we go farther. This gentle and devoted companion of her journeys one of the simple and guileless priests who now, as then, are still to be met with amongst the Spanish clergy was the son of Crist6bal de Avila and Ana de Sto. Domingo his wife, virtuous and respectable inhabitants of Avila. In his youth he followed his father's business, until, at the age of twenty, resolved to seek his fortune farther afield, he spent two years between Granada and Seville. Tired at last of a roving life, and bent once more, from a stern sense of duty, on returning to his native city, he made arrangements to undertake the journey . l At least such is the figure as stated by Professor Weiss. A maravedi is equal to the fourth part of a halfpenny. I will leave it to the reader to calculate the amount in English money. 284 SANTA TERESA with a party of muleteers, from whom he hired a mule to carry himself and his scanty bundle. As he sallied forth from the fair Andalusian capital, whose delights had cast an irresistible spell over his senses, he felt a strange desire to retrace his footsteps, when, about half a league from Seville, the mule he rode took fright and ran away with such fury as to throw him on the ground, where he fell upon his sword, the hilt of which was crushed into his body. As the muleteers raised him, thinking he was dead, he heard in his swoon a mysterious voice which said : " Behold ! if thou hadst been killed ! " These words, the creation of a fancy perturbed by irresolution, sealed his vocation. The journey ended, his only desire was to change his garb, and study for the Church. On his return to Avila he at once commenced, unknown to his father, whose opposition he feared, to learn the elements of grammar, under a teacher procured for him by Daza, to whom he had opened his soul in the confessional. At the end of a year, having at last obtained his parents' consent, he openly prosecuted his studies, thinking it no shame to attend the classes of arts and philosophy in company with mere children a humiliation sweetened by his resolution and genial character. Although not a man of brilliant abilities, he acquired enough knowledge to enable him competently to fulfil his clerical duties and ministrations. At the time of Teresa's first foundation he was about twenty-five, and on the endowment of a chaplaincy she chose him for the chaplain and confessor of San Jose". Thenceforward he became her inseparable companion in all her journeys, travelling about with her in summer and spending the winter in Avila, whence he accompanied Master Daza in his expeditions to the surrounding mountain hamlets, con- fessing, whilst his friend, a true precursor of Saint Vincent de Paul, preached. A gentle, yielding nature, its most beautiful feature his devotion to Teresa, which subsisted long after her death and until his own. He had, however, the defects of his qualities. Two years before her death, Teresa bitterly com- plained of the excess of benevolence whose effects on the discipline and pecuniary affairs of San Jose were so disastrous as to have well-nigh brought about its total disorganisation. For a time, at least, she found herself constrained to vest its government in firmer and sterner hands. Master Julian ac- cepted her decision with the same meekness with which he owned his failing. It is to his pen, however, that we owe embedded, indeed, in a Life of Teresa, which is at the best a bad copy of what had been better told by herself, full of wearisome digressions on mystical theology that we owe a FOUNDATION OF MEDINA DEL CAMPO 285 few charming pages, the merit of which is that they present a truer transcript of the life of the period than anything else that has been written concerning her. If, instead of wandering away into the realms of " increated light which no one under- stands" such is Teresa's witty criticism on his exposition of the words " Seek thyself in me," which, she adds, " he began well, but finished ill," he had confined himself to the simple matter-of-fact record of the everyday occurrences of her life which he himself knew and had witnessed, he would have left us a book of inestimable value, not alone as elucidating much that is obscure in the surroundings of the saint, but much that we would fain have known concerning the interior life of an entire period, as the lively, and, alas ! all too short narrations of her journeys prove. Strange that our ancestors should never have foreseen that their customs and modes of life would become as obsolete to their descendants as the manners of the Visigoths were to them. In the long and dazzling accounts bequeathed to us by contemporary witnesses, how willingly would we change the long roll of sounding titles the unending sequence of external events and complications, few of which have left any definite impress on history for one word which revealed to us the strange scene more intimately, and gave it life, and breath, and animation ! It is remarkable that Master Julian of Avila should have been towards the end of his life (he lived until 1612 or 1614) the last connecting link between the century which had witnessed the birth and death of this great woman, and the one that followed it. After Teresa's death we find him sought after in the confessional, not only by the nuns of San Jose, but by other communities as well, especially that of Sta. Ana of the Bernardines, a post he held until his death. The retirement and sanctity of his life ; the depth of his contemplative fervour, which often led him forth amidst the great stone boulders which surround his native city, whence he could shout to God unheard, procured him the reputation of a saint. He left behind him three books (one of them character- ised by his biographer, Vaquera, as an admirable work), whose style was accounted so antiquated as to augur ill for their success ; whereupon they were consigned to the dusty archives of the Discalced Carmelites of Avila, among which they probably still lie buried to this day. In vain the Archbishop of Toledo solicited his help in reforming several convents of nuns under his control. After 286 SANTA TERESA having visited the Convent of the Image, endeared to him by the memory of its reformer, Teresa, the old man deaf to the Archbishop's entreaties and promises, the prayers of the nuns themselves, and the arguments of his friends sped back to the spot he loved best on earth, which had for him an invincible and irresistible attraction, inasmuch as it was still fragrant with Teresa's memory, and whither he fled as to the centre of his life and heart. There he remained to the last, faithfully fulfilling his duties as chaplain to the nuns of her first foundation, held in great veneration and esteem by all who knew him, visited by grandees and great personages, who were fain to have a sight of him who had been the " secretary of Teresa's heart." Nothing could induce him to accept any increase of income to alleviate the necessities of old age. With his 150 ducats a year he was amply satisfied, " for in all respects," adds Vaquera, " he was ever poor in spirit." He lived to give his testimony in the evidence for her Beatification, and it was sent to Rome at the Pope's special request. He died, as he had lived, in the little house close to San Jos6, where he and Master Daza lie side by side, covered by the shadow of Teresa's personality and glory. So great was the crowd which assembled to witness his funeral, such their anxiety to procure a shred of the clothing that had touched the venerable body, that it was found necessary to withdraw it to the sacristy, pending the preparation of the grave. Such the man, whose greatest glory was that he had been chosen by Teresa for her companion in her journeys (where, above all, constancy, valour, prudence, painstaking, and consummate virtue were needed), henceforth to be her most faithful servant, whom she now fixed upon as her messenger to Medina. Her past experience as a foundress had not been lost upon her. She was determined this time to omit no formality, the neglect of which might endanger the existence of her convent in the future. Her determination to found in poverty made the negotiations more difficult. It was necessary to obtain the license not only of the governing bodies of the town, but of the Bishop, or, as in the case of Medina, the abbot. These she requested Alvarez to procure for her, whilst to Fr. Antonio de Heredia, the prior of the Carmelites, was entrusted the commission of purchasing a house suitable for the purpose. Alvarez, whose long experience of the saint and her ways had convinced him that her " words were deeds," at once fulfilled her behest. Master Julian made a judicial statement of the utility and benefit which would accrue to the town from the FOUNDATION OF MEDINA DEL CAMPO 287 fresh foundation. He was seconded by all the influence of the Jesuits, as well as many of the most distinguished inhabitants of Medina, amongst them some of its regidores (governors). In the grave consultation which ensued, one of those present, a friar of a religious order, a man of authority and an eminent preacher, carried away by his zeal, broke out into bitter invectives against Teresa, whom he compared to Magdalen de la Cruz; upon which a grave Dominican Fray Pedro Fernandez, whom we shall shortly find so intimately engaged in the affairs of the rising Order brought him to his senses by a sharp reproof, explaining who and what she was, and how she should be spoken of, threatening to leave the assembly if anything more of the kind should be breathed. Afterwards, when the circumstance was related to her, she is reported to have said : " Alas ! sinner that I am ! how little they know me ; for if he had known me better he might have accused me of many other wickednesses, but not of being a charlatan." Master Julian's efforts were successful, and the license was conceded. Heredia was not so successful, however, in his choice of a house, which, on the security of his word, he bought from one of his own penitents. The site was good, but as for the rest, it was " more like some old deserted grange in the mountains than a Christian dwelling." There were, indeed, some remains of buildings which had once been halls and rooms, also a staircase, long disused, in the wall facing the porch. The porch was spacious, but roofed no better than a shed, although it opened into a courtyard commodious enough. Otherwise, it was simply a mass of ruins and heaps of earth, which had fallen down in the progress of decay. Seeing that the house was uninhabitable, pending its restoration, Master Julian hired another, close to the Augustinian monastery, at a yearly rent of 51 poo 1 maravedis. He gleefully describes it as one of the best and largest in Medina. Delighted with his success in having accomplished, in little more than a fortnight, what might have been the work of months, he returned to Avila. Teresa, who had not fifty maravedis in the world (" How should a pilgrim like her have credit ? " she asked gaily), was no less triumphant. " The less there is, the freer I am from care ! " she exclaimed with the radiant confidence of one whom no material difficulty could daunt. " Lord," she was often heard to say, in these moments of supreme difficulty " Lord, this 1 Or 26 : ii: 3, English money. This by no means, however, represents its value then ; which would probably be nearer $o or 60 now perhaps 288 SANTA TERESA business is not mine but thine ; if thou wiliest it to be done, nothing can oppose thee, and if not, thy will be done." Where- upon she remained as contented and satisfied as if all had been accomplished according to her desires. On the 1 3th of August 1567, the month when, in the great arid plains between Avila and Medina, the heat becomes almost insupportable, Teresa set out on her journey. To meet all expenses of the road, and the first instalment of the rent, she had in her pocket a few " blanquillas," " few enough," she adds feelingly, entrusted to her by a virtuous damsel, who, seeing that there was no room for her in San Jose, was anxious to enter upon her novitiate in the about-to-be-founded convent of Medina. The companions she chose to accompany her were her niece Maria Bautista, the future prioress of Valladolid ; the two cousins who had followed her fortunes from the Encarnacion, Ine*s and Ana de Tapia (now Ines de Jesus, and Ana de los Angeles) ; and two others, who like them also had been nuns in the Encarnacion, Isabel de la Cruz and Dona Teresa de Quesada, all anxious to share in the glories and marvels attendant on Teresa's fresh foundation. Early one August morning, so as to take advantage of the cool, three or four carts (you may see them, or ones similar to them, still traversing the dusty, monotonous roads of Castille), with spokeless, wooden wheels, covered by an awning stretched over a framework of interlaced canes caked with dirt, stained to all sorts of fawn and leather-coloured hues, creaked slowly out of Avila and took the Medina road. When the awning is tied down in front, the interior of the carts is hermetically closed against the curious gaze of the passer-by. Canvas bags like hammocks, in which jingled pots and pans, swung beneath, guarded by a yellow prick-eared cur. The taciturn muleteers, and when not taciturn, profane, then as now, a profanity unrestrained by the proximity of the nuns counting their beads inside, followed on foot, their stout knotted sticks thrust into the gay sashes woven by the Moors of Avila. It seems strange to think of a Spanish peasant without a cigarette in his mouth ! Beside them rode Master Julian, not altogether unacquainted, as we have seen, with swords and horsemanship ; probably he bore one then, concealed under the long black priestly robes which dangled like a foot- cloth from the hindquarters of his little, stoutly-knit Castilian horse, bred in the vast oak forests between Avila and Alba. A strange little procession truly ! but such as you may still see to-day or to-morrow traversing the plains of Old Castille, on the way to a christening or a funeral. There had been no dearth of neighbourly tongues in that Gothic city, so rapidly becoming a FOUNDATION OF MEDINA DEL CAMPO 289 mere spot on the horizon, to prophesy defeat and failure for an enterprise which seemed little short of madness. Some said she had lost her wits, others that she was bent upon gratifying her passion for gadding about and seeing the country ; others again, shrugging their shoulders, and looking unutterable things in the sapience of their wisdom, waited to see what such supreme folly would end in. " This is another mad freak ; well, we shall soon see how it ends," wagged the tongues of the former, and suggested the significant silence of the latter. The most friendly disposed had looked with coldness upon a journey which de- pended alone on her own unaided efforts. Those even who had assisted her in her first foundation had endeavoured in vain to dissuade her from one which seemed to them to present still greater difficulties ; the Bishop also, although he loved her too well to thwart her openly, regarded it with marked disfavour. And so the Gothic city they had left behind them in the morning light, fades away until it becomes a gray speck in the distance. And malicious criticism and evil augury they too with the town die into space, unremembered and unheeded by the little old nun who, absorbed in some interior vision, sits in the cart where a little holy water stoup marks out the place allotted to the foundress, hugging in her arms an image of the Child Christ. Probably some old mattress thrown in the bottom softens the jerks and jolts of the unwieldy vehicles, as they slowly plough their way through the sand and ruts. And so, shut in on every side by the sackcloth awning, the interstices carefully covered up with mats of esparto grass, with a wooden crucifix and leather water-bottle hung up beside them ; the nuns travel all day long, on the long and monotonous track (for it could scarcely be called a road), towards Arevalo, seeing nothing of the landscape, hearing nothing but the tinkling of the bells on the mules' collars, or the rough objurgations, the guttural "arres" of a muleteer, whose art of driving mainly consists in rhetoric. Perhaps through some little rent in the awning, invisible except to those within, a curious eye took a transient peep at the world outside : but for the most part no details of changing landscape ; of silvery olive trees, their black stems rising against the brick-coloured calcined earth ; of foliage glittering in the sunlight ; of waving corn plain ; of aromatic wastes covered with cistus thickets and lavender and Psage, and all the sweet prickly family of savoury shrubs, which people these desolate upland wastes of uncultivated Castille ; no glimpse of fervid sky met the extinguished vision of the nuns; no free wind of Heaven, no blast of sultry sun swept over their pallid faces, pallid with the pallor of the cloister, and 290 SANTA TERESA recalled to them the earth and sky. To all this were they dead. At appointed times, you might have heard, were it not for the clatter of hoofs and harness and the creaking of the carts, the tinkling of a little bell, followed by a faint murmur from within, the sisters were saying Hours, and priests, friars, and peasants travelled along in silence, until the same signal let loose their tongues once more. Their orisons ended, they sat with lowered eyes, in mute abstraction and contemplation, she, the soul of the expedition, absorbed in an inward vision of the Trinity. And many a mile did she make less tedious by her shrewd and witty tongue, so that those (the muleteers, not the nuns), who had formerly beguiled the monotony of the road by cards or swearing, forgot the sweltering choking dust, or obstinate mule, to listen to the words that fell from that little old nun's mouth. The muleteers ceased to swear, and the bota went round the parched and dusty mouths, accustomed to rough oaths, and rougher wine, less frequently. The first day's journey draws to its close. Night has fallen, and the nuns are just on the point of entering AreValo, when they encounter their first reverse. A quarter of a league on this side of AreValo, Master Julian is met by a messenger who hands him a letter from the owner of the house he had hired, begging them to delay their departure from Avila until some agreement was come to with the Augustinians next doors, who objected to a convent in such close proximity to their monastery. They were his friends, he added, and he had no mind to cause them any annoyance, for which reason he refused to give them entry of the house until their consent had been obtained. " Which, when I heard," says he, " and saw the sensation our departure had excited in Avila, and the laughter and jeers with which many, especially those who had not approved of the journey, would greet our return, and saw that what I had done (I who thought I had done not a little), had rather been to the hurt of the mother and the nuns, who were already on their way, I was seized with great perturbation, and we entered AreValo, sadly enough, ignorant of what to do in face of such a catastrophe." If even Teresa's stout heart felt a sudden qualm, what must it have been for the timid priest, blaming himself on the one hand as being the author of their misfortunes ; his ears tingling already on the other with the laughter he knew awaited the crestfallen party on their return from a bootless quest? " In spite of her great resolution, she could not but be a little troubled at such a great blow, although not so much as I was, whose powers of resistance were not equal to so much." Sadly enough, with the burden of that secret letter lying on their FOUNDATION OF MEDINA DEL CAMPO 291 hearts, did two amongst that little band enter the dusky, arcaded streets of the little mediaeval town that night where a lodging had been got ready for them in the house of some pious women. At Teresa's request the nuns were kept in ignorance of these tidings. She feared their bad effect on those from the Encarnacion, one of whom was its sub-prioress, and had encountered extreme difficulty in obtaining permission to accompany her, whilst both were well connected, and had flown in the face of the wishes of their friends and relatives, in whose opinion the enterprise was nonsense ; as for the rest, she was sure of their devotion. As chance would have it, Fr. Domingo Banes happened to be in the town, and joined in the anxious consultation which lasted far into the August night. Grave were the faces, and puckered with doubt the brows of priest and friar, although such was the latter's opinion of Teresa's powers, that he never doubted but that she would carry through anything she had set her heart on. It was the night before the Eve of Our Lady of August, and Teresa had set out from Avila with the firm intention of founding on that great festival. To her deep grief, this now seemed impossible. I think I can see the scene. The inn room, with its mud floor and grated window, an oil lamp flickering dimly from the wall, now lighting up the priestly faces, now throwing them into shadow. The anxious nuns, from whom concealment was no longer possible; Banes optimistic and cheerful, prophesying an easy and speedy settlement of the difficulty with the Augustinians ; Master Julian " fighting against death." It was determined that the journey to Medina must be continued at all hazards, although with a diminished following, so as not to excite attention. Part of the little train that had come with her from Avila was therefore dismissed that night ; three of the nuns to take refuge with the curate of a neighbouring village, Vicente de Ahumada, brother of one of them, a virtuous priest of AreValo, Alonso Esteban, being told off to accompany them thither; the two others were to go on with Teresa and Master Julian to Medina. Early next morning they were cheered, however, by the arrival of Fray Antonio de Heredia, prior of the Carmelite monastery of Medina del Campo (he who had bought the ruined house), with the welcome notice that it might serve their turn, and that with the help of a few hangings the gateway could easily be trans- formed into a church. Thoroughly determined, Teresa, whose only wish was to take possession before the inhabitants of Medina got wind of her arrival, started forthwith for Olmedo (a 292 SANTA TERESA castle belonging to the Mendozas), whose ivied ruins still stand a memory of the past. She was warmly welcomed by the Bishop of Avila, Don Alvaro, and the same night, in the Bishop's coach, continued her journey to Medina, escorted by one of his chaplains. Master Julian, with renewed confidence, rode on in front to herald her approach. It so happened that on their way to Olmedo they had heard that the widow lady of Medina del Campo, from whom Heredia had bought the house, was then staying at her property in the country, and that their road took them close beside it. Teresa turned aside to see her. Although still inhabited by her steward and a housekeeper, she at once placed it, if necessary, at Teresa's service, giving her permission to turn out the mayordomo without delay, and to use some tapestries and a blue damask bed she had left in it. This inspired them with a ray of confidence, and they now went forward with lighter hearts. At midnight a loud knocking at the gates of the Carmelite monastery of Medina roused the echoes of the silent street, and woke the drowsy friars from their slumbers. A torch gleamed for a moment in the darkness ; heavy bolts and bars fell grating to the ground, and the gates swinging back upon their hinges swallowed up horse and rider in black shadow. They were then shut, and profound silence reigned once more. Presently lights flashed through church and sacristy, by this time Teresa and her nuns had already alighted in the courtyard of the monastery, so as to avoid rousing the attention of the town ; brown figures flitted to and fro, hurriedly gathering together some altar ornaments, cloths, and sacred vessels. Then a strange fantastic procession of nuns, priests, and friars issued silently from the gateway into the night, furtively and fear- fully groping their way along through the outskirts of the town. It was a great mercy of God [writes Teresa], for at that hour they were shutting up the bulls for the bull fight next day, that we did not fall in with one. Nor were bulls alone the only danger, for the streets were thronged with people and holyday folk, gathered together from all parts to witness the great festivities of the morrow, and, as is usual when the ordinary tranquillity gives way to excitement and revelry, all the most ruffianly and worthless vagabonds of the town were astir and alert for mischief. The remarks and salutations of these midnight revellers, to FOUNDATION OF MEDINA DEL CAMPO 293 which they dared not reply, but quickened their pace ; and they passed on in silence with their strange burdens. " We were all so burdened, that we looked like gipsies who had been robbing a church ; and certainly, if the watch had fallen in with us, he would have been bound to take us off to gaol, until it had been investigated whither priests, friars, and nuns were bound at such an hour. And even then they might not have believed us, since appearances and the strangeness of the hour were against us ; as well as so many people as there were going about the streets, being, for the most part, as is usual on such occasions, the most reckless and vagabond of the place. God was pleased, however, that although we came across people, as it was not the watch, they let us pass, contenting themselves with words such as are to be expected from such people at such an hour. As we dared not reply, we but increased our pace, and let them say what they liked. We arrived, thanks to God, without any mischance, at the house inhabited by the aforesaid steward ; and what with our haste to rouse him, and our desire to enter before some misfortune overtook us, we gave him such a bad night that at last he awoke and let us in, and obeyed his mistress's order to leave us the house clear. Ah ! Lord, when at last we saw ourselves inside, and day not far off, you should have seen the Mother and Sisters, and the whole company of us, some sweeping, others hanging cloths, others making ready the altar, others fixing up the bell. He who was able to do most did more from very joy : Sicut qui invenit spolia multa" So far the dramatic narrative of Master Julian. Daylight, alas, only revealed the utter ruin which the silent friars and patient nuns had laboured through the small hours of the night to repair. When we arrived at the house [adds Teresa], we entered the patio, the walls of which seemed to me almost in ruins, but not so much as they did by daylight, when I saw them better. It seems as if the Lord had willed that blessed father (Heredia) to be blinded, so as not to see that it was not fitted to receive the Host. As to the gateway, we had to work hard to clear away the heaps of fallen earth, the roof was covered in by rough tiles like a shed, and the walls unplastered. The night was short, and we had only brought a few hangings (" reposteros "),* I believe not more than three, which were nothing compared to the size of the gateway. I knew not what to do, for I saw it was not fit to place the altar in such a site. The Lord, who willed that it should be accomplished without delay, was pleased to order that the lady's steward had in the house a great many of her tapestries and a blue damask bed, of which she had said we were to have as many as we wanted, for she was very good. When I saw such excellent preparations 1 Covering, generally of velvet, with a coat of arms, on which at that time grandees and great personages generally dined. 2 94 SANTA TERESA I praised the Lord, and so did the rest, although we knew not what , , ug we new not wat to to A lt b r g Nor was the poor steward the only one to be roused ruth- lessly from his slumbers before that eventful night drew to its close. Just before daylight they knocked up the vicar-general with a request that he would send a notary to bear witness that the convent had been made with the abbot's authority and benediction Whereupon the notary in his turn was dragged out of bed, and the deed duly registered according "to hhSerft" aW ' S n ne Sh Uld bC S b Id as to contest or S . ^Iv^en the Au S ust s "n beamed on the medieval streets of Medma del Campo, it shone on another convenes simple altar waiting for the celebrant ; rich tapestries and velvet hangings masked the rude walls of what but yesterday had been a ruined gateway fit only to stable sheep and donkeys. As the sound of the bell rose for the first time into the silent reets, its precincts were thronged with an amazed and speech- less crowd who gazed at one another in mute bewilderment. Each one called his neighbours and acquaintances to come and see the miracle, until at last, full to overflowing with the curious the pious, the little chapel could not contain the crowd which pressed around the entrance. It was necessary " (it is Master Julian who speaks), "in order to celebrate the first Mass and CKft? %.?* "^.should withdraw; the HnT> ,f tC USe WaS a hea P of > f J^S I J aS a l m St m the Street This the y arranged nn ?n tl g - r J \ staircase opposite the altar which led up to the only wing of the gallery still left standing; through n thS d ? r ' Which Was not on] y the HI* ^oir the , fM , r' I or e nuns of Medina del Campo possessed but also the parlour where wi V ^ V1S r tS / the , lr confessio " a1 ' a ^ the dungeon in which they wept, they listened to their first Mass." But the difficulties that Teresa made so light of in those critical moments when all depended on her* courage and constancy now rose menacingly before her, crushing her with their weight. Hers the guiding hand, the creative spirit the feverish haste the fixed concentration of purpose during the :ruggle: and lo! in the moment of success, when those around er inspired by her example, have lost all fear and irresolution, 3 at last breathe freely, she herself is compassed about by K I FOUNDATION OF MEDINA DEL CAMPO 295 brooding shadows. The world rises into view as the motives which have guided her sink out of sight below the horizon. She hears its voices, its criticism, its condemnation before proof. Her cherished idea becomes a folly, a madness, the freak of a presumptuous woman. She has painted these ups and downs of her mobile and sensitive character in the following passage: Sometimes it seems to me that I am completely detached, and in fact so I am when it comes to the proof. At other times I find myself so attached, and that to things which perchance I should have jested at the day before, that I scarcely recognise myself. At other seasons it seems to me I am full of courage, and that I would not turn my face away from anything which was for God's service, and of this also there is proof that for some things I possess it. Another day comes and I find myself so destitute of it as to be unable to kill an ant for God's sake if it made any resistance. So sometimes it seems to me I care not what they say of me, or how they calumniate me ; nay, as I have sometimes proved, rather does it please me. Then come days when a mere word distresses me, and I would fain flee from the world, for everything seems to weary me. Nor am I alone in this, for I have observed it in many persons better than myself, and I know that it happens with them also. So with Medina. Not long did my joy endure, for when Mass was over, I drew near to a window to see the patio, and I saw all the walls in several places on the ground in such a state as to need a long time to repair. Oh, Valame Dios ! when I saw his Majesty almost in the street in such a time of peril as we are now placed in on account of these Lutherans, what was not the anguish which visited my heart ! Together with this was joined every difficulty that could have been suggested by those who had opposed it, and I saw clearly that they had been right. It seemed impossible to me to continue what I had begun ; for, in like manner as before all had seemed easy to me, when I considered it was undertaken for God ; now in the same way did temptation so tighten its power, that it seemed I had received none of his favours : I remembered only my own baseness, and powerlessness. For what good result could I hope for from that which depended on so miserable a thing as myself ? And it seemed that I could have borne it better if I had been alone ; but it was hard to think of my companions having to return home after the opposition they had encountered when they started. It also seemed to me that, this beginning a failure, there was no chance of accomplishing all I had understood the Lord was to bring about in the future. Then to this was added the dread whether what I had understood in prayer was an illusion, which was not the least, but the greatest pain of all ; for that the devil should deceive me filled me with the greatest dread. So the mental struggle, similar in all its details to that which took place after San Jose", wore out its course in the breast of the woman, to all appearance so calm and self-composed, who hid all signs of it from her companions in her wish not to make them more depressed than they were. In the afternoon the 296 SANTA TERESA visit of a priest, sent to her by her good friend Baltasar Alvarez, to whom she confided not all her anxieties, but only her distress at the situation in which she and her nuns found themselves a distress increased by the exposed position of the Host dis- pelled the last fleeting clouds of the tempest. " I began to set about seeking for a hired house to live in, cost what it might, whilst this was being repaired ; and I began to be consoled when I saw the numbers of people who came, and that none perceived our folly, which was God's mercy ; for it would have been but right to deprive us of the Host." In spite, however, of the ardent efforts of Master Julian and her friends ; in spite of their being willing to give whatever was asked even for a part of one, a house was not so easily to be found. Medina was then so prosperous and populous that the search proved useless, until a rich merchant, one Bias de Medina, offered them the upper floor of his dwelling, pending the restoration of their own. Thus was the conscientious woman relieved from her constant vigil she who, when the moon rose high in the heavens above the sleeping town of Medina del Campo, touching its towers with a fantastic gleam, and casting strange shadows over its melancholy plains, and her daughters slept, had herself watched nightly over the Host from an upper window, lest the men they set to guard it should relax their vigilance. Master Julian remained until he had seen them safely deposited in their new refuge, where a large room, with a gilded roof, one of those mediaeval open-raftered Spanish roofs, curiously gilt and inlaid, so many of which are still to be seen in out-of-the-way corners of Spain, served them for a church, and then returned home to Avila. Alms poured in in ever- increasing abundance. Nor was the worthy merchant their only benefactor. The widowed niece of the great Cardinal of Quiroga, Arch-Inquisitor of Spain, afterwards Archbishop of Toledo, who lived next door to the ruined house, assisted them to build the chapel, where in process of a few years her daughter, Dona Geronyma, her eyes opening to the meaning of life only to despise it, took the veil and became a novice in Teresa's convent, a resolution which re-echoed throughout Castille and filled the court with amazement, causing the Reform to rise high in public estimation, so all-powerful in all ages is the influence of rank on the minds of its social inferiors. And so was the valiant woman who had left Avila with a few blanquillas in her pocket enabled not only to purchase a house and endow a chaplain, but to spend on it many thousands of ducats, which sum, and much more, she found at her command within a few days. FOUNDATION OF MEDINA DEL CAMPO 297 When Teresa was writing her Foundations in Malagon, she hesitated when she came to that of Medina, as to which she had received no supernatural revelation ; and the Lord, answer- ing her thought, said : " What more dost thou need ? thou hast only to look upon the foundation of Medina to see that it was miraculous." CHAPTER XI FOUNDATION OF MALAGON FROM this moment Teresa's life takes wider and broader dimensions ; the narrative becomes full of movement and dramatic interest. New figures figures, many of them, full of the romance of the strange ardour which swept over that mediaeval world group themselves around the foundress, who every day becomes more grandiose as one success follows rapidly on another. The conflict of their characters, the deep undercurrent of emotion, of contradictory impulses, weaves one of the strangest and most picturesque episodes of history. Fresh scenes call our attention. We find ourselves in quick succession in the lonely deserts of La Mancha, the sweet and flowery solitudes of La Roda ; before us pass, as in a rapid phantasmagoria, the pearl of Andalucia, the white, low-roofed city of Cordoba, with its gleaming mosque and the broad bosom of its river; the great commercial city of Seville, where the same river is full of the great galleons, either bound to or returned from the Indies, full of bustle, animation, enterprise, Genoese money-changers, and a floating population of adven- turers, priests, and friars. Thence we return to the old decayed northern cathedral towns of Burgos, sacred to the Cid, whence sprang the proudest aristocracy of Spain ; Palencia, girdled by its dusty plains and Moorish orchards ; Segovia, its gray towers rising amidst the great deserts by which then as now it was entirely surrounded ; whilst days of Teresa's life are spent in the unrivalled oak-glades and olive-groves which separate Avila from Alba, and Alba from Salamanca, the path she was destined to thread so often, and which was her last journey of all. It was now that she was enabled to undertake that greater and more radical Reform, on which the very existence of her own partial efforts depended, and which resulted in the forma- tion of a new Religious Order, instinct with the same lofty flame of idealism which had driven the primitive fathers to the desert. San Jos^ had been the grain of mustard seed which had quickly shown by its fruits the vigorous vitality it contained ; it was 298 FOUNDATION OF MALAGON 299 now to become a forest tree, whose branches should cover the world and carry her name to the ends of the earth. Her death only added a more mysterious lustre to the great movement she inaugurated, which excited a devotion and achieved a success alike unparalleled and sweeping. It is curious that the Brief which enabled her to found her first two monasteries of friars was despatched on the very day that she was journeying to Medina to make her second founda- tion. For, nothing daunted, Teresa, deeply alive to the necessity which called for the extension of the Reform to friars if she herself was to continue the work she had begun, and if it was to be permanent, had once more appealed to the General in behalf of her cherished idea. Her letter procured for her what her personal pleadings had failed to obtain. The General, on the point of leaving the shores of Spain behind him, then waiting in Valencia for a propitious gale to waft him to Italy, no longer in dread of turbulent monks or the King's displeasure, easily conceded what even the Bishop's entreaties had failed to wrest from him in Avila a Brief to found two monastic houses, subject to the approval of the past and present Provincials of the Order in Castille. Since I was now comforted with the license [writes Teresa], my anxiety grew greater, as I knew of no friar in the province to undertake it, nor secular person who was willing to make such a beginning. I spent my time supplicating our Lord that he would rouse up even one such person. Neither had I a house, nor any means of getting one. Behold her now, a poor discalced nun, with no one to help her but the Lord, laden with patents and good desires, and without any likelihood of being able to use them. My courage did not wane, nor the hope that, since the Lord had given one, he would provide the other ; already everything seemed to me extremely possible, and so I began to set about it. As a living example of her own constitutions foremost in humility and obedience, she organised and swept and scrubbed in her convent of Medina, whose red brick walls, faded by time, pierced with narrow irregular gratings, still remain a monument of her pertinacity and courage as she secretly made the sisters' beds when no one was by, especially those of the nuns still wearing the garb of the Encarnacion, who thence had followed her fortunes, and swept and washed their cells, saying to the sister who helped her (the weather was very hot, remarks the chronicler) : " Behold, sister, it is very right that we should wait on these ladies who have come to honour and assist us ! " her active brain was shaping out her great Reform. When she met the laughing attempts of her daughters to remove the broom or the dish-clout from her hands with the words, " Daughters, 300 SANTA TERESA do not cause me to be idle in the house of the Lord," she was already following in fancy the growth of her grandiose and in- visible edifice. " In a land of merchandise," says Master Julian, " where everything is to be procured, it is not strange that she should find the foundation-stones of her building." Whilst I was here [writes Teresa] I was still anxious about the monasteries of friars, and as I had no friar, as I have said, I knew not what to do, and so I resolved with great secrecy to consult about it with the prior of this place [Heredia], to see what he advised me ; and so I did. He was greatly rejoiced when he knew it, and promised me that he would be the first. I thought it was a jest, and so I told him ; because, although he was ever an excellent friar, retired and very studious, and fond of the solitude of his cell (being a scholar), he did not seem to me fit for such a beginning, nor to have the strength to go on with the necessary rigour, on account of his delicacy, and not being accustomed to it. He assured me greatly, and affirmed that the Lord had been for long calling him to a straiter life, and that he had resolved to join the Carthusians, who had already promised to receive him. In spite of all this I was not entirely satisfied, although I was rejoiced to hear it, and I begged him that we should delay some little time, and that meanwhile he should practise him- self in those things that he would have to promise. Perhaps no incident better shows Teresa's knowledge of character. It was as if she almost anticipated the narrowness, the petty greed for pre-eminence, of a character which, played upon afterwards by designing intriguers, became such a fruit- ful source of discord in the Order. In other respects he seems to have been a gentle, amiable old man, little versed in the business of the world, simple, and ingenuous, but warped by the mean jealousies and trivial ambitions of the cloister. Of noble and distinguished birth, a man of letters and an eloquent preacher, better fitted so polished his manners and habits, a refinement which he carried into his cell and its adornments to shed lustre on his order by his worldly dignity and con- sequence than by anything calculated to bring it into contempt or lowliness, he had filled and adorned the highest offices of command amongst the Carmelites, and according to Master Julian's graphic phrase ("no le falto un pero"), no jot was wanting, at least in what can be perceived without ; " for God alone," he adds piously, " is judge of what is within." But in the case of the frail, undersized young friar, through whose wan and ascetic face shone the fervour of his devotion, who is known to all posterity as San Juan de la Cruz, she felt no such hesitation. Let her tell the story in her own inimitable manner. A little while afterwards a young friar, who had been studying in Salamanca, happened to come to Medina. He came with another one FOUNDATION OF MALAGON 301 as his companion, who told me great things of the life this father led ; his name was fray Juan de la Cruz. I praised our Lord, and when I spoke to him he pleased me greatly, and he told me how he also intended joining the Carthusians. I told him my intention, and implored him fervently to wait until the Lord gave us a monastery, and how great a benefit it would be, if he was to make such a change, to do so in his own order, and how much more he would serve the Lord thereby. He promised me that he would, if this delay was not too great. If Medina was dear to Brother Juan de San Matias as being the scene of his early struggles, in after years he remembered with particular affection and veneration the convent where, for the first time, he saw bent down on him through the grating, the kindly and searching gaze of the great woman with whose name his own was to be so intimately linked. In this young ascetic, with whom even she herself had found it difficult to obtain an interview, so great his aversion to treat with women, however saintly, her bright eyes had found the fervent tempera- ment and ardour needful to animate and organise a great Reform. She had at last found her " friar and a half," as she calls them with loving satire (Brother John was short of stature), in the dignified Carmelite prior who a few years hence will watch over her as she lies dying in Alba de Tormes; in the young student-friar, fresh from the halls of Salamanca, burning with ascetic fervour, whose name is for ever linked in glorious unison with her own, and whom the world will hear of not far hence as San Juan de la Cruz. It is meet that I should devote to her greatest friar more than a few passing words. His life presents the same im- possible tangle of fanciful legend blended with real virtue and heroic abnegation which is common to the history of all the saints. The son of Gonzalo de Yepes, a relative of that Yepes, Bishop of Tarazona, who at a later date wrote Teresa's Life, he came of an old and distinguished family of New Castille, if impoverished by misfortune. Gonzalo early made his way to Toledo, where, under the protection of his uncle, a rich merchant, he quickly established himself at the head of the business. On his way, however, to Medina del Campo, to sell his silks at its celebrated fairs, he wooed and won in Fontiveros a poor orphan girl. Disinherited in consequence by his family, whom he sought in vain to soften, at the end of a few years' hard struggle with the world as a weaver a poor and unremunerative employ- ment he died, leaving behind him three sons, the youngest of whom, Juan, was afterwards fated to become Teresa's coadjutor. After trying Arevalo, the widow finally settled in Medina del Campo. The infernal powers endeavoured in vain to shorten the life of one who, they already foresaw, was to deal them such 302 SANTA TERESA potent blows. He was scarcely five years old when he fell into a well ; thrice he rose and thrice he sank, until rising once more he was miraculously sustained, whilst the Virgin, appearing to him, held out her hand to help him out, whereupon he drew back his own for fear of soiling hers ; and the youthful prodigy would inevitably have been drowned, had not a labourer settled the controversy by coming to the rescue. But the devil is not so easily vanquished. As he and his brother returned home one day from the country they were suddenly attacked by a monster which issued from a neighbouring pool, and fled on John's making the sign of the Cross. He received the first rudiments of education in the school for the poor children of the town. At nine his mother surprised him sleeping on a bed of thorns. At thirteen, she being unable to afford his further education, he tried his hand at various trades painting, carving, carpentry, but the dreamy saint, succeeding but indifferent ill in wielding the brush or the chisel, gladly accepted the post of infirmarian, which was charitably offered to him in the Hospital of Medina, and afforded him the opportunity of continuing his studies under the Jesuit fathers. Again, it is noted that he fell into a well there was in the hospital court- yard ; those who saw him fall shouted, but neglected to go to his assistance, and the crowd which quickly assembled was regaled with the spectacle of the saint seated tranquilly on the surface of the water, whence he clambered out by the assistance of a rope. When they asked him how it was that he had not sunk, he replied that a lovely lady rescued him from the bottom and received him in her arms. This circumstance, notes the ingenious biographer, caused the young scholar to be regarded with marked respect. If this marvellous escape, although it is hard to say how much it owes to the hagiologist of a later date, astonished the good folk of Medina, no less amazed were the Jesuit fathers at the aptness and diligence of their pupil, and the progress he made in the metaphysical crudities and Dialectics of the schools; whilst the sweetness and benevolence of his nature displayed itself in the tenderness with which he tended and nursed the sick under his charge. His mortification was extreme. In the hospital he slept on a bed of vine-shoots. When the time came for him to choose his future career, he hesitated from a sentiment of his own unworthiness to take orders, this being his mother's earnest wish, who thus saw her son provided for in the Church. In answer to his tearful prayers for divine guidance, he thought he heard a voice which said, " Thou shalt serve me in an order whose primitive observance thou shalt establish." On the 24th FOUNDATION OF MALAGON 303 February 1563, at the age of twenty-one, he took the habit in the Carmelite monastery of Sta. Ana, a community which had only a short time before established themselves in Medina. The young monk, who imposed on himself penances almost beyond the limits of human strength, speedily became an object of respect and awe to the rest of the community. When his brother friars espied his figure in the distance in the shadowy obscurity of the convent corridors, they remained transfixed and motionless until he had passed from sight. His unobtrusive piety, and his abilities, determined his superiors to send him to continue his studies at Salamanca, whither he started on a donkey, his bundle of books under his arms. The lecture halls of Salamanca, the most majestic and ancient university of Spain, then resounded to the teaching of a galaxy of great and re- markable men, eminent alike for their scholarship and virtue men whose names are still on the lips of every student of theological history, whilst one of them has touched the heart of man profoundly, not only by his tender and incomparable lyrics, the best that Spanish genius has ever produced, but by the grandeur and gentleness of his life, and his five years' unmerited imprisonment in the Inquisition dungeons. Here, as he listened to the lectures of Fray Domingo de Soto, Melchor Cano (the bitter opponent of the ill-fated Archbishop of Toledo, Carranza), and Fr. Luis de Leon, his life did not relax anything of its stern severity ; like the ancient Benedictines, he never removed his habit even to sleep, and wore an iron chain round his waist, next to the naked skin. At twenty-five, by the command of his superiors, he was ordained to the priesthood, and his mother had the inexpressible satisfaction of seeing him celebrate his first Mass in Medina del Campo. It was on this occasion that he first saw the greatest woman of her century, who was to have such a momentous influence on his life. Teresa's instinctive prevision was right : although others will touch her sympathies more nearly, in Fray Juan de San Matias she had met her greatest friar. Void of ambition, completely indifferent to the active concerns of life, modest, retiring, he was happy to fill a humble office in the background, whilst others with more assurance and less sanctity rose rapidly to the front of the Order. Others made more noise in the Order and the world whilst they lived, but when the noise has died away, it is Fray Juan de la Cruz his soul divided between the Invisible and Duty who, impalpable, almost impersonal, rises the greatest and purest figure of the Order, and takes his place with the saints on the altars of the Church. The world has felt the charm, the delicate perfume, the faint thrill of mystery which 304 SANTA TERESA clings around the man who is almost a diaphanous abstraction, so far removed does he seem above the storms, the joys, the sorrows of life. This very impersonality constitutes his indi- viduality amongst the saints. His benevolence, his love, his sweetness, his inexhaustible patience bear no resemblance to the impassioned and ardent humanitarianism of a Saint Francis of Assisi rather are they the passionless attributes of an inhabitant of a higher sphere. His mysticism does not appeal to the emotions like the profoundly human mysticism of Teresa; metaphysical, it addresses itself to the intellect and reason rather than the heart. Teresa never loses sight of earth ; San Juan de la Cruz is a being without sex, without passions, a soul continuously hovering on the confines of two worlds, a vaporous emanation which seems at times to roam through immeasurable space. Meanwhile Teresa's success had taken hold of public opinion. The entrance in the Convent of Medina of the daughter of Da. Elena de Quiroga, niece of the Arch-Inquisitor of Spain, has roused the attention of the court. For the substratum of human nature changes not with the centuries, and the glamour of worldly rank was as dazzling then as now. She who has hitherto encountered little else but difficulties and opposition is now besieged by the greatest nobles in the kingdom, anxious to grace their possessions or add a reflected lustre to their names, by becoming the patrons of one of her foundations. She has gradually risen from obscurity into fame and reputation, and is already spoken of as the " Miracle of the Century." Da. Maria de Mendoza accounts it a signal favour that Teresa accepts a seat in her coach. Her brother Don Bernardino de Mendoza has offered her a country house on the outskirts of Valladolid, which had been the summer resort of the Comendador Cobos ; and as she passed through Olmedo on her way to found at Medina, the old Count of Ribadabia his father had joined with him in dissuading her from that foundation, and in inducing her to undertake the former. Da. Luisa de la Cerda is already impatient to honour her fortress town of Malagon with one of her foundations. Da. Leonor de Mascarenas, a lady high in favour at court, she had been Philip's governess as a boy, and had brought up his ill-starred son, Don Carlos, urges the necessity of Teresa's presence in Alcala to organise and regulate the discipline of the Convent of the Image, founded by the Beata Maria de Jesus. So after spending two months or thereabouts with her daughters of Medina, Teresa, now fifty-two, prepares for a FOUNDATION OF MALAGON 305 longer journey than any she has yet taken first to Alcala and then to Malagon. The nuns she chose to accompany her were Ana de los Angeles, one of her old companions in the En- carnacion, and Antonia del Espiritu Santo, for whom she had conceived a great affection. Da. Maria de Mendoza, who was on her way to Ubeda, offered them seats in her coach as far as Madrid. Behold, then, the heavy lumbering vehicle, with its burden of great ladies and nuns, as, surrounded by an escort of armed men under young Don Bernardino's leadership, it labours and jolts and creaks through the shaggy pine forests, and over the wild sierras of Segovia. Behold the great edifice on wheels a strange object in those days when there were only four or five in all Spain, as it rattles through little towns and villages, virtually the same to-day as then a half-Moorish, half-Christian population turning out to eye the apparition with superstitious awe, which, however, does not stop the rapid clatter of their tongues, nor their excited exclamations of surprise and wonder. At night, by virtue of that unwritten law of hospitality which obtains in all half-savage countries, where travelling is difficult and dangerous, as also by the privileges of the close relationship much closer then which knit the great families together in a common bond of kindred, and made them, according to the phrase, " primes " (first cousins), not only to the King, but to each other, they took refuge in the lonely castles perched on the hills, whose ruined walls still dominate the surrounding country. In Madrid they alighted at the house, close to the Convent de los Angeles, in the plazuela of Sto. Domingo, of Dona Leonor de Mascarenas, whose emotion and delight was great at harbouring under her roof one who was already looked upon as a saint. There she found assembled to receive her the greatest ladies of Madrid, who, moved by curiosity or devotion, were in a flutter of expectation to see the woman who had made such a stir throughout Castille. There was an anxious pause, which Teresa broke by a remark on the handsomeness of the streets of Madrid, continuing the conversation in the same indifferent tone of ordinary well-bred society. Those who expected at least to have witnessed a miracle or an ecstasy, or to have received from her lips the solution of their doubts or her pre- dictions of the future, were greatly disappointed. These great ladies, with their stiff bodices, and perfumed gloves and hand- kerchiefs, and monstrous farthingales (in those days chairs were exclusively a masculine solace), 1 felt the same profound dis- 1 See Mme. d'Aulnoy's amusing account of the social habits of the period, even so late as Philip iv.'s time. The ladies reclined (for I doubt of their being able to 20 306 SANTA TERESA satisfaction, the same feeling of having been defrauded of a legitimate spectacle, generally experienced by those who are brought into contact for the first time with some celebrity, whose name is in all men's mouths, and who refuses to minister to their curiosity or amusement. What golden opinions might she not have won, if she had but stooped to cant and humbug ; instead of which they went off saying that she was a good, but a very ordinary nun ; nevertheless they had the uneasy feeling that this ordinary old nun who knew how to keep them at a distance, and to preserve herself with a dignity not devoid of sweetness from ill-timed impertinences and puerile curiosity, had taught them a lesson in good breeding. At the request of the King's sister, Da. Juana, the Princess of Brazil, she spent a fortnight in the Convent of Discalced Franciscanesses ; its abbess, Sor Juana de la Cruz, was a sister of the famous Duke of Gandia, whom Teresa had known in Avila as Father Francis the Sinner. But no matter who it was, whether Royal Foundress, or high-born abbess, " who did not cease to be a grandee because she was a nun," down to the rank and file of the community, the chief emotion she excited was surprise that such a frank and simple demeanour should be associated with so much sanctity. " Blessed be God," they said, when at the end of a fortnight she departed for Alcala, " that we have been allowed to see a saint we can all imitate, who speaks, sleeps, and eats like us, converses without ceremony and pious pruderies. Without doubt the spirit in her is from God, for she is sincere without feigning, and lives amongst us as he lived." On the 2 1st of November the friends (for Teresa still travelled in Da. Maria's coach) set out for Alcala. She was received by the sickly and ailing nuns as a messenger from heaven. It is hard to say which of the two gave the most proof of greatness the brave old foundress, whose iron will it needed to endure her own discipline, who, with a magnanimity almost sublime in its way, was the first to make a voluntary and unhesitating surrender into Teresa's hands of the convent she had journeyed to Rome and back to found, and to offer her entire obedience, or the Carmelite nun, who, within the short space of two months, brought it under her austere and gentle sway. She gave it the same Constitutions as she had drawn up for the use of her nuns in Avila C9nstitutions by which it is ruled even to this day. By the advice of Baiies, who was at Alcala busy founding a Jesuit college, she made a futile attempt to vest the jurisdiction sit) on velvet cushions (almohadas). In the inventory of Lope de Vega's furniture (1627) mention is made of eight of these cushions of crimson velvet. FOUNDATION OF MALAGON 307 in the friars of her own Order ; but this being strenuously opposed, not only by the Archbishop of Toledo, and Da. Leonor de Mascarefias, in whose house the foundation had been made, but by Maria de Jesus and the entire community, the Arch- bishop retained the control of the convent, as he retains it still. Towards Lent of 1565 she set out for Toledo. No note has been preserved of her journey on this occasion, for Master Julian, whose delightful garrulousness picks up for us by the wayside so many strange and picturesque details, was no longer with her. After waiting in Toledo until she was joined by the nuns she had sent for from Avila (it is curious that they were all chosen from her old companions of the Encarnacion), the little band of travellers, including Da. Luisa, set out for Malagon, one of that lady's possessions, midway between Andalucia and New Castille. A stern, savage little town this Malagon, and as stern and savage its history. A town under the Romans ; for four cen- turies a stronghold of the Moors ; in Teresa's time, a possession of the Medinacelis, and a place of some traffic, being on the high road to Andalucia ; to-day notable for little except its proverbial evil fame " En Malagon, en cada esquina un ladron," and for being the site of one of Teresa's convents. For the rest, much the same as when it grew on Teresa's vision three centuries ago. A little conglomeration of houses, whitening on an eminence, shut in by jagged peaks of mountain ridges ; above them, as in all towns of Moorish origin, on the highest pinnacle of the rock, the crumbling walls of the dismantled fortress ; close by the parish church, in other days a mosque, outlined sharply against the wolf-haunted sierra, known as the Plaza of the Moors, the site of a mythical Arab town* To-day another building rises close beside them, irregular in outline, dark of hue, stained by years and time a building which was conjured into being not by Moorish adalid or Christian warrior, but by a Castilian nun. Above the high walls, you see the red tiles on the roof, perhaps a latticed casement, the tall crests of two or three cypresses. Do you heed me to tell you that it is the Carmelite Convent of Malagon the most primitive of them all, the least touched ; nay, not touched at all since she watched it fade away in the distance, when for the last time she bade it farewell. The chronicler tells us how she chose the site. How, accompanied by the corregidor, the parish priest, and one of her nuns, they came to one that seemed to them all except her- self the most suitable for the purpose. " Let us leave this," she said, " for the Discalced friars of San Francisco, for here shall 3 o8 SANTA TERESA they found." A prophecy, like many others, that brought about its own fulfilment, for eventually a band of Franciscan friars did found there ; although why she was so anxious to provide them with a site when she was looking for one for herself, he forgets to inform us. At last she paused in an olive grove at a little distance from the town. " Here we must stay," she said, " for this is the place that God has chosen for my convent." And so it is that to this day, on every side but one, the convent walls are masked by terraced groves of silvery olives. Another story is told about the convent gardens, then an olive plantation ; the nuns, despairing of ever having money enough to turn it into a garden, were for building up the door in the wall. Teresa objected, and assured them that in good time their desires would be effected, even if the money came from the Indies. As so it did ; for in 1609 Captain Francis Valverde, on his return from South America to his native town, hearing from the nuns (cunning nuns !) of the prophecy uttered by Teresa nearly half a century before, saw fit to accomplish it. As one stands in the little grass-grown plaza, flanked on one side by the convent gateway, on the other by the parish church, the strange old foundress, and somewhat of what she did, comes back to us very vividly. Many a time and oft in those ceaseless journeyings of hers has she alighted in the low- browed gateway opposite ; many a time has she mounted her donkey from yon mounting-block in the corner. To this day it is the special boast of the good nuns of Malagon that she visited their convent oftener than any of the rest. It was here that the divine impulse came over her to write the Foundations ; here, that, feeling the stealthy march of old age, she girded her- self up for greater* efforts " ere the sands of life ran low." In the angle opposite, a stone's-throw from the convent gates, is the parish church, whence on one Palm Sunday some three centuries ago, for ever famous in the annals of the town, Teresa and her nuns were borne in solemn procession to the house in the plaza, which was to be their temporary abode. It was the first of her foundations to be attended with such touching ceremony the first to take place in the light of day. Hitherto she has been forced to work like a thief in the night. To-day an entire population turns out to do her homage. Little did that great lady dream, who now sleeps her last sleep in that same parish church, where the arms of her ancestors, the Medinacelis and Tabernas, are emblazoned on the keystone of every arch, that in spite of her wealth and lineage, her very name would have been forgotten had it not been for the humble nun, to whom for a little while she played the part of patron. FOUNDATION OF MALAGON 309 It is rare, however, that humanity can carry out an Ideal without a multitude of modifications, adaptations, retrenchments, concessions to popular prejudice and folly. So Teresa, enthusi- astic adherent of Poverty as she was, saw herself obliged, in the case of this last foundation, to waive the principle that she regarded (and rightly) as the corner-stone of the Reform. Malagon was a small town, inhabited by peasants and labourers, whose labour was barely sufficient to maintain themselves, much less a convent. Da. Luisa insisted that unless a fixed endow- ment was provided, it was useless even to think of founding there at all. Teresa hesitated long, and only yielded to the advice of Banes, whom she anxiously consulted in Alcala. " It was not right," he said, "to leave such a foundation, likely to be of so much service to God and productive of so much good, unmade for the sake of her own devotion to Poverty." How strangely different the advice of the old Franciscan, " who had lived it," from that of the Dominican ! Thus convinced, that mysterious ego reasserted itself, speak- ing through the mouth of the phantom she herself conjured up by some obscure psychological process in the recesses of her fancy. Having just communicated on the second day of Lent in St. Joseph of Malagon, our Lord Jesus Christ appeared to me, in an imaginary vision, as he is wont. Whilst I gazed on him, I saw that he wore on his head a crown of great splendour, instead of the crown of thorns, which entirely covered up the wounds made by the thorns. ... I began to think how great must have been the torment which had made so many wounds, and to be much afflicted. The Lord told me not to pity him for these wounds, but rather for the many he was receiving now. I asked him what I could do to prevent it, for I was determined for all. He said to me that the time for rest was not now, but that I should make haste to conclude these houses, for with the souls therein he took great comfort. That I should take as many as were given me, since there were many who, for want of them, did not serve him. And that those I made in small places should be like this ; for their merit was not less if their desires were the same as the others. And that I should endeavour to place them all under the control of one superior, and use all my endeavours to prevent interior peace being lost for the sake of the maintenance of the body, and that he would aid us so that it should never fail. Thus, reassured indeed, by the mysterious voice, the interior echo of her own desires, we see how gradually Teresa was led to make the cause of Poverty subservient to what had now become the supreme object of her life the rapid growth of her foundations. Eventually recognising the dangers involved in a too rigid adherence to the principles she had first laid down, and that it might prove fatal to the future existence of her convents, she even admitted endowments in the case of those very ones which had at first been exceptions. To the other point, however, that is, the vesting of the 3io SANTA TERESA control in the friars of her own Order, she clung till death, refusing several important foundations on that account alone. The good chronicler is at great pains, at the cost of many words, and with but indifferent success, to reconcile this vision with the one Teresa received, ordering her to found without endow- ment. It was a needless and a bootless task. Do we love her better for this unconscious Jesuitism ; or would we have loved her more if she had stuck rigidly and un- deviatingly to her pristine resolve? I know not; for it was this same pliancy, this same subserviency to circumstances, this knowing when and where to relax, that was the secret of her success, not alone with inanimate things, but in the government of the cloister and her commerce with mankind. Barely two months have passed away ; the foundation has been successfully concluded, and her nuns installed in their new home ; she appoints Ana de los Angeles prioress, and once more prepares to turn her steps homewards. As her foundations grow in number, so with advancing years, the greater the responsi- bilities, the all-absorbing claims on her time and strength. There was another and more urgent reason that to her con- scientious mind admitted of no delay. At Alcala she had been greatly shocked by the news of the untimely death of Don Bernardino de Mendoza, snatched away at Ubeda amidst the gaieties and slips of his merry bachelor life, without further preparation beyond a few mute signs of contrition. Teresa did not forget her debt to the generous youth to whose benefac- tions San Jose had owed so much. She now remembered how ardently he had insisted, as if even then he foresaw his impend- ing fate, on signing the deeds which made over to her his house and possessions in Valladolid. I accepted it [she writes], although I had no great wish to found in it, on account of its being a quarter of a league from the town ; but it seemed to me that I might there take possession, and afterwards change to the town ; and as he gave it with such goodwill, I did not like to refuse his good work or hinder his devotion. Death had now transformed his desires into a sacred legacy : " The Lord said to me that his salvation had been in great danger, but that he had had mercy on him, for the service he had done his Mother, in the house he had given for a monastery of her Order, and that he would only be freed from Purgatory when the first Mass was said in it The grave sufferings of his soul were so constantly before me that, although I desired to found in Toledo, I left it for the time being and made all the haste I could to found in Valladolid." FOUNDATION OF MALAGON 311 On the eve of her journey she penned a brief note to Da. Luisa de la Cerda, who had already left Malagon and was on her way towards Andalucia. I am well, and like this town better every day, and so do they all ; none of them now have anything to be discontented with. I assure your ladyship that three out of the four who entered (novices) have great prayer and even something more. Such are they that your ladyship may be sure that, although I am not here, no point of perfection will be wanting, above all, since I leave them with the person I do. The last week of May she was on the road to Toledo, accompanied by Sor Antonia del Espiritu Santo, and Juan Bautista, the parish priest of Malagon, who had assisted her greatly with that foundation. The ride (probably on donkeys) over rough mountain paths was too much for her. On the 2/th of May she writes again to Da. Luisa de la Cerda from Toledo, on the eve of starting for Avila. After sympathising with her on her various trials (Da. Luisa would seem to have fallen out with one of her household a certain licentiate who has just appeared in Toledo, bearing a letter from her for Teresa), she goes on to say : I have told him he has acted badly, and he is very much ashamed, at least he seems to be ; but certainly he is not easy to understand. He is also troubled with a little melancholy, like Alonso de Cabria. But how strange a world it is, that one who has the power to be always serving you, will not, and I who would delight in doing so, cannot. Such, and worse things, must we mortals go through, and withal we never end by knowing what the world is, nor will it let us do so. ... My health has been wretched these last few days. And it would have been worse, if I had not found the comforts your ladyship ordered for me in this house ; for the pain I had when you were in Malagon got so much worse with the sun on the journey, that when I arrived at Toledo, they had to bleed me twice without loss of time ; for I could not move in my bed, so violent was the pain from the back to the head, and next day they purged me ; and so I have been delayed here a week, and I start greatly weakened on account of the loss of blood ; other- wise well. I felt very lonely when I saw myself here again without my lady and friend ; may it all be to the Lord's service. They have all treated me very well, including Reolin. Indeed, I have been delighted with the manner, being so far away as you are, you have looked after my comfort here. . . . The curate of Malagon takes charge of me on the journey, for it is really extraordinary how much I owe him, and Alonzo de Cabria is so wrapped up in his "administrador" that he had no mind to come with me ; he said that the administrador would feel it greatly. As I had got such good company, and he arrived tired from the last journey, I did not insist. ... I have been so busy to-day that I have not had time to finish this ; it is now far on into the night, and I am very weak. I take away with me the saddle your ladyship had in the fortress (I beseech your ladyship not to be angry), and another good one I bought here. I already know that you will be glad that it should be of use to me on these journeys, as it was lying there idle ; I shall at least travel on something of yours. I hope in the Lord to bring it 3i2 SANTA TERESA back with me, and if not, when your ladyship returns, I will send it to you. [Punctilious saint !] . . ; Keep up your courage so as to travel in strange lands [Andalucia, for which Teresa felt all a Castilian's distrust and dislike] ; remember how Our Lady travelled when she went to Egypt, and our father, San Jose. I go by Escalona, for the marquesa is there, and sent for me here. I told her [adroit flatterer !] that your ladyship showed me so much favour that I had no need for her to do me any, but that I would go that way. The Senor Don Hernando and the Senora Dona Ana have done me the grace to see me, and Don Pedro Nino, the Senora Dona Margarita, the other friends and people, and some of them have wearied me a good deal. Your people are very secluded and alone. I beseech you to write to the lady Rectora ; you now know what you owe her. And I have not seen her, although she has sent me presents ; for most of the time I have been in bed. I must go and see the mother prioress to-morrow before I start, for she is very urgent about it. I would fain not mention the death of my lady the Duchess of Medinaceli, in case you do not know of it. I trust it will not grieve you, for to all who loved her well, the Lord did a service ; and more so to her, in taking her so suddenly, for with the illness she suffered from one would rather a thousand times have seen her dead. Her ladyship was such that she will live for ever, and your ladyship and I with her ; and since this is so, I endure being deprived of so great a treasure. I kiss the hands of my senores. Antonia those of your ladyship. Give many messages to the Sr. Don Juan from me ; greatly do I commend him to the Lord. May his Majesty guard me your ladyship and always sustain you. Now I am very tired, and so say no more. Indigna sierva y subdita de V.S. Teresa de Jesus, Carmelita, And yet there is still a postscript, chiefly about a nun, re- commended by " our eternal father " so called " on account of his great gravity," opines the chronicler, at a loss to reconcile so trivial a thing as a joke with saints and sanctity the good Jesuit, Hernandez, who afterwards plays so prominent a part in the founding of the Toledan Convent. He has found a nun, a great reader, and of such good parts as to please him. She has only two hundred ducats, but their loneliness is such and the necessity so great, especially for a monastery which is but begun, that I advise them to take her. May your ladyship remain with God, my lady, for I would fain not conclude ; nor do I know how I am going so far from one whom I love and to whom I owe so much. This letter shows Teresa to us in a new light that of the Castilian gentlewoman, who not only treats on terms of perfect equality with people of the highest rank in the kingdom, but is in the greatest request by them. A poor hidalgo's daughter of the age, of unblemished birth, belonged to the nobility as much as did the proudest aristocrat. In fact, there never were but two classes in Spain the peasant and the noble both knit together by the kindliest, most patriarchal, and democratic sentiments sentiments that modern ideas have no conception of. It is only FOUNDATION OF MALAGON 3 ! 3 recently that a middle-class (that is, in Spain), by the extortion of a respect unwillingly conceded, has brought about that gulf between them that can never again be bridged over. Society is in a state of revolution, like all else ; but we may surely regret the severance of these old-world social relations, which certainly form one of the pleasantest aspects of the age I write of. In a country which has always attached an exaggerated importance to birth and family, the success achieved by Teresa could only have been won by one whose birth and family opened up to her the palaces and hearts of the great, predisposing them to favour one of their own class. It is a fact that all the Spanish saints have been men of illustrious or gentle birth. Even an inspired fakir like San Pedro de Alcantara, all dirt and rags, was no exception. Thus Teresa condoles with Dona Luisa on the Duchess of Medinaceli's death, not in the tone of a dependant, but of one lady to another, who expresses her sorrow for the death of a friend she has known, and whose sufferings she deplores. In the little series of letters she addresses to Dona Luisa from Malagon, Toledo, and Avila, the thought uppermost in her mind relates to the MS. of her Life. This, Dona Luisa had taken with her into Andalucia, with the object of submitting it to the judgment of Master Juan de Avila. Teresa's great anxiety is that it should reach his eyes before death sealed them for ever. " I cannot understand," she says, in the first, from Malagon, "why you neglected to send my message to the Master Avila. I beseech you not to fail to do so for the love of the Lord, but to send it to him immediately, for they tell me it is only a day's journey, not more ; since to wait for Salazar is nonsense, for if he is rector he cannot set out to see your lady- ship, much less to see the Father Avila. I supplicate your ladyship to send it at once, for it distresses me so much that it seems as if the devil did it." Again from Toledo she returns persistently to the same theme : " I have already written to your ladyship in the letter I left for you in Malagon, that I think that the devil prevents this my business reaching the eyes of Master Avila ; I would not that he died before seeing it, which would be a great misfortune. I supplicate your ladyship, since you are so near, to send it to him by a messenger, sealed, and with a letter from your ladyship, recommending it to him much, for he is desirous of seeing it, and will read it as soon as ht is able. Fray Domingo (Banes) has now written to me here that I am to send it to him by a messenger as soon as I arrive in Avila. I am distressed at not knowing what to do, for, as I told you, if they get to know of it, it will do me great harm. For the love 314 SANTA TERESA of our Lord, make haste about it, considering that it is in his service." A petition she repeats once more from Avila ; and would seem, from the following expression, to have been at last granted. " Let your ladyship be careful, since to you I com- mended ' my soul,' to send it to me as soon as possible, and not without a letter from that holy man, as you and I arranged. I am terrified lest Fray Domingo Baiies should come (for they say he is to come here this summer) and find me in the act : for our Lord's love send it to me as soon as that saint has seen it, for you will have time enough to look at it when I return to Toledo. Don't trouble about showing it to Salazar, unless he is very importunate, for this is more important." The question naturally arises, What motive induced Teresa to play hide-and-seek with her confessors, in a manner which, to say the least of it, savours somewhat of double-dealing and Jesuitry ? Alas ! this would be to deal with the saint, and I only pretend to deal with the woman. Banes was, as he confesses, very averse that her Life, a book which he looked upon as dangerous to the multitude, should run any chance of becoming public, and his orders on this point may have been categorical. Yepes makes an amazing error, therefore, when he asserts that this book was transmitted to Master Juan de Avila by Banes himself. Teresa wrote the book of her Life twice once at the suggestion of Ibanez, adding to it, by the desire of Fray Garcia de Toledo, the narrative of her foundation of San Jose ; and again a second time at the instigation of the Inquisitor, Francisco Soto de Salazar, afterwards Bishop of Salamanca, before whom she laid her doubts, and the proposal that she should be examined by the Inquisition. " Senora," said the Inquisitor, "the Inquisition does not concern itself with examining spirits, nor with the way persons who follow it set about prayer, but with chastising heretics. Write with all frankness and sincerity all these things that you experi- ence within you, and send them to the Father Master Avila." This second manuscript is the one which is still preserved in the treasure-chamber of the Escorial. The question is, and it will probably never be answered, What became of the first ? Was it the one that, according to the testimony of Sor Antonia del Espiritu Santo, the Duchess of Alba treasured with such care, or was this only a copy ? Is it the one referred to by Master Julian de Avila when he says that " several persons displayed the utmost diligence that certain things written by the Mother, which seemed to them too strange and supernatural to go about from hand to hand, should be burnt and destroyed ; whilst others with no less diligence were eager that they FOUNDATION OF MALAGON 315 should be preserved, although kept from falling into the hands of those who might understand them wrongly." " I repeat," he adds, "that it seems to me a miracle that it was not destroyed, and that if God who had bidden her write it had not guarded and shielded it, in all human probability no memory of it would have been left. . . . And I was a personal witness and saw with my own eyes how diligently the devil set to work in order that this writing of the holy Mother should disappear in its cradle ; for it happened when she had just finished it. And I myself was one of those, who in order that a copy of it might be taken, gathered together as many writers as were necessary to transcribe it in a single day, for it was considered certain that the originals would be burnt." This point, which is as yet but of insignificant interest, becomes of capital importance farther on, as on its solution depends the guilt or the innocence of the unfortunate Princess of Eboli, on whom the odium has rested from that day to this, of having delated Teresa's Life to the Inquisition, although there is not an atom of serious evidence to fix upon her an action so mean and repugnant. Teresa's desires were gratified, for her book was approved by the venerable Juan de Avila. His letter, dated from Montilla on the I2th of September, reached her in Valladolid, and in a bundle of papers, long preserved in Pastrana, another letter he addressed to her on the same subject was afterwards found written a few short weeks before his death. On the 28th of May, still ailing, and weak from loss of blood, she set forth for Avila. Again absorbed in her great plan for extending the Reform to friars, the rhythmical cadence of the mules' hoofs sinking in the sand alone disturb her reveries as the closely-muffled nuns and their muleteers traverse the melancholy plains between Toledo and Escalona. At Escalona, Teresa broke her journey, and lay over Sunday, the guest of the Marquesa de Villena. They travelled slowly on account of her weakness ; as good luck would have it, the curate of Malagon, who was still with them, " could (she notes) turn his hand to anything" ("que para todo tiene gracia" an invaluable quality in Spanish travelling), " which has been a great comfort to me." I wonder if she called to mind as she went along that other woman, a woman whose very presence, as she passed in her litter, awed into silence and respect the turbulent crowds of Toledo, who, forty-six years before, when Teresa was but a child in Avila, a fugitive and in disguise, travelled the same path, bound to the same destination. That woman, the wife of the popular hero, Juan 316 SANTA TERESA de Padilla, as great of soul as the greatest that ever graced the proud line of the Mendozas, as great perhaps as Teresa herself, although she never wrote a line, and laid no claim to sanctity had implored from her own kith and kin, before those same fortress gates of Escalona, shelter for herself and children, and implored in vain. The heart of its owner remained as hard and obdurate as the iron nails which studded them. Three days afterwards it was now the 2nd of June she arrived in Avila, " very tired," as she wrote to her correspondent Dona Luisa, to whom she again manages to pay an adroit compliment or was it simply the natural instinct of a nature which, in its anxiety to please, becomes all things to all men, an instinct that can neither be regarded as flattery nor double- dealing? as she speaks of the hospitality she has received from the Marquesa at Escalona, " who showed me much favour, but as the Lady Dona Luisa alone is necessary to me, I heeded it but little." Before she left Avila for the foundation of Valladolid, a fortunate circumstance enabled her to redeem her promise to the two men whose privilege it was to be the first friars of her Order. Our Lord was pleased [she writes, in simple, sincere phrase], that as he had given me the chief thing, which were friars to begin with, so also to order the rest. A gentleman of Avila, called Don Rafael [Mejia Velasquez according to some, Velasquez Davila according to others what's in a name ?] with whom I had never had any dealings, happened to hear I know not how, for I do not now remember that there was a wish to make a monastery of Descalzos, and he came to offer to give me a house he had in a small hamlet of very few inhabitants I do not think they would be more than twenty, for I do not now remember that he had there for a " rentero " who collected his dues of corn. Although I saw what it must be like, I praised our Lord, and thanked him heartily. He told me that it was on the way to Medina del Campo, that I would pass it on the way to the foundation of Valladolid, it being on the direct road, and that I might look at it. I said that I would do so, and more- over so I did, for I set forth from Avila in June with a companion (Sor Antonia del Espiritu Santo) and Father Julian de Avila, chaplain of San Jose of Avila, who assisted me on these journeys. Although we started at daylight, as we did not know the road, we missed it, and as the place is not much known, few could tell us anything about it. So we toiled on all that day with great fatigue, for the sun was exceeding hot. When we thought we were close at hand we had to go as far again. I shall never forget the fatigue and anxiety we went through on that journey. Thus we only arrived a little before nightfall. When we got into the house it was in such a state that we durst not remain there for the night, on account of the filth and the number of harvesters in it. It possessed a tolerable gateway, and a room with an alcove and a loft above, and a fireplace this was all the edifice our FOUNDATION OF MALAGON 317 monastery had. I thought that the gateway might be made into a church, the loft into a choir, for which it was suitable, and the room into a dormitory. My companion, although she was very much better than I, and a great lover of penitence, could not endure that I should think of making a monastery in such a place ; and so she said, " Certainly, Mother, no spirit, however good it may be, will endure it ; treat of it no more." The father who was with me, although he agreed with my companion, when I told him my intentions, did not contradict me. When she arrived at Medina, Teresa sent for Fray Antonio, the dignified Prior of the Carmelites. We can fancy the half- humorous, half-anxious expression in her eyes as she watched the changes that flitted over the prior's face he whose life had been one of lettered ease and dignity until sixty. She described the poverty-stricken Castilian village; its mud walls, of the same colour as the desert around; its tumbled lines scarce distinguishable against the unbroken flatness of the horizon ; the house little better than a barn for storing grain, exposed to all the winds of heaven and the scorching heat of the summer sun ; the streamlet that ran before the door, christened by some wag the Rio al Mar " the river running to the sea " : " Every- thing, indeed, very suitable to harbour people who sought tranquillity amidst the incommodities of the world." I told him what had passed, and that he might be certain that, if he had courage to dwell there for a time, God would quickly provide a remedy ; that to begin was everything. It seems to me that I saw before me what the Lord has done, as clearly and certainly, so to speak, as I see it now, and even still more than what I have seen up to now ; for as I write this, there are ten monasteries of Discalced friars through the grace of God ; and I assured him that neither the past nor the present pro- vincial (for their consent was indispensable, as I said at first) would give us the license if they saw us in a decent house, let alone the fact that we could not help ourselves, and that in such a wretched house and hamlet they would take no notice of them. God had inspired him with more valour than he had me, and so he answered that not only there would he dwell, but even in a pigsty. Fray Juan de la Cruz was of the same mind. Leaving Fray Antonio and his magnanimous resolutions behind her in Medina to gather together such necessaries as he could for her first monastery of friars, spurred on by the Lord to cut short as soon as possible Don Bernardino's sufferings in purgatory, she continued her journey to Valladolid. She bore with her Fray Juan de la Cruz. I entered Valladolid [she writes] on the day of San Lorenzo (roth August) ; and when I saw the house it rilled me with great dismay, for I saw that it was impossible for the nuns to live there, unless at the cost of a great outlay ; and although it was a pleasant spot, on account of the orchard being so delightful, it could not but be unhealthy, for it stood close 3 i8 SANTA TERESA to the river. Although I arrived tired out, I stayed to hear Mass in a monastery of our Order on the outskirts of the town ; and it was so far away that my pain increased. Withal I said nothing to my companions so as not to discourage them ; for, weak as I was, I still had faith that the Lord, who had bidden me hasten in Medina, would provide some remedy. With great secrecy I sent for some workmen to begin to put up some mud walls, and do what was necessary in order to protect our seclusion. The priest I have spoken of, called Julian de Avila, and one of the friars who, as has been said, wished to become a Descalzo, and who was instructing himself as to our mode of life in these houses, were with us. Julian de Avila, who had been engaged in procuring the ordinary's license, had already given us good hopes of it before I started. However, it could not be done so quickly as to prevent a Sunday intervening before the license was conceded ; but they gave us leave to say Mass in the place we had fixed upon for a church. I was far from thinking that what had been said to me about that soul was about to be accomplished ; for although I had been told it would be at the first mass, I understood it to be the one when the most Holy Sacrament should be placed on the altar. As the priest bearing the Host came towards the place where we were about to com- municate, and I drew close to him to receive it, the gentleman I have spoken of appeared to me, his face resplendent and joyous, his hands clasped, and thanked me for what I had done for him, in order to release him from purgatory and send his soul to heaven. . . . Well, then, when the day of Our Lady of the Assumption arrived, which is on the I5th of August 1568, we took possession of this monastery. We lived there only a short time, for nearly all of us fell ill [of quartan ague, adds Master Julian de Avila, who was attacked by the same illness on his return to Avila, brought on, he says, by the miasmatic neighbourhood of the river]. Da. Maria de Mendoza, sister of the Bishop of Avila and of the Don Bernardino thus marvellously rescued from purgatory, and perhaps in gratitude for the same, came to the rescue. She sheltered the ailing women in her palace until they were recovered, and bought them another house nearer the town, in exchange for that given them by her brother. The abandoned dwelling, whose unsalubrious situation in the low damp plains on the brink of the Pisuerga proved so fatal to the health of its inmates, afterwards became the property of the Duke of Lerma. On the 3rd of February day of San Bias a great and solemn procession escorted Teresa and her daughters to the house they, or rather the successors who have followed in their mystic footsteps, inhabit to this day. And thus with all the pomp and splendour of mediaeval rejoicing, and the unanimous devotion of a great and stately city, did she bring her fourth foundation to a triumphal ending. CHAPTER XII DURUELO AND FOUNDATION AT TOLEDO IN the meantime the Monastery of Duruelo has become an accomplished fact. Cleverly pulling the strings, at the end of which danced, to the bidding of a superior will, grandee and provincial, bishop and friar alike, Teresa has induced the licenses of both provincials to be forthcoming. Gonzalez, Salazar's predecessor, who chanced to be in Valladolid, "an old man, good-natured and simple-minded," she terrified into acquiescence by that awe-inspiring rhetoric, as to which the Bishop of Calahorra is reported to have said that "he would rather argue with all the theologians in the world than with the Mother Teresa." Says Teresa, " I put before him so many things and the reckoning he would have to give God, if he opposed so good a work . . . that he softened greatly." The influence of the Bishop and his sister Maria de Mendoza did the rest. As for Salazar, from whom she apprehended greater difficulty, as he himself happened to stand in need of Da. Maria de Mendoza's favour in a certain necessity of his own, he willingly conceded what he might otherwise have refused. Towards the end of September, therefore, a month after he arrived with her in Valladolid, Fray Juan de la Cruz was started off to take up his abode in Duruelo. As she busied herself with the workmen transforming the Comendador Cobo's pleasaunce into a convent, she had instructed him in the whole manner of life of the Discalced Carmelites as exemplified in her convents. " He was so good," says the saint humbly, " that I at least could have learnt much more from him than he from me." So, clad in the habit her own hands had helped to sew, and which he was never more in this life to relin- quish, the " great heart and little body " trudged off to Avila. Together with the humble and meagre requisites for celebrating Mass, he bore letters in his wallet to Velasquez' and Teresa's good friend Francisco de Salcedo. Lovingly and full of tender jest she besought the holy knight's favour for her diminutive friar ; " although I see he is great in the sight of God. ... It 319 320 SANTA TERESA seems that the Lord holds him by the hand ; for in spite of our having had some occasions here in business, and of me who am the very occasion itself, for I have often been very vexed with him, we have never seen an imperfection in him. He is very prayerful, and has a good understanding. May God forward him." Less than two months after, he was joined by the worthy prior of Sta. Ana. The latter had gone through a far severer novitiate than any Teresa could have imagined for him, and displayed under difficult circumstances and active persecution qualities which augured well for his constancy in the Reform. In pursuance of that dark policy of tergiversa- tion and secret dealing which was destined only too surely to suck out all the life and vigour of an empire on which the Spaniard of that day fondly boasted that the sun never set, Philip, out of his Christian zeal for the reformation of the Orders (and well did they need it, if contemporary records are true), placed the monasteries of his kingdom under the same odious system of espionage, which was at once the strength and weakness of his reign. To gratify the King, the friars themselves became spies on their own communities. The prior of Sta. Ana was one of the number singled out for this purpose. Whether he performed it or not (and events in his future career would almost lead us to assume that he did) we do not know. The mere fact, however, of his being in correspondence with the King, when it leaked out in his community, was more than enough to excite against him the anger of its members, who bitterly resented a supervision which they regarded as a treason to them and to their house. He was charged with being an innovator, a disturber of the monastic peace; with concealing under a cloak of zeal an itch for command and pre-eminence; with a thirst for temporal honours, which led him, unworthy of those he held in the Order, to curry favour at court. So that between his own voluntary exercises of mortifica- tion and those gratuitously afforded him by the furious friars, the endurance and patience of the good old prior were rudely put to the test He triumphantly emerged from them, however, notes the chronicler, " a pillar of brass for the protection of the greater Reformation." He, too, before setting forth for Duruelo, comes to Valladolid to bid Teresa farewell and receive her last instructions. " He came to Valladolid to speak with me in high delight, and told me what he had gathered together, which was indeed little ; he had provided himself with nothing more than hour-glasses, of which he had five, which amused me highly. He told me that he did not want to go unprovided with means DURUELO AND FOUNDATION AT TOLEDO 321 for regulating the Hours. I even think he had not got a bed." We may be sure she keenly relished a pious trait of un- practicality so entirely after her own heart. From Valladolid Fray Antonio Heredia returned to Medina, and to the pro- vincial's amazement that a man over sixty, who might have risen to the highest offices of his order, should thus voluntarily dedicate his life to obscurity and poverty, he resigned his office ; and then he too girded up his habit and trudged off to rejoin his brother at Duruelo. This took place in November. If the tide had now turned in Teresa's favour, she owed it to her own indomitable will to the power (and none ever possessed it in a higher degree), not only of grasping the whole of the vast scheme she now felt herself engaged on, but of noting and following out with passionate ardour the most trivial detail. Her letters at this period, of which probably only a tithe remains, show us how marvellously the horizon of her life has expanded, how rapidly her fame has grown. Although her pen is never idle, few of them are written by her own hand, and, to husband her slender strength, she is obliged to employ a secretary, Sor Antonia del Espiritu Santo. Perhaps no more finished specimens of epistolary correspondence have ever been penned than these letters written in the press of multifarious occupations often late at night when the rest of the convent was sleeping. To those to whom she can freely open her heart, with what infinite grace, with what tenderness, with what loving and witty sallies or sly touches of humour, does she not address them ! With strangers how courtly, ceremonious, and urbane does she not become ; whilst to those above her in rank there is a touch neither of sycophancy, subserviency, nor adulation of recognition of the respective differences of social equality, which must have been both soothing and grateful to the recipients. In her hands even a refusal loses all its bitterness, and is deprived of half its sting. It is impossible to convey the charm of these letters, the truest picture of her character and life. It matters not whether she has to refuse a would-be novice, owing to the insufficiency of her dower (as in the case of Isabel de Cordoba) ; to write a few lines to the Bishop ; to reply to the conditions of Cristobal de Moya, who proposes to found another of her convents in Segura de la Sierra (Murria) in which his two daughters are to enter, on the understanding that the government is to be vested in the Jesuits, in all she displays that intimate knowledge of human nature, and the fine sure tact that veils the hardest truths under a garb of kindly and genuine feeling impossible to simulate. None ever 21 322 SANTA TERESA practised the difficult art of "putting off" with such delicacy and consummate skill, veiled by an undissembled kindliness and genuineness, so that none could feel hurt or think she was overlooking their claims, or was postponing them to her own convenience. Her chief correspondence at this time, however, relates to the foundation of Toledo. During her stay in that city, pend- ing the foundation of Malagon, her confessor had been Fray Pablo Hernandez, a learned and pious Jesuit. It is to him that she refers wittily, in writing to Da. Luisa de la Cerda, as "our eternal father." The Jesuit in his turn summed up the profound impression she made on him in graphic and familiar phrase, the sense of which alone bears translation. " The mother Teresa," he said, "is a very great woman humanly speaking, but immeasurably greater spiritually." Transformed into one of her most ardent devotees, he ardently desired to have one of her foundations in Toledo. With this object he sought out a rich merchant, Martin Ramirez by name, then lying at the point of death, who intended to devote the wealth, " got together in honest traffic," to increasing the revenues of a church. Why not, said the Jesuit, found a Discalced convent instead, whereby he would not only do the Lord a service, but keep his own memory green as well ? The pious merchant wanted but little urging. He was already so ill that, seeing there was no time to settle anything, he left it entirely in the hands of his brother, Alonso Ramirez, " a man of great discretion, God-fearing, exceeding truthful and almsgiving, and open to reason." The news of Ramirez's death reached her in the thick of the foundation at Valladolid, together with the pressing requests of Hernandez and Alonso Alvarez that if she accepted the founda- tion she should lose no time, but start at once. She at once sent a deed (7th September) empowering Hernandez and a brother Jesuit to act for her. Nevertheless, more than five months passed away before the affairs of her freshly-founded convent admitted of her gratifying their eagerness and her own desire. During that time, however, she was not inactive. In December she writes to Da. Luisa de la Cerda : Jesus be with your ladyship. I have neither time nor strength to write much, for to few people now do I write with my own hand. ... I am wretchedly ill. With your ladyship, and in your country, my health is better, although, glory to God, the people here do not abhor me. But as my heart is there, so would the body fain be also. What think you of the way his Majesty goes about disposing it, and with so little trouble on my DURUELO AND FOUNDATION AT TOLEDO 323 part ? Blessed be his name that he has chosen to order it in such a way by the hands of persons so desirous of serving God, for I think his Majesty will be greatly served by it. For the love of God, let your ladyship set about trying to get the license. 1 think the governor had better not be told it is for me, but for a house of these Descalzas ; and he might be told of the good they do where they exist : at least, glory to God, we shall not lose through them of our Malagon, and your ladyship will see how quickly you will have this your servant in Toledo, for it seems as if God wished that we should not be separated. Please his Majesty that it may be so in glory, together with all those my senores, to whose prayers I greatly commend myself. . . . Write to me as to how you are, for you are very lazy in doing me this favour. On the pth of January she writes to Diego Ortiz, Alonso Ramirez's son-in-law, in the name of whose son, then a child of six years old, it was proposed to vest the patronage of the foundation : Please God, the fever has left me. I make all the haste I can to con- clude this to my satisfaction, and I think by the Lord's favour it will shortly be concluded ; and I promise your grace to lose no time, nor let my illness come in the way, even should the fever return, of my setting out im- mediately ; for it is but right, since your grace is doing everything, that I should on my side do what is nothing, that is, take a little trouble, since we who pretend to follow him, whose life was so justly full of them, must not seek anything else. . . . His letter had been optimistic. I will delay as little as I can, since your grace desires it, although in a matter now so well ordered, and already as it were, concluded, I shall have nothing more to do than to look on, and give thanks to our Lord. . . . On the Qth of February clouds had arisen on the horizon, and complications ; it was difficult to procure the licenses : her letter is full of encouragement, but it is the encouragement of a saint, which perhaps afforded but cold comfort to the recipients. Concerning the licenses, with the favour of heaven I have no fear of the king's, although we may have to go through some little trouble to obtain it, for I have experience how ill the devil can endure these houses, and so he persecutes us always ; but the Lord is all-powerful, and he [the devil] departs discomfited, his hands up to his head. . . . When they stone your grace, and the sefior your son-in-law, and all of us who have any part in it, as they almost did in Avila when San Jose was made, then the matter is in a good way, and I shall believe that neither the convent nor we who suffer the molestation shall lose anything, but rather gain much. . . . Let your grace be in no way troubled. She beseeches him to have patience. I shall tarry little more than I said in my letter, for I assure your grace it does not seem I lose even an hour ; and so I have not even been a fort- 324 SANTA TERESA night in our convent since we passed to the house, which was with a procession full of solemnity and devotion. Since Wednesday I have been with the Senora Da. Maria de Mendoza, as on account of her having been ill and unable to see me, it was necessary for me to treat with her on several matters by word of mouth. I only thought to have been a day, but the weather has been so cold, with such snow and frost, that it seemed impossible to travel, and so I remained until to-day, Saturday. I shall start on Monday, please the Lord, without fail for Medina, and there and in San Jose of Avila, make what haste I will, I must remain more than a fortnight, on account of some business matters it is necessary for me to see about, and so I believe I shall be longer than I had said. Your grace will pardon me, for by this reckoning I have given you, you will see I can do no more, and the delay is not much. . . . She commends herself to their prayers. " Consider that I have need of them to travel those roads in such bad health, although I have had no return of the fever." On the 2 1st of February, very little more than a fortnight after she had seen her daughters safely harboured in their new convent, she started for Medina. On her way from Medina to Avila she turned aside to pay a visit to her first monastery of friars at Duruelo, that "little gateway of Bethlehem," as she calls it, " for indeed I think it was no better." Barely four months had passed since that November day when Fray Antonio de Jesus, arriving from Medina, had rejoined Fray Juan de la Cruz at Duruelo. The following day (28th November 1568), after spending the night in prayer and celebrating Mass, the four friars (for two of his own com- munity had followed their prior from Medina), kneeling before the Host, renewed their profession and solemnly renounced the Mitigated Rule. They then, in imitation of their foundress, buried the names they had hitherto borne, and assumed the humbler and more glorious ones by which they were hence- forth to shine in the annals of the Order Fray Antonio de Jesus, Fray Juan de la Cruz, Fray Jose de Cristo. It was morning when she arrived at Duruelo. Fray Antonio, the whilom neat and dainty prior of Medina, was busily sweeping out the church doors, his face beaming with the bright and cheerful expression unquenched by mortifica- tion habitual to it. " How is this, my father ? " asked the witty nun, "and what has become of our dignity?" Where- upon he answered, in words expressive of his unclouded joy, " I curse the day I had any." When I entered the church I was amazed to see the devotion the Lord had placed there ; nor I alone, for two merchants who had come with me so far from Medina, for they were friends of mine, did nothing but weep. It was so full of crosses, so full of skulls ! I never forget a little wooden DURUELO AND FOUNDATION AT TOLEDO 325 cross which contained holy water, whereon was pasted a paper image of Christ, which seemed to inspire more devotion than if it had been a thing of elaborate workmanship. This scene passed in the depths of winter, and her descrip- tion of the monastery and its inmates, is tinged with the sentiment of the season. The choir was the loft, which in the centre was high enough to enable them to say Hours, but they could not enter or hear Mass without crouching down. At the two corners next the church they had two little hermitages, where it was impossible to do anything else but sit or lie. These were filled with hay, because the place was very cold, and the tiles almost touched their heads, with two little openings towards the altar, and two stones for pillows, and their crosses and skulls. I was told that after they finished Matins, they remained there in prayer, until Prime, and so absorbed, that when they went to Prime their habits were covered with snow, and they did not know it. They said their Hours with another father belonging to them of the Cloth, who went to live with them, although, as he was a great invalid, he did not change his habit ; and another young friar who was not ordained was also there. They went to preach at many of the neigh- bouring towns close by, which had no religious teaching, for which reason also I was glad the house had been founded in that spot ; since they told me that besides there being no monastery near, neither was there any other place whence it could be had, which was pitiful enough. Already in so short a time so great was the credit they were held in that it gave me the greatest joy when I heard it. They went, as I say, to preach a league and a half, and two leagues away, barefoot, for at that time they did not wear alpargatas, as afterwards they were ordered to, and with great snow and cold ; and after they had preached and confessed, they returned to their house very late to eat. Their contentment made everything seem little to them. As to food, they had enough and to spare, for the dwellers of the neighbouring townships provided .them with more than they needed, and some gentlemen came to them to confession who lived in those towns, where they already offered them better sites and houses. Amongst these was Don Luis, lord of the Cinco Villas. Thus far, Teresa. It is not difficult to imagine the super- stitious awe and veneration with which the rustic and simple labourer looked on these cowled brothers who had appeared amongst them as suddenly as a thief in the night, and whose penances and deprivations were more than human ; how their figures, clad in the meagre habits of the Order, soon became a familiar object in the villages of the surrounding plains, whither they went, not to beg, for this Teresa's rules strictly forbade, but to preach and minister to such bodily and spiritual neces- sities as they could. Not yet does the Discalced Carmelite swell the ranks of the mercenary friars, whose dark shadow never fell over the threshold of some humble dwelling but to add to its poverty and desolation. Not yet does the peasant dread his advent as a veritable scourge. Far otherwise the 326 SANTA TERESA lofty ideal which sustained these first solitaries of Duruelo. No wonder that, as he trudged along on his errands of mercy, a figure darkening against the immensity of the snow, he came to be looked upon as little less than a saint. Such the life in those days surely neither a useless nor an unpractical one of these Teresa's first Carmelites, who indeed restored alas ! for how brief a period, this history itself will show the Rule of the ancient dwellers of Mount Carmel in the deserted straw grange of a Castilian desert. The flame was too brilliant to last long, and quickly paled when the animating spirit was gone And yet, could the keen-eyed old woman (to whom those about her attributed the gift of prophecy) have seen the stately line of monasteries and great monastic deserts, presently to rise from this humble cradle, whose ruins strew the sweetest and loneliest spots in Spain, I doubt whether she could have felt so keen a thrill of joy as she did before this rude beginning, these early struggles, every one of which surmounted was a triumph. I doubt even if she would have recognised her handi- work, or have taken any delight in the pomp and material grandeur of the monasteries that hailed her as their foundress and their queen. Doubt ? Nay ; I know ! How strangely must her words have sounded to the friars the successors of these heroic and valiant men, ringing as they did from the grave, when they began to rear those splendid fabrics and transform the arid wilderness into paradises of beauty, fertility, and delight. Father fray Antonio has told me that when he came in sight of the little hamlet, he felt an exceeding inward joy, and it seemed to him that he had already finished with the world, which he had left entirely behind him to bury himself in that solitude, where neither noticed the badness of the house, rather did it seem to them delightful. Oh ! valame Dios ; how little these edifices and external beauties affect the interior life ! For love of him, I beg you, my brothers and fathers, never to cease to be exceeding modest in the matter of large and sumptuous houses : let us keep before us our true founders, who are those Holy Fathers from whom we trace our descent ; for we know that by the road of poverty and humility they arrived at the enjoyment of God. In very truth I have seen more devotion, and even inward joy, when it seems that the bodies are least cared for, than afterwards, when they own a spacious house and possess every comfort. However large it is, what does it profit us, that our cell should be exceeding roomy and well built, when we can only enjoy one constantly ? What docs it matter to us ? Little, indeed, since our life is not to be spent in looking at the walls. Considering that we are not to live in the house for ever, but such a brief space as is that of life, all will be sweetened to us, however long our life, by the thought that the less we possess here below, so much the more our enjoyment in that eternity, where the dwellings are measured by the love with which we have imitated the life of our dear Jesus. If we say DURUELO AND FOUNDATION AT TOLEDO 327 that these are the foundations on which to restore the rule of the Virgin, his mother, our Lady and Patron, let us not do her, nor our Holy Fathers of the past, such offence as to neglect to observe them ; and although on account of our frailty we cannot follow their example in everything, still we are bound to be careful in those matters which are not indispensable to the sustenance of life, since it is all but a little savoury trial, and so these two friars considered it : and once we have decided to face it, the difficulty is over, for it is only a little pain in the beginning. Time mocked Teresa's efforts: they were doomed to be fugitive. She who had sought the transcendental, the unattain- able, who for a moment might flatter herself she had stirred in some pure hearts the glowing fire that burned within her own, who sought to build a temple of pure souls and lofty desires, was destined to succeed in raising but stone walls. It seems as if man's nature resisted being kept at tension point ; and so her fate, the inexorable but certain one which awaits all minds greater than their century, was to reach an unparalleled material success, every advance in which perverted her intentions. Her greatness to vulgar minds was destined to lie in what she most despised ; to be praised for what she contemplated with horror, by a world too obtuse to realise its inner meaning. The ruined walls of Duruelo still rise against the plain ; the little streamlet close by wavers a line of verdure against the calcined brown upland and distant sierra flecked with snow a bare austere landscape, not without its charm. Enough still remains to enable the dreamer to reconstruct this brief idyll of the desert. Those few poplars before the gateway, they say Teresa planted ; a herdsman marks out to you on the ground the foundations of what was once the church. Although to the Carmelite of the seventeenth century unresponsive to the sentiment for natural beauty in which the contemplative of the generation before him found the only solace for the austerity of his life it was a bleak and savage spot, he has still preserved with loving and tender hand the rustic dwelling for ever con- secrated to the memory of San Juan de la Cruz and Fray Antonio de Jesus. The loft above, where, oblivious of the snow, the morning sun still found them on their knees as night had left them, is untouched. Untouched the rough ladder; untouched the pent-house roof, so low that except in the centre you must either sit or lie. Dusky, rude, and rough of architecture no better than a barn, and that the roughest : yet it was here that the great San Juan de la Cruz attuned his soul to those mystic harmonies, and found those accents that ring like a silvery bell amidst the religious literature of the day. Not much to see for the sight-seer not much ! But would you see more ? Would you see the commentary on 328 SANTA TERESA this strange life of heroism ? Go to the little graveyard yes ! that patch of sand that gleams like silver in the sun ; and there turning up the dust you may find, as I have found, a whitening skull all that remains of them, all that shall remain of us ; and it may say, as dumb things do say more powerfully than living voices : Was not mine a better life than yours, free from greed and malice, forgetting and forgot, doing good and thinking good ; a rude, hard life of desires repelled, inclinations mortified, but a life of peace ! as harmless as the flowers . . . and as lovely ! Well may Teresa have indulged a legitimate emotion of pride and triumph at seeing how amply her dreams had been realised. It was not, however, unmixed with apprehension ; and before she bade them farewell she prayed them to temper their austerities, lest they should shorten lives on which she felt depended all the fate and future of her Order. Towards the middle of March she was on her way from Avila to Toledo. Isabel de Sto. Domingo and Isabel de San Pablo, one of her own relatives, went with her. Unhappily for us, who shall miss the quaint and graphic touches of Master Julian's pen, they were escorted by the priest, Gonzalo de Aranda. The road, or bridle track, frayed by mules and donkeys, lay, nay still lies, for have I not travelled it? to the south-east of Avila. Past great bleak sweeps of wild prairie, flecked over by streamlets that shine like silver, a fantastic vegetation of brown spikes for spring is late in Avila, cutting far above the blue sierras in the distance, cleaving the sky. No Moors in their recesses then ; no saints to fleet past them on donkeys now. A wild and fearful enough journey even to-day across the mountain barrier between Avila and Madrid; then full of strange and romantic elements of danger which the centuries have swept away. See then the priest and the nuns as they thread the gloomy defiles of the Guadarramas ; see them as, hung between earth and heaven, they listen terrified to the thunders of the river, which boils and leaps in the chasm beneath. Once through the Puerto (pass), they enter the more benignant climate of El Tiemblo, where olive, pomegranate, orange, and lemon blossom and fruit ; renowned throughout the province for its vineyards and delicious Muscatel grapes. In a narrow street off the Plaza, a gray stone building still goes by the name of Sta. Teresa's posada for the past is very tenacious in these towns. As I stood on the mud floor of the dark and empty house swept and garnished (for it is now uninhabited), every detail of its interior redolent of an older and simpler world an old woman DURUELO AND FOUNDATION AT TOLEDO 329 pointed out two amongst the little alcoves or cells, where she said Sta. Teresa and San Juan de la Cruz had once slept. In the morning when the hostess went to look for her guests they were gone gone to say Mass with the friars of Guisando. The saint (I can indeed recognise her in this) had not forgotten to leave the reckoning in the spot where she had laid her bundle over night. How this may be I know not, but it is probably in this very spot that on this same journey the following incident occurred, duly narrated by the chronicler : They arrived at Tiemblo: the mesonero, seeing that they were women and moreover nuns, gave them a room already bespoken by another traveller, on account of its being quieter and more retired. When the latter returned to the posada and saw his things no longer in the place where he had left them, furious with the mesonero he fell upon him with his drawn sword and tried to kill the muleteers who restrained him. Refusing to listen to reason, he insulted the nuns with op- probrious epithets. Seeing that no one took his part, he betook himself to the corregidor it was then late at night to whom so as to stimulate him the more, he accused them of having robbed him of his money. The corregidor came, and as he was himself from Avila, at once recognised Gonzalo de Aranda. When he heard who the travellers were, and, above all, that the saint was one of them, he deplored the incident greatly. The enraged guest, seeing that he had entirely failed of his object, took up his bundles and disappeared into the night, leaving behind him the impression that he was either the devil or possessed of one. In Madrid she probably stayed with the hospitable Francis- canesses and their high-born abbess, the Duke of Gandia's sister, who, although a nun, still conserved her rank as a grandee of Spain. At least she once more came into personal contact with the Princess of Brazil, a great admirer of hers, to whom it is said she gave a paper of advice that God had inspired her to deliver to the King, which proved to be so adjusted to his most secret thoughts, that he conceived a strong desire to see and speak with her, but she was gone before with the cumbrous dilatoriness of state etiquette the interview could be arranged ; and the opportunity, once lost, never occurred again. So that by one of the strange contrarieties of fate, these two strange and most characteristic figures of their epoch (in whose separate individualities, so distinctly, and in many ways so violently opposed, one might almost say the whole tendency and spirit of the age were summed up and synthetised) passed 330 SANTA TERESA close by one another and never met ; and history is the poorer for the want of the strange and picturesque interview between the gloomy, wily, irresolute and withal commonplace and "routinier" fanatic, who was then doing his best to accomplish the ruin of his great empire, and whose shadow seemed to blight the lives of all it fell upon, and the cheerful, courageous, high-minded woman of genius, and swift and certain action. On the 24th of March she and her nuns alighted at the gates of Dona Luisa de la Cerda. A portion of the house was set apart for them, where they could preserve unaltered the retirement and tranquillity of the cloister. In a letter of this date addressed to her friend Dona Maria de Mendoza y Sarmiento, in which Teresa condoles with her on certain troubles that remain in the vague obscure, she says : It gave me great pleasure to hear that you enjoyed good health. Oh ! if you had an inward command, such as you have outwardly, how little would you care for what are called trials here below. ... I arrived here well, on the eve of Our Lady. Dona Luisa was overjoyed. We spend many moments in speaking of your ladyship, which to me is no small pleasure, for as she loves you greatly she is never weary. I tell your ladyship that here your reputation is what, please God, may be your actions, for they are never tired of calling you a saint, and chanting me your praises at every moment. . . . Let your grace take courage : consider what the Lord passed through at this time. Life is short, our troubles last only for a moment. Oh, my Jesus ! and how often I offer up to him my separation from you, and the impossibility of knowing of your health as I would wish. My founders here are very gracious ; we are now setting about obtaining the license. I should like to be quick about it, and if they only give it us soon, I believe everything will end happily. She had barely, however, taken up the thread of her old Toledan life in Da. Luisa's palace; she had barely written, pleased and confident, to the other great lady she had left behind her in Valladolid of the good disposition she noticed in her founders (" muy de buen arte " is the Teresian phrase) than the whole project fell through. Da. Luisa de la Cerda, although seconded by Don Pedro Manrique, son of the Adelantado of Castille, and canon of Toledo Cathedral, had utterly failed in getting the license. The governor and his council were obdurate. Alonso Ramirez and his son-in-law, the latter, " a very good theologian, but more pigheaded than the other," imposed conditions altogether at variance with the peace and tranquillity of the cloister. Neither was it any easier to find a house. See her then, this elderly woman, without a house or hopes of one; her negotiations with the founders broken off; her whole worldly fortune a ducat or two and the habit she stood up in. DURUELO AND FOUNDATION AT TOLEDO 331 Nevertheless, as the difficulties thickened, her breezy confi- dence grew greater. The more she was thrown on herself, the less she depended on exterior aid, the freer did she breathe. " Now that this wretched little idol of money is out of the way," she exclaims, as if she threw off a weight, " everything will be better managed." And, strange to say, it was ! After two months of weary waiting, Teresa resolved to apply to the governor himself. This was the licentiate, Don Gomez Tello de Giron, who administered the affairs of the Archbishopric during the absence of the Archbishop Carranza, at that moment expiating his supposed Protestant errors in the Inquisition dungeon of Valladolid. Accompanied by Isabel de Sto. Domingo, she proceeded to a church close to the governor's house, and sent to beg him to come and speak with her. When I saw myself with him, I said that it was hard there should be women whose desire was to live in such rigour, perfection, and seclusion, whilst those who knew not what they were, but were engrossed in pleasures, should hinder works of such service to the Lord. These and many other things I said to him, with a great resolution given me by the Lord. Her marvellous and touching eloquence effected what riches, power, worldly rank had in vain solicited. She obtained the license on the spot although coupled with the condition that the foundation was to have neither patron, founder, nor endow- ment. " I went away very happy, since it seemed to me that although I had nothing, I now had everything." She at once expends her entire fortune three or four ducats in the pur- chase of two pictures for the altar, two small pallets, and a blanket. Thus provided, the next thing is to find a house. Alonso de Avila, the friend who had promised to get her one, has fallen ill. She bethinks herself of a ragged and penniless youth one Andrada by name sent to her by a Franciscan friar, Fray Martin de la Cruz, his confessor, and one of her devotees. Accosting her in church one day, this lad had placed himself entirely at her orders, "although he had little more to offer than his person." I thanked him, and was greatly amused, and my nuns more so, when they saw the help that holy man had sent us, for his clothes were not suited to treat with Uiscalced nuns. The good Sor Isabel de Sto. Domingo, terrified lest Teresa's being seen to speak with so unseemly a person might give rise to evil surmises, was highly scandalised. But Teresa, too great 332 SANTA TERESA for any such puerile scruples she ever respected rags as much as she did brocade, if the person beneath them was worthy of it, bade her hold her tongue. " What evil can they think of us," was her witty reproof, " who for all the world look more like poor palmers ourselves than anything else ? " It may be imagined how these good narrow women welcomed the idea she now proposed to them of sending for this same ragged student, and charging him with getting them a house. They laughed, remonstrated, entreated ; the only service, they said, that such an one could do them would be to divulge their plans and bring them to nought. Nevertheless, guided by a surer instinct, convinced that his having been sent to her by so good a man was not without its mystery, for him she sent, and to him she confided the execution of her plans. The only security she could offer for the rent was the name of Alonso de Avila. Her instinct justified itself. Andrada, brought up from infancy in the streets of Toledo, and knowing every hole and corner of it, found in a few hours what her rich friends had been looking for in vain for months. Next morning as she was at Mass in a neighbouring church, he appeared before her bearing the keys of a house close by. They went at once to inspect it, and Teresa had no reason to be dissatisfied with his choice. Often when I think of this foundation, I am amazed at the way in which God disposes things ; for three months had passed away (at least more than two, for I do not remember quite) during which such rich people had been going all round Toledo in search of one, and could never find one, any more than if there was never a house in it at all ; and this lad came at once, neither rich nor powerful, for he was very poor, and the Lord wills him to find one on the instant, and that when it was in our power to found without trouble, on account of the agreement with Alonso Alvarez, it was not so, but far from it, in order that the foundation might be made with poverty and labour. For it was but natural that Teresa, anxious to attribute every circumstance connected with her foundations to a special intervention of Providence, should overlook the natural and obvious causes which enabled the active and ragged student, the curious coadjutor that Fate had sent her, to succeed where her rich and powerful friends, who perhaps at best confined themselves to a cursory and listless inquiry, or delegated it to subordinates, had failed. It is the one sad prerogative of rags and poverty that they can creep and peer where riches cannot enter. To prevent the cropping up of any unforeseen hindrance, Teresa resolved to take possession that very night. Andrada arrives to say that the house is being cleared out, and that they DURUELO AND FOUNDATION AT TOLEDO 333 had better set about removing their furniture. " That will not be long," replied Teresa merrily, "for it only consists of two pallets and a blanket," an answer which filled her nuns with alarm lest her frank confession of their abject poverty should scare away their humble friend, and deprive them of his aid. No doubt their estimate of human nature was juster and better founded than Teresa's hopeful confidence, whose " divine mad- ness " they could (practical women as they were) but ill under- stand. " I paid no attention to it," she adds, " and little did it matter ; for he who gave him the will, would maintain him in it until his work was finished ; and so it is, that it does not seem to me that ours was greater than his, such the ardour with which he set about getting the house and procuring workmen." Night falls on the narrow tortuous streets of Toledo, bathing each angle and irregular recess in gloom. The heavy gates of the houses have swung to for the night, shutting in the mystery of a thousand gloomy courtyards ; of a thousand arcaded patios full of fountains and orange-trees sparkling fantastically in the moonlight. The clanging of a chain, the grating of a bolt, and all is silent as the grave. No hour this for men to be abroad in mediaeval Spain ! Here and there, flickering feebly before some dusky picture of a saint, an oil lamp lights up a breadth of fissured moss-grown wall one of those strange moles of Moruno architecture that seem to shut and press in the streets of Toledo as in a vice and frown threateningly on the passer-by. Through one of these paved uneven causeways, rather a passage than a lane, and a narrow one at that, beneath a double line of menacing shadows meeting overhead, flits a little band of people whose vague forms graze the walls as they slip by in unbroken silence. One would say, to see them, so stealthy and mysterious their movements, that they were after no good. If warned by the distant sound of hoofs, of the approach of some belated traveller, they shrink within the shadow of a gateway, or press closer to the wall, until mule and rider have clattered past them over the pebbles. Many a wild adventurous night has Teresa had, but surely this as strange as any of them, when she and her nuns, with their strange unkempt companion and a mason, speed through the darkening streets of Old Toledo to take possession of their house. How many a time and oft in after life will good Andrada tell the story of this midnight flitting, until it figures as the chief event of his life ! Nay, that it did so figure we may be certain, for a century later his grandchildren still preserved as their chiefest treasure the little tokens that Teresa gave him. 334 SANTA TERESA They carried with them all their belongings, and in good sooth the burden was not great : the two straw pallets, the blanket, the vessels they had borrowed to celebrate the first Mass in the convent which to-morrow's light was to see founded ; the pictures to adorn the altar, and the famous bell, whose humble ringing served to usher in the solemn act of Consecration, and to give the world the notice that a Discalced Carmelite convent, before whose humble altar it summoned the faithful to worship and adore, had found another home on Spanish soil. All night long the sounds of hammering and activity rang through the desolate solitude of the empty Toledan house. Towards daylight it was necessary to break an opening through the wall between it and a little house next door, which gave on to a small patio or courtyard, the only possible entrance to the room they destined for the chapel. Although they had rented both houses, they prudently avoided saying anything to its occupants, two women, who, aroused by the unwonted move- ment and the knocking, now appeared on the scene, terrified and angry. Their clamours being soon pacified with a present of money, that worker of impossibilities, and a promise to get them another house doing the rest, they allowed the nuns to put the last finishing touches to their labours, it being now close on the time for saying Mass. On the I4th of May 1569, as the great bells of the most splendid cathedral in all Spain tolled on the morning air, summoning drowsy worshippers to their orisons, and the grave sound was taken up and repeated from the churches and con- vents, almost as numerous as the house-tops, set like jewels in the narrow streets of Toledo ringing from Moorish towers and slender minarets, whence in another age had resounded the solemn voice of the Muezzin " Allah hu Akbar," the many different tones and various compass of their sonorous voices were echoed by the feeble tinkling of a little bell, which drew together an astonished congregation to wonder at the new thing that had sprung up in their midst even as they slept. Amongst those present at this first Mass, sung by the prior of a neighbouring Carmelite convent, were Dona Luisa de la Cerda and her household. For days before this event, says the chronicler, the Toledan population had been greatly disturbed by the gloomy prophecy of a soothsayer; to avert it, they had diligently confessed and communicated ; and their amazement was extreme to see it end thus in the foundation of another convent, which had been established in face of all opposition and contradiction. Still DURUELO AND FOUNDATION AT TOLEDO 335 more amazed, however, was the owner of the house, a great lady, who was far from dreaming of the use that was to be made of it. However, she too was quietened by the hope of selling it to the nuns at a good price, if they found it suitable. There was still a graver difficulty to be met, and had it not been for Barren, Teresa's Dominican confessor of former days, who confirmed her assertion, and the interference of the canon Manrique, it might have fared ill with the devoted woman. The governor, whose promise had been a verbal one, was now absent from Toledo on a journey, leaving his council in ignorance of what had passed. Incredulous and furious at the daring of the "wretched woman" who had braved their authority by founding under their very noses, they suspended the cele- bration of Mass, under pain of excommunication, until she should place before them her patents which, as they had been granted by the General of the Order, she regarded as a com- plete justification. She sent these through her friend, the noble canon Manrique, with the reply, in which there lurked just a suspicion of energetic self-assertion and independence, that she complied with the orders of the council although nothing com- pelled her to obey them. As she had foreseen, the council resigned themselves to the inevitable; Manrique and Barron dexterously turned to her advantage the moment of hesitation which they felt before proceeding to a step which would have covered them with odium, and the existence of the convent was assured. It seems strange that, in a town where she numbered many powerful and wealthy friends, she and her few devoted com- panions should have been reduced to such depths of destitution as they experienced during the period which followed this foundation. We may perhaps find the reason of it in that she had begun by flying in the face of every aristocratic prejudice, by entering into negotiations with a humble merchant family, in whom she had intended to vest the rights and privileges of foundership, then eagerly sought after by, and considered the special prerogative of, the great. Still this does not explain why Doiia Luisa de la Cerda should have been so unmindful of the necessities of the struggling community as to leave them in an abject misery and privation, that so little would have remedied. I know not the cause [says the high-minded woman, who lent the lustre of her own magnanimity to the motives of friends and enemies alike], except that God willed us to experience the benefit of this virtue [poverty] ; I did not ask it of her, for I am loth to give trouble, and perhaps she did not notice it, for I am in debt to her for far more than she could give us. 336 SANTA TERESA Always the same enchanting mixture of old-world pride and dignity with a certain stately note of humility, which rings out so sharp and clear and true through all her godliness. The sufferings of hunger were increased by the intense cold. Shrewdly does the air bite in Toledo in the early days of May ; shrewdly did it make itself felt in the empty unfurnished house. Wrapped in their serge capes for the one blanket they lovingly reserved for Teresa, whose frailty and ill-health it is at times so difficult to realise the nuns, on their straw pallets, shivered with cold throughout the livelong night. Teresa felt the cold keenly. One night she begged for more clothing ; her nuns told her laughingly that already she had got all there was in the house, namely their capes ; at which she laughed heartily. The day they took possession, they celebrated their jubilant and humble festival on a scant sardine or two, their only meal, and would have been forced to eat them raw, as there was not even a dry leaf to cook them with, had not some pious soul been moved to deposit in the church a small bundle of sticks, which tided over their necessity. So devoid were they of the barest necessaries of life, that if they wanted to fry an egg they had to borrow the frying-pan, and they ground the salt with a pebble wrapped in paper. Yet Teresa, wedded to Poverty, found hidden springs of joy in these deprivations and acute physical tortures ; they drew her closer to the Being whom she saw in her dreams and visions, maimed and mangled and bleeding; linked to him by that thirst of suffering, that fervour of self-sacrifice, she saw only how infinitesimal it was compared with the great desires that filled their heroic hearts. When it was over, Teresa and her nuns looked back upon this period with keen regret, like the traveller who forgets the suffering he experienced on the road, and only remembers its loveliness, and the beauty, which has become for him eternal, of a sunrise in the open, or the peaceful close of some wondrous day. And it is certain [writes the saint, who perhaps of all others gave most proof of quiet and unassertive heroism], that my sorrow was so great that it seemed to me as if some one had robbed me of many golden jewels, and left me poor ; such was the pain I felt when the poverty was drawing to a close, and my companions likewise, for as I saw them disconsolate, I asked them the reason, and they said to me : How can it be otherwise, mother, for now it seems as if we were no longer poor. The little convent was but a fortnight old a fortnight of unceasing activity and toil, in which the gallant foundress had been always foremost and it was now the eve of Pentecost. DURUELO AND FOUNDATION AT TOLEDO 337 She had expended much zealous labour on the church, and, not content with directing the workmen, she had with her own hands helped to fix up the iron gratings and wooden lattices, which protected the sanctity of conventual seclusion. The last stroke of the hammer had echoed through the corridors ; the wooden turn-wheel was ready to receive the alms of the faithful, whilst the observation of a little child in the church, " Blessed be God, and how lovely this is," thrilled her great heart with an emotion of honest delight ; these words alone, she told her nuns, had repaid her for all the labours she had undergone in its foundation. With a sigh of happy relief the wearied woman sat down with her nuns to their morning meal in the refectory. Unable to eat for joy, she looked forward to spending one of the greatest and most solemn festivals of the Church in intimate communion with God. Nevertheless, at that very moment, her blissful anticipations were cut short by the portress, who entered with the news that a gentleman of the Princess Eboli's house- hold, booted and spurred, waited to speak with her before the convent lattice. The famous and ill-fated Ana de Mendoza, Princess of Sboli, a descendant of Isabel's great cardinal, and the wife of Ruy Gomez da Silva, the King's most powerful favourite, was one of the greatest ladies of the kingdom. It was said, although it has never been proved, and the question still remains enveloped in mystery, that the man who began life as an obscure adventurer, and whose brilliant alliance with the wealthy heiress had been the first step in his fortunes, owed his unparalleled advancement as much to his wife's charms as his ovyn fidelity. He had just bought the town of Pastrana, and with the town its inhabitants, at 1600 maravedis a head. Philip had erected it into a dukedom still to be found in the Spanish " nobiliario." Few ever possessed, as he did, Philip's heart and favour ; few so faithfully repaid his master's cold affection; few in that age so free from prejudice and of such enlightened views. With an intelligence that does honour to his memory, and a liberality altogether in advance of his century, he began his rule at Pastrana by a series of measures which, if extended to the kingdom at large, might have averted the decadence that was even then casting its shadow before. He established looms and factories ; placed at the head of them experienced workmen from Milan and Flanders; invited to settle there many of the Moriscos, who had been hunted from the Alpujarras like dogs : a mouldering quarter of the town, which remains much as they left it at the time of the expulsion, still retains its name of the Albaicin. The brocades, 22 338 , SANTA TERESA silks, and tapestries of Pastrana were soon renowned through- out Spain, and maintained their reputation even to the beginning of this century. The Moor introduced his unrivalled system of agriculture, the remains of which are distinctly to be traced to this day. Under his hand fertile country blossomed like a garden. Nor was its material prosperity alone the object of Ruy Gomez's care. The ancient parish church was raised to a pitch of magnificence only surpassed by the greatest of the cathedrals. In place of the priest and three beneficiaries, who had until then sufficed to serve it, he founded and endowed forty-eight prebendal stalls. Under his auspices it became one of the finest and most important collegiate churches in Spain, its religious ceremonies celebrated with unequalled pomp and grandeur. He and his wife were now bent on adding another spiritual treasure to their possession, in the shape of a religious founda- tion. To found a monastery or a convent, where the entire community was bound to pray night and day for the souls of the founders, was then a pious luxury, indulged in by all whose means corresponded to their desires. The General of the Carmelites had spread Teresa's praises in Madrid ; the Princess of Brazil was one of her most devoted admirers ; the King himself spoke of her with singular veneration and approval ; success had added to her fame, and a perfume of sanctity and respect had already begun to attach to the very sound of her name, although as yet it was unknown beyond the confines of her native land. It was at this moment, when to use an odious phrase, forged by vulgarity, which, treating of an epoch so stately and dignified, is almost devoid of sense, although perhaps it best expresses the precise meaning to a modern ear Teresa had become the fashion, that the Princess of Eboli had urged her to undertake a foundation at Pastrana. She was probably one of those fine ladies who, on the occasion of her first visit to Madrid, had welcomed her in the house of Da. Leonor de Mascarenas. At all events, it had been agreed upon between them long before Ramirez's death, and the pressing letters of his brother and the Jesuit Hernandez, had called her to Toledo. She had, however, but little expected such a pressing summons at a moment so inopportune. There was a robust independence at the bottom of Teresa's character (was she not a descendant of the mail-clad warriors of Avila ?) which at times got the better of all her prudence and her meekness. She at once decided not to go, and informed the messenger of DURUELO AND FOUNDATION AT TOLEDO 339 her resolution. Amazed at the temerity of the nun, who could thus treat so lightly the imperious commands of the most powerful grandees in Spain which he himself was accustomed to receive on bended knees, afraid doubtless to encounter the prince's frown and the princess's rage on his return from a bootless quest, he begged her to reconsider her decision. It was impossible, he argued ; the princes were already in Pastrana, had gone there for no other purpose; to refuse to comply would be to affront them gravely ; it was dangerous to thwart them ; the court itself would be furious. " In spite of it all," she adds, " I did not dream of going, and so I told him to go and get something to eat, and that I would write to the princess. . . . As he was a very honourable man, he acquiesced, although unwillingly, when I told him the reasons." The nuns just arrived from Avila and Malagon would not hear of her departure. The foundation had been attended with extreme difficulty, it was barely concluded, its fate still hung in the balance; its welfare at this juncture depended on her presence. I betook me before the Host to ask the Lord that I might write in such a way as not to give offence ; for this would have been prejudicial to us, on account of our having just begun these houses of friars, and it was good for everything to have the favour of Ruy Gomez who was in such request with the King and every one, although I do not remember if I thought of this, although I well know that I did not want to offend her. As I was doing this, it was said to me by the Lord : That I should not fail to go, that I was bent on more than that one foundation, and that I should bear with me the rule and constitutions. What share such mundane considerations had in the forma- tion of this divine locution I know not. It must be remembered that the point which Teresa had most at heart to prove, and which she herself devoutly believed, was the divine and almost miraculous origin of each of her successive foundations. It is strange that after such a direct revelation (and she was perfectly sincere in accepting that momentary flash of light, which so often illumines a mind wrapped in obscurity and perplexity, as an indication of the path to follow) she should still, as if in doubt, summon her confessor, with the intention of abiding by his verdict as final. As was her invariable habit in like circumstances, she said nothing of the supernatural mandate that might have warped his judgment, and influenced his decision. If she entirely believed that these commands were of divine origin, it may be asked why she subordinated them to human judgment. The most singular thing about this most singular woman is, that she was constantly floating between 340 SANTA TERESA her inherent good sense and rectitude, which was undoubtedly the most potent element in her success, and the fancied and distempered dreams of the enthusiast. For me, these contradic- tions, this want of logic, contain the most striking proof of her sincerity and honesty, and preserve her from the charge of voluntary imposture and deceit. Had her books and letters been without them, instead of considering her with the feeling of admiration which even her aberrations rouse in us, there would have been but one verdict. Her weaknesses have thus formed her strength, for from them emerges, more radiant, more lustrous, the incomparable figure of this marvellous woman. In this instance her confessor counselled her departure, and charged her not to lose so favourable a juncture for winning the favour of the great Princes of Eboli. And so, leaving the struggling community to the charge of Isabel de Sto. Domingo, on the 3Oth of May, the second day of that Easter she had so wistfully looked forward to, she was jolting to Madrid in the coach sent for her by the Princess of Eboli. She was ac- companied by Isabel de San Pablo and her cousin, Da. Antonia del Aguila, who had just joined her from the Encarnacion. In Madrid they lodged in the Franciscan convent of Los Angeles, founded by her friend Da. Leonor de Mascarenas, whose house it adjoined. This lady expressed her delight that she should have come at such a moment, as she had living under her roof a famous hermit, well known at court, who wished exceedingly to know her, and whose life, as well as his companion's, bore a strange resemblance to the Primitive Rule. Teresa, bent on securing fit subjects for her reform, at once resolved to capture these two men ; " and so I begged her to procure me an interview." That hermit, Ambrosio Mariano Azaro, shall from this moment flit through the pages of our history, inseparably connected with the dawn of Teresa's Order. His strange and diversified career, full of picturesque incident and adventure, is a reflex of the stirring age that had seen the famous battles of Lepanto and San Quentin, the discovery of the strange and wonderful countries across the seas by the swine-herd of Estremadura. We see the great treasure-ships of Spain, with castellated poop and embroidered pennon, toiling painfully into the ports of Cadiz and San Lucar, amidst salvos of artillery, bearing the wealth of the Indies, whose very name stirred men's imaginations so vividly. We see men, their consciences affrighted by shadows, cowering like culprits beside their hearthstone, never sure of the moment when the grim Dominican and his red cross shall cast the shadow of his silent and baneful figure athwart the threshold. We catch a glimpse DURUELO AND FOUNDATION AT TOLEDO 341 of the Council of Trent the greatest Council the world has ever known, and whose impress it bears to this day. All this, and more, comes before us as we read this hermit's history. A Neapolitan of noble birth; a fellow-student of Pope Gregory XIII. ; a doctor of divinity and law ; a geometrician ; a Latin versifier turning an elegant Latin verse with the same facility as he resolved a knotty problem of geometry, designed a bridge, or constructed an aqueduct, student, soldier, diplomatist, courtier by turns, and pre-eminent in all ; his talents were as varied as his career. He assisted at the celebrated Council of Trent, and was by it entrusted with the investigation of the religious troubles in Flanders and Germany. He acted as the trusted counsellor and head of the household to the Queen of Poland, until, disgusted with the world, or perhaps crossed in love, he shook the dust of that country from his feet, took the vow of chastity, and enrolled himself a knight of the Military Order of St. John of Malta. At San Quentin he signalised himself and gained the King's favour by pointing out the breach in the walls through which the Spanish troops entered the beleaguered town. With a chivalry uncommon in a Spanish soldier of the age, I forget he was an Italian and a Neapolitan to boot, he drew his sword on a swash-buckler companion, in order to save the daughter of the house where they were both billeted from outrage. An imprisonment of two years on a charge of murder, after- wards discovered to be false, effectually sickened him of a world in which he had met so many bitter disillusions. Profoundly disheartened, he refused to defend himself, and when at last his innocence was triumphantly established and he was set at liberty, he used it to procure that of his accusers, who in their turn were tasting the delights of a Spanish dungeon. He then wandered to Italy, became governor to the young prince of Salmeron (a territory of Naples), accompanied him to the court of Spain, spent some time in Madrid, was employed by Philip on the contrivance of a scheme like most of those undertaken by the House of Austria, destined never to be realised except on paper to make the Guadalquivir navigable between Cordoba and Seville, and to re-establish the river communication between those two cities, which had ceased to exist since the time of the Moors. Sick of the noise and humbug of the court (so says the chronicler), he retires to Cordoba to carry out the King's behest. Less intent on the laws of hydrostatics than on the Exercises of San Ignacio, he hesitates between joining the Jesuits or some stricter and more contemplative order less bound up with the world. A trifling incident fixed his choice. As he gazed one 342 SANTA TERESA day through the casement of his cell upon the altar of the church below, his attention was arrested by the entrance of a hermit of venerable appearance and penitential garb. It turned out to be the hermit Mateo, the head of a small community of anchorites who had taken possession of the desert of El Tardon, about three leagues from Cordoba. When Ambrosio Mariano rode out in the golden Cordobese sunshine towards the hermits' cells, he may have thought that as he left behind him the white walls overtopped by slender palm-trees, so he left behind him for ever hope, ambition, life. He had, however, but exchanged his wild, chequered career in the century for one as strangely diversified and active in the establishment of a Reform which had not as yet even been commenced. When he got to the lovely and benignant spot on an outlying spur of the Sierra Morena, he alighted from his horse close to the hermits' chapel. As he did so, he stumbled and fell over his gilt-hilted sword. The weapon, which he valued highly it had dangled from his side for twenty years snapped within the sheath into three equal parts. To the pious soldier it was a sign that earthly combat for him had ceased, and that, henceforth, he must trust to weapons of a diviner nature. In him again we note the curious characteristic that we have already remarked in Teresa, at first sight so incompatible with a roving life the equal alacrity and cheerfulness with which they both accept either action or the stagnation of the cloister. For eight years the courtier, scholar, soldier versed in all branches of learning and the most elegant accomplishments of the age, full of vivacity and lively wit wore the penitent's garb of El Tardon with as much content as if he had never known any other destiny. To mortify himself the more, he supported himself by spinning that being the office most radically opposed to that of arms. He whose inventive and brilliant brain had won for him the highest honours in the world, listened humbly and obediently to the simple discourses of the unlettered Matias. Nevertheless, the austerities of the hermit's life were sweetened by a warm and faithful friendship with one whom he had not only known in his youth, but was drawn to by the ties of a common nationality. This was Brother Juan de la Miseria, a simple, guileless friar, in whose name there lurks a certain suggestion of pathos and helplessness. The strong mutual friendship that then sprang up between the strangely assorted pair was never afterwards interrupted. In the meantime, the discovery of a pearl, which had been stolen from the Queen by one of the Secretary Eraso's servants, and which Mariano's servant con- fessed on a sickbed to have hidden in a hole in his master's DURUELO AND FOUNDATION AT TOLEDO 343 cell although how it came into his possession, and how he came to hide it there, the veracious chronicler neglects to relate, led to the two being sent to Seville to have it valued. As might have been foreseen, except by the guileless Matias, the mere fact of two ragged friars having in their possession a priceless gem was more than enough to get them into trouble. The first lapidary they showed it to recognised it as the one he had himself sold for the Queen's use, and at once gave notice to the deputy-governor. They were seized in their lodging the chronicler is careful to inform us that it belonged to a compatriot, a Genoese and dragged off to the dungeon. On the way thither Mariano could not refrain from a joke at his companion's expense : " Now, brother," said he, laughing, " thou shalt not want for thy hundred lashes " ; whereupon Fray Juan replied, with no less wit : " I fear me that you will get them instead." Still it was just as well, for the sake of both pairs of shoulders, that when, towards evening, they were led before the deputy-governor he had been out hunting, and had just returned he should at once recognise and embrace in Mariano an old friend. The alguaciles who had so diligently accom- plished their duty perhaps his orders alone felt the brunt of his anger. The discovery of the gem excited great rejoicing at court. The Princess of Brazil would fain have rewarded the friar's honesty, in returning a jewel he could so easily have kept (honesty seems to have been as rare then as it is now), by a gift of a thousand ducats. These he refused, with a request that she would devote them instead to the purpose of portioning off a poor orphan. His conduct on this occasion won him high applause in Madrid, and increased the high opinion already won for him by his virtues. After this, being again sent to Seville by their brethren of the Tardon, on some business connected with the monastery, Mariano and his faithful follower took up their abode in San Onofre, a little hermitage, a quarter of a league distant from the city. Here, freed from the noise and bustle of the town, the hermits supported themselves by manual labour, Mariano earning as enviable a reputation for the beauty of his spinning as for his learning, genius, and sanctity. Indeed, so highly was the former esteemed by the ladies of Seville that they gave him 10 rials an ounce for it. Conspicuous amongst the visitor^ who flocked to that humble retreat was one Nicolas Doria, a Genoese rich, noble, a type of the high-class commercial man of the day his first appearance in the annals of the Order over whose fortunes he was to wield so fatal an influence after Teresa's death. 344 SANTA TERESA In the meantime Brother John, rinding his seclusion gone, disappears one day and trudges off on foot to Jaen in search of greater retirement. The pleasantest feature in Mariano's character is his affection for this dog-like companion. No sooner does he learn his friend's retreat than, accompanied by Doria, he goes off in search of him. It was difficult, however, for Mariano to cut himself off from a world which was always reclaiming his services. We next find him at Ubeda, transact- ing business for the Duke of Sesa; then at court, summoned thither by the King, to devise some scheme for carrying the waters of the Tagus to the Vega of Aranjuez, here, as every- where, followed about like a shadow by Brother Juan de la Miseria. His brethren of the Tardon did not neglect to turn Mariano's favour with the King to good account. The Council of Trent had issued a decree ordering all hermits and solitaries to enter some regularly constituted community. This they now sought to evade by getting Philip to use his influence with the Pope to sanction their continuing a mode of life condemned by the Council. Mariano having offered to proceed to Rome, he and Fray Juan were already on the point of starting, when his momentous interview with the great foundress arresting his journey before it was begun, changed the whole horizon of his life. Strange that this man, from whose past one would have predicted so brilliant a future, sinks into a secondary position from the moment he enters the Order, completely dwarfed by the striking personalities of Gracian and Doria. And yet in his way he was a remarkable figure too, this Mariano. Under a courteous and genial exterior, and manners of transparent simplicity, he concealed a caustic and polished wit, and all the wily diplomacy of the Italian. His versatile genius, his agile and subtle mind, his rare turn for mechanics that signalled him out so conspicuously for Philip's notice, were the very antithesis of the dry and didactic Spaniard, with his haughty indifference to the liberal arts and the heavy and pompous movement of his intellect. Even Brother John, whose vague character is so much more sympathetic, was not devoid of some tincture of the fine arts, in which few of his nation are deficient. The Princess Juana took a great fancy to the simple friar, and whilst Mariano was busy with his schemes for irrigat- ing the Vega, she enabled him to study painting under Alonso Sachez Coello. At a later period, as we shall see, he im- mortalised himself and the badness of his brush by painting some portraits of Teresa the only ones that exist. We are glad to know that the saint failed to recognise her DURUELO AND FOUNDATION AT TOLEDO 345 features in her counterfeit presentment, and laughed heartily at the blear-eyed, hard-featured old woman, whose grim and heavy visage stared at her from the canvas. Such were the men, the ingenious Neapolitan and his half-witted companion, "very simple in the things of this world" whom Teresa was now to enlist under her banner. The interview between them, as ardently sought after by her as by Mariano himself, was decisive. In the description of the life of the hermits of the desert of El Tardon her ardent fancy recognised the portrait of the ancient solitaries of Mount Carmel. As she showed him the Primitive Rule she pointed out how closely it resembled that which he had followed for the past eight years, above all, that it specially inculcated that each friar should maintain himself by manual labour. On this point Mariano most strongly insisted ; and to the neglect of it he attributed the decay of the religious orders, and the low estimation into which they had fallen, adding that greed had ruined the world. When he promised her to think of it that night, " already," she says, " I saw him almost determined, and I understood the meaning of what I had heard in prayer that I was bent on more than a convent of nuns, which was this. I was greatly delighted, as it seemed to me that if he entered the Order it would be greatly to the Lord's service." That night, as Mariano translated the rule to his companion, who held the torch as he read, he said before he had got to the end : " Brother John, we have found what we sought : this is the rule most fitting for us to take. The Church has sanctioned it. It is followed by men and women full of spiritual fervour; the captain of them all is most holy; what more do we seek ? " The die was cast. All his life afterwards Mariano was constantly heard to repeat his wonder that a woman should have wrought such a sudden change in all his resolutions and plans. " Next day he called me, now quite determined, and even amazed to see himself changed so quickly, especially by a woman (for even he says it to me sometimes), as if that had been the cause, and not the Lord, who can move hearts." Renouncing their journey to Rome, they enrolled themselves unhesitatingly under Teresa's banner. Nor was she blind to the importance of a recruit like Mariano ; his genius and talents had made him acquainted with the greatest personages in the kingdom ; he was a persona grata to Philip himself, who, fain to keep the useful and ingenious hermit at his side, had offered him a hermitage in the gardens of Aranjuez. "It was better fitted for gardens than hermits' grots," he replied, and accepted 346 SANTA TERESA instead, from Ruy Gomez da Silva, that of San Pedro, close to the town of Pastrana, where, secure from the interruptions inseparable from the neighbourhood of a royal palace, he could devote himself to a life of unbroken contemplation and penance. This spot he now placed at Teresa's disposal. Despatch- ing messengers from Madrid to the two Provincials, past and present, whose consent was necessary to the foundation, and not forgetting to solicit the aid of the Bishop of Avila to use his influence with them to secure a favourable reply ; full of hope and triumphant gladness, she now sped on to Pastrana. Mariano remained behind, awaiting their return, upon which he was to follow her thither without delay. CHAPTER XIII THE FOUNDATION OF PASTRANA- DIFFICULTIES WITH THE PRINCESS OF EBOLI TERESA left Toledo towards the end of May ; the earliest days of June saw her and her nuns on their road to Pastrana. It would be midday before they traversed the one long winding street of the university town of Alcala de Henares, half- way between Madrid and Guadalajara, where the greyhounds immortalised by Cervantes in Don Quixote still hunt, as they did then, for garbage amongst the filth, or sleep in the heat of the sun. They would pass before the Palace of Cisneros, with its immense extent of turreted walls, and the splendid church of the Magistral, where the nuns would be sure to alight, to tell their beads before the famous shrines of the martyred children Justo and Pastor. Emerging once more from the shadow of its lofty naves into the brilliant, all-pervading sun- light, they would pass the opening to that narrow lane where stood the house, intact until very recently (it was pulled down to make room for a theatre), wherein, some thirty years before, the greatest genius of Spain first opened his eyes to the light. I doubt, however, whether they had ever even so much as heard the name of that immortal soldier of fortune, so shortly to lose his arm in the equally immortal combat of Lepanto. Even nuns would crane their necks, stirred by an unwonted ripple of excitement, as through the windows of the coach they caught a passing glimpse of the great university, glittering in all the freshness of its youth, before they made their way into the open country, studded by Moorish water-wheels and gardens. It would be late at night ere, clattering over the bridge beneath which the river Henares of the Christian slept as peacefully under the moonbeams as the river Guaaalajarat of the Moors, they found themselves in the picturesque hill town of Guadalajara, their halting-place for the night. Here tradition has it that she slept in the splendid palace of the Mendozas, Duques del Infantado, and to-day it treasures the 347 348 SANTA TERESA memory of having sheltered the humble saint as proudly as of the magnificent hospitality it afforded to Francis I. of France and Don Juan of Austria. According to the Venetian ambassador, it was the most beautiful in Spain ; and is so still, although sadness and melancholy reign undisturbed in the great and splendid halls and spacious courts which then, full of movement, life, and bustle, rang to the clattering steel of men-at-arms and dependants. From Guadalajara a wild path ran across the mountains to Pastrana. Now the coach ploughed through rough "monte" (hills covered with scrub evergreen oak carrascales) ; now it crept under precipitous banks, where a tangled undergrowth of dwarf arbutus flung long tendrils over rock and road, and the sun played amongst the transparent foliage of early summer ; solitudes disturbed by no sound of life or motion save the flight of a pied magpie across the dusty trail. And so on throughout the long summer's day, until from the top of the last ridge they had been mounting always the travellers saw stretched before them one of those landscapes, grandiose and severe, so peculiar to Spain. The evening sun fell on the silhouette of a mediaeval town, that broke the middle distance. Between them and it a plain a streamlet running through the bottom, lost in flags and rushes darkening against the light green corn. Then a wave of tumbled country, finally resolving itself into a distant perspective of rolling mountain sparsely covered with stone pine. Set in all this immensity of plain and mountain, clustered on the slope of an eminence, and embowered in orchards and almond blossom, lay the little town, once the possession of the Knights of Calatrava. See, then, the foundress and her nuns rumbling through the gates of the town ; see them alight, travel-stained and weary, in the courtyard of that famous palace or fortified house of Pastrana, whose grim facade and corner towers faced the walls of the town, which was then the court of the Princes of Eboli. To-day, when there are no walls to face, and the Plaza de Armas before it has been transformed by the exigencies of another age into the public square or market-place, the palace, virtually unchanged since it sheltered one Teresa de Jesus within its walls three centuries ago, still remains intact, thanks to the benignity and dryness of the air, defying, with a certain proud endurance, the neglect and squalor that seek to make it their own. There it stands always, an empty shell, a cast-off vestment of the grave and stately century that has faded away with the past it belonged to. The carved and inlaid timber THE FOUNDATION OF PASTRANA 349 roofs ; the monstrous chimneys ; the great halls and kingly rooms, so perfect, that it would not be difficult even to-day, after the lapse of centuries of decay, to restore it to some appearance of its ancient grandeur. Strange that it should have become impossible to reconstruct all the heterogeneous elements that entered into a life so alien in thought and outward manifestation to our own, so rarely can we catch the faintest echo of it ; to combine that singular mixture of brutality and coarseness, of fastidious refinement and real dignity, which were the prevailing characteristics not only of this, but of the age preceding it, and so flush it with vitality and colour as to become once more spectators of this forgotten life of our forefathers. In this building, fraught with a gloomy and mysterious interest, steeped in the tragedy of that existence Teresa now saw so stately and so brilliant, tradition points out the room where she lodged ; the underground chapel next the stables (pregnant detail) where she gave the habit to her first friars of Pastrana. Behind the palace a staircase ascends to a hanging garden, a labyrinth of box and cypress alleys, where narrow channels of water, running hither and thither under a screen of flowering shrubs and dripping fountains, fill the noon- tide silence with dreamy and delicious murmurs. Here, too, under some sweet bower of pomegranates and orange-trees, may Teresa have sought a momentary relaxation from her cares. In this grim old palace, where she now reigned supreme in state, and happiness, and honour, little dreaming that it was to become her prison house for life (alas ! how merciful the blindness bestowed on us by Fate), the Princess of Eboli perhaps knew the brightest and most unclouded moments of her life when she welcomed within its walls the old Castilian nun. I shall be forgiven if for a moment I interrupt the thread of my narrative to touch briefly on the history of this singular woman whom Destiny now threw across Teresa's path. Ana de la Mendoza y de la Cerda, Princess of Eboli, was a descendant of the great line of the Mendozas which for more than four centuries had occupied, next the throne, the highest offices in the realm. Their history is that of Spain itself. From the day when Iftigo Lopez de Mendoza, an obscure soldier of fortune, carved out fame for himself and for his descendants a brilliant future by breaking the chains that girt about the Moorish camp at Las Navas de Tolosa, a long list of valiant Mendozas had continued the glorious tradition of their house, until it had become second to none in the kingdom. 350 SANTA TERESA One of the first admirals that Spain possessed was a Mendoza. A Mendoza was that mayordomo of Pedro the Cruel, who died to save his sovereign's life (John I.) at the rout of Aljubarrota. His grandson was that Marques de Santillana, whose name is surrounded with a double aureole of glory. A keen soldier, and a learned scholar, his name lives not alone in the warlike annals of his country, but has left an indelible impress on its literature. In reward for many a stiff affray with the Moors, he was created Adelantado Mayor of Andalucia. His three sons were mainly instrumental in placing Isabel the Catholic on the throne. The eldest, in recompense for his fidelity, was made Duque del Infantado; the second, the Count of Tendilla,succeeded his father as Adelantado Mayor of Andalucia, his son again being the first to unfurl the banner of the Christian conquerors over the towers of the Alhambra ; the third, the most famous of that famous line, was that Pedro Gonzalez de Mendoza, the great cardinal, known to his contemporaries as the Third King of Spain, who, alternately wielding lance and crosier, virtually ruled the fortunes of his country for nearly half a century. By one of the Portuguese maids of honour, who accompanied the Princess Juana of Portugal into Spain on her marriage with Henry IV., he had two sons, one of whom, the Count of Melito, was the grandfather of the Princess of Eboli. She was thus the great-granddaughter of the powerful prelate, whose haughty pride she had inherited, together with the beauty and frailty of her ancestress, which drew from a grave chronicler the remark " that they were singular women, those maids of honour, shameless and stately as belonged to the high estate of a queen ! " One of the wealthiest heiresses in Spain, Philip II. seems to have fixed upon her from earliest childhood as the future bride of his favourite, Ruy Gomez de Silva, not only assisting personally at the betrothal which linked a bridegroom of thirty-six with a child of twelve, but in pursuance of a time- honoured custom which made it incumbent on the monarch to take an active part in the marriage of his favourites, bestowing on them a yearly revenue of 6000 ducats. It was part of his policy to place around the throne obscure hidalgoes, foreigners for preference, to the exclusion of the powerful families who had disputed the government of Spain during the Middle Ages, since he could count the more confidently on their fidelity, in proportion as they depended on the Crown alone for advance- ment. By this marriage the poor Portuguese adventurer who had begun life as a page in the service of the lovely Isabel of Portugal, and had risen to the chief place in the counsels of her THE FOUNDATION OF PASTRANA 351 son, became a rival to be feared, if not the equal of the greatest of the native nobility, by whom he was hated and distrusted. But if Ruy Gomez was detested by the haughty grandee, no minister was ever more popular with the people, and none have used their immense power to a nobler, a more benignant purpose. Amongst the foreigners whom business or diplomacy brought to the Spanish court, his sweet and winning disposition and the gentleness and generosity of his nature won universal sympathy. At the time of Teresa's visit to Pastrana he was about fifty-four. The scandal of the time asserted that he owed much of his fortune to the King's predilection for his wife. But there is no reason to suppose that she was ever Philip's mistress, or that, until her husband's death left her, unguarded, unguided, and alone, to follow the caprices of her wilful and ungovernable nature, she had ever been anything but the most affectionate and virtuous of wives and mothers. The mere fact that she was already the mother of ten children goes hard to disprove any such assertion. The cold malignancy, full of inexplicable hesitation and demur, with which the King hunted her to death presupposes other and graver motives than her amours with his secretary, Antonio Perez. His conduct on this occasion can scarcely be attributed to the offended dignity of a powerful and rejected rival who had sued in vain for the favours bestowed on his servant, or the rage of a supplanted lover. In spite of the loss of an eye, injured when quite a child by a thrust of the foil at fencing, and always concealed under a black patch, her loveliness impressed her contemporaries amongst them, the fastidious Brantome. What would have been a disfigurement in another, in her only added a strange and piquant attraction to her singular beauty. In her pictures the delicate and highbred features are stamped with the same hauteur and petulance that were the dominant ones of her character. An oval girlish face, ex- quisitely moulded, narrowing towards the finely-cut chin, lit up by large dark eyes ; a pale brow shaded by masses of black curly hair ; a slight and graceful figure, dignified and stately (although she was small and short of stature) ; a marvellously graceful poise of head ; such is the Princess of Eboli, as depicted by the painter of the day, and described by Antonio Perez, with the tender exaggeration of a lover, as a " jewel set in rank and wealth." All the pride of her haughty fathers seemed to have culminated in the feather brain of their de- scendant, whose lips were destined to give a last lingering expression to the protest of the proud mediaeval nobility of Spain, whose power had been broken, and themselves 352 SANTA TERESA alienated from the throne, by the tortuous policy of the House of Austria. If, petulant, self-willed, haughty, and domineering, she never forgot an injury, being as implacable in her hatred as she was warm and constant in her friendship, she was generous even to prodigality. This fragile and childish-looking creature, whose sombre eyes look down on us from her pictured semblance ; who, accustomed to have every desire gratified before she had barely formulated it ; who, unused to have her slightest caprice thwarted, was never anything but a spoilt and wayward child from the cradle to the grave, rouses all our interest and sympathy. Capricious, wilful, inconsiderate of the feelings of others, not so much from want of heart as of thought ; this fine lady, frivolous and fond of pleasure, who amused her leisure by questioning her favourite bravoes as to how they killed their man, developed in the moment of her misfortunes a force of character and a constancy which did not belie the proud race she sprang from. An inscrutable mystery, which will never now be solved, hangs over the motives which led to her imprisonment. After her husband's death she would fain have abandoned the world for the cloister, and it was only at the King's command that she resumed the guardianship of her children and their property. After three years of widowhood she once more appeared at court, to defend their interests and her own, which were called in question by a near relative. Here she became the mistress of Antonio Perez, and from that moment dated the long series of misfortunes which finally led to her imprisonment. What she did to incur Philip's cold malignancy seems destined to remain one of the unsolved secrets of history. Was she, as some have contended, the King's mistress, or did she, as others have supposed, reject his overtures to accept those of his servant ? Philip himself declared that his conduct was dictated by his regard for the memory of Ruy Gomez, and to save his fortune from being recklessly squandered by his widow. It is more probable, however, that as Perez's mistress she had become cognisant of some state secret, which Philip, knowing her impulsive and daring character, dreaded she might make use of against himself; perhaps he feared her machinations with her own relatives, amongst whom were some of the most power- ful nobles of the kingdom, in order to induce them to reassert their power and diminish his authority. No other reason can be formulated for the action he took ; no other reason for the caution, the strange hesitation, that characterised every step of his mysterious vengeance. Before he finally resolved to take a THE FOUNDATION OF PASTRANA 353 decisive step, he carefully sounded them, and reassured himself of their personal loyalty to the throne. It is certain that Escobedo's murder was brought about by Perez at the King's instigation and command. The affair excited immense excite- ment. It was necessary at all hazards for Philip to prevent himself being incriminated. How could he best do so ? The devil is always at hand when he is wanted. The jealousy between his secretaries, Vasquez and Perez, revealed to him how he could save his own honour by sacrificing his instrument. Vasquez accused Perez hotly of having assassinated Escobedo on account of a woman, and represented that, if justice was not done, the murder would be ascribed to a higher source. These letters were shown by the King to Perez. Vasquez (it seems probable that he too acted in this matter by the royal instigation) pursued Perez with remorseless malignancy. Indignant at the rumours which circulated freely as to the share that not only he himself, but the Princess of Eboli, were supposed to have had in it, Perez rejected all attempts to bring about a reconciliation between himself and his accuser, whom he regarded as their originator and fomenter. The princess, the only person besides himself who was aware of the real motive of Escobedo's murder bitterly resented the accusation that she had set her lover on to kill him, in no measured terms. In a letter she wrote to Philip, perhaps one of the most daring and defiant that monarch had ever received, she hinted as plainly as it was safe to hint that it was done at Philip's own instigation, and called upon him to prove that it was not true. She threatened to make Vasquez pay for his shamelessness, and concluded in words which cannot have sounded pleasantly to the royal ears they were intended for. From that moment Philip vowed against the pair an eternal enmity, which coldly, and after much hesitation, reflection, and preliminary partaking of the Sacra- ments, he proceeded to execute. It was first necessary, however, to discover how much the Princess of Eboli actually knew! The King was " so well acquainted with the truth that he need call no witness but himself," was her haughty reply to his confessor, Chaves, who tried to wheedle out of her exactly what she knew as to the royal share in Escobedo's assassination. She defended Perez with all the boldness and energy, with all the proud spirit and determination, of her great ancestors. In words of almost contemptuous defiance she bade the King clear her lover's character from the aspersions his enemies had cast upon it, not only as a King but as a gentleman. Her fate was sealed. Both Perez and the princess were slowly but surely and artfully lured on to their destruction. At eleven o'clock 23 354 SANTA TERESA on the night of the 28th of July 1579, at the same moment, they were both laid under arrest. The capture of the Princess of Eboli was witnessed by the King himself, who, muffled in his cloak, remained concealed in the shadow of the doorway of the church of Santa Maria, opposite her house, until his orders had been executed. From 1579 to 1581 she was kept in close im- prisonment in the tower of Pinto (where the Duke of Alba was also afterwards confined), three leagues to the south of Madrid, and in San Torcaz, a gloomy keep, midway between Alcala and Pastrana. At the intercession of her son-in-law, the Duke of Medina Sidonia, and her son, the Duke of Pastrana (who seems to have taken but a mediocre interest in his mother's fate), she was allowed to return to Pastrana and resume the adminis- tration of her estates, but she was still virtually a prisoner and not allowed to set foot beyond the boundaries of her palace. In vain the President Pazos, the most straightforward and honest of men and of counsellors, urged upon the King that the prisoners should either be legally tried and condemned, or set entirely at liberty. The only liberty, however, that the un- fortunate woman, whose uncontrollable temper Philip seems to have regarded as a constant menace to the safety and tran- quillity of the kingdom, was ever again to know, death alone was to concede. Barely two months after her translation to Pastrana, on the pretext of her flighty conduct, 1 and of her maladministration of her children's revenues, the real reason would rather seem to have been that she here renewed that unfortunate intimacy with Antonio Perez, which had been the cause of all her woes, stricter measures were resorted to, and lasted without inter- mission for nine years until 1590, the date of Perez's escape into Aragon. Then, haunted it would seem by the fear that the step had been taken with the princess's collusion, and that she herself would follow his example and incite his subjects to rebel against his authority, Philip resolved to make her captivity absolute. It might have been thought that the slow tortures to which his victim had been subjected might have softened a heart of stone. A woman of fifty, reduced by close confinement to the condition of an ailing invalid, must surely long ago have ceased to give cause for either fear or scandal. On the 23rd of May, barely a month after the flight of Antonio Perez, D. Alonso del Castillo Villasante, a knight of Calatrava, whom the King had appointed the princess's gaoler, and who in her name 1 "The small inclination she had all her life for quietude," writes Pero Nunez de Toledo to Vasquez, ' ' still continues ; I believe that the truest judgment is to believe that she really has none, for this is clearly gathered from her actions." THE FOUNDATION OF PASTRANA 355 administered justice and managed the estates of Pastrana, appeared before the door of her apartments, with a scrivener and a troop of masons, who at once set to work on their cruel task. Finding the door barred from within, they removed the turn-wheel, the only communication she was allowed with the world outside, and for three days they were busy excluding the light of day from the chambers where lay the bedridden woman who had been so long immured in them ; the windows were barred and darkened, and that which looked on to the Plaza was covered with a sheet of copper wire. Thus rigorously confined and shut off from every object that could divert for a moment the gloom of her imprisonment, deprived even of air and ventilation, her infirmities rapidly increased, and the following winter found her helpless and paralysed, barely able to crawl from her bed. Mercifully the greater release was close at hand. On the 2Oth of November she asked for the Sacra- ments, and on the i8th of January the Princess of Eboli ceased to trouble a world on which she had flashed for a moment with meteoric splendour to be swallowed up by a fate so dark and relentless. Her restless spirit, let us hope, had at last found that rest so long denied to it on earth. It is with mixed emotions that we contemplate her death. " Eulogy and praise," says Quevedo, "alone belong to misfortune and the grave." However we may regard her faults and her violent, headstrong character, the coldest nature must award a meed of admiration to the resolute resistance and defiance she opposed to the gloomy monarch, to whom she owed not her fortunes only but the tragedy of her life ; her unbending pride ; the uncom- promising arrogance which, if it led her into many indiscretions, needed only the touch of calamity to develop into a virtue. We feel that she was a worthy descendant of her race, and that she was animated by the same masculine valour and energy that made her ancestress, Maria de Padilla, hold Toledo against the forces of Charles V., and Jimena Blasquez man the walls of A vila against the Moors. Rather than sue for clemency (perhaps she knew it would not be granted) she preferred to remain a prisoner in the gloomy dungeon of San Torcaz, and to suffer all the agonies of confinement ; and she suffered them with constancy to the end. The King might break but could never boast of having quelled that domineering, unquiet spirit ; for that Death alone could do. The chronicler of the Carmelites has steeped his pen in vinegar at the bare mention of the princess's name. If we may believe his long and circumstantial account (for neither Yepes nor Ribera refers to it), the princess insisted on reading SANTA TERESA Teresa's MS. of her Life that MS. which, urged by her fears, Teresa had sent through Dona Luisa de la Cerda to the venerable Juan de Avila, the Illuminated Apostle of Andalucia, that he might see it and search her spirit before his death. Teresa, who had ever preserved a shrinking reserve about the book, which contained the most secret and sacred expansions of her soul, refused at first to gratify what she instinctively felt was but a puerile and childish curiosity. Her refusal but sharpened the princess's eagerness to see the precious volume. Unwilling to offend her powerful patrons, whose support was all-essential to her second monastery of friars, the centre of her thoughts, in an evil hour Teresa yielded to the earnest solicitations of Ruy Gomez, who, to gratify his wife, seconded her petition. Even then she only assented after they had given her their formal promise that it should be seen by them- selves alone, and that they would preserve an inviolable secrecy as to its contents. A few days after, the saint discovered that it was being circulated freely amongst the servants, and that her revelations were the jest of the household. The princess, oblivious of her promise, had left it lying about, and they had taken possession of it. Nor was this all. According to the chronicler (whose statement we must however accept " cum grano salis"), the princess did not let slip so favourable an opportunity of mortifying and wounding her guest. Not only was she the prime instigator of the laughter and jests which were freely bandied about as to Teresa's revelations, but her own witticisms on the subject were highly applauded in the drawing-rooms of Madrid, and she freely hinted her opinion that Teresa was little better than Magdalen de la Cruz, and richly deserved the same treatment. A graver accusation, however, than that of having violated the sacred laws of hospitality, hangs over the Princess of Eboli : that of having delated the MS., or having caused it to be delated, to the Inquisition. All her biographers are agreed that it was so delated by some great lady whose name, however, they suppress. As to the date at which this occurred there are considerable discrepancies. It is alleged to have been thrice delated : the first time, whilst she was founding in Pastrana; the second time by Banes himself, to anticipate its detractors; and the third time, in 1579, by some great lady unknown, affirmed by the chronicler to have been the Princess of Eboli. If then the princess was guilty of so odious a breach of faith for as to the first statement, it depends on the uncertain memory of the venerable Isabel de Santo Domingo it seems strange that she should have waited five years before she revenged herself THE FOUNDATION OF PASTRANA 357 on Teresa for grievances which must long ago have faded from her volatile brain, when it would have been as easy and more natural for her to have done so, while they were still fresh and rankling in her mind that is, if she was not then already a prisoner in the Castle of Pinto, where she was taken in July of that same year. In justice to the memory of an unfortunate woman, I would fain vindicate her from a charge which rests mainly on the evidence of the chronicler, who, with fierce partisan- ship, could not banish from his mind the disputes between her and the nuns of Pastrana, which ended eventually in their abandoning a convent made unendurable to them by her freaks and unreasonable exactions. In the much-vexed ques- tions of history where nothing can be definitely proved on either side, it is always well, especially in such a case, to give the accused the benefit of the doubt. The cause of the delation is said to have been a dispute between the saint and the princess concerning a certain novice whom the latter had brought with her from Segovia to become an inmate of the new foundation. Her imperious mandate, which she believed she had every right to make, was met with a quiet and resolute negative. Her displeasure was no doubt great to find that the woman whose exquisite urbanity she may have mistaken for subserviency, and whom she had perhaps flattered herself it was easy for one of her exalted rank and more especially in her quality of patroness and benefactress to bend to her will, should display an independence and energy equal, if not superior, to her own. She little knew whom she had to deal with. With all her sweetness of temper and compliance to reasonable demands, on questions of principle Teresa was as firm as steel. And in this case a question was at stake on which (she felt) hinged the entire future and intention of her Reform. It was one as to which, as time went on, she became more and more stringent, subordinating all considerations of temporal interest to the spiritual well-being of her communities. She selected her nuns with a scrupulous care, as if the whole weight of the Reform rested on the shoulders of that one individual, nor did she ever let a question of dower stand in the way of enlisting a suitable subject. " With her and others like her," she said, speaking of one whom she had accepted without a farthing, " God pays me for the labour I undergo in these foundations." She assured the parents of another, as penniless as her disposition was good, that she ought to give them for their daughter what others gave her in order to receive theirs. In vain did Yepes use all his powers of persuasion to persuade her to admit a great lady in possession of wealth and vassals. 358 SANTA TERESA After thanking him for his desire and efforts in behalf of the Order, she begged him not to recommend her ladies who, being habituated always to doing what they liked, only served to bring confusion into the convents where they entered. On the other hand, in the case of others whose birth was equally illustrious, but of whose fitness she was better satisfied, she herself implored them to take the habit of her Order. In time, too, she found it necessary to extend this prohibition against receiving nuns from other Orders, to the Encarnacion itself, whence she had drafted some of her most famous daughters. It was no part of her intention to make her strict and pure community the refuge of waifs and strays, who, inured to a discipline so different from her own, could only bring into it an element of restlessness and disquiet. In the case of the princess's novice (who was an entire stranger to her), she had had neither time nor opportunity to prove the sincerity of her vocation. The mutual antagonism which thus sprang up between the princess and the saint was increased by a misunderstanding as to the provision for the maintenance of the convent. Teresa heard with surprise that, as she had already founded in poverty, she was expected to do so in this instance also, since (cleverly turning her own precept against her) they saw it was more " perfection." It was no part of her intention to abandon a foundation to the fickle favour of a volatile and capricious woman, more especially as the mere fact of its being dependent on such wealthy and powerful patrons would discourage those alms which otherwise might have been expected to flow in from the town itself. The princess, tired alike of the project and the foundress, eagerly welcomed the opportunity to break off the negotiations. Teresa, wounded in her dearest susceptibilities, was herself for abandoning a foundation under auspices so unpromising. An open rupture was averted only by the gentleness and compliance of the prince, who brought his wife to reason, and by Teresa's own intense anxiety to avoid giving offence to the King's powerful favourite, whose support and countenance were in- dispensable to her second monastery of friars. The extension of the Reform weighed far more heavily with the wise and shrewd Teresa than the slights and insults of a bad-tempered woman, whose affronts and contumely were but as pin-pricks compared to the realisation of the Idea she lived or. Nevertheless, the weariness of her sojourn in Pastrana, where she and her nuns had been forced to take up their abode in the palace until such time as the house intended for them should be rebuilt the princess having ordered it to be gutted on account THE FOUNDATION OF PASTRANA 359 of its being too small, made it seem to her that time went by with leaden footsteps. " I would be about three months in that place, where I underwent many vexations because of the princess requiring some things of me that were not fitting for our Order ; so that I resolved to return without founding, rather than grant them. But the prince, Ruy Gomez, with his good sense (for he had much, and was open to reason), brought his wife under, and I myself bore several things, for I desired the foundation of the monastery of friars more than of the nuns, perceiving how important it was, as has since been seen." On the 9th of July 1569, the question of endowment having been satisfactorily settled, she had the profound satisfaction of dedicating to Our Lady of the Conception her fifth foundation, so soon to be undone by the violent freaks of the newly-widowed princess, who, as Teresa justly observed, was unfit to treat with its calm, phlegmatic, but gentle and enduring inmates. Four days later her heart was gladdened by a greater triumph. The arrival of Mariano and Fray Juan de la Miseria with the licenses was almost simultaneous with that of the two nuns she had sent for from Medina and the Encarnacion, who came escorted by a Carmelite friar, told off to accompany them, at the saint's request, by the prior of the Monastery of Medina. Now this friar, Fray Balthasar de Nieto, a native of Zafra in Estremadura, one of the most eminent and eloquent preachers in Spain, in high esteem with Philip and the court, in the language of the chronicler, " besides his learning he was a Chrysostom in speech and in enslaving hearts," had long ago formed the idea of joining the Reform, and had consulted Fray Antonio de Jesus as to the best means of doing so, when the latter came to Medina from Duruelo. There were many difficulties, however, in the way, arising from the nascent jealousy with which the official Carmelites, already on the alert to prevent any defections from their body to the rival camp, regarded the new Order, so fast springing up into power and importance. The secession of a man like Nieto, whose eloquence, celebrated throughout the Peninsula, reflected lustre on the entire Order, was certain to arouse a storm of opposition, and every expedient would be resorted to in order to prevent it. By choosing him to escort Teresa's nuns to Pastrana, his own prior had thus unwittingly supplied him with the opportunity he had so long been waiting for, and Teresa won a new and important recruit. A few days, therefore, previous to the I3th of July, Mariano's impatience admitting of no delay, in the presence of the Prince and Princess of Eboli and a train of courtiers, the high officials of the household, and the principal 360 SANTA TERESA inhabitants of the town, who filled to overflowing the Gothic oratory l decked as for some great festival, Teresa bestowed the habit on the three men who were thenceforth to fight under the banners of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. It was noticed that, rejecting all offers of assistance, she insisted with her own hands on clothing Mariano and his companions in the habits which she and her nuns had sewn. A slight but pathetic trait of character, this tender and jealous assertion of her prerogatives as foundress ! On the 1 3th of July a solemn and imposing procession, celebrated with all the pomp and circumstance the town afforded, assembled to conduct the three friars to the sunlit hill, about a quarter of a league to the south of the town, which was soon to become the centre of a powerful and influential Order. The days of such processions are gone ; yet can we not, in the dusky curtain of the past, discover some faint rent, through which peeping we may discern somewhat of the joy, the emotion that filled the multitude that day ? Alas ! no, it is all too misty. The dust rises and blinds one : all the vibrations of so many hearts what though most of them were peasants ? are shut up for ever in a brief paragraph in the chronicles of the Order. Still, here and there flashes upon me out of the darkness a monkish habit ; an upturned face amongst the eager crowd, which gathered together from all the country-side around, lines gate and pathway ; and so kneeling devoutly as the friars approach, and the solemn chant waxes louder and closer, in ever-swelling numbers they rise and follow in their wake. How the voices rise and fall on the peaceful summer day, in that brief halt they make before the newly-founded convent only a few days old ! ere, streaming forth from the old walled town, peasant and prince, craftsman and courtier, under the democratic sun gleaming on all alike equals to-day in one common sentiment of rejoicing and enthusiasm struggle up the steep and sandy path that leads to St. Peter's Hermitage. Two pictures still preserved in the cloisters of Pastrana commemorate these scenes of the foundress's life. In one, a line of light falling full across the picture encompasses her in its glow, as she bends forward with outstretched hands to give the habit to her friars. In the background stands Ruy Gomez, slender and graceful, in black velvet suit, resting lightly on the hilt of his rapier ; with peaked beard and handsome face, pallid and wearied. To the extreme right of the picture, surrounded by her ladies, is the haughty and imperious figure of the princess, superbly proud of face and gesture; and superbly fair, her dress, such as Coello has made us familiar with in his pictures of the 1 It is now used as a wood-shed. THE FOUNDATION OF PASTRANA 361 Infanta Clara Eugenia, embroidered with pearls and glistening with jewels. In the other Teresa is represented as being present at this taking possession by her friars of the hillside of Pastrana. It was the last time that the Princess of Eboli crossed Teresa's life, although her self-willed presence will once more chequer the pages of this history before she disappears, a brilliant meteor, into the current history and intrigue of the age, until she comes again, a prisoner, to take up her abode and drag out the remnant of a weary existence within those very walls, transformed into a dungeon, where Teresa had seen her rule it, gay, haughty, and with the stateliness of a queen. Yet it is not she, although wounded to the quick, who exposes the faults and failings of the Princess of Eboli. In her Foundations, Teresa the saint writes of her in the most scrupulously guarded terms. Only once does Teresa, the woman, give vent to any expression of resentment, when she writes to Banes, " that any place was good enough for her." That she viewed the princess with little favour may be seen from the significant warning she gave the Prioress of Pastrana to take a strict inventory of all the valuables and gifts she had bestowed upon the community. The event proved how accurately she gauged her character. In little more than a week after the scene which had filled her heart with such legitimate joy and gladness, she found herself once more, doubtless to her great relief, amongst her nuns of Toledo, whence, in the same coach that had brought her from Pastrana, she despatched Isabel de Santo Domingo, a woman of capability and energy, who had acted as prioress in her absence, to assume that office in the newly-constituted community. From the end of July 1569 to the middle of August 1570, an interval of over a year, we find Teresa in Toledo. The chronicler, however, is in some doubt whether she remained there the whole time, or whether, after a few months' sojourn with her daughters, to confirm them in the observance of the Primitive Rule, she did not make a fruitless attempt to found at Alba de Tormes, visiting Avila on her way, and returning again to Toledo by Medina and Valladolid, in time to witness Mariano's profession at Pastrana, which, according to the monastery books, took place in July of 1570. The latter may easily have been the case : as for the other hypothesis, although not wholly inadmissible, it hangs on no better foundation than a vague phrase of Teresa's, copied by Ribera, to the effect that she was "some months in Toledo, until she had bought the house and left all in order." How- ever this may be and Teresa's chronology is always loose 362 SANTA TERESA one thing is certain, that the greater part of this year of her life was spent in Toledo, until towards the middle of August 1571 she started for Avila, bound to the foundation of Salamanca. For us this year of her life is shut up in three or four letters that form the only outward visible expression of it, and link it with the world outside. Time has drawn his curtain over the duties done, the triumphs, the joys, the sorrows, the peaceful monotony: the old woman writing the Moradas in Toledo is a dim phantom covered by a blacker veil than any she wore in life ; but still there they are, these letters bubbles that have floated to the surface of the resistless current that has borne away all the rest as if they had never been. One is to Simon Ruiz, that rich citizen of Medina who still looks down at us from the walls of the hospital he founded there: trunk-hose, ruff and doublet, grim, sour old face even as I daresay he was in life standing out from the duskiness of the canvas more clearly than he does from the immense and darker background of the past. His niece, Isabel de los Angeles, has just taken the veil in Teresa's convent of Medina. It is no wonder [she writes] that it roused devotion and remark, since, for our sins, the world is such that few of those who have the wherewithal to live in it to their thinking with ease, embrace the cross of our Lord, whereas by remaining in it they are left with a heavier one. . . . That she has lived with good companions is easy to be known, since she has thus understood the truth. As for the rest, it is certain that under colours of the fairest seeming the devil will prove his power against whatever thing is done to the service of our Lord. He has not been idle here, and in somewhat they are right ; since it seems to them that as these houses are to depend on alms, they might not be forthcoming, when people see the benefits bestowed on us by persons able to do so ; for some time indeed this may be so, but soon the truth will be made manifest. . . . May his Majesty keep your grace many years, so that you may enjoy it, and may you make the house [the hospital] for so great a King, for I hope in his Majesty that he will reward you with another that never ends. In October of 1569, Teresa is stirred to unwonted gladness. Her brother Lorenzo, who has long held the post of treasurer in the province of Quito, is about to return home. With what eagerness does she not hasten to send the welcome news to Juana in Alba de Tormes Juana, ever fighting the wolf from the door as best she may dwelling joyfully on the brighter prospects her sister might expect from his arrival : I am sending money to Avila [she writes] so that they may send you on this messenger, for these letters cannot fail to give you great joy : to me they have given intense joy ; and I trust in the Lord that my brother's coming will be of some, and indeed to the great alleviation, of your troubles. . . . Now do you not see what it is that God works in Lorenzo de Cepeda ? THE FOUNDATION OF PASTRANA 363 it seems to me that he is more desirous of furthering his children's salvation than of amassing a large fortune. . . . There is no greater joy for me than to feel that those whom I love so much as I do my brothers are enlightened to choose the better part. Did I not tell you [poor Juana is tormented by cares] that if you left it to the Lord, he would not fail you ? So I tell you now to put your business in his hands, for his Majesty will do all that is best for us in everything. [The postscript is eminently characteristic.] I opened my brother's letter in order to know [but she bethinks herself, and goes on], I was about to open it, and felt a scruple about it ; if there is anything besides what comes in mine, let me know. To Lorenzo she writes it is now January of 1570 she has already written to him by three separate ways, and it is im- possible but that one or other of her letters must have reached him: In all our monasteries we are offering up very particular and constant prayer that since your intent is to serve our Lord, his Majesty may bring you to us well, and direct everything to the greatest profit of these children's souls. I have already written to your grace, how that six convents have been founded up to now, and two of friars, also Descalzos of our Order. . . . At this moment I am in Toledo. It will be a year ago come the Eve of Our Lady of March that I arrived here ; although from here I went to a town of Ruy Gomez, who is Prince of Eboli, where a monastery of friars was founded and another of nuns, and they are doing very well. I returned here to finish setting this house in order, and it looks as if it was going to be a very principal house. I have had much better health this winter ; for the temperature of this country is so admirable, that if other obstacles did not stand in the way (for it is impossible for you to settle down here on account of your children), I sometimes wish you could live here, on account of the climate. But in " tierra de Avila " there are places where you can spend the winters, for so some are in the habit of doing. I mention it on account of my brother Jerdnimo de Cepeda, who, I am inclined to think, when God may bring him, will have better health here. All is as his Majesty wills. I think I have not enjoyed such health for forty years, and that, too, in spite of keeping the same rule as all the rest, and never eating meat, except in cases of great necessity. A year ago I had quartan ague, and since it left me I have been better. I was then at the foundation of Valladolid, where the Senora Da. Maria de Mendoza, once the wife of the Secretary Cobos, killed me with kindness, for she loves me greatly. So that when the Lord sees it is needed for our good, he gives us health, and when not, sickness. May he be blessed for all. I was grieved at your grace's infirmity being in the eyes, for it is a troublesome thing. Glory to God, that they are so much better. Juan de Ovalle has already written to you how he went from here (Toledo) to Seville. A friend of mine managed it so well, that he obtained the silver on the very day he got there. He brought it here, where the money will be paid at the end of this month of January. The ciccount of the duties charged on it was made before me ; I shall send it with this ; for, understanding these matters as I do, I had no little share in it, and what with these houses of God and the Order, I am become such a haggler and business woman that I know all about everything ; and so I look upon your grace's business as theirs, and am delighted to be employed in it. Before I forget : know that after I wrote to your grace the last time, Cueto's son 364 SANTA TERESA died quite a lad : we can put no trust in this life ; so does it console me whenever I remember how well your grace knows it. When I am free here I should like to return to Avila, for I am still prioress there, so as not to vex the Bishop, to whom I and the whole Order owe much. I know not what the Lord will do with me, whether I shall go to Salamanca, where I have got a house ; for although I am wearied, such is the good these houses do in the towns they are in, that my conscience urges me to make as many as I can. May the Lord favour it in such wise as to encourage me to go on. In my former letters I forgot to mention the advantages there are in Avila for giving those boys a good up-bringing. They of the Company have got a College, where they teach them grammar and hear their con- fessions every week, which turns out such virtuous youths as makes one praise our Lord for. They may also study philosophy, and afterwards theology in Sto. Tomas, for there is no need to go beyond Avila for virtue and learning ; and the whole town is so full of Christianity as to edify those who come from other parts : many prayers and confessions, and secular people who lead a life of great perfection. Good Francisco Salcedo is one of them. Your grace [for the worthy treasurer in Peru is not forgetful of the faces he remembered in his youth ; and Juana's poverty is gladdened, Teresa's necessities relieved, and indigent relatives of his family in Avila made rich by the gifts of the generous donor] did me a great favour in sending such a good present to Cepeda. That saint (for I do not think I overrate him) is never done thanking you. Pedro de el Peso, the old man, died a year ago ; it was well earned. Ana de Cepeda was greatly pleased with the alms your grace gave her ; with them she will be quite rich, for, as she is so good, she gets help from other people besides. . . . The son of the Senora Da. Maria my sister and Martin de Guzman, professed, and is progressing in sanctity. I have already written your grace that Da. Beatriz and her daughter are dead. Da. Magdalena, who was the youngest, is in a secular convent. Fain do I wish that God would call her for a nun. She is very pretty. I have not seen her for many years. Quite recently, they wanted her to marry a mayorazgo, a widower. I know not how it will end. I have already written you at what an opportune moment my sister received your favour [she refers to Juana] ; for I am amazed at the trials and privations the Lord has given her, and she has borne it so bravely, that so I fain would help her. I need nothing ; on the contrary I have enough and to spare, and therefore I will share the alms you send me with my sister, and spend the rest in good works which shall be for your grace. On account of certain scruples I had, a little of it came at a very seasonable time ; for in these foundations, certain things arise, that however careful I may be, and it is all for them, one might give less in certain civilities to learned men, for in matters relating to my soul I always go to them ; in short, in trifles ; and thus its being forthcoming was a great relief to me, so that I need not borrow it from any one. I like to be at liberty with these gentle people, so that I can speak out my mind freely to them. And so wrapped up is the world in money, that in very truth I abhor the possession of anything. And so [curious the mixture of real goodness and Jesuitry, the best intentions, and temporal shrewdness] I shall never possess any- thing without giving part of it to the Order, for by so doing I shall be freer, and to this end shall I give ; since I have the fullest possible permission from general and provincial to transfer as well as to take nuns, and to help one house with what belongs to the others. So great is their blindness in giving me credit, I know not how and such the esteem they hold me in, THE FOUNDATION OF PASTRANA 365 that they entrust me with a thousand and two thousand ducats. So that at the time I most abhorred money and business, the Lord wills me to treat in nothing else, which is no small cross. ... In very truth it seems to me that it will be an alleviation to me to have you here, for so little do all earthly things give me, that perhaps it is our Lord's will I should have this, and that we should join together in procuring his honour and glory, and the good of souls. For this is what fills me with great pity, to see so many lost ; and those Indians cost me not a little. May the Lord give them light, for here, as there, there is great unhappiness ; for as I go about in so many parts, and speak with so many people, I know not often what to say, but that we are worse than beasts, since we do not perceive the great dignity of our soul, and how we belittle it with such mean things as are those of earth. May the Lord give us light. . . . Your grace can treat with father fray Garcia de Toledo, who is the viceroy's nephew, a person I miss greatly in my own affairs. And if you needed anything of the viceroy, know that he is a great Christian, and it was a great chance his going there. I wrote to him in the packets. I also sent you in each letter some relics for the road ; I hope they will reach you. I did not intend to be so lengthy. My desire is for you to understand the favour God did you in giving the Serior Da. Juana such a death. [Lorenzo has just lost his wife hence, perhaps, his sudden resolution of returning home.] Here we have commended her to our Lord and sung her funeral honours in all our monasteries ; and I hope in his Majesty that now she does not need it. Do your best to throw off your grief. Consider that to mourn so deeply for those who, set free from these miseries, go to live, is too like those who forget there is a life eternal. Commend me greatly to my brother Jeronimo de Cepeda. I am overjoyed at what your grace tells me, that he was settling everything so as to return home in a few years from now ; and I would fain, if he can, that he should not leave his children behind him, but that we should meet together here, and help one another to meet again for eternity. In a postscript Many of the masses have been said, and the rest will not be forgotten. I have taken a nun with nothing, for even to the bed I desired to give it her, and have offered it to God, so that he may bring me back your grace and your children safe. An inimitable letter! How wistfully she looks forward this world- and religion-dried old saint to the reunion of the large and scattered family which had assembled around her father's hearth in Avila, to join with them once more, ere Death shall eternally divide them, in seeking that country whither time is inexorably bearing them ! See how her solicitude embraces the whole of her scattered family; what kindly messages, if interspersed with spiritual counsel and exhortation, she sends to Pedro, Agustin, Hernando, all the strong young men who had gladdened their father's house, whose eyes are now growing dim, and their heads streaked with gray, far away in the Indies, across the seas. See in these homely details how she herself clings .to those relatives and neighbours of Avila ; 366 SANTA TERESA how neither foundations nor sanctity have deadened her interest in whose who stroked her hair and nursed her as a child. See her anxiety lest the new-comers, habituated to the tropical suns of Peru, should find the climate of Avila too rigorous ; and yet how family pride and the traditions of her house dictate that they should settle down, not in Toledo, a town for which she herself ever professed a special predilection on account of the benignancy of the climate, but in the old gray-walled town on the Castilian uplands, the cradle of her name and race. We also note her scrupulous exactitude as to money in regard to the large sums that passed through her hands, sums that did not fail to rouse the cupidity of her relatives more especially of the poverty-stricken Juana. Firmly, but with infinite gentleness, she shuts the door on her hopes : One thing I beg of you for charity [she writes to Juana], not to care for me on account of temporal benefits, but because I can commend you to God ; for in anything else (let the Senor Godinez say what he will) I can do nothing, and it only gives me pain to refuse ; my soul is governed by One alone, and not by every one's caprice. I say this so that you may have an answer ready when anything is said to you, and let your grace clearly understand that considering what a state the world is come to now, and the station in which the Lord has placed me, the less they think I do for you the better is it for me, and this is what is fitting to the Lord's service. Certainly, although I do nothing, if they imagined I did ever so little, they would say of me what they do of others ; and so, now that you tell me of this trifle, you must be on your guard. Believe that I love you well, and will sometimes send you some little trifle at a time when it will most commend itself to you ; but understand, when anything of this sort comes to your ears, that what I have I shall spend on the Order to which it belongs, and what business is it of theirs ? And believe that, for one who is so much before the eyes of the world as I am, it is necessary even in what is a virtue to be careful how one performs it. You cannot believe the trouble I have ; and since I do it to serve him, his Majesty will take care for me of you and yours. May he guard you for me, for I have been writing a long time, and the bell has rung for Matins. I tell you, indeed, that when I see a novice with something nice I remember you and Beatrice, and that I have never dared to take anything, even by paying for it. Towards Lent of 1570 she writes to Fray Antonio de Segura, guardian of the Discalced Franciscan Monastery of Cadahalso ; in which Order her nephew, Fray Juan de Jesus, son of her sister Maria and Martin de Guzman (whose progress in the ways of sanctity she had commented on in her letter to Lorenzo), has taken the habit. The letter is a model of urbanity and grace. The Holy Ghost be with your grace, my father. I know not what to say of the slight importance to be attached to anything of this world, and how THE FOUNDATION OF PASTRANA 367 I never end by being convinced of it. I say this because I never thought your grace would be so unmindful of Teresa de Jesus ; and as you are so near, it cannot be your memory that is at fault, for so little does it look like it, that even although your grace has been here, you neither saw nor bestowed your benediction on this your house. Now I hear from Father Julian de Avila that you have been appointed guardian of Cadahalso, and if you had been mindful of me ever so little, you might occasionally have heard of me. Please the Lord you do not carry the same forgetfulness of me into your prayers, for if this is so I will forgive all else ; neither do I, although a wretch [forget you]. He also tells me that my nephew is about to pass by Cadahalso. If he has not already gone, I beseech your grace to make him write to me at length of how it fares with him spiritually and bodily ; for according to the way he is being exercised by obedience in these journeys he will either be greatly improved or distracted : God give him strength, and grant that you do not treat him as I think you will on account of his relationship to me. If he stands in need of any favour on the part of his superiors let me know, for it will be easy for one who knows the Senora Da. Maria de Mendoza and other people like her to obtain it, so that at least he may be allowed to take some little rest. So that from this and the preceding letters we see that the saint has already become a considerable figure in this dim old world of mediaeval Spain. In the meantime, the difficulties that lowered over the foundation of Toledo have all melted away. Antonio Ramirez, unable to resist the spectacle of the devotion enjoyed by the new foundation, now held in high esteem and veneration by the gravest and greatest personages of Toledo, has once more reopened negotiations with the saint, to secure the patronage of her convent for himself and his heirs. Great was the storm his pretensions excited in Toledo. Each proud and penniless hidalgo felt himself aggrieved that a plebeian merchant, however rich and estimable he might be, should thus seek to enhance himself and his posterity by a privilege which was then considered the exclusive right of the nobility, and for which a noble and illustrious personage was already a suppliant. Moreover, the governor had expressly stipulated when he gave the written license that the patrons of the convent should be noble. It was on this memorable occasion, as Teresa wavered between alienating her powerful friends and wounding them in their every aristocratic prejudice by admitting the prior claims of the humble merchant, perhaps also the 1200 ducats he offered her to buy a house with had something to do with her final decision that, in her own words, Our Lord willed to give me light in this case, and so he said to me once : How little would their lineages and stations matter before the judgment- seat of God. And he reproved me greatly for having listened to those who 368 SANTA TERESA had spoken to me about it, as not being things for us who had already despised the world. And she had no reason to repent a resolution in which, I fancy, temporal shrewdness had as large a share as the voice of God; for with those self-same 1200 ducats she bought an excellent house in the quarter of San Nicolas opposite the Mint, where, before she left Toledo on her way to Salamanca, she had the satisfaction of establishing her nuns. In this house, for it still exists, although the lower part of it has been transformed into a grocer's shop, were spent some of the most important years of Teresa's life. From 1576 to 1580, the period when the fate of the Carmelite Order hung in the balance, she rarely left it, unless to pay a visit to Avila or Malagon, and on her passage to and fro between them here she always rested. Here she wrote, calm and tranquil, amidst the ragings of the storm through which she was directing the progress of her fragile ark of the Reform, what critics account (I do not, although it is perhaps more artistically finished than her other books) her greatest work, the Moradas. Here, too, that in 1571 she wrote one of the most curious of her " Relations," and another no less curious in 1576. This house, so intimately linked with the most agitated portion of her life, when intel- lectually she had developed and matured her greatest thoughts, and her personality was never grander or more impressive, has a charm and interest for her votaries, equal almost in intensity to that of the Encarnacion where she blossomed into maturity. From this house, which lies a little back from the sombre and narrow street in the heart of the Moorish city, surrounded by so many strange vestiges of decaying mediaeval- ism, and of civilisation long anterior, as heterogeneous and as varying as the colours and forms of a kaleidoscope, her eyes swept over the great plains, studded with gray keeps, that stretched between the walls and the horizon. A stone's-throw from the windows, crowning the hill, she looked on the crenellated walls of Charles v.'s palace, formerly that of the Moorish kings. Do I imagine it, or is it that she has really coloured the pages of the Moradas with the local colour of her surroundings? The great keep; the winding walls ; the narrow echoing streets ; the great gates, studded with nails (to-day the prey of the antiquary) ; the gratings ; the loopholes ; this echo of fighting and of swords, that mingle so strangely with fairy-like patios, whose alabaster columns, and marble fountains, and fragrant orange blossoms, are full of the thousand subtle and sensuous delights of an eastern nation, are THE FOUNDATION OF PASTRANA 369 surely the material and visible archetypes of the " resplendent and beautiful castle, this oriental pearl," the mystic image under which she painted the soul. To-day, as I have said, this house may still be seen em- bedded in a narrow Toledan street, in the quarter of San Nicolas, opposite the Mint, and the curious in such matters may visit the small Renaissance chapel beside it, which bears over its gates the mendacious inscription : Bis geniti Tutor, Joseph, conjuxque Parentis Has asdes habitat, primaque tentpla tenet. I take away with me in the twilight a vision of a grass-grown courtyard, solitary and desolate, splashed with rain, surrounded by high walls ; of a simple and unpretentious nave, filled with the gathering gloom of a February afternoon. The uncertain light of the lantern struggling with the last gleams of day flickers on the distorted creations of the mad Toledan painter, Theotocopuli, in the retablo over the high altar. Teresa's votaries are touched more nearly by two tombs, whose presence there seems to form a bridge over the gaping chasm that lies betwixt us and her. They are those of the founders. One bears the inscription of Martin Ramirez, and the date of his death, October 1568. The other is that of his niece Francisca, who died on the I2th of May 1578, and lies buried with her husband, that same Diego Ortiz, whose theology and obstinacy the saint found such an obstacle. He, we learn, lived to the age of ninety, when, on the 3Oth of November 1611, he too was brought to repose by her side. In the little sacristy close by, a picture of an old man, dictating his last dispositions from a sickbed, keeps green the memory of Martin, and the donation he made in Teresa's favour. This house, however, was not destined to be the final resting- place of her daughters, and one would wait in vain for the rustle of the Carmelites as they take their place in the deserted and empty choir. During her life Teresa smoothed over many misunderstandings that arose from the conflicting claims of the founders, and the menaced independence of her nuns. The day before her journey to Avila in August of 1570, in a note of exquisite courtesy she carefully defined their position, safe- guarded their rights, and endeavoured to protect there repose and tranquillity from undue invasion. " What I intended was," she writes to Diego Ortiz, " that the chaplains should be obliged to sing on festivals, for so is it stated in our Constitutions ; and not to oblige the nuns, who are allowed by the Rule to sing or not as they please, to do so ; 24 370 SANTA TERESA for, in spite of its being in the Constitutions it is not obligatory, nor does it imply any sin not to do so. Let your grace con- sider, whether I should force them. I would not do so on any account ; nor did you nor any one else ask such a thing of me ; on the contrary, I settled it thus for our convenience. If it arises from an error in the deed, it is not right to force on them what they are inclined to do of their own free will ; and since they desire to serve you and sing the customary Masses, I beseech you, when anything prevents them doing so, to allow them to enjoy their liberty. I beseech you to pardon another's writing, for the bleeding has left me weak, and my head is not fit for more." The three letters that remain to us of her epistolary correspondence for 1571 relate exclusively to her Toledan foundation, and that which she writes on the 2ist of May of that year from Salamanca to the same Diego Ortiz runs as follows : The grace of the Holy Ghost be with you, Amen. Your grace does me so much favour and charity with your letters, that although the last had been still more rigorous than it was, I should still have been well pleased, and only the more obliged to serve afresh. You say you sent me the one that the father Mariano brought me, so that I might see how reasonable is your request ; and you allege such good reasons and know so well how to enhance what you wish, that, aware that mine will be of little avail, I do not think to defend myself with reasons, but like those who plead a bad case, to deafen you with noise, and call upon you loudly to remember that you are ever more obliged to favour my daughters, who are orphans and minors, than you are the chaplains ; since, in short, everything is yours, and the convent and those in it, belong to you as much and more than those who, as you say, go thither only anxious to get through quickly [she means the chaplains of misa and olla]. You do me a great favour in granting that matter of the vespers, for it is a thing I cannot serve you in. As to the rest, I am now writing to the mother prioress to do your bidding, and send her your letter. Perhaps if we left it entirely in her hands and those of the Senor Alonso Alvarez, it would be better for us. Let them arrange it between them. ... In one thing it seems to me a notable injury is done them, and one that will be very grievous to them, in that when any one celebrates a festival, Mass is to be said before High Mass. I know not how it is to be arranged, especially if there is a sermon. It matters little to your graces that on that day the festival should be celebrated at High Mass, and that the chaplains should say theirs a little before. It can only be on a very few days that this happens. Let your grace do a little violence to your own wishes, and grant me this favour, though it be a feast day, so long as it is not one of those celebrated by you ! ... In short, I will not depart from whatever your grace sees is for the best and surest, and I will do all I can to serve you. It grieves me not to be where I can show you my affection more nearly. Few prioresses, however, displayed the same sweet reason- ableness, the same gentle moderation, the same firmness as their foundress. After her death, the relations between patron and THE FOUNDATION OF PASTRANA 371 community grew more and more strained until it ended in an open rupture. Wearied of their monastic tranquillity being invaded by the constantly recurring festivals and the crowds of people they brought to the chapel, the nuns removed in 1594 the saint had then been dead twelve years to the house of one Alonzo Franco, in the Tendillas of Sancho Minaya, close to the site now occupied by the Capuchin convent. In 1608 Beatrice de Jesus, the saint's niece, finally transferred the community to some houses belonging to Don Fernando de la Cerda, close to the Puerta del Cambron, which then became to them sacred ground ; for (strange coincidence) tradition affirmed them to have been the very palace that Teresa had so often inhabited as the guest of Da. Luisa de la Cerda, and where she had so often broken her journeys. It would almost seem as if her invisible hand had guided her daughters to the building, where the fragrance of her presence still lingered. Her personality but adds another interest to the old irregular walls, of themselves so full of the weird charm with which dead centuries have tinged them. Close to the Puerta del Cambron, on the outskirts of Toledo, the visitor to the Church of San Juan de los Reyes cannot fail to notice the building that rises on the face of the steep hill to the right a building in whose irregular archi- tecture, the cyclopean massiveness of the Visigoth, the flat solidity of the Moor, the grace of the Early Renaissance, mix and blend in a thousand fantastic combinations a building the fruit of many epochs, altered and changed by many hands. On the one side forming a prolongation of the rock, it rises sheer above the abyss which separates the matchless vega of the Tagus and its boiling waters from the town above ; on the other it guards the narrow entrance of the gates. Here and there its red walls, faded by the heat and cold of many centuries into hues tender and diaphanous, or glowing in patches with a heat and fervour of colour that can only be seen in these remnants of antiquity, are pierced by irregular casements. A delicate Moorish ajimez, from which in other days, as the sun gleamed redly to his setting, some dark Moorish face watched for the return of the cavalcade across the vega, exists side by side with a Gothic loophole and the square wooden lattice of a Christian convent. A buttress here props up a falling wall ; the cushion-shaped buttress of the Moor, which gleams whitely against the broken surface it sustains ; everywhere an angle ; in the flagged courtyards, over which reigns a supreme silence a supreme pathos of abandonment the fine grass grows un- molested by the steps of any passer-by : mouldering woodwork 372 SANTA TERESA and panelled doors, whence the sun has stripped off the paint in flakes; curious and delicate ironwork moulded with the strong grace of the fifteenth-century smith bid the dreamer linger and frame for himself, if he can, somewhat of the inner thoughts that guided the hands of the craftsman who wrought them, and of the century that produced him. A relic of many centuries, this old building, most fitly do its walls enclose the phantom, the spectral form, unreal and infinitely saddening, of that shadowy cloister life once so full of vigour and vitality ; most fitting framework for the mystic figures, melancholy, forgotten of the world and men, who here wear out their lives for a vanquished and dead Ideal. Below this house (to describe it and figure forth the shadowy existence that lurks under brick and mortar I would need the brush of the painter) is the church of San Juan de los Reyes. The rusty chains of enslaved Christians set free by the Catholic Kings Ferdinand and Isabella, hanging round the gateway, mingle strangely with the garlands of pomegranates which cover every niche and pinnacle. To this famous church, reared by its founders for their shrine, Teresa must often have gone down to pray ; and, lost in the vast space of its magnificent interior, few noted the kneeling figure of the little old Carmelite nun the greatest woman of her age, perhaps the best repre- sentative of its sublimest virtues, of its chivalrous crusade against indifference and lukewarmness ; a chivalry which, if it tilted at windmills, kept aloft all that was pure and noble, and whose subtle influence, wafted to us across the ages, may still inspire us with something of the old fighting spirit, as we cast down the gauntlet, not for dogma, but fearlessly in the face of it, for abstract Right and abstract Reason, as being the highest ends Humanity can aim at. CHAPTER XIV THE FOUNDATIONS OF SALAMANCA AND ALBA DE TORMES WHILST Teresa lingered in Toledo she received a letter from the Rector of the Jesuit college of Salamanca, Don Martin Gutierrez, a man of great learning and virtue, who, anxious to forward a Reform he looked on as a benefit to the Church at large, advised her to found in Salamanca, a city he described as very suitable for the purpose, alleging in favour of his opinion various excellent reasons. " Although," writes Teresa, " I had forborne making a foundation without endow- ment there, on account of the place being very poor, still, considering that Avila is just as poor, and that God fails not, nor do I think will ever fail those who serve him ... I determined to make it ; and when I left Toledo for Avila I at once from there set about procuring the license from the then Bishop, who acted so well, that as soon as the father rector told him of this Order and that it was for God's service, he gave it at once. It seemed to me that, once I had the Bishop's license, the monastery was made, so easy did it seem. And so I at once set to work to hire a house, which a lady whom I knew got for me, and a difficult thing it was to get, as it was not the season for letting, and the house was inhabited by some students, whom they persuaded to give it up, when the person who was to take possession of it arrived. They did not know what it was for, for of this I was exceedingly cautious, so as to let nothing be known until we had taken possession, for I have now experience of how hard the devil works to hinder one of these foundations. . . . Well, when I had got the license, and was sure of the house, confiding in God's mercy (for there was no one there to whom I could look for any assistance to get the many things that were needed to furnish the house) I set out for Salamanca, taking one companion only, so as not to excite attention on the road, for I took warning by what had happened to me in Medina del Campo, where I had seen myself in great 374 SANTA TERESA difficulty ; so that if any hindrance arose I might meet the difficulty alone together with her whose company I was bound to have. ... I do not put down in these foundations the great discomforts of the roads, the cold, the sun, the snow, for once it snowed upon us all day ; how in other foundations we lost the way ; how in others we suffered ailments and fevers ; for although, glory to God, I have generally but feeble health, I saw clearly that our Lord gave me strength. For sometimes it happened to me when I was setting about a foundation, to find myself afflicted with so many aches and pains, that I was full of anguish (for it seemed to me that I was not fit even to be in my cell without lying down), and to turn to our Lord and complain to his Majesty as King, that he wished me to do what was beyond my strength, and afterwards, although not without some suffering on my part, his Majesty gave me strength and inspired me with such ardour and solicitude, that I lost sight of myself entirely. To the best of my recollection I never abandoned a foundation for fear of the trouble, although I felt great repugnance to the journeys, especially the long ones ; but when I had once started, I made light of them when I thought in whose service I was making them, and that the Lord was to be praised, and the most Holy Sacrament placed in another house." So she wrote, the tender and heroic nun to whom all life was but one long journey, the world but the comfortless posada of a night ; who looked on the things around her as a shimmer- ing uncertain mirage, her steadfast gaze fastened on another country where the wearied and dusty feet shall find the so- desired rest at last ; as years afterwards she penned in her quiet cell at Toledo, the simple annals of the Foundation of Salamanca. It was noon on the Eve of All Saints, when the two nuns who had travelled through the greater part of the long cold November night, sleeping at some place on the way, came in sight of the cupolas, towers, and creamy walls of sixteenth- century Salamanca. And yet this magnificent city, 1 a Renaissance jewel set in the great alluvial plains that skirt the Tormes, that they watched glittering before them under the searching rays of a winter sun, as at each step they took it grew larger and larger on their vision, was even then in full decadence, 1 Both town and district, the richest in natural capabilities in Spain, had even in Teresa's time become the prey of the swarm of convents, colleges, hospitals, churches, and pious endowments to such an extent that the inhabitants could scarcely call an inch of the soil their own, and were reduced to letting lodgings to students. Both agriculture and industry had almost disappeared. SALAMANCA AND ALBA DE TORMES 375 on account of those very monasteries, one more of which Teresa had come to found. So they trudge, this sixteenth-century nun and her companion across the twenty-six arches of the Roman bridge, past the fortress that guards its entrance over which float the banners of Spain and the municipality into the town, exciting but little comment (for in those days nuns on their travels were by no means an unusual sight), until at last they fade into the dark-browed gateway of some posada. From the posada they at once send out in search of Nicolas Gutierrez, a pious merchant whom Teresa had charged from Avila with getting the house ready for their arrival. But so far from the house being ready, the good Nicolas comes to say that, in spite of all he can do, the students refuse to leave it. " I told him," says Teresa, " how important it was that they should let us have it at once, before the news got wind that I was in the town ; for I ever dreaded some obstacle arising, as I have said. He went to the person the house belonged to, and worked so hard that it was cleared that same afternoon. We entered it just at nightfall." In after years, when he had become the grave Bishop of Barbastro, one of those same graceless Salamanca students was wont to relate how he and his companions had been turned out to make room for Teresa's convent. "It was the first I founded," Teresa continues, "without placing the Host ; for I did not think I had taken possession unless this was done, but I have since learned that it was not essential, which was a great consolation to me, so little fit was the house to receive it, owing to the state in which the students, who can have had ' no curiosity,' had left it ; so that we had not a little to do that night." I can see them, the two elderly women in nun's habits, squired by good Gutierrez cloaked to the eyes, as they flit through the darkening streets of that old and vanished Salamanca, vanished yea! as completely as they have; can see them as the key grates in the lock, and their footsteps and voices echo ominously through the empty house, as if the voices were not their own, but others in response to them ; can see them, one of them an invalid, as they light some wretched oil lamp, and hang it on a crook in the wall, and then, tucking up their sleeves and habits, set to work, forgetting the two nights they have spent on the road, to repair, as best they might, the dirt and "want of curiosity" of the students. I can see them as they she and Sor Maria del Sacramento toil through the long November night, scrubbing and sweeping whilst Salamanca slept, as happy as if they owned the gold-mines of Peru, nay, to my mind, far happier, although the whole sum 376 SANTA TERESA and total of their worldly possessions are two old paintings an Ecce Homo and a Descent from the Cross, that Teresa with characteristic improvidence, "the less money the more heart," sending out from the posada had bought with the last fourteen reals left over from the journey. The Jesuit rector has lent them some tables, some linen, a frontal, and the requisites for saying Mass. With these humble materials they and the two Jesuits he has sent to help them construct the modest altar; and when the gray dawn of day steals through the chinks of the wooden shutters, the Jesuit rector celebrates the first Mass with such humble pomp and ceremony as they had. That same day [writes Teresa] I sent for the nuns who were to come from Medina del Campo. On the night of All Souls my companion and I were left alone. I tell you, sisters, that when I remember the fear of my companion, who was Maria del Sacramento, a nun older than myself, a great servant of God, I am moved to laughter. The house was very large and rambling, and with a great many garrets, and nothing could get the students out of my companion's head, who bethought herself that as they had been so angry at having to leave the house, one or other of them was hidden away in it : this they could easily have been, for there was no lack of places where they might have bestowed themselves. We shut ourselves up in a room where there was some. straw, which was the first thing I had provided for the foundation, since, having it, we did not want of a bed. We slept on it that night, with two blankets that had been lent us. Next day some nuns who lived close by, to whom we thought our coming would have been a grievance, lent us bedclothes for the companions who were on their way, and sent us alms. The name of the convent was Santa Isabel, and all the time that we dwelt in that house they did us many good offices and charities. As soon as my companion saw herself shut up in that room, she seemed to become a little easier as to the students, although she did nothing but peer from one side to the other, still full of fear ; and the devil must have helped by suggesting to her fearsome thoughts with which to disquieten me, who, owing to the weakness of my heart, was easily frightened by very little. I asked her what she was looking for, since there no one could enter. She said, " Mother, I am just thinking what you would do here alone, supposing I were to die here this moment." That, indeed, if it happened, seemed dreadful to me : it made me dwell on it a little, and even filled me with dread ; for although I am not afraid of dead bodies, the sight of them, even if I am not alone, makes me faint. And as this was increased by the tolling of the bells (for, as I have said, it was the night of All Souls), it was an excellent beginning for the devil to distract our minds with follies : when he sees that one fears him not, he seeks other roundabout ways. I said, " Sister, when that happens it will be time enough for me to think about it ; at present, let me sleep." As we had had two sleepless nights, sleep soon drove away our fear. The following day more nuns arrived, and we feared no more. In the Quarter of San Francisco of Salamanca, facing the entrance to a narrow lane on the outskirts of the town, one may see the long rambling faade of the house where she and Sor Maria del Sacramento listened to the slow and strident clanging SALAMANCA AND ALBA DE TORMES 377 of the bells as they tolled through that November night for the spirits of the dead. Look at it well, for it is worth it, even though its walls did not shut in a page of Teresa's life ; as the centuries have left it, so it has remained, a remnant of a life becoming every day more dim and distant. The arched, low- browed gateway, not built for foot passengers, but for horse- men and travellers ; the mouldering shields above it, that once ciphered the history of some lineage long forgotten (nay, not forgotten, for are they not the arms of the Godinez, connections of Teresa herself, and was not the eldest brother of Juan de Ovalle a Godinez?); the low-pitched, rustic roof of tiles, irregularly outlined against the sky, full of strange curvatures and broken lines and faded colour; the massive breadths of walls, broken here and there, but not impaired, by a casement, pierced with whimsical irregularity by successive generations according to their needs, are alike characterised by the same old-world mixture of unpretentious strength, simplicity, and stateliness. A house that, to modern ideas, incapable of comprehending the beauty of these quaint structures, or the dignity of the life they once enshrined, is little better than a barn, and that the veriest little bourgeois would turn from in disgust, but which to the artist and the dreamer is a never- failing source of delight, as if by looking at it he could saturate his soul with the tranquillity of a nobler age than his own. For in older days this house and others like it sheltered families whose blood was the purest in Castille, and who lived in them in a poverty which, as it was shared by a whole class, was accounted no disgrace, and implied no diminution of con- sideration or esteem. Of this class was Don Juan de Ovalle, a man of quality and birth, who could count three generations of distinguished ancestors ; to it belonged Teresa's father (and, as we have seen, she was intimately connected with the most illustrious families of Castille, and the proudest grandees of Spain bear her family name to-day) ; to it also that other brother-in-law of hers, Don Martin Guzman y Barrientos. And yet Juan de Ovalle and her widowed sister felt the pinch of poverty keenly, even if they bore it with that proud grace and dignity which still remains such a remarkable characteristic of the Spanish people. Inside you will find evidences of refinement that millions to-day would be powerless to buy. Step within the room which tradition affirms to be the one where Teresa and her companion slept and listened to the bells. The low, dark, open-raftered roof is inlaid with geometric designs of ivory in places the woodwork seems to have been bent and distorted by age ; the 378 SANTA TERESA cunning fingers of the Moorish artificer have long mouldered into dust, but the work is as delicate and fresh as if it had been finished yesterday. The irregularities of the white-washed walls, which bulge out here and there in a manner so portentous as to suggest that the mason who built them cared more for strength and solidity of workmanship than mere smoothness of surface (and he was right) ; the low wooden doors, blocked out of solid chestnut, darkened a little with the passage of centuries, but on which you can almost follow the strokes of the carpenter's axe are all suggestive of a healthier and larger life ; of a healthy respect for the veracities even in the building of a house ; of a virile and complete existence, not wrapped about in shams but in realities. A special charm hangs over these old interiors, with their strange atmosphere of emptiness, repose, and perfume of rusticity, a charm which fills one with sadness, so completely elsewhere does it seem to have faded from the world. The dark and sombre woodwork, the strange creak of the boards under one's feet, that have echoed to so many generations of other feet ; the rays of golden light that flood the narrow casements when the heavy shutters are unlatched, and sleep and flicker and lengthen over wall and floor ; this rectangular patio lying so still and tranquil under the blaze of the mid-day sun, full of flowers and caged birds whose melody fills the air ; the quaint columns that support the upper story, hidden by the creepers which send their fingers into every crevice, peep into every window, hang in garlands from low lintels; above all, the draped figure that flits silently through it, sending a rustle of the same unspoken peace, the same unobtrusive and obscure virtue, the same ineffable sentiment of beautiful resignation (relics of that older life) through each dim nook and corner, are the last lingering vestiges of the world in which Teresa lived. Barely two months after the foundation of the convent of Salamanca, Teresa was on her way to Alba de Tormes. The chronicler has it that, at the instance of her brother-in-law and Juana (they lived in Alba), she had already made the journey to Alba during her stay at Toledo, but, on account of the conditions imposed by the founders and the subsequent delay, had abandoned the foundation and returned to Toledo. How- ever this may be, it was not the first time (for Alba is nearer to Avila as the crow flies than Salamanca, and it is most probable that she and Sor Maria del Sacramento passed through Alba on their way to Salamanca) that she had trod that road, all unconscious (thank God for such unconsciousness) that along it she was to take her last journey ; and that those scenes and changing landscape she rode past on her donkey that January SALAMANCA AND ALBA DE TORMES 379 day were to be the last pages of the book of nature that should greet her eyes ere death closed them in unalterable repose. One can follow every step of this journey ; for it is a very short one, and easily performed in five or six hours. With her one can turn back, ere, lost in. the folds of interposing country, Salamanca fades from sight to gaze on the magnificent city, studded with the stately towers of churches and monasteries that to-day are a heap of ruins. With her one can thread the sunlit ilex woods, or wild stony wastes as stern as the flint rock that crops up amongst the fine short herbage. To her, however, those two green parallel hills the scene of one of the memorable battles of modern times, only brought to mind the familiar romance : Bernardo estaba en el Carpio, El Moro en el Arapil ; Como el Tdrmes va crecido, No se pueden combatir. Winding through oak glades and olive groves, the road, then a mere track worn by donkeys' feet, passes by the village of Calvarrarasa, where the stork muses gravely on the gray church- tower, and farther on the huts of Pelargarcia (both of which places claim the honour of having given her shelter). Then it follows for a moment the great Roman road from Zaragoza to Merida, the famous Camino de la Plata, over the wild pasture- lands of La Maza (where tradition has it that the saint and one of her companions lost their way, and were guided by angels to a fountain where she quenched her thirst) to the summit of the ridge, whence, as in a vast panorama, shut in by a distant line of mountains, one can follow the countless windings of the Tormes, as, sweeping under the old walled town, it spreads itself, a belt of glittering silver, across the vast alluvial plains that stretch from the gates of Alba to the horizon. Nothing more peaceful than the little brown pastoral town that once took rank with Avila and Salamanca, and whose fueros or municipal rights were given by Alonso el Sabio, as, sloping down to the river, it lies exposed to the evening sun. Over against the bridge, so old that already in the thirteenth century it formed the device of the municipal seal, is the machicolated gateway. On an eminence a little to the right is the castle of the Dukes of Alba, which had taken the place of some still older fortress, whence in other days the turbulent baron or the king's castellan overawed the town beneath. Already in Teresa's time the mutual rivalry and defiance that had once existed between the town and the fortress had become traditions of the past and were fading away. Those old wild 380 SANTA TERESA days were gone when the stern watch-tower exacted dues from and signed treaties with the town, sometimes defending it, as the case might be, mostly at daggers drawn with it ; or when, if menaced and attacked, the town rose in defence of the fortress. In Teresa's time it had grown into a splendid and spacious palace ; to-day it has recovered somewhat of its former look, as gaunt and impressive the gray keep, all that remains of it, rises above the surrounding waste. Farther on, as one looks across the plain studded by herds of tawny and ashen-coloured bulls, the ruins of the Jeronimite monastery built by the Archbishop Don Gutierre de Toledo at the same time as he founded the fortunes of the great house of Alba, gleam white through the poplars that fringe the river. Turn again to the town. Almost in the centre of the irregular assemblage of lines that slope down to the river, the eye is arrested by two cypresses, tall and sombre, that cut straight and rigid against the red tiles of the house-tops, the gray towers of the churches ; their blackness but brings out the pearly softness of the light behind them. Look at them well ; for that orchard whence they spring has often been trodden by the woman whose dead body is enshrined in the neighbouring walls : it is the Discalced Carmelite Convent of Alba. From this height, if you know where to look, you may even mark out the latticed casement whence the faded sight of the old foundress was soothed and cheered by the lovely perspective of plain and river which stretched below to the dim horizon ; the reflection of the beauties of this passing landscape of earth must still have lingered impressed on Teresa's eyeballs, from which the light of day was so fast fading away, as she lay dying. And indeed not one spot of it alone, but every stone in Alba, seems dedicated to Teresa's memory. It is said that her first visit when she arrived in Alba that January day was to the duchess in the magnificent palace on the hill, whose painted galleries and works of art were the wonder not only of their contemporaries but of three centuries later. To-day when all this magnificence, which so impressed Teresa as to suggest to her one of her incomparable similes, has died away like the shadow of a dream, that ruined tower and those few battlemented lengths of walls, so intimately associated with two of the most remarkable characters of the age, Ferdinand the grim Duke of Alba, and Teresa de Jesus, are chiefly remembered from their connection with the latter. Juan de Ovalle lived in Alba; his son (supposed to have been resuscitated by Teresa during the foundation of San Jose") was a page, and subsequently a gentleman, of the duke's house- SALAMANCA AND ALBA DE TORMES 381 hold. The duchess was one of her most intimate friends and admirers. It was for her that a copy of her Life was made, and it was this manuscript that cheered the duke's imprisonment in the fortress of Pinto. It was by one of those strange caprices of fate the desire of the duchess for the consolation of her presence during the confinement of her daughter-in-law that Teresa found her grave in Alba instead of in the town which had given her birth. It was when thinking of the splendours of this palatial interior which had so dazzled and confused her, that she wrote in the Moradas: "You enter a room belonging to a king or some great noble (I believe it is called a treasure-chamber), where are stored infinite kinds of glasses and pottery, and many other things placed in such order, that when you enter you can nearly see them all at a glance. I was once taken to such a room in the Duchess of Alba's house (where on arriving from a journey my superiors had ordered me to stay in obedience to her request), and as I entered I stopped amazed, wondering what such a pell-mell of things could be used for, and saw how one could praise the Lord for such a diversity of things ; and now I feel amused with the way they have come in useful here." The founders themselves were closely connected with this illustrious house, Teresa Laiz, or de la Iz, as she is styled in the original deed of foundation still preserved in the old Cathedral of Salamanca, being the wife of the steward or administrador. A dim image this Teresa de Laiz this little great lady, for the post of " contador " to the great Dukes of Alba was no small one, and only given to a gentleman of birth, reflected very vaguely from the letters of Teresa, the saint ; yet not so vaguely but that I can discern as she brushes past me fleetly a phantasm all ruff and veil and farthingale, in the faded fashion of the day a woman of excellent intentions, but pig-headed, obstinate and tenacious of her prerogatives as foundress. Testy too, and despotic, loving to rule the nuns of Alba, as she did the little world outside its gates, with a rod of iron ; imposing such a wholesome terror in them, that one and all fled from undertaking the office of prioress in her convent. And yet she was at one with them in one thing her love and reverence for the saint. Would you know more of her, turn to the Funda- ciones, where you shall find as much as you will ever know. If Teresa rouses a smile by her naif narrative of the prodigies associated with her namesake's childhood and settlement in life prodigies which did not seem to her at all misplaced when connected with one destined by Providence to fulfil such an important mission as that of foundress she has sketched in her 382 SANTA TERESA history with a few broad and vigorous touches and all her inimitable grace and energy. Teresa de Laiz was the daughter of noble parents (" Muy hijos de algo, y de limpia sangre" very much sons of some one, and of pure blood), whose poverty, however, not corresponding to their illustrious descent, forced them to hide it, together with their pride, in the obscure village of Tordillos, about two leagues from Alba. So great a pity is it [moralises the saint], that, on account of worldly things being placed in such vanity, they will rather be deprived of religious teaching and many other things which are the means of enlightening souls, by living in these little hamlets, than abate one jot of those points which constitute what they call honour. Having already had four daughters, the birth of the fifth filled them with sorrow. Indeed one may well weep, to see how mortals, blind to what is best for them, like those who are entirely ignorant of God's judgments, knowing not the great benefits that may come to them from their daughters nor the great evils from their sons, unwilling, it seems, to leave it to him who sees and creates all, are thrown into despair by that which should rather rouse their joy. Such was their mortification and disgust, or perhaps only thoughtlessness (the law nowadays would give it an uglier term), that, the third day after its birth, the hapless infant was left alone, forgotten by every one from morning until night. It is satisfactory to know that they had not neglected to baptize her. When the woman who had charge of her returned and heard what had happened, she, together with several others, rushed to see if it was dead. Weeping, she took it in her arms and exclaimed : " As if thou wert not a Christian, my child ! " on which it looked up and answered : " Yes, I am " not speaking again until the usual time for children to do so. The mother, thus convinced of the singular destinies reserved for her daughter, began to treat her well and make much of her, expressing a desire to live to see the fate in store for her remarkable offspring. When the time came for her establishment in life she would fain not have married, having no inclination to matrimony unhesitatingly, however, when her parents proposed him to her, accepting the hand of Francisco Velasquez, whom she had not as yet even set eyes on ; " but the Lord saw," says Teresa, " that this was necessary in order that the good work which both have done in his Majesty's service might be accomplished. For, apart from his being rich and virtuous, he loves his wife so dearly that he seeks to gratify her every wish ; and with every reason, as in her the Lord gave him abundantly all that can be asked for in a wife; for together with the great care with which she keeps his house, her excellence is such, that SALAMANCA AND ALBA DE TORMES 383 when her husband took her to Alba, of which he was a native, and the duke's ' aposentadores ' (officers of a great household, whose duty it is to provide and prepare quarters for their master's guests or servitors) happened to quarter a young gentleman in her house, she felt it so much, that she began to dislike the town ; for, being a young woman and of great beauty, the devil began to inspire him with such evil thoughts, that unless she had been as virtuous as she was, some harm would have come of it. When she perceived this, without saying anything to her husband, she besought him to take her to some other place, whereupon he did as she wished, and took her to Salamanca, where they lived with great content and worldly prosperity, the office he held being such that every one desired to please and make much of them." This happy and unbroken union was clouded by one thing only the absence of offspring. " Great were the devotions and prayers she made, and the only thing she besought of the Lord was, that he would give her children, so that they might praise him when she was dead ; for it seemed hard to her that she should leave none behind her to praise his Majesty in her stead. And she told me that this was the only reason she had for desiring them, and she is a woman of great truthfulness, and so religious and virtuous, that to see her works and a soul so desirous of always pleasing him, and ceaseless in employing her time well, often makes me praise the Lord." In spite, however, of her prayers to Saint Andrew (whose advocacy had been recommended to her as a sovereign remedy in such necessities), years went by and her desires remained still unfulfilled, when one night a mysterious voice broke the stillness of her bedchamber, which said : " Desire not to have children, for thou wilt condemn thyself." In spite, however, of the warning, still haunted by the same unstilled desire, " for since, she argued, her object was so good, why should she condemn herself?" she still continued her devotions until, whether asleep or awake (" however it be, that it was a good vision may be seen from what took place after- wards " it is Teresa who speaks), she had a dream. She thought she found herself in a house where, in the courtyard beneath the corridor, there was a well, and close by a lovely meadow, the grass studded over with white flowers of inex- pressible loveliness. Close to the well stood a venerable and beautiful form, delightful to look upon, whom she took to be Saint Andrew, who said, pointing to the flowers : " Different are these children from those thou longest for." She would fain have prolonged the consolatory vision, but 384 SANTA TERESA it faded away. From that moment she resolved to found a monastery : " Whence," adds Teresa, " it may be seen that it was as much an intellectual vision as an imaginary one, and that it could not be a fancy, or a delusion of the devil." Her thoughts were no longer set on having children ; far other was now her heart's desire. Her husband, complacent and devoted, welcomed her scheme, and set about looking for a suitable place. She would fain have honoured her birthplace with so pious a memorial, but this he rejected. Six years passed away, and the idea still lay latent in their breasts, although it remained unrealised, when he was summoned by the Duchess of Alba to undertake the office of treasurer in her household ; this, in spite of its being less lucrative than the one he held in Salamanca, he accepted ; and, having bought a house in Alba, he sent for his wife to join him. Great was the virtuous Teresa's grief at abandoning Salamanca for a town associated with such an odious memory, although she was somewhat tranquillised by her husband's assurance that she should be molested by no more lodgers. On arriving in Alba, to add to her distress, she was greatly discouraged by the aspect of her new dwelling, which, in spite of its being spacious and well situated, wanted the conveniences to which she had become accustomed. " And so all that night she was exceed- ing troubled." Next day, however, with the morning light, as she entered the patio, it flashed upon her that it was the one she had seen in her dream. There in the self-same spot stood the well. Amazed at the strange coincidence, she at once fixed upon it for the site of her convent. Consoled and strengthened in her resolution of making Alba her home, the childless couple began to buy the other houses adjoining, until they had secured enough space. The choice of the Order to which it should be devoted presented greater obstacles. The state of the religious bodies may be gauged by the difficulty they found in meeting one such as she wished, that is, with a limited number of inmates who should strictly adhere to their cloister. At length despairing of finding any that at all responded to her desires, and guided by the advice of two f r i arSj themselves of different Orders, good and learned men, who counselled her to devote her fortune to some other object (" for the great majority of nuns, they said, were never satisfied ; besides many other objections"), after consulting with her husband, the two resolved instead to leave the bulk of their possessions to her nephew, a virtuous youth, whom they intended to marry to Francisco's niece, devoting the rest to SALAMANCA AND ALBA DE TORMES 385 Masses for their souls. The sudden illness and death of this nephew, however, scarcely more than a fortnight after, shattered all their projects. She blamed her fatal determination of leaving to him what God had destined for another object as being ^ the cause of his death. She remembered the prophet Jonah's punishment for his disobedience, and she looked upon the loss of her nephew (whom she dearly loved) as a chastise- ment from the Almighty. Thenceforth, although ignorant how to set about it, their resolution was unalterable. It seemed as if she already foresaw what afterwards came to pass, as she discussed the disposition of her convent with those who laughed at her eagerness, convinced that her requirements were too great to be realised. She was in despair. The one, however, her confessor, a Franciscan friar, and a man of letters and influence, who had laughed the most, was the means of enabling her to accomplish her desires. On one of his journeys the fame of the new convents which were being founded every day by one Teresa de Jesus, reached his ears. He procured as much information about them as he could, and on his return he greeted the disconsolate foundress with the news of his discovery. Negotiations were opened with Teresa through Juan de Ovalle and his wife, but the insufficiency of the endow- ment stood in the way, and the scheme seems to have been abandoned until, whilst in Salamanca, she was again urged to undertake it. It was with extreme reluctance, indeed, as we have seen in the case of Malagon, that Teresa departed from her resolution of founding in poverty; but once having done so, she was inflexible in insisting that the endowment offered should be enough to cover all the needs of the community without the intervention of charity or the aid of friends and relatives "for many inconveniences arise from their wanting the necessaries of life. And never do I lack heart and con- fidence to found many convents in poverty, without endowment, in the certainty that God will not fail them ; whereas to found them with endowment, and that too little, I have none; in that case, I hold it best not to found at all." Yielding, how- ever, to the advice of her old friend and confessor, Banes, then in Salamanca, whose opinion was that it was inadvisable to leave so good a work undone for such a reason, and that a settled endowment was no obstacle to the poverty and perfec- tion of the nuns, and having brought her founders to reason by her cogent and unanswerable arguments (they having given up their house and betaken themselves to one much poorer a mark of self-sacrifice which she highly appreciated), the Host was placed on the altar, and the convent dedicated (according 25 386 SANTA TERESA to the founders' desire) to Our Lady of the Conception, on the 25th of January 1570. And so the mysterious flowers shining amidst the verdure of the meadow, that Teresa de Laiz had seen in her dream, blossomed into the white-caped Carmelites who that day took up their abode within its walls. Amongst those of illustrious rank drawn irresistibly thither by Teresa's fame (whether before or after her death is uncertain) was a sister of the Duke of Alba (Don Antonio Alvarez de Toledo, the famous old Duke of Alba's son), and it is noticeable that Teresa's niece, Juan de Ovalle's daughter, took the veil in the same building where lay the mortal remains of the valiant woman who had in vain endeavoured whilst she lived to lure her to her Order. The aged and heroic Maria del Sacramento was appointed sub- prioress under Juana del Espiritu Santo. After having, with Teresa, enjoyed a kindly laugh at her untimely tremors, let us bestow a word of praise on her real and cheerful courage. She listened unmoved to the verdict which was to deprive her of a limb, and whilst the doctors amputated her festering leg she herself (although one of them fainted), urged them on and bore the burning of the bleeding stump without a sign of emotion. This painful case lasted ten years years of great and continuous suffering, but more patience. Truly Teresa and her nuns were women of marvellous endurance. The following instance, if it serves for nothing more, shows how profoundly and ineradicably her great figure fixed itself upon the imagination of her contemporaries. When, after the saint's death, Teresa de Laiz was attacked by her last sickness, which was soon to prove mortal, feeling a little better, and far from dreaming that her hour was come, she was visited by the Mother Teresa de Jesus, with her white cape, and just as she remembered her in life, who motioned her towards her by signs. Upon which the sick woman knew that she was dying, and that she had been called by the radiant and con- solatory vision to enjoy the glory she had merited by her good works on earth. Nor must it be imagined that the saint, so immersed and occupied in her new foundations, lost sight of those she had left behind her, or that they ever ceased to have a foremost place in her thoughts. As her hair grows a little whiter, and she leans a little more heavily on that crooked ebony staff which I have so often seen in Avila, it would seem that her capacity for work waxed greater as that work, the circle of her cares, grew larger and more absorbing. She found time and attention to spare for all. Her nuns of Toledo, battling for their freedom, SALAMANCA AND ALBA DE TORMES 387 of action with the chaplains instituted by the founders, were still uppermost in her thoughts. During the years 1571 and 1572 the only letters that remain to us are the three addressed to Ramirez and Ortiz. To the former she writes from Alba de Tormes " His Majesty knows," she says, " how gladly I would have remained in your house [Toledo] longer. Since I left it I assure your grace that I have not had a day which has not been full of trials. Two monasteries have been founded, glory to God ! and this [Alba] the least. May it be his Majesty's pleasure that they may be of some service. I do not under- stand the cause why the body of the Sefior Martin Ramirez (I desire and supplicate of the Lord that he may be in glory) has not been moved [to the convent]. I beseech you to let me know the reason, and if what you settled to do (as you mentioned to me one day) has been done. O Lord, how often have you been in my memory, and how often have I blessed you in the negotiations that I have been occupied with here ; for you never went back from what you once said, even if it was in jest. ... I beseech you to tell the Sefior Diego Ortiz not to forget, as he is doing, to put my lord St. Joseph over the church door." Towards the end of March she was again in Salamanca, where her daughters had great need of her presence. This foundation, which had been accomplished with such apparent ease, was henceforth to be the constant anxiety of her life, an anxiety she was destined to bear with her to the grave. The conclusion she draws from it is characteristic. " In spite of God not having given the devil leave to put obstacles in the way of it in the beginning, since he wished it to be founded, so many have been the trials and contradictions that have been borne since, that although I write this some years after it has been founded, even yet everything is not finally settled, and so I believe God is greatly served in it, since the devil cannot abide it." An open stream (since covered over) flowed before the house, and made it cold and damp ; the size of the building made it impossible to dream of repairing it, and, as it was out of the way and at some distance from the town, the nuns suffered much from want of alms, which in their case meant hunger and ill-health. But the greatest trial of all to these solitary and cloistered women was the deprivation of the ineffable consolation of the Host upon the humble altar, it being the first foundation that Teresa had made without it. But before she could rejoin and cheer her daughters, in response to the precepts of obedience, she was obliged on 3 88 SANTA TERESA arriving in Salamanca to alight before the palace of the Counts of Monterey, who had obtained leave from the provincial for her to visit them. This vast Renaissance palace, with its plateresque balustrades, arcaded windows, and corner towers, from which hang the escutcheons of the great family of the Zunigas Acevedos, is one of the glories of Salamanca. The lower part of it which the architect, as if weary of the elegance and grace of neo-classicism, the airy filigree work, and the thousand caprices he has lavished on the upper, or unconsciously obeying the subtle Eastern influence of the Moor, has left in massive breadths of creamy wall, broken only by an occasional loophole, gives the building a harmony with its surroundings, which would have been entirely lost had it been cut up by Italian colonnades and ornament. So that not only the humbler "solar" of the decayed hidalgo which also glories in its inlaid cedar roofs, sunlit patios, and upper galleries of most quaintly carved wood, with its simple and rustic charm, inhabited to-day by the Siervas de San Jose, but the princely dwelling, retain across the centuries some perfume of Teresa's presence. I know not to whose authority to refer the two miracles Teresa is said to have worked on the occasion of this visit to the Counts of Monterey. They are not mentioned by Ribera or Yepes, but by the chronicler alone, and they may probably depend on the deposition of Ines de Jesus, the nun who accompanied her from Alba. At the request of her host she visited the sickbed of the wife of one of the high dependants of the household, suffering from high fever. As the woman felt Teresa's hands (who in a movement of pity placed them gently on her head), she exclaimed : " Who touches me ? for I am well " words which drew from the saint the exclamation which we feel disposed to echo : " Sefiores, this woman is raving " ; but when she proved her assertion by rising from her bed sound and well in body and clear in mind, the bystanders were filled with amazement. It would be puerile and an insult to good sense to impugn an occurrence so gravely told and chronicled. The explanation comes spontaneously to the mind of every one. Semi-civilised and half-educated people in all countries are apt to exaggerate their maladies ; medical science was all but non- existent, and numerous and opposite symptoms were often classed under the heading of the same disease ; besides which this special illness was one of those burning fevers (" tabardillas ") so frequent in a hot country, and so much more frequent then when, from the absence of drainage and all sanitary precautions, it was the most prevalent malady both of rich and poor. It SALAMANCA AND ALBA DE TORMES 389 may be that, as Teresa's hands touched Dofia Maria de Arriaga's head, the fever had reached its crisis in one of those moments of sudden and beneficial relief that mark the turning-point towards health. It may be, too, that so strong was the patient's faith in the saint, that the will re-acted on the body, for if faith can remove a mountain, how much more easily should it operate on a simple fever. Be it as it may, the precision of the account of the miracle has been blunted by time ; its exact sequences have been lost So little does it take in an age of credulity to make or imagine a miracle ; so small a tax on the reason to believe it. She is also said, by the prayers the dis- tracted parents implored her to make, to have restored to life the Count's little daughter, who was lying at the point of death. On this occasion, according to the chronicler (we are treating of a Count), Santo Domingo and Santa Catalina of Siena both appeared to her and told her that the child's life was spared, whom they desired to wear their habit for a year afterwards in token of gratitude. This message Teresa is said to have intimated to the Counts through Fray Domingo Banes, himself a Dominican (the correlation is striking, as also the implied flattery to his Order). This child lived to become the wife of the Count de Olivares, and mother of the Conde Duque, Philip iv.'s powerful favourite, who himself appealed through am- bassadors and cardinals to obtain the Pope's confirmation to Teresa's being made the co-patron saint of Spain, declaring that " almost from my birth I account her my patron saint and advocate, and confide greatly in her protection." Alas ! that his devotion should have taken the form of destroying for her votaries the house where she was born, and rearing in its stead a commonplace and gewgaw church, full of stucco and gilt gingerbread, in which the woman whose life we are following shrinks away from us into space, to give way to the heavy and disfigured Image of the Catholic Saint. But how? may not the unaesthetic and devout aristocrat be forgiven for doing what men many of them learned and deeply attached to her person have done with her history ? Let us seek reverently to resuscitate the Teresa of flesh and blood, and forgive the mausoleums of stone and mortar, as well as volumes, which have been piled above her strong individuality, and have well- nigh succeeded in crushing it out of all recognition. Let us now follow her to her daughters, starving for want of alms in the cheerless solitude of the empty barrack-like house over against the Arroyo de San Francisco, whom she cheers with her presence throughout Lent a Lent of which she has preserved the memory in one of those strange documents of her 390 SANTA TERESA mental autobiography called her Relations. Her biographers have assumed that it was addressed to Ripalda, but more probably, as it seems to me, it was to Banes. Nor am I sure that their chronology is right that is, if it is based on the assumption that it was Isabel de Jesus who sang the ballad which swept Teresa away from earth into a heaven of ecstasy. Either the date assigned to the letter in which Teresa expresses her desire that the would-be novice (Isabel de Jesus) should take the veil in San Jos6 of Salamanca, or that assigned to her profession in Salamanca, is incorrect ; or perhaps both. For if Isabel de Jesus did not enter the convent of Salamanca until June 1572, and did not profess until the I4th June 1573, and we find Teresa writing to her from the Encarnacion at the beginning of 1572, it is impossible that she should have sung to her in February of 1571. These discussions of dates are arid things, and import little enough to my history, although I feel it my duty to point out the anachronism into which all her biographers have fallen. Teresa's own example will shield me for not giving minute details of chronology : " In my count of the years in which they were founded [she speaks of her convents], I suspect that I am wrong about some of them, although I am as careful as I can to call them to mind. As it does not matter much, for it can be amended afterwards, I mention them, according as my memory brings them to me : the difference will be small, even if there is some error." It is necessary, however, to point out to those who are more meticulous as to trivialities than Teresa, that this Relation may well refer to the year 1574 when, as she passed through Salamanca, she bore Isabel de Jesus with her to the foundation of Segovia, and the experiences she mentions in it may have taken place partly in Salamanca, partly in Segovia. It was then, probably, that the simple and touching ballad she so often asked Isabel de Jesus to sing to her, worked on her the marvellous operation of which she speaks in this Relation. When the nuns were gathered together at night on Easter Sunday the clear young voice of the novice 1 who had trodden rank and wealth under foot to enter religion sang the moving couplets, the refrain of which was : Ve"ante mis ojos, Veante mis ojos, Duke Jesus bueno ; Muerame yo luego. 2 1 Yepes introduces a variation into the account, and affirms that this incident took place the year following that of the foundation of Salamanca. 3 May my eyes see thee May my eyes see thee Sweet and good Jesus, And soon let me die. SALAMANCA AND ALBA DE TORMES 391 Vean quien quisiere Flor de serafines, Rosas y jazmines, Jesus Nazareno, Que si yo te viere, Veante mis ojos, Vere" mil jardines : Muerame yo luego. 1 Such was the effect it worked on me [writes Teresa], that my hands began to lose sensation, and resistance was useless ; but in the same way as I "go out of myself" in ecstasies of joy, so does this profound pain suspend the soul as to leave it transported, and until to-day I did not understand it : rather did it seem to me that for some time I have not had these impetuses so strongly as I was wont, and now it seems to me that the cause is this that I have mentioned ; I know not if it can be so. For before, the pain was not so extreme as to show itself outwardly, and as it is so intolerable, and I was in my full senses, it made me cry out aloud without my being able to prevent it. Now as it has increased, it has reached the culminating point of this anguish, and I know more what Our Lady suffered, because until to-day, as I say, I have not experienced what anguish is. It left the body so broken that to-day I write even this with great pain, for the hands are left bruised and sore and as if they had been disjointed. You will tell me when you see me, what this delirium of pain can be, or if I feel it as it is, or am deceived. Again amidst much that, however beyond the range of ordinary human experience, we can follow and to a certain degree account for, comes the certain discordant note a note which if less sincere she would have suppressed, a crudity of image, the production of a mind that must give a concrete form to dim sensation ; it is the strange mixture of the materialism of the south pervading and struggling with the nebulous mysticism of the north. A Teutonic mind would have involved these ex- periences in a metaphysical haze, which we would have accepted as more probable. Teresa altogether removes them from the bounds of probability by giving them clear, sharp outlines, by throwing on them the light of day, in accordance with the instincts of the Castilian, whose country presents the same sharply-defined features, the same dislike for an atmosphere that veils and softens. She herself is the first, by the grossness and power of her conceptions, to throw doubt on much that is tender and beautiful. This is not so clearly to be discerned in the passage that immediately follows, as in several others farther on, where the harsh chord she strikes will at once jar on a sensitive ear and delicate perception. I remained with this pain until this morning, when, being in prayer, I had a profound ecstasy, and it seemed to me that our Lord bore me in spirit 1 Let jessamine and roses Flower of seraphims, Delight him who will, Jesus of Nazareth, Sweetest gardens shall refresh mine eyes May my eyes see thee At sight of thee. And soon let me die. 392 SANTA TERESA to his Father's side and said to him : " She that thou gavest to me, I give to thee," and it seemed to me that he drew me close to him. This is not an imaginary thing, but, with so great a certitude, and so spiritual a delicacy, that I know not how to describe it ; he said to me some words that I do not remember ; some of them were about doing me favours. He had me close beside him for some time. All the pathos of the renouncement of her life is concentrated in the following lines : As you went away so soon yesterday, and I see how with your many occupations it is impossible for me to console myself with you, even the needful time, since I see that your occupations are more urgent, I remained for a time with pain and sadness. This was increased by the solitude I was in, and as it seems to me no creature on earth holds me in bondage, I felt some little scruple, for fear I was not beginning to lose this liberty [sad, sad liberty !]. This was last night ; and to-day our Lord answered me as to it, and told me : " Not to be astonished, for just as mortals desire company with whom to communicate their sensual delights, so the soul desires (when there is any one who understands her) to communicate her joys and sorrows, and is saddened when she has no one." He said to me : " Now thou art on the right track, and thy works please me." . . . After communi- cating it seemed to me that I felt the Lord beside me in the clearest manner, and he began to comfort me with great delights, and said amongst other things : " Thou seest me here, daughter, for it is I ; show me thy hands," and I thought he took them in his own, and placed them on his side, saying, " Behold my wounds, do not be without me ; the shortness of life passes." And here comes in the jarring note I understood from some things he said to me, that after he ascended into heaven, he never came down to earth to have communion with any one, except in the Host. He told me, that when he rose from the dead he had seen Our Lady, for she was in great grief, being so transfixed with anguish that even then she did not recover consciousness to enjoy that joy. Hence I understood my own anguish that I have mentioned, how different it was. But what must have been the Virgin's ! And that he had remained with her a long time, since so it was necessary, until he had consoled her. On Palm Sunday as I had just communicated I was seized with a great sus- pension, so that I could not even swallow the Form, and whilst I had it in my mouth, when I began to come to myself, it seemed to me in very truth that my whole mouth was full of blood; and it seemed to me that my face and I myself were entirely covered with it as if the Lord had just shed it. It seemed to me that it was still warm, and the suavity I felt at that moment was excessive, and the Lord said to me : " Daughter, I desire that thou shall benefit by my blood, and fear not that my mercy shall fail thee. I shed it with much suffering, and thou enjoyest it as thou seest with great delight ; well do I reward thee for the delight thou gavest me this day." This he said, because for more than thirty years, if it was possible, I had com- municated on this day, and tried to prepare my soul to receive its guest, the Lord ; for the cruelty of the Jews in allowing him to go so far away to eat, seemed to me great, and I reckoned upon his becoming my guest, and ill enough was the lodging, as I now see. . . . SALAMANCA AND ALBA DE TORMES 393 Still more remarkable is the paragraph that follows, and yet let it not rouse a smile either of derision or of indulgence. Truly there is much in what Ribera says that only they who have lived this life can judge it ; not we, buried in the mechanical cares of life, whose thoughts never soar farther than money- getting or money-spending, and who have erected ourselves into our own gods, and study our mental phenomena as intently as we do our physical. Who then so bold as to impugn the reality of this subjective world, these fancies, these thrills of emotions, these sudden enlightenments, these depths of depression, shaped and moulded by desire, intense aspiration, absolute crucifixion of self; fanned into flame by amorous impulses which left the body too frail a tenement for so great a guest, fainting and distraught, which Teresa saw, which existed for her eyes, faded by suffering and abnegation ? What ideal to-day exacts such subjection, such control, such profound and ceaseless vigil on every restless sense and instinct? Ah ! let us veil our eyes, let us touch with reverence these frailties of a strong and energetic mind distorted by a belief; but let us not deny that this woman did find some recompense in this strange dream-world, often tender, and often terrible, of her own creating, for the renouncing of her life ; and that for her it existed in very truth, shedding a strange and pathetic radiance over her meagre and solitary existence. Before this [Teresa continues] I had been I think three days with that great pain of being absent from God, which is greater sometimes than at others, and during those days it had been so profound that it seemed to me I was unable to bear it, and thus having been in great distress, I saw it was late to take some food, and that I could not ; and on account of my vomitings, it makes me very weak, if I do not eat at the proper hour ; and so forcing myself I placed the bread before me in order to break it and eat ; when all at once Christ appeared to me, and broke the bread, as it seemed to me, and was about to put it in my mouth, saying : " Eat, daughter, and bear it as best thou canst. I am grieved at thy sufferings, but they are what is best for thee now." That he should say " I am grieved " [she adds characteristically] made me reflect ; because it does not seem to me that he can now feel grief for anything. In assigning this Relation to this period of her life, her biographers have been guided by a vague instinct, a sentiment, a dim perception of a distinct growth in her mental and spiritual development. They have felt that she has attained her full maturity ; that she has reached that culminating point of greatness which she may add to, but can never surpass ; that the outline of the circle has been formed and can never be widened, although it may be deepened. According to Ribera, 394 SANTA TERESA it was at this epoch that she felt the last conflicting impulses between the work which, as it grows, precipitates her more and more into action on the one hand, and the quiet of the cloister which beckons her on the other. It has been reserved to none, perhaps, as to Teresa, to retain the faint tender perfume that clings about the contemplative the poetry and the idealism, and to combine them with the multiple forces of action and motive until the one, instead of being absorbed by the other, only shows it up and marks the contrast more clearly. She perceives the chasm which folly has interposed between idealism and action, as if the two were distinct, and the one did not flow from the other as naturally as the forest tree germinates from the seed. Without idealism, show me your work how poor, how mean it looks ; but with it, although it is still mean and poor compared to the motive power, although it falls far short of the type conceived by the brain and the imagination, still it glows with all the lustre of conviction, concentration, and effort. Again, without active work, how selfish and poor is your idealism, which sits weaving its fine-spun theories, and hugging itself in the proud consciousness that it is not as those publicans and other mere men of action ! If with those eyes of the soul she sees these glimpses of glory and of light, these mysterious and fleeting forms of heavenly guests ; if the ineffable smile of Christ lends strength to the fragile frame and sinking heart, no less clear is her vision for earthly things. Martha and Mary have never been more completely, more subtly combined have never interpenetrated each other more completely ! Towards the end of March she writes to Diego Ortiz : The Holy Ghost be with your grace's soul always, and repay you the charity and grace you did me with your letter. It would not be waste of time if you wrote me many, for they might help to sustain us in our Lord's service. His Majesty knows that I would like to be with you, and so I make great haste to buy a house for this convent, which is no small matter, although there are many and cheap ones to be got, and so I hope in our Lord to conclude it quickly ; since [was flattery ever more delicate and refined ?] my haste would not be small if it could be measured by the consolation that the sight of the Sefior Alonso Ramirez would give me. I kiss his hands and those of the Senor Dona Francisca Ramirez. It cannot be but that your church must console your graces greatly, for even here I get a good share of the good tidings you give me. May the Lord permit you to enjoy it for many years ; so greatly to his service, as I beseech him. Let your grace leave some- thing to his Majesty, and do not be in such a hurry to see it finished, for in two years he has done us a good enough service. I don't know what they write to me about the lawsuit with the curate and chaplains ; it must be him of Santa Justa. I beseech you to let me know what it is. I do not write to his grace the Senor Alonso Ramirez, as there is SALAMANCA AND ALBA DE TORMES 395 no need to weary him when I write to you. I beseech our Lord (since I owe you more than I can ever repay) to reward you, and to keep you many years, and to make those little angels very saintly, especially my patron [the lad Martin Ramirez mentioned in former letters], whom it is necessary to us should be so, and always support you. Amen. To-day the XXIX. of March. Your grace's unworthy servant, Teresa de Jesus, Carmelite. Nevertheless, Teresa's efforts to provide her daughters with a suitable house were not crowned with success. In spite of the four journeys she made to Salamanca for no other purpose, death overtook her before they were finally established. After Salamanca we next find her in Medina, engaged in defending the rights of Isabel de los Angeles, seriously menaced by her relations. The letter she wrote to Simon Ruiz towards the end of October 1569, before she left Toledo, which we have already noticed, throws some light on the tangled web she was now intent on unravelling. Simon Ruiz was the regidor of Medina del Campo, and the founder of that magnificent hospital which, now one of the lions of Medina, is a memorial of the piety and devotion of that dead century. Isabel de los Angeles, his niece rich, noble, and beautiful together with her faithful and devoted servant, Sor San Francisco, who followed the fortunes of her young mistress into the cloister, as she had followed them in the world, had taken the habit in Medina del Campo in September of 1569. Her family and relatives, who had opposed her intention to the last moment, now that her entry had cut their contention short, asserted their right to the patronage of the high altar in compensation for the dower she had brought the convent. This pretension the novice herself contested. The Provincial or Visitor (himself a Carmelite), siding with the relatives, took Teresa, who was prioress, and her novice so rudely to task that Isabel de los Angeles, in an impetuous moment of masculine resolution, divesting herself of her scapulary, threw it at his feet with the words, " If your paternity is acting in the interests of your habit, behold it before you." As a last resource, Teresa was obliged to remove her to another convent, where she took the habit afresh, and finally sent her to profess in Salamanca ; which she did, according to the original document of her profession, on the 2ist of October of this same year of 1571. Her religious life was short but pregnant ; the Lord gave her as much glory (averred Teresa) during the brief four years it lasted as to others during fifty. VVith such ardour did she embrace the Cross, and so keen was her desire for suffering, that when the nuns, as they chanted the office in the choir, reached the verse, 396 SANTA TERESA " Quando consolaberis me," it was noticed that she said it so hurriedly as to form a dissonance with the rest. When the mistress of novices asked her the reason, she replied, " I fear that God may console me in this life." It is said as it is said of nearly all Teresa's nuns (and it is not strange that they should feel the presence which had attracted them so powerfully in life hovering around them in the mysterious moments which precede the corporal dissolution) that, although one was in Segovia and the other dying in Sala- manca, for these two souls the barriers of space were cleared, and that the saint cheered and strengthened her to meet her death, which took place on the nth June 1574, when the faithful and devoted servant, whose tender ministrations (let us hope) were permitted by the rigorous rule of the convent to soothe the sufferer's last hours, saw her crowned with great glory. Already in Medina might be heard the first distant mutterings of the tempest which was presently to menace with destruction Teresa's Reformed Order of Carmelites. The dis- pute about the dower of Isabel de los Angeles was embittered and complicated by Teresa's resolute and independent attitude as to the election of a prioress, in which she again came forward as the champion of the rights and liberties of her nuns. The Provincial, already angered by her having withdrawn the prioress, Ines de Jesus, to accompany her to the foundation of Alba, was now bent, instead of re-electing her as Teresa and her nuns laid claim to, on imposing on them a prioress chosen by himself one Dofla Teresa de Quesada, who, in the saint's judgment and that of her daughters, was absolutely unfit for the post. Irritated by the robust resolution they displayed, which he looked upon as unwarrantable daring and defiance, the Provincial, spurred on by the angry friars behind him, already jealous of the rising fame and purity of the rival body, expelled Ines de Jesus, and, forcibly reinstating Dona Teresa de Quesada in her stead, ordered both Teresa and her prioress, under pain of excommunication, to leave Medina that same day. Deaf to her daughters' entreaties and unmoved by their tears (it was mid-winter), the saint and her companion set forth that very night, and, mounted on a water-carrier's donkeys, the only mode of transport she could find, arrived at the gates of San Jose". It was not long, however, before Teresa's anticipations and her opinion of the rival prioress were promptly justified. She and her nuns came to an open rupture, and Dona Teresa, dis- gusted with a post which she perhaps felt herself but ill com- petent to fulfil, doubtless rendered a thousand times more SALAMANCA AND ALBA DE TORMES 397 difficult by the hostile attitude of a resentful community, left both it and the Primitive Rule at the same time, and, return- ing in dudgeon to the Encarnacion and the Old Observance, abandoned the government of the convent of Medina to its fate. In 1570, seeing that the visitation of the Orders by the bishops and private individuals appointed by the Pope and Philip had been attended with such scandal and disquiet, notably in the case of the Carmelites (we have already seen how profoundly convulsed they had been by the General's visit in Andalucia) ; Pope Pius V., at the instigation of the Catholic King, appointed two visitors for that Order, men of unblemished character and reputation, both Dominicans (the administrators of what it is customary to call in euphonious language the Holy Office) one of them, Bargas, for the Province of Andalucia, and the other, the Father Master Fray Pedro Fernandez, for that of Castille. Their commission was to last four years, during which time they were empowered, if prevented by their occupations from undertaking it themselves, to devolve their powers on a substitute. The authority of a monastic visitor was omnipotent, unimpeachable. Thus Teresa writes to Ortiz : After the letter to our father general was gone, I recollected there was no reason for it, for anything done by the father visitor is incomparably more binding, since it is as if the pope did it himself, nor can it be undone by any general or general council. In 1571 Fray Pedro de Fernandez, who had not assumed his charge at once, first made the acquaintance of Teresa, now prioress of San Jose in Avila. Of great sanctity, courage, and prudence, in spite of the warm eulogies of a brother Dominican, Banes, notwithstanding that he himself when she was all unknown to him had taken up the cudgels in her defence, when the authorities and corporation sat in consultation as to the advisability of another convent at Medina del Campo, he was still inclined to think that Teresa's character and qualities had been exaggerated. He had only to converse with her to realise her transcendent abilities, her gifts of government, and the power and charm of her spiritual enthusiasm. The bare approbation of such a man, given to few words, not over-lavish of praise, was equivalent to extravagant eulogy on the lips of others. Compelled by reluctant admiration, he is reported to have remarked to Banes, " They told me she was a woman, but I find her a bearded man ! " From Avila he visited Medina, and attempted to introduce 398 SANTA TERESA some order into that convent, still agitated by the events we have just narrated. By this time the prioress, whose appointment by the Provincial, and his absolute refusal to withdraw her, had caused all the mischief, had betaken herself to the Encarnacion and the Mitigated Rule, having abandoned the government of the convent to its fate. The visitor seized the opportunity to appoint Teresa herself prioress, his decision being approved by the unanimous voice of the community. As she travelled to Medina in obedience to his behest, she arrived by night at a river. Those who were with her (probably Master Julian and some rough muleteers), in ignorance of the ford, stood hesitating on the brink, afraid to cross ; upon which the stalwart old nun tucked up her habit and stepped into the river, saying, " It is not good for us to remain here exposed to the night dews ; begin to cross and commend yourselves to God." Before she had got very far, however, they suddenly noticed a light like that of a torch, which, although a little way off, guided them across the dangerous crossing to the opposite bank. From August to October we find her signature affixed to the convent accounts, which until the previous June had been signed by Teresa de Quesada. But she was presently to be recalled from Medina to under- take the work of Reform in the great, unruly, disorganised community of the Encarnacion. The very existence of the convent where she had spent the greater part of her life was threatened. The nuns, menaced by starvation, had already determined to seek permission to abandon the cloister and return to the houses of their relatives. Its discipline, the relaxations in which had driven Teresa forth to undertake the great work of her life, was almost extinct. " In everything relating to temporal matters as well as spiritual ones," writes Yepes, "destruction was imminent." In this supreme crisis the heads of the Order could devise but one remedy ; there was one person only who could save it from utter ruin and abandonment. And that was the very woman who had shaken its dust off her feet ten years ago, whose conduct on that occasion had, in the eyes of her outraged sisters, been an affront and insult to themselves and the Order ; who had been condemned by her own townsfolk as a dangerous visionary, and laughed at as a madwoman. Time, however, had redressed the mistaken verdict of men. To save the Encarnacion from destruction, the Carmelite authorities them- selves, jealous as they were of the rising Order she had brought into being, turned to solicit the aid of Teresa de Jesus, as being the only person whose wise head, indomitable will, and strong and steady hand could cope with the impending ruin, and restore SALAMANCA AND ALBA DE TORMES 399 the Encarnacion to prosperity and discipline. For Fernandez in taking such a resolution was not alone ; he was seconded by the unanimous vote of the Carmelite Definitors. Even Teresa's stout heart (and never was there a stouter one than that which beat under her coarse serge habit) shrank at the prospect. In spite of the affection with which she regarded the home where the greater part of her uneventful life had slipped away in uninterrupted repose, an affection which she proved by her efforts to relieve its necessities out of such slender stores as she could conscientiously call her own (the money, for instance, her brother sent her from the Indies) ; one may imagine the struggle which now took place between duty and inclination, inclination which she had also raised into a duty. She saw herself condemned to bury three years of her life, a life which she could not help fearing was nearing to its term, she was now close on sixty, three years of the life she might otherwise have spent in the propagation and extension of her Reform (for already she had begun to cherish the prospect, which she herself was not destined to realise, of carrying it beyond the confines of Spain into other countries), in the shadow of the Encarnacion, in the fulfilment of duties which she had ever shrunk from. She was called upon to relinquish that control over the scattered communities she had formed, which drew from her their vitality and nourishment; towards which she stood almost in the same relation, but a much nearer and a more intimate one, as did the visitor to the entire Order, exercising over them complete supervision, and their entire business passing through her hands. In short, it meant the abandonment of the work to which she had sacrificed her life and strength, in order that she might invigorate and breathe fresh life into a demoralised and hostile community, on whom she had been imposed against their will. Small wonder that the frail old woman, worn out with constant ill-health and ceaseless travel, hesitated. Not for long. She now shows us how pure, how clear the motive, unstained by a particle of self- interest or personal consideration, which forces her to sacrifice all she most cherished before the imposing and ruling power of her life, Duty. One day after the octave of the Visitation, as I was commending one of my brothers to God in a hermitage of Mount Carmel, I said to thz Lord, I know not if in thought (for this my brother is where his salvation runs great danger) : If, Lord, I saw your brother in this peril, what would I not do to help him ? It seemed to me that I would have left undone nothing it was in my power to do. The Lord said, " Oh, daughter, daughter ! my sisters are they of the Encarnacion, and yet thou hesitatest. If so, take 400 SANTA TERESA courage ; behold this is my will, and that it is not so difficult as it seems to thee, and where thou thinkest that thy own foundations shall lose, both they and it shall gain." The date when Teresa assumed the government of the Encarnacion is not determined. She asserts that this Divine locution took place a week after the Visitation, and, according to some, on the I3th of July, one or two days later, she formally renounced the office of prioress at Medina, although, according to others, she signed the convent accounts from August to October. 1 This would point either to the conclusion that the chronology of her biographers is at fault, or that she received the intimation that she was appointed prioress of the Encarnacion before she started for Medina. At all events, on her return journey from Medina to Avila an incident occurred, trifling enough in itself, but in which the pious chronicler finds a parallel to Christ's charge to his apostles, when he bade them go to Jerusalem and tell a certain man to get ready an upper room, where he might sup with them. However this may be, it is a fine touch, which marks one of the characteristic traits of the national life, and is for that reason interesting. It has always been the Spaniard's habit to take his exercise in public: in winter under the arcades of the market-place or the crowded streets, as he does to-day in Avila and Burgos; in summer along some promenade set apart for the purpose, bordered by trees and lit up by fountains. This is as empty and deserted in winter as the arcades are crowded and noisy. As Teresa drew near to AreValo she sent forward one of her escort to inform a certain priest, Alonso Esteban, whom, she said, he would find walking under the arcades, of her approach, and to ask him to make ready for her some place where she and her companions might spend the night. All passed as she had said ; and he found her a lodging in the house of a lady, Dofta Ana de Velasco. Before Teresa had started for Medina, in obedience to an enactment of Fernandez (doubtless made necessary by what had just taken place in regard to Da. Teresa de Quesada) to the end that no Carmelite nun could remain in a Dis- calced Convent, unless she had first publicly renounced the Mitigated Rule, she insisted on being the first to do so. Before a large and imposing concourse of witnesses, she 1 So far as I can make out, the most probable chronology of this year of her life runs as follows : Teresa left Medina in mid-winter of 1570. She remained at Avila, where she received the above revelation, until July or August, when she returned to Medina, and signed the convent accounts until October. It was therefore in October that she assumed the reins of the Encarnacion. SALAMANCA AND ALBA DE TORMES 401 read out aloud the following words, which she then solemnly signed : I, Teresa de Jesus, a nun of Our Lady of Carmel, professed in the Encarnacion of Avila, and now at this moment in San Jose, where the Primitive Rule is observed (which I have hitherto kept in this convent, by the leave of our most Reverend Father, fray Juan Bautista Rubeo, who also gave me permission, in case my superiors bade me return to the Encarna- cion, to keep it there), declare that it is my will to keep it all my life, and I promise to do so, and I renounce all the briefs given by the pope for the mitigation of the said Primitive Rule, which, with our Lord's favour, I hope and promise to keep until death. And in testimony of my truth, I sign it with my name. Done on the I3th of the month of June 1571, Teresa de Jesus, Carmelite. This deed was accepted by the visitor on the 9th of October, which we may therefore consider as the approximate date of her entry into the Encarnacion. By virtue of his apostolic authority, he then released her from her vows in the Encarnacion, and admitted her into the Primitive Rule, making her (although, according to Ribera, she was already prioress of the Encarna- cion) a member of the convent of Salamanca. 26 CHAPTER XV LIFE IN THE ENCARNACION JOURNEY TO SALAMANCA FOUNDATION AT SEGOVIA IN the meantime the nuns of the Encarnacion, backed up by many influential people of the town, prepared to resist the obnoxious control which the visitor and Carmelite chapter had forced on them against their will and without their sanction. Their bitter hostility to Teresa arose from many reasons. Had she not risen, out of their knowledge, into fame and to small minds (and the majority of minds are very small) can any one they have known and been familiar with commit a greater crime? Is it not a personal insult to themselves an impalp- able derogation from their merits? When, indeed, shall a prophet get honour in his own country? Moreover, had she not blackened her offence she, this Teresa de Ahumada, who had lived with them for more than thirty years by inaugurat- ing a Reform which was little less than a treason, at the very least an act of base ingratitude to the Order she had been nurtured in, a slight to the Encarnacion in particular, and an obvious reflection on themselves ? Neither had they any mind to be shorn of their privileges, to be rudely shaken up from their supineness and exemptions exemptions that Popes had sanctioned, by this stern old rigorist who would surely never rest until she had reduced them to a rule and discipline they had not professed and did not feel inclined to admit. Hunger was bad, but to be forcibly transformed into a model of virtue like San Jose* was worse. No, not they ! they would soon show the visitor and his prioress that it was not so easy to tamper with the liberties of the Encarnacion as they thought. They bespoke the assistance of a number of gentlemen of the town, and prepared to resist Teresa's entry by main force. The visitor himself felt an uneasy qualm as the moment approached. Accompanied by the Provincial, Fray Caspar de Salazar, and another monk, sent with her by the visitor in case it came to blows, Teresa re-entered her old home. 402 LIFE IN THE ENCARNACION 403 In the low choir of the convent that choir to-day so tranquil and dreamy which faces the high altar, the Provincial convoked the frowning and angry sisterhood, and read to them the patent of Teresa's election by the visitor and chapter. Their conclusion was the signal for the wildest uproar. Many rose up and defied the patents, vomiting forth accusations and insults against Teresa. The minority seized the cross and formed in procession to receive her, whilst the two monks effected her entrance by sheer force. Then arose an unholy Babel ; a shrieking of women's tongues, a frenzied excitement, which it is hard to imagine as having taken place within the tranquil walls of the Encarnacion. Some chanted the Te Deum ; others breathed maledictions against their prioress and him who sent her there. The Provincial, beside himself with rage, stood in the midst of a pandemonium he could neither restrain nor control, surrounded by fainting, hysterical, excited women. During the progress of this wild scene Teresa remained humbly kneeling before the altar. She now rose. With a smiling face she mediated between the wrathful Provincial and his no less furious and rebellious subjects. She expressed her sympathy with the nuns for having a prioress forced on them against their will, and begged the Provincial not to wonder at anything they said, for they were right not to desire a prioress so unworthy. Concealing her intent, she approached those who had fainted either through excitement or weakness of the heart, and stroking their faces gently with her hands in compassionate tenderness, it was noted that under her soothing and magic touch they recovered consciousness and strength. When, however, she was confronted with these miracles and others like them, she attributed them to the great virtues of a relic of the Lignum Crucis she bore on her person : " All to dissemble," adds Yepes, '*' that which the Lord had placed in her hands." Such was her stormy entry. The Provincial, however, although he had effected Teresa's entry, left the revolt still raging behind him when he shook the dust of the Encarnacion off his feet that October day. The most obstinate and defiant only waited for an opportunity to flout her authority. They plotted amongst themselves to resist her orders by insolence, and, if necessary, by blows. Teresa was not ignorant of these intentions when she held her first chapter. As the sisterhood, however, gathered together in the choir to meet their prioress, a strange hush fell upon them ; some averred afterwards that they trembled, for, enthroned in the provincial stall, they saw, not the obnoxious intruder, whom they had come to insult and set at nought, but the benign and 4 o 4 SANTA TERESA beautiful image of Our Lady of Clemency, holding in her hands the convent keys ; at her feet serene and confident sat Teresa de Jesus. Overawed by her profound humility, they listened in silence, as she rose and gently addressed them. The words which fell from her lips welled from her heart to meet the exigencies of a fleeting moment. It was not a set oration, but one most potent. They were perhaps afterwards preserved by the pen of some sister who was present, although the dis- similarity of style to Teresa's has caused them to be regarded as apocryphal ; but the spirit which informs them, so firm, moderate, and gentle, is verily her own : Ladies, mothers, and my sisters, our Lord has sent me to this house to undertake this post by reason of my obedience, one which I as little expected as deserved. This election has given me great distress, not only because it has forced duties on me that I may not be able to fulfil, but also because it has deprived you of the control which you possessed over your own elections, and given you a prioress against your will and taste, and such a prioress that she would do well if she succeeded in learning from the least one of you the many virtues she possesses. I come only to serve you, and to administer to your pleasure as far as I am able ; and to this end I hope that the Lord will help me greatly. For as to the rest, any one of you can teach and reform me. For that reason consider, my ladies, that what I can do for each one of you, I will do it willingly, even to the shedding of blood, and giving up my life. I am a daughter of this house, and a sister of your graces. I know the circumstances and necessities of all, or of the greater number ; there is no reason to dread one who is so entirely yours. Do not fear my rule, for although I have lived until now, and ruled amongst Discalced nuns, by the Lord's mercy I know well how those who are not should be governed. My desire is that we should all serve the Lord with suavity ; and that we should do that little enjoined on us by our Rule and Constitutions, for the love of that Lord to whom we owe so much. Well do I know how great is our weakness ; but although our works do not reach so far, let our desires do so ; for the Lord is pitiful, and will order it so that, little by little, our works shall rise to our intentions and desire. Teresa had surprised them into silence, and that pause of hesitation and suspense, which she knew so well to turn to account, gave her the victory. Those haughty and indomitable nuns, many of whom belonged to the noblest families of Castille, were vanquished. They who had been the most refractory, voluntarily placed the yoke which had seemed so unendurable upon their own necks. They it was who brought her the convent keys, and requested her to distribute the offices of trust as she thought fit So true is it, as she herself says, that everything is best achieved by love. And not only was Teresa suaviter in modo, but fortiter in re, as a gay young gentleman, belonging to one of the noblest families of Avila, found to his cost. More persistent than the rest who had been wont to spend the sunny afternoons dangling LIFE IN THE ENCARNACION 405 around the convent gratings, infuriated at the failure of all his efforts to see a particular nun, he demanded to speak with the prioress herself, and took her roundly to task in no measured or courteous language. Teresa listened to him in patient silence, reasoned with him gravely, and then menaced him sharply and decisively with the King's displeasure. If his shadow fell again across the convent doorway, she would, she said, make the King cut off his head. When he retired, discomfited and dismayed, from the interview he himself had sought, he averred there was no jesting with the Mother Teresa, adding sorrowfully that, as for him, he had done with nuns, and that the palmy days of the Encarnacion were over. Her other measures were equally energetic and radical, although so masked over with deference for her subjects that, surprised to find themselves captives, they proposed of their own accord those measures which she secretly desired. " It is right, mother," said the humbled nuns, amongst whom were some of the most refractory, " that your reverence should have the keys of the wheels and parlours, and choose such and such persons for office." " Since so it appears to your reverences," she answered, " let it be so." With the Commissary's approval she sent for two of her Discalced friars, Fray Juan de la Cruz and Fray German de San Matias, to take charge of the services and the souls of the nuns of the Encarnacion. Isabel Arias, a first cousin of her own, on whose co-operation she could rely, was summoned from Valladolid, where Maria de Bautista (afterwards so famous) substituted her as prioress. The temporal affairs of the convent began to improve under Teresa's wise administration. She herself was beholden to the convent for nothing beyond a ration of bread, and we find her writing to her sister Juana to send her a few reals to provide for her most urgent necessities. Even with the alms sent her by her powerful friends, Dona Maria de Mendoza, and that Dona Magdalena de Ulloa, " the almsgiver of God " the friend and mother of Don John of Austria it was a perpetual struggle to keep the wolf from the door. " With the great want I see in the Encarnacion," writes Teresa, " I can save nothing." Besides the constant care and responsibility entailed on her by a large and poverty-stricken community "This house of the Encarnacion is seen notably to make my health suffer; please God I may gain somewhat by it" this feeble and elderly woman, suffering from habitual ill-health, her nights consumed by fever, which left her at two in the morning only to make way for the shivering fits of ague (" it grieves me to 406 SANTA TERESA see myself so useless, that I do not and cannot leave my corner except for Mass ") never lost sight of the scattered communities she had founded, kept up a ceaseless correspondence with them, advising, directing, and consoling, " So that I might see," she adds, " that, as St. Paul says, all is possible in God." Scarcely able to cope with her innumerable occupations and trials, not the least amongst them her enormous correspondence, she felt that sense of loneliness, of complete isolation, which often weighs so heavily on those whose genius or aspirations interpose a bar between themselves and their fellows. It is scarcely a complaint, scarcely more than a sigh, which breathes imperceptibly through her familiar letters. " I miss you very much here," she writes sadly to her sister Juana, buried in the little town of Galinduste, near Salamanca, where she and her husband were wont to pass the winter (on account, as we shall hear farther on, " of the excellent fires "), " and I find myself alone." The cold, hard winter of the upland Castilian town sorely tried the ailing woman. " God deliver me from it " she refers to Galinduste " and even from this also." " My native place," she adds to Dona Maria de Mendoza, "has agreed with me in such a way that it does not seem I was born here. At one and the same time I have so little health (and I laugh sometimes at myself that in spite of it all I do everything), and I am left without a confessor, and so much alone, that there is no one with whom I can converse for some little consolation ; but I must be so circumspect in everything, although, as to what concerns bodily comfort, sympathy has not been wanting, nor thoughtful people." But if she lives in solitude, the solitude which is perhaps the inexorable fate of those greater than their age, it is sweetened by the love and respect she has conquered from her nuns. " When I see them so tranquil and good, and certainly so they are," she writes feelingly to Dona Maria de Mendoza, " it hurts me to see them suffer [from hunger] the change in them is so great as to praise God for it. The most wilful are now the most contented, and the kindest to me. This Lent neither man nor woman, not excepting even parents, has visited the convent, which is a strange thing for this house. . . . Truly there are here great servants of God, and nearly all of them are improving. My prioress works these marvels. That you should see it is so, the Lord has ordered my state to be such, that it seems as if I had only come here to abhor mortification, and to consider my own comfort alone." Although she never for a moment shrank from her responsi- bilities, her words to Father Ordonez, in reference to the LIFE IN THE ENCARNACION 407 foundation of a school for the education of maidens in Medina del Campo were surely dictated by her own experience of the difficulties to be encountered in the government of a large community. It must be remembered that when she took up the reins in the Encarnacion the relaxations that had driven her from it had ended in complete disorganisation. More than eighty nuns fought for preference, and filled the cloister walls with their often not edifying chatter. By degrees Teresa her- self had drained off the purer and more conscientious spirits to swell the Reform, and only the residuum was left. "It is as different," she writes, "teaching girls, and managing a great number of them together, from teaching boys, as white is from black. ... I have experience of what many women together are like. God deliver us." Whilst Teresa thus defined a sharp line of demarcation between the sexes, which, so all unconsciously in her own case, she had annihilated so gloriously, she wrote her brilliant and witty answer to the friars of Pastrana, who had challenged her and her nuns to enter with them the lists of a spiritual combat. This Cartel de Vejamen, now become famous, veiled a deep current of lofty intention under the jesting terms of knight- errantry. In this spiritual combat, suggested by the celebrated Gracian, who two years before had entered Pastrana as a novice, which was in Teresa's case at least a combat of wits, the monks measured themselves against a powerful and merciless antagonist. Thus were the two people, afterwards destined to wield such an enormous influence over each other's lives and the future fortunes of the Order, first brought into contact, little recking the closeness of the ties which time was to forge between them, and which " death itself was powerless to loosen." The prologue is delicate and humorous : Having seen the cartel, our strength did not seem sufficient to enter the lists with champions so brave and valorous, as they were certain of victory, and of leaving us entirely despoiled of our possessions, and even perchance so cowed as to be unable to do what little we can. Seeing this, not one of us signed, and Teresa de Jesus least of all. This is entirely true, without a trace of fiction. We agreed to do what our strength allowed us, and, after a little practice of these feats, it might be that, by the favour and help of those who should desire to take part in them, we may be able to sign the cartel a few days hence. It must be on condition that the maintainer being, as he is, buried in those caves [an allusion to the caves of Pastrana, the first dwelling-places of the primitive friars of Pastrana], does not go back from his promise, but that he sallies forth into the field of this world, where we are. It may be that finding himself always at war, where it is necessary for him always to keep his armour buckled, and never relax his attention, nor enjoy a moment in which he can rest with security, he may not be so SANTA TERESA furious, for the one is as different from the other as action is from words, for we understand a little of the difference between them. Let him sally forth, himself and his companions, and leave that delightful life ; it may be then that, as soon as they do so, they will stumble and fall, and that it may be necessary to help them to rise ; for it is a terrible thing to be always in danger, and laden with weapons, and hungry. Since the maintainer provided food so abundantly, let him send the provisions he promises without delay ; for to vanquish us by starvation will gain him but little honour or profit. Each of the nuns offers up a merit in exchange for some virtue to be gained by the prayers of the knights of Pastrana. Thus Beatriz Juarez (she was probably Teresa's infirmarian, for the whole of this strange and characteristic document is instinct with subtle irony) bestows two years of what she has earned in curing very troublesome patients to him or her who shall offer up a prayer each day that the Lord may keep her in his grace, and grant her not to speak unadvisedly. Teresa de Jesus takes up the challenge last in quaint and humorous spirit. Teresa de Jesus says : That she will give to any of the Virgin's Knights who shall every day offer up a most determined resolve to bear all his life with a stupid, vicious, gluttonous, and ill-conditioned superior [she was herself the prioress of the Encarnacion], the day he shall do so, the half of what she has merited that day in the communion as also in the many sufferings she endures ; which, in short, all told, will be little enough. He must consider the humility of Christ before his judges, and his obedience even to death on the cross. This contract is to last for a month and a half. Teresa's residence within its walls sheds to-day its greatest glory over the imposing embattled convent of the Encarnacion. As her influence still lingers in a thousand details, so in like manner it may be that, if they could but render them, those massive walls still conserve the tones of her voice, as of those of the generations of nuns who have passed away to their eternal rest under the cloister slabs. Strange it is that the inanimate should live, whilst the vitality it enveloped, with its passionate throbs, its world-embracing aspirations, its strange mixture of the human and the divine, should be swallowed up in darkness, and leave no record. It is hard to penetrate the quaint and fanciful body of legend which has sprung up about this period of her life, formed in equal parts of fact and fancy, but so inextricably blended as to be impossible to separate. The Virgin of Clemency still looks down on the curious gazer into the obscure depths of the Coro Bajo which faces the High Altar, with the same benignity as when she quelled Teresa's first unruly chapter. From that day to this, like the Visigothic Archbishops of Toledo, who never again occupied the throne LIFE IN THE ENCARNACION 409 where it is said San Ildefonso perceived the vision of the Virgin, no prioress has dared to profane the priorial stall, so doubly consecrated, consecrated by an inanimate figure, consecrated far more by the hand whose severed portions have been scattered as a benediction over the world. Here in this shady locutorio, where behind the wooden lattice flits a glimpse of some white coif, cutting a straight line over a pallid brow, and luminous eyes; where the sun streams in through an open casement and sleeps on the red brick floor, so cool, so full of a rural quaint simplicity which is mingled with I know not what dignity and stateliness of another epoch, Beatriz de Jesus entering suddenly, testified to having seen Teresa and San Juan de la Cruz floating in mid-air in ecstasy. That little narrow grating, submerged in obscurity, where the nuns communicated, tradition sanctifies as the spot where Christ celebrated his espousals with Teresa de Jesus. As with Sta. IneV Sta. Cecilia, St. Catherine of Alexandria, here the faithful devoutly believe that Christ pledged his mystic troth to Teresa de Jesus. And in very truth she saw, or fancied she saw (and are not the two identical, O ye of little faith?) those great things which had been promised to her as she knelt in the little hermitage of Medina del Campo. In those moments when, in her own figurative and sublime language, her soul rose above itself on to its own house-top, soaring to heights alone inhabited by the brooding presence of the divinity : I saw Christ, represented to me as at other times in an imaginary vision, in the interior of my soul, give me his hand, and say to me : Behold this nail, which is the sign that from this day henceforth thou shalt be my bride. Until now thou hadst not merited it. Henceforth thou shalt watch over my honour not only as thy Creator, and King, and God, but as my spouse in very truth. My honour is thine, and thine mine. Now she sees the heavens open and reveal the enthroned Divinity, in all its glory, and is surprised to find that the vision which had seemed to her so transitory has lasted two hours. On the Day of the Assumption she watched the Ascent of Christ into heaven, and the joy and solemnity of the celestial court as he took his place amongst them. These visions, however, sensual as are many of the elements which form them, and their evolution distinctly and easily trace- able that of the celestial court is moulded on Ezekiel and the Apocalypse, as her fancy of the animals supporting the throne 1 Perhaps better known to the English reader as St. Agnes. 4 io SANTA TERESA distinctly proves are mingled with others, truly the most wonderful she ever used, which show the curious mixture of poetic and delicate feeling, combined with an intuitive per- ception of philosophical abstractions and psychological analysis, which is so characteristic of her intellect, and separates her by a world from the aberrations of the Quietists. Being, with the rest, at Hours, my soul was suddenly suspended, and every part of it seemed to me to be like a clear mirror whose back and sides, top and bottom, were all absolutely clear, and Christ our Lord, as I am accustomed to see him, in the centre of it. It seemed to me that I saw him clearly in every part of my soul as in a mirror, and this same mirror (I know not how) was entirely sculptured in Christ himself by a communication (that I cannot describe) of exceeding love. I know that this vision did me great good whenever I thought of it, especially after communicating. I understood that when a soul is in mortal sin, this mirror is covered with a dense mist, and becomes very black, so that the Lord can neither be represented in it nor seen, although he is ever present giving us life and being ; and that in the case of heretics, it is as if the mirror was shattered, which is much worse than if it was only darkened. The way in which it is seen is very different from any description of it, for it is very difficult to make any one under- stand it. But it has done me great good, and filled me with sorrow for the times when my sins darkened my soul so much that I could not see this Lord ! In the nomenclature of the mystics, in which sometimes I can distinguish the voice of a distraught Plato, high philo- sophical contemplations, driven into a thousand aberrations by the attempt to reconcile them with, and force them into, the narrow limits of Christianity, this representation of the mirror was an imaginary one, since it united dimensions, with light and a centre ; all these things being counterfeits of, or bearing some resemblance to, corporal ones. In the intellectual vision, on the contrary, the soul rises to the comprehension of things in themselves, in their essence, seizes on the archetypes of ideas, when all image is superfluous. 1 In her vision of the Diamond, without using any philo- sophical subtleties of language, she gives an example (perhaps unconsciously) of the intellectual vision, clearer than any definition : Being once upon a time in prayer, it was represented to me like a flash, although I saw nothing formed, still it was a representation with all clearness, how all things are seen in God, and how all are contained in him. ... It seemed to me, I repeat, although I cannot be certain, 1 This is at all events what I can seize as being the schoolmen's meaning, for I must put myself into Teresa's category (in which I think she far outstripped both schoolmen and philosophers) when she says, "As for mind, soul and spirit it is all one to me." JOURNEY TO SALAMANCA 411 that I saw nothing ; (still something must be seen, since I am able to give this comparison) but it is in a way so subtle and delicate that either the understanding cannot reach it, or I do not myself understand these visions, for they do not appear imaginary, and in some of them something of this there must be, but rather that as the faculties are suspended, they cannot shape it afterwards in the way the Lord then represents it to them, and wills that they should enjoy it. Let us say that the Divinity is like a very lustrous diamond, larger than all the world, or like a mirror, in the same way as what I said of the soul in the former vision, saving that it is in a manner so transcendental, that I cannot express it ; and that all we do is seen in this diamond, it being so fashioned that it includes everything within itself, because there is nothing but what is contained in this magnitude. It was a fearful thing for me to see in so brief a space, so many things together in this clear diamond, and most grievous when- ever I think on it to see what ugly things were represented in that lovely clearness as were my sins. On St. Stephen's Eve, during the first year of her rule at the Encarnacion, as the voices of the nuns intoned the magnifi- cent strains of the Salve Regina, Teresa, kneeling in the choir, wrapped in ecstatic devotion, saw the Queen of Heaven flutter down, surrounded by a multitude of angels, and by some strange transmutation fill the place of the wooden image in the priorial stall (" at least it seemed to me that I saw not the image, but our Lady, as I say "), whilst the invisible forms of the angels (whose presence she felt and did not see) clustered above the carved heads of the choir stalls, and wreathed themselves about the lectern. These were the visions which illumined her cares while the two years of her term of office were fast drawing to a close in the Encarnacion, where five years later, such the devotion and affection inspired by the austere benignity of her rule, those same nuns, with the same independent and insubordinate spirit they had on a similar occasion directed against herself, will unanimously elect her prioress, and carry their suit against the angry Provincial who refuses to confirm it, before the Royal Council Chamber, then the supreme Court of Spain, suffering imprisonment and the severest punishments rather than yield a jot of their pretensions. For towards the end of July 1573, the old wayfarer, her frail and ailing body sustained by her brave and resolute spirit, once more found herself on the way to Salamanca, where the necessities of her daughters so urgently claimed her presence, that they had obtained Fernandez's permission (who happened to be there at the time) for her to return to them. Before she started, towards the middle of June (although she had written to him before), she addressed the first of her letters that has been preserved to "the Sacred 412 SANTA TERESA Cesarian Catholic Majesty of the King our Lord." The nature of the service she sought from Philip is unknown, but the letter itself forms a curious link between the life of the Carmelite saint and the history of the House of Austria. For " our lady the queen " and the prince to whom she refers, for whose long life the community of the Encarnacion and the convents of the Reform offer up their supplications, are that Ana of Austria, Philip's fourth wife, who should by rights have become the consort of the unfortunate Don Carlos, and her son, the infant Don Fernando who, a baby of one year old, had just been proclaimed heir to the Spanish throne in the monastery of San Geronimo el Real. "On which day," says Teresa, "we offered up especial prayers. ... A great alleviation it is for the trials and persecutions rife in it, that God our Lord possesses so great a defender-and prop of his Church as is your Majesty." So she addresses the strange and much-misunderstood man a man without parallel in history, for none have ever been so belauded and so vilified ; a man, in whom it is difficult to separate what was imposed on the monarch from the spon- taneous tendencies of the individual, so intimately are they connected ; whose gloomy fanaticism, as it touched on the one side the lowest depths of superstition, is on the other the outcome of the noblest qualities of the Spanish character. His desperate struggle with heresy, so full of tragedy and bloodshed, displaying all the chivalrous sentiment, the sombre passion, the exalted devotion to an idea of a Loyola (an idea drunk in at the founts of mysticism, but ferocious in the effects which are its logical outcome), was a quixotic enterprise, but surely not one devoid of grandeur. On the eve of her journey she wrote to the Jesuit Ordonez as to the establishment of the girls' college in Medina. " I should like," she says, " to have much opportunity and health to say some things which, to my mind, are important. And such has been my condition, incomparably worse than before, that it is all I can do to write this. . . . To-morrow I start, if I am not taken ill again, and the illness must indeed be serious to prevent me." So did the brave and resolute spirit sustain her frail and ailing body. The simple pages of Master Julian de Avila (her companion on this expedition as on so many others) flash to us, so to speak, this sixteenth-century journey with its vivid details, showing to us for a moment, as in the obscure depths of some magic mirror, the quaint picturesqueness of a life which has almost faded not only from existence, but whose meaning also has almost faded from the mind, the mind which preserves latent for so long JOURNEY TO SALAMANCA 413 those mysterious impressions of heredity ready to be stirred into life by some chance impulse, but which the railroad, and the commercial ugliness of the nineteenth century will soon altogether obliterate. The little party consisted of Teresa, Fray Antonio de Jesus, Master Julian de Avila, and Dona Quiteria of Avila, a nun of the Encarnacion, and afterwards its prioress. They travelled on donkeys. To avoid the suffocating midsummer heat, as intense on these upland plateaux as the cold is great in winter, and which was hurtful to Teresa, they left Avila about nightfall, intending, as is still the custom in hot weather, to travel all night. Mounted on their donkeys (how many generations of nuns and donkeys have passed in and out of the gateway of the Encarnacion !), these nuns of the sixteenth century, so cloaked and caped to the eyes that, as they flit through the gloaming, they look for all the world like a group of Moorish women on a road in Morocco to-day; to the imminent peril of their necks, clatter down the narrow street, as steep as a precipice, composed in equal parts of boulder and cobble-stones, that leads down to the bridge ; fading past some little square more open than the rest, where a torchlight sheds a ghostly gleam on shadowy houses and yawning gateways, clustered round a cross with a boulder for its pedestal. Before them, dark and sombre against the light of the evening sky, the light that still ripples uncertainly on the river, lies the hill up which winds the road. Once on the summit, whence the strange silhouette of the walled mediaeval town lies sloping down to the river in the breathless repose of the summer night, they are in the vast rolling prairies and " descents " of billowy forest, that sweep uninterruptedly away to Alba. A region unintersected by roads : at most a little sandy path frayed by the feet of generations of donkeys, scattered over with huge crags and boulders, gray and strange enough, in the sun- light, but which when touched with the moonbeams take the most fantastic shapes. Here the imagination forges a phantom city, there a looming tower. I too, like Teresa, have ridden over these plains by night, a belated traveller, between the small hours of the night and morning. The vast solitude, the open, unending expanse of earth and sky ; the immense masses of rock, jagged, and rounded, and angled ; the midnight sky of a depth and serenity peculiar to the heavens of Avila, where even the stars gleam larger and more brightly than elsewhere, leave an impression never to be effaced. As a beginning to their journey, before they got to Martin, a little hamlet not far from Avila, Fr. Antonio de Jesus, who 414 SANTA TERESA was probably nodding with sleep, and was at the best but an indifferent horseman, had a bad fall from his donkey. Says Master Julian : It was God's will, however, that he did not hurt himself, either in this or in many others he has had on journeys connected with the business of the Order. With us travelled a waiting-woman belonging to a lady [probably to Dona Quiteria]. A little farther on, I saw her fall from her mule with such violence that I thought she was killed, and God delivered her, so that she escaped without the slightest injury. And as we travelled on in the dark, for night had now closed in, we lost the donkey on which was packed the money [500 ducats, the dower of Ana de Jesus, the purchase money of the house at Salamanca] and other provisions for the road, and it did not turn up again all that night ; so that what with the tumbles, and looking for the donkey, together with the great darkness, it seems to me it would be after midnight before we arrived at the posada. I would not eat any supper, although I think I needed it, but thought it better not to break my fast, so as to be able to say Mass on the morrow. In the morning a lad set out to look for the donkey, and found it lying a little to one side of the road, un- touched and his burden intact. Whereupon we had a mind to go and say Mass in a neighbouring hermitage, called Our Lady del Parral. We got there in good time, but found nothing in the Hermitage to say Mass with. I was forced to go to the village at some distance from the Hermitage, for the necessary things, but the Curate was not at home, and there was no one who could give us them. In short, the whole morning slipped away in comings and goings, and sorely against my will, I found myself, not only unable to say Mass, but supperless and breakfastless to boot, and tired out with the journey. And although the Holy Mother remained without communicating for this her journeys never prevented her from doing I did not feel it so much as I should have done ; for, as if I had not had trouble enough about it, they made merry at my expense, and well they might. The next night our loss was greater even than that of the donkey ; in spite of it carrying, as they said, 500 ducats. It happened that as we were again travelling by night, and the darkness was very great, our people divided into two companies ; he who accompanied the Holy Mother, for to save his honour, I will not mention his name [Fray Antonio ?], left her and the Lady Dona Quiteria, who is now prioress of the Encarnacion, in the street of a small hamlet, to wait there until the rest came up, so that they might all join and not be separated ; in such wise that when the others did appear, and he who for the sake of going in search of them had abandoned the saint and her companion, returned to look for them, he could never hit on the spot where he had left them ; and as the darkness was so great, he missed it so completely that, twist and turn as he liked, he did not find them ; and as he said they must have gone on ahead, we travelled on a good space until we came up with those in front. We said to one another : Is the Mother there with you? They answered : f No! Is she not travelling with you ? How should she be if she was travelling with you? What has happened ? So that we all found ourselves in double darkness that of the night which was great, and that of finding ourselves without our Mother which was incom- parably greater. We knew not whether to turn back or to go forward. We JOURNEY TO SALAMANCA 415 began to shout no answer. Again we were forced to separate, some to look for what we had lost, the others to shout to see if from anywhere there came an answer. After being in this distress a considerable time and he who had left them most of all, as we were turning back to retrace our steps, behold our Holy Mother coming towards us with her companion and a labourer, whom they had taken from his house and given four reals to, to put them on the right road. He indeed had much the best of it, for he returned home with them in great glee, and we in greater at having once more found all our treasure, and right merrily we trudged on, recounting our adventures. We alighted at an inn where there were so many muleteers lying on the floors that we could not take a step without stumbling over pack-saddles and sleeping men. We found a place for our Mother and the nuns (I do not believe it was more than six feet), so that, to make room for them all, they had to stand up all night. The only merit these posadas possessed was to make us long to get out of them as quickly as possible. And if it had only been the fatigue, the sleepless nights in poverty-stricken resting-places, haunted by muleteers and fleas, the fierce heat which increased her fever, or the winter's sleet and bitter winds, others too have suffered these for the sake of realising a cherished fancy of seeing some spot lost to the world ; but she, this woman nigh on sixty, in pursuance of her lofty object, of the Idea which absorbed her life, had further- more to suffer the criticism to which these journeys subjected her, and the scandal they gave to the social prejudices of her age. If she had warmer partisans and more devoted followers than ever woman had, she had antagonists (as who has not who is worthy of them ?) as bitter and as strong. Many were of the opinion of the papal Nuncio, Sega, when at a later date he inveighed against her as a restless, roving woman ; many very learned and virtuous people (amongst them some of the gravest doctors and professors in Salamanca), who, however much they loved and admired her for her virtues ("for I believe," says Master Julian, "that no living person could but love her"), disapproved and condemned her going about from place to place instead of staying quietly in the retirement of her convent. " It is as if they who are not thirsty should contemn a person for drinking ; for if they who murmured at her knew the great necessity which spurred her on, they would no longer have done so, even if they had seen her start for Jerusalem." Nevertheless, she had only to see and speak with her greatest detractors, to turn them into her fastest friends, to make them defend her cause against all comers. In the case of her confessors this was especially remarkable. She owed it to a great extent to her own consummate diplomacy, a diplomacy she scrupled the less to exercise (for although it had been one of her besetting foibles as a child and maiden, she had ceased to care at this period what the world thought of her), inasmuch as it was to 416 SANTA TERESA forward the Reform, and the Reform and Teresa were now identical. In it she had submerged her individuality, for it she lived ; to work for it seemed to give her a fictitious strength, which deserted her when the occasion for effort was over. If she wished to be thought good, if she wished that men should think well of her, it was for the sake of her Reform ; that through her at least, she who was its foundress, and who was responsible for its existence, no reproach should reach it, no diminution of the lustre which began to give forth so bright and pure a light. " For this cause, says Yepes, " she desired to be esteemed and honoured ; and whereas formerly she had fervently supplicated our Lord to remove the opinion men held that she was a saint, yet when she saw the favours God had bestowed upon her, and the many things he had entrusted to her, and how he had chosen her to be the instrument of resuscitating this Order, the constant care of her life was that no imperfections should be noted in her." Thus it was her custom, on her arrival in a place, as she did on this occasion in Salamanca, to seek out men of weight and learning, and make them her confessors. By this means those who had been prejudiced against her by what they had heard and were disposed to be adverse to her, were infallibly won over, and thenceforth invariably assisted her with their influence, and encouraged her in her projects. Chief amongst the back- biters of Salamanca was one Fray Bartolome' de Medina, 1 a distinguished lecturer of the University. Teresa never rested until he had heard her in the confessional ; to listen to her, and to become her willing servant, was all one. She left him full of amazement, but filled with so profound a respect and love for the woman he had vilified, that it seemed to him a favour little less than divine to be summoned by Teresa when she needed him in Alba. When one of her nuns, to whom he was talking at the torno at Alba, happened to mention her as Mother Teresa, it so angered the old man that he scolded her roundly for her want of reverence, and ordered her in future to speak of her by no less a title than Our Mother Foundress. The business that had called Teresa to Salamanca, and into which she at once plunged with characteristic energy, was the purchase of a house. The preliminaries had already been adjusted between the prioress Ana de la Encarnacion and the owner, subject to Teresa's approval. It was the only one available in all Salamanca; but besides the price, which they had arranged to pay by degrees, it was necessary to lay out 1 This Fray Bartolome de Medina was a very notable person in his day ; nor is his manual of the Confessional entirely obsolete in this. JOURNEY TO SALAMANCA 4 r 7 more than a thousand ducats to make it habitable. None of them had dared to face so great a responsibility without Teresa, and so they had waited until she arrived with the precious' donkey which bore the first instalment of the price. " None of her daughters," she says in the Foundations, "had been called upon to suffer more than the nuns of Salamanca." For three years they had lived in a ruinous house, before which ran an open sewer, which made it damp and cold. It was out of the way, and alms did not flow in ; whilst, greatest of all troubles to the devout nuns, they were deprived of the consolation of the Sacrament on the humble altar of their little church. On the other hand, the house they were about to purchase was almost as bad, and the little band of newly-arrived travellers were filled with dismay all except Teresa, whose phenomenal daring in such cases was proof against all difficulties. Un- daunted by the cost, or by the question how she was to get the money to pay for it, she at once concluded the sale, subject to certain conditions which were to keep the good sisters in a constant ferment of disputes and lawsuits for the next ten years of their lives. The owner of the house was one Pedro de la Vanda, " a knight of good quality although not rich and of indigestible condition." When Teresa arrived in Salamanca he was absent from the city ; but although the King's consent (necessary in such cases) to annul the entail was not yet arrived, he had consented to give them possession, and allowed them to set to work on the walls which were to shut in the life of the Carmelites from the outer world. Spurred on by the threats of the owner of the one they occupied, who signified his intention of enforcing payment of another year's rent if they were not out of it by Michaelmas Day, the preparations were pushed on with all haste. Teresa from the window of her cell acted as overseer, and kept her keen eyes on the workmen. Sometimes she ordered wine to be fetched for them ; and a legend grew up on the strength of the assertion of one Pedro Hernandez, a carpenter, that on one occasion it had been mysteriously increased. On Michaelmas Eve, before it was daylight, and against the advice of some of their well-, wishers, who deprecated their haste " When needs must, advice is not always easy to follow, if it does not assist," says Teresa amidst torrents of rain, the nuns moved their few and humble belongings. It had been published throughout the city that the touching ceremony of the Consecration was fixed to take place on the following day, and every one was prepared. Towards afternoon the rain came down so heavily as to make the translation of their possessions from the one 27 4i8 SANTA TERESA house to the other almost impossible. Worse still, it poured through the ill-roofed chapel, lustrous with fresh whitewash, and flooded the pavement below. " I tell you, daughters, I fell into great imperfections that day ; as it was already known, I knew not what to do, but I was in a grievous state, and I said to our Lord, almost complainingly : That he should either not bid me undertake these works, or that he should remedy that necessity. The good Nicolas Gutierrez" (he whom we have before seen assisting her when she first founded in Salamanca), "in his equable manner, as if there was nothing wrong, bid me gently have no anxiety, for God would remedy it." And so it was ; for when St. Michael's morning rose, calm and radiant, over the world of Salamanca ; amidst strains of triumphant music, and with great solemnity, Teresa saw raised above the heads of the hushed and expectant crowds amongst them the most powerful nobles and greatest ladies of Salamanca the Host, which consecrated alike her convent and her labours. The next day, as if to temper their joy and triumph, arrived Pedro de la Vanda himself. Oblivious of the condition that the house was to be paid for by instalments, he now demanded full and instant payment. The convent rang with his angry voice. Even Teresa's persuasive tongue failed to control his ungovernable rage; the nuns cowered before his violent gestures. They offered to forego all they had spent, and abandon the house : but this he would by no means hear of, having no mind to lose so good a price. Three years later the question was still unsettled, and the purchase in abeyance, and for another ten years the disputatious and ill-conditioned knight was a constant thorn in the flesh to the poor nuns. Time, which removes all landmarks, has demolished this. It stood close to the great palace of Monterey, and the house of the Conde de Fuentes, who rased it to the ground to make room for a magnificent convent of Reformed Augustinian nuns. As the curious visitor stands in the lofty and silent nave of the convent church, he treads, perhaps without knowing it, on the site of that humble chapel where Teresa knew so many commingled emotions of doubt and joy. In vain she endeavoured to alleviate her daughters' sufferings by transferring them to another house. She failed to effect it, and the foundation of Salamanca weighed on her to her death. Small wonder that the mild pen of Master Julian (he notes plaintively how he was employed from Our Lady of August to St. Michael's Day, " spending much money with many workmen until the convent was concluded, with its JOURNEY TO SALAMANCA 419 cells, refectory, and church, and all other essentials pertaining to a convent ") distils unwonted bitterness : I strongly wished that they had taken the counsel given by Christ to his apostles, that when they were not received in one town, they should go to another, and that they had shaken off even to the dust that stuck to their feet, so as not to carry it away with them ; which, for me at least, it was impossible to do, since I had swallowed it and sweated it, with the bitter draughts that blessed soul gave us about his house the whole time until we fled from it. God forgive him. Amen ! Teresa still hoped, however, when at the end of five months she set out to pay a visit to her nuns of Alba, that the matter would be satisfactorily settled. " This business of Pedro de la Vanda," she writes to Banes, " seems as if it would never finish : I believe that I shall have to go first to Alba so as to save time, for the matter is ticklish, being a dispute between him and his wife," . . . and she adds, " the love of God can bear much, for if there was anything in it that was not [the love of God Teresa's style is singularly elliptical], it would already have been settled." Her letter from Alba to her prioress of Salamanca, Ana de la Encarnacion, breathes a rustic calm, a serene pleasure in the natural beauties around her, such as is felt by one who, leaving some dusty and noisy town, and along with it his cares, suddenly finds himself transported into some country hamlet, tranquil, green, and sleepy. She had looked forward to its peaceful seclusion to restore her shattered strength, and the event proved that she was right, for she speaks of being better than was her wont. Jesus be with your reverence [she writes]. Let me know how you and all are, for well would I desire to be able to enjoy you there as I do these here. I think that here I shall have fewer cares, and I have a grot which looks on to the river, as does the cell also where I sleep, so that I can enjoy it from my bed, which is a great delight to me. I am better to-day than I am wont. Dona Quiteria, still with her fever, says she misses you all. . . . To-day the Duchess [of Alba] sent me this trout : it seems so good that I have hired this messenger to send it to my father the master fray Bartolome de Medina : if it should arrive at dinner-time, let your reverence send it to him by Miguel at once, and the letter along with it ; and if later, neverthe- less do not fail to send it to him, to see if it will induce him to write a line. Let your reverence fail not to write how you are, and be sure to eat meat these few days ; tell the doctor of your weakness, and do not forget to remember me to him. . . . Tell Juana de Jesus to let me know how she is, for her face was very thin when I started. ... If Lescano [the messenger] should ask for anything, give it him, as I said that if he wanted anything your reverence would give it him, for I will pay you. I am sure, however, that he will not ask it. 430 SANTA TERESA The letter of a loving mother, to whom the slightest detail connected with the well-being of her children is precious, with a sly, humorous thrust at the grumpy Fray Bartolome' de Medina, whom she has determined to conquer; her courteous inquiries for her friends, the Countess of Monterey and the wife of the corregidor ; giving us too a glimpse of the messenger ragged surely, swarthy, and good-tempered, who, in spite of his rags and poverty, bore the nuns' messages for nothing, and would probably have spurned the bare thought of payment. A strange, ill-assorted, democratic society, such as it still exists in these old-fashioned, old-world places where the nineteenth century has not carried its abominable vulgarity. A letter, too, that only a Spaniard could have written and that a Castilian with its kindliness, sobriety, and fun, tinctured with an old- world grace and stateliness that has gone with the age in which it flourished. But she was not long to delight in the lovely plains and poplar-fringed river of the Tormes. Teresa had been visited in Avila by Dona Ana de Ximena, the widow of Don Francisco Barros de Bracamonte, whose name proves him to have belonged to the noble family of the Bracamontes of Avila. Isabel de Jesus, who had taken the habit two years before at Avila, was this lady's cousin. It was this visit which probably suggested to Teresa the idea of founding in Segovia. The noble widow, who had found but little happiness in life, felt impelled by an irresistible impulse to seek in the obscurity of the cloister what had been denied to her by the world. On her return home she and her cousin Andres de Ximena devoted themselves to securing the license of the bishop and city of Segovia, which was conceded to them with ease. Unfortunately, however, the bishop's promise was a verbal one. The news reached Teresa in Salamanca. To receive it and a divine locution at the same time bidding her to found was all one. If the locution was a self-deception ; if for words inspired by the Divinity she mistook the fervent impulse which gave her no rest, an impulse felt by lower and less enthusiastic minds in matters on which hang merely material interests, an interior voice which prompts them to do this rather than that, it was a wholly unconscious one. She was convinced that it was next to impossible even to imagine that Fernandez, who was averse to further foundations, would allow her to desert her post of prioress of the Encarnacion until her term of office was over. "As I was thinking on this," writes Teresa, " the Lord told me to tell him about it, for he would bring it about." Fernandez was then in Salamanca. She wrote to him pointing out how, as he already knew, she FOUNDATION AT SEGOVIA 421 had received a precept from the General to found whenever a suitable occasion presented itself; that the city and bishop of Segovia had admitted one of her convents, and that she only awaited his permission to found ; that she informed him of it to comply with her conscience, but whatever his decision she would remain content. To her amazement and contrary to all expec- tation, the visitor interposed no objection. She at once charged her friends at Segovia to set about hiring a house, for her past experiences in Toledo and Valladolid had shown her the advisability of not looking out for a permanent one until she had taken possession. This for many reasons, chiefly indeed that she had not a " blanca " to buy one with, since once the convent was made she depended on God to send her both money and a house to her liking. On the 8th February 1574 she signed the convent accounts for the last time, and, wasted with fever and sickness, full of trouble in mind and body, she set forth for Medina, with Dona Quiteria of Avila and a nun she took from Alba. She was joined at Salamanca by Isabel de Jesus and a lay sister, both natives of Segovia. She was escorted from Alba by one who appears for the first time in our pages Antonio Gaitan, one of those anomalous characters so frequent in this history, a gentleman of illustrious birth who, sickened of the world's vanities, of which he had drunk freely, devoted his life to God's service. He shares with Master Julian (although Father Julian was the first) the glory of having been her companion in her longest and most toilsome journeys, and of having lightened hardship and hunger by his unselfish and gentle humility. He undertook the most menial office if necessary, more willingly than any servant. " It is well, daughters," says the grateful Teresa, oblivious of the spell her own personality had cast over these men, " it is well that you should remember them in your prayers, and you would most willingly do so, if you knew the wearisome days and nights, and the hardships of the road that they endured." In Avila the band of travellers was swelled by the addition of another nun and Fray Juan de la Cruz. It is needless to say that Master Julian was of the party. It was March when they set out to cross the bleak mountains of the Guadarramas, the barrier between the two Castilles. On the 1 8th they arrived in the grand and stately city of Segovia the grandest and stateliest in Spain. Tired and dust-stained, under cover of night and with all secrecy, they entered the house that had been taken for them. Friendly hands had pre- pared for their coming, and they found the house provided with many little necessaries, and the church decked and arrayed in 422 SANTA TERESA readiness for the morrow ; so that on the following morning, on St. Joseph's Day, Teresa's favourite and best-loved saint (and the fact filled her with the most intimate satisfaction), the little bell which had now ushered in so many foundations rang in another. Julian de Avila said the first Mass, and placed the Host upon the altar. And then came that contradiction which Teresa looked upon as the best test of the value of her work. During the course of the journey, when Master Julian asked Teresa for the license, and he heard that she had nothing but the Bishop's verbal promise, his heart sank within him, and he already anticipated difficulty with the Provisor (or vicar substi- tute), the Bishop being then absent in Madrid. His forebodings were but too well founded. When the Provisor heard what had taken place, his fury was boundless. His ecclesiastical dignity thrown to the winds, he sped to the convent church, where he found a canon of his own cathedral saying a Mass. This canon who happened to be the Bishop's nephew, and afterwards became the Bishop of Guadix and Baeza, struck by the cross over the doorway, and finding on inquiry that it belonged to a freshly-founded convent of Discalced Carmelites who had just arrived, and had only that very morning taken possession, and said their first Mass, entered the humble chapel, and after kneeling a moment before the altar in adoration, sent his page to ask per- mission to say a Mass. " He was in the midst of it when the Provisor broke in upon him in a towering rage with the rough exclamation : ' You had better have left it unsaid ! " " Well do I believe," says Master Julian, ascribing to another what his own feelings would have been under the like circumstances, "that, however great the canon's devotion, it left him at that moment." He next looked about him for the offenders. The nuns had already retired, and Master Julian, who was a witness of his tempestuous arrival, considering that prudence was the better part of valour, discreetly hid himself behind a staircase there happened to be in the gateway. " The Provisor fell, how- ever, upon St. John of the Cross : ' Who has placed this here, father ? ' said he. ' Get it all cleared away at once ; indeed I have a good mind to send you to prison.' And I believe it was only his being a friar that saved him, for I am convinced that if it had been me, I should certainly that time at least have gone there. Nor would it have been strange that I who had so often shut up nuns, should have been shut up for once myself, although, as they did it from choice, they do not feel it so much as I should have done." The naif Father Julian is not exempt from a sense of shame as he reflects on his cowardice, and in a bolder tone he adds : FOUNDATION AT SEGOVIA 423 After all, I did not flee from the dungeon, but only hid myself so as to avoid being sent there. The Provisor made such haste to undo all that had been done that St. Joseph's night, that this great tempest did not pass over. He sent an alguacil to prevent any one saying Mass, and he sent a priest of his own to say one in order to consume the Host. The Mother and Sisters were doubtless witnesses of the ease with which their labours were undone. When I escaped I went to the Jesuits' college to relate what had happened ; and although the rector did all he could, and went straight to speak with the Provisor, he made no impression on him. He went about in search of the persons who had been present at the granting of the license, and after much contention about the matter it was agreed that a judicial inquiry should be instituted as to how the license had been given. Now with this it seemed the matter was settled. We stated our case before the notary with very reliable witnesses, and so the Provisor could not avoid granting the license for saying Mass, although he refused to allow us to have the Host ; and in this he was right, for the house was a hired one, and the chapel was in the gateway ; and as to this our Mother was also agreed, as she knew that the mere fact of saying Mass was enough to take possession. In the midst of this great tempest our Holy Mother showed her great valour, for she was neither agitated nor overwhelmed, nor did she lose heart. On the contrary, she spoke to the Provisor with great boldness, mingled with great courtesy, so that it could be seen that the Lord helped her. For nothing could quell or cast more than a momentary shadow over her indomitable spirit. When the Provisor took the extreme resolve of posting an alguacil at the church door, she merely wondered why, as it could only frighten those within ; and she herself attached no importance to anything that happened when once possession had been secured. The motive for this outburst on the part of the Provisor, who acted like a veritable jack-in-office, was ruffled dignity at not having been himself consulted ; and " if he had been," says Teresa, one of the shrewdest judges of character, " we should have sped worse than we did." She owed much to the friendly offices of the good canon, whom she doubted not that God had led to her convent that morning. With that strange mixture of worldliness and sanctity so conspicuous in her, she reminded him of the obligations he was under to assist her obligations imposed on him by kinship (which in the Spain of that day formed a link as strong as in the patriarchal ages of the world), her cousin Dona Maria de Tapia being his aunt. Thenceforth, as long as she remained in Segovia, he acted as her chaplain and confessor. What struck him most particularly in her upright and generous character (and his testimony is not without importance, from a man who seems to have been particularly single-hearted and truthful), was her silence about herself. From which fact, and the things he afterwards heard about her, he concludes, in his letter to the General of the Order, dated 1606, that as they 424 SANTA TERESA had already gone through so many searching ordeals, and she was now sure of herself, she had no longer any motive to divulge them to the directors chance threw in her way, shrinking, as she always did, from being taken for a saint. The impression she left on him was the indelible one she left on all whom accident or their good fortune brought under her influence. On the day he received the news of her death, the accidental sight of one of her books (the Camino de la Perfection, which he had made one of his servants copy out for him unknown to the saint), which had for long been mislaid, and then strangely reappeared, affected him so strangely that he fell back in the arms of a brother ecclesiastic, moved to floods of tears. Almost at the same moment that Teresa established a new house of her Order in Segovia, that of Pastrana, which had cost her so many bitter moments, was undone. The exactions, the folly, and the caprice of its unfortunate patroness, who, on the death of her husband, Ruy Gomez, in 1573, in the first violence of her grief, insisted on assuming the habit of the Discalced Carmelites, and entering the community of Pastrana, had led to this extreme resolution. As may be supposed, from the very first an incompatibility existed between the good nuns of Pastrana and their self-imposed inmate an incompatibility which, as every one foresaw it must, presently grew into an insurmountable antipathy. Mariano, whom she had forced to give her the habit at her dead husband's bedside, not a very clean one, according to the chronicler, uneasily conscious of the coming storm, made all haste to set out for Andalucia. When the prioress (that Isabel de Sto. Domingo who was so scandalised in Toledo at Teresa's conferences with the ragged Andrada), ruthlessly roused from her slumbers at two in the morning by Fray Baltasar de Jesus knocking at the convent gates, heard from his lips that the 'princess come to bewail her widowhood within its walls was on the road to Pastrana in a cart (she had refused to come in her coach), she exclaimed, " The princess a nun ! Then I give up this house for lost ! " There were, no doubt, faults on both sides : it would seem to be the prerogative of religion to develop all the hardness and rigidity of human nature. These good sisters who had renounced their lives could be as stern and rigorous as they were generally sweet, gentle, and beneficent. And although we must allow considerable latitude to the account given by the chronicler, who, actuated by a natural, to some extent a laudable, instinct to glorify his Order by showing that the fault was all on one side, still the nuns seem never to have forgotten the fact that the princess was their patroness, and that they owed many FOUNDATION AT SEGOVIA 425 favours to her hand, and to have borne her freaks as gently and patiently as possible until they could bear them no longer. The first demand of the princess when she arrived with her mother, the Princess of Me"lito, at eight in the morning, was that the habit should be given to two of her waiting-women ; and when the prioress replied that she could not comply without the superior's consent, she asked imperiously, " What right have the friars to meddle with my convent?" After consulting with the prior of Pastrana, Fr. Baltasar, it was resolved to do as she wished. A more harmless freak, but one which probably gave great offence to these quiet, retired women, reared in the strictest obedience, was to insist on sitting in one of the lowest places in the refectory, instead of accepting the seat of honour which had been reserved for her close to the prioress. It was proposed, after some consultation with her mother, to set aside part of the convent for her use, and that of her servants, where she could receive her visitors without interrupting the discipline of the community, whilst she herself could enter whenever she liked by a private door. This she refused. The day after the celebration of her husband's obsequies, the Bishop of Segorbe and other great personages arrived to pay their visits of con- dolence. In spite of the prioress's remonstrances, who begged her to receive them at the grating of the church, the princess insisted on the gates being thrown open, and the convent turned into a miniature court. The indignation of the nuns may be imagined as they thus saw their tranquillity invaded, not merely by the bishop and a train of lordly visitors (" for lords do not think they are lords if they obey laws," remarks the chronicler with dry acumen), but by their men-at-arms and lackeys. The rest of her conduct was on a par with this. She insisted on having two secular women to wait on her, and refused with disdain the offers of the worthy prioress, who proffered her services and those of the community, especially of the two novices to whom she had herself forced them to give the habit. Teresa was appealed to, and wrote to the petulant and self-willed princess, but in vain. The great lady who made the nuns serve her on their bended knees and address her by her titles, was in no mood to listen to reason. The prioress and two of the most aged nuns of the community solemnly warned her that if she persisted in her conduct there was no help for it but that they should leave the convent. In high dudgeon she retired to a hermitage in the convent garden, where, from its being outside the cloister boundaries, none of the nuns could go to her. Still obedient and anxious to conciliate her, they sent 426 SANTA TERESA her the two novices, who were not as yet so strictly shut out from the world, to wait upon her. Here the stern, weird old hermit Catalina de Cardona (whose life, even for an age steeped in romance, is particularly strange and striking) paid the Princess of Eboli a visit. On her return one night from singing Matins with the nuns in the choir, Catalina, herself a woman of highest rank, with the familiarity of age and old friendship (in former life she had been long a trusted inmate of Ruy Gomez's household) told her bluntly to beware how she treated the nuns, for, said she, " as I was at Matins I saw angels amongst them, guarding them with drawn swords." But the princess was not to be so easily terrified by the mystic threats of the old visionary. At last open hostilities broke out. She abandoned the hermitage and betook herself to a house close by, where she dwelt in seclusion, still wearing the garb of the Carmelites ; and presently, as might have been foreseen, she took up her abode in the gaunt, gray old palace which stands protecting the walls of Pastrana, facing the lovely vega and the jagged spurs of the sierras of Cuenca. Worse than all, with a breach of faith impossible to excuse, whatever the reasons she may have felt she had for her bitterness against the community, she ceased making the allowance that had been assigned to it by Ruy Gomez. Her grief had already subsided, and, either unable or unwilling to recognise that the inflexible laws of convent discipline should be more imperious with a few poor humble women, who subsisted on her alms, than her own capricious and imperious will, resenting their firmness, the alms ceased, and she left them to struggle alone as they best might with their necessities. After an anxious consultation between Teresa, the Pro- vincial, Fr. Angel de Salazar ; Fr. Pedro Fernandez, the visitor ; Banes, and Fr. Hernando de Castillo, it was decided that, after requesting the princess once more to attend to the necessary sustenance of the convent, the only alternative was to abandon it. Fr. Hernando, an old and trusted confidant of Ruy Gomez, was the bearer of the embassy. But she broke out into such violent invectives against the nuns that it was easy to see that all she desired was to be rid of them. The Provincial, Fr. Angel de Salazar, was sent to Pastrana, and once more he and Fr. Hernando returned to the palace on their ungrateful mission. This time the princess, feigning illness, refused to see them, and the servants made no secret of their mistress's intentions. On hearing this, Teresa, then in Salamanca, instructed the prioress as to what she was to do. And although the nuns professed them- selves willing to suffer rather than abandon their house, she FOUNDATION AT SEGOVIA 427 replied that there was now no help for it, as the heads of the Order had decided otherwise, and to go on slowly making preparations, so as to be in readiness to leave it when she should write to them from Segovia, whither she was on the eve of her departure. The princess was but ill prepared for this trait of resolution and energy on the part of those whom for more than a year she had tortured with her caprices. The prioress sent for the corregidor and a notary, in whose presence she delivered up to the former all the jewels and presents the princess had ever given them. With the inventory in her hands she checked them off one by one till the number was complete. The rumour got about that the nuns were going. The princess affected to be deeply distressed, and sent the corregidor to tell them that she would place guards at the convent gates. The prioress answered that it was now too late. The princess (with a touch of humour truly delightful) then signified her consent, if they would agree to take with them the two unfortunate waiting- women, she being now anxious to get them off her hands. This, they replied, they would do in the case of Ana de la Encarnacion, who was needy and portionless; but as to the other, who was better off, her Excellency might arrange about her even as she thought fit. The Princess of Eboli never darkened Teresa's life again, and her strange, meteoric individuality, full of passion and un- controllable impulses, has flitted across the pages of my history for the last time. Henceforth she is swallowed up in the dark gulf of state intrigue of the age. Her unhappy passion for Antonio Perez, and its consequences, I have already dwelt on. As she disappears, and the horizon of her life grows dim, I feel a strange, inexplicable sympathy for that proud, head- strong, self-willed character (for if she sinned she suffered more). Her strange and pathetic fate was a meet ending to her restless, agitated life. But in justice to the dead, let me try to exonerate her memory from the charge which has darkened her fame from that day to this, that in an impulse of pitiful and malignant revenge she denounced Teresa's book of her Life to the Inquisi- tion. It has never been proved that she did so. The only argument of any weight that has been brought in support of such a charge, is that no one was so likely, considering the circumstances, to have done so as she, and that it was so denounced by a woman and a lady of high rank. Impetuous and uncontrollable as she was, if she denounced it at all, it would have been when the motives for her anger against Teresa and her nuns were still fresh, and rankling in her 428 SANTA TERESA mind. If I have read her character aright, she was incapable of patiently waiting for an opportunity to do so black an injury in cold blood. Plunged as she was in the vortex of the court life of her time, Teresa and her nuns must long have faded from her brain at the date (1579) when she is supposed to have made the denouncement. A strange and picturesque type of the great lady of the period, she flashed for a moment over the life of the great foundress, and both of them have now become phantoms, to all except a few enthusiastic searchers into the past, on the dim background of Tradition and History ! CHAPTER XVI THE FATE OF THE CONVENT OF PASTRANA IT was early in April (according to Lafuente) when Master Julian and Antonio Gaitan arrived in Pastrana to finish the last sad work of demolition, and bear the nuns to Segovia. They kept their mission as secret as possible. After speaking with the prioress, who was on the lookout for them, and anxious to be gone, they hired five carts to take the nuns and such few treasures as they could call their own. When they had concluded the preparations, and laid in their little stock of provisions for the journey the day before they started, at the last Carmelite Mass which was to echo through the little church which a few hours thence would be full of the silence of emptiness and desolation, the Host was solemnly consumed. So as not to rouse the princess's suspicion, they were to start at midnight. But in spite of their precautions it got to her ears, and she sent one of her household " to say many things " (we can well imagine what they were), which it was perhaps as well that the fearful ears of Master Julian were spared, the shower of abuse falling instead on Fray Gabriel, a Discalced Carmelite of Pastrana. At midnight a little procession of closely-veiled nuns, escorted by priests and friars, sallied out from the convent gates, which closed on their retreating forms for the last time, and like shadows lost in the greater shadow of the night, wended their way up the silent and irregular street (the convent which still exists the home of another religious community lies in a hollow) which led to the outskirts of the town. The five carts were waiting for them on the summit of the hill. "And as no one was with us, and we crept on in silence, half-fleeing as it were, although not from God, but from men, it seemed like the flight of David, when he fled barefoot with his followers before Absalom ; save that we had no Shimei to curse us, but God, who accompanied us, aiding us, and comforting us; for in this case it needed as much courage to flee as in others to attack." It is Master Julian 429 430 SANTA TERESA who speaks, and tells the story in his own charming and gossiping fashion. " When we arrived at where the carts were waiting, which was at some little distance from the town, we all placed our- selves in marching order ; and, so that danger of sea (!) as well as of land might not be wanting, on the second or third day of our journey, we had to cross a river, which I think is the same as that which passes by Alcala de Henares. It is generally crossed in a ferry-boat, but the drivers, who knew the country well, said that they would not go in the boat, which was at some distance off; that they could easily cross by the ford, and that all our company could go and cross in the boat. Afraid that there might be some difficulty, I stayed alone with the drivers, and entered the river on horseback, which to all appearance was not very deep. Upon this the five carts enter in single file; when the front one got to a deep and narrow current there was in the middle of the river, which in that place was very wide, the mules refused to enter, and the more the drivers urged them on, the more they held back, and if they made a few steps forward they sank and knelt down as if they were going to the bottom. I shouted to them to turn back, but even had they wanted to, it was now impossible. I found myself in great distress, and with none to help me, for all the others had gone save the carters and the nuns. As for the poor nuns, some of them seemed about to faint ; whilst the drivers shouted to the mules, the nuns must have also shouted to God. The Lord willed that by pure dint of shout- ing and strength one of the carts got through. When this, which had the best mules, was drawn up in safety on the bank, the mules were unyoked, and attached to each cart by turns, so that with the help of four mules all the carts crossed safely ; and thus were we delivered from this danger, although I resolved never again to believe drivers in a matter of such importance, who, to save themselves the trouble of yoking and unyoking their mules " (Master Julian might also have added, to save the expense ; for the ferry-boat charges, being private monopolies, are to this day extravagantly high in Spain), " refused to go in the boat and put themselves in great peril." The chronicler has it that at the very moment when the nuns saw themselves in imminent danger of a watery grave, Teresa requested her daughters in Segovia to pray for them. No doubt she repeated the request as often as she thought of the travellers exposed to all the perils of travel, when travel was full of danger. Nevertheless the inference drawn by the chronicler is obvious. THE FATE OF THE CONVENT OF PASTRANA 431 After several more days of constant journeying, often retarded by other mischances and hardships, left by Master Julian at the bottom of his inkpot, the travellers emerged from the vast deserts and shaggy pine forests, to-day as wild, desolate, and deserted as they were then, between Guadalajara and Segovia, which they entered on the 4th or 5th of April. Teresa received the wanderers with heartfelt joy ; and Master Julian and Antonio Gaitan, their mission ended, returned to their several homes, highly pleased at the success of their labours in so good a cause, and more than ever resolved to follow their Mother wherever she should see fit to lead them. Nor was the foundation of Segovia accomplished without a sore struggle. Julian de Avila and Antonio Gaitan, before they departed, had bargained for a house, but in such a sorry state as to draw from Teresa the remark that she knew not where their eyes were when they wanted to buy such a place. When she at last found one to her liking (it still remains, spite of all the changes of time, the home of her daughters), she found herself plunged head and ears in contentions and law- suits. The cathedral chapter held a mortgage over the house, and insisted on being paid. The Franciscan friars and the monks of the Order of Mercy objected to the vicinity of another convent, subsisting like themselves on the alms of the faithful. However, the canons' mouths were shut with money ; the Franciscans calmed down ; and a few days before Michaelmas the nuns stole into their new house, unperceived by the Mercenarians who still persisted in their suit. Never- theless, they too, seeing that their enemies were in possession, were glad to hold their peace for a gift of money. It may be asked how it was that a woman who of herself was nothing and had nothing, beyond her staff and her rosary, came to have the administration of large sums of money, and that at the very time when she was writing to her niece, Maria Bautista of Valladolid, to get some one to lend her a few reals to relieve her most pressing wants in the Encarnacion, until such time as she was paid the money sent her by her brother (" whether it be little or much," she writes, " get it for me ! ") ; how it was that she arrived in Segovia without a farthing, and in a few months bought a house which cost 4600 ducats, besides being able to defray the expense of making it fit for the purposes of a convent ? It must be remembered that there was then no lack of titled and wealthy novices, who accounted it a privilege and a glory to lay their rank and their riches on the altars of a convent. Nor can we judge of this strange century from a modern 432 SANTA TERESA standpoint. In those days the cloister by no means implied the frigid dearth of affection and human interest which a northern mind and a Protestant standpoint instinctively attach to it. Even now, if it were not for the constant poverty which menaces every moment of their existence, the life of a Spanish community is by no means a mere round of dull, sour, monotonous discipline and observance. Merry enough eyes gleam from under the white coif; shrewd and voluble tongues, and no less nimble wits, discourse behind the iron grating as freely as if it did not exist. The nuns have their visitors the bishop ; their own chaplain ; old, sun-dried, wrinkled priests ; great ladies, who entertain them with a mixture of profanity and godliness ; shabby Beatas, with whom they bemoan their ailments and crunch sweetmeats. For it is the imagination which forges these grim spectres that haunt the northern intellect. And the Spaniard has little or none; he cannot dread what he does not see; what has for him no concrete existence. In those days especially, when the existence of great ladies in their vast palaces, regulated by a severe ceremonial, was in itself monastic (even now amongst the aristocracy of Spain, who adhere to the old traditions, the women of the family dress and live like Beatas), the transition to the cloister was by no means great. In the case of Teresa's foundation at Segovia, as we have seen in that of her previous ones, she set forth dependent on what the Lord might send her and it never failed to come in the shape of well-dowered novices. In Segovia she bought the house with the dower of the widowed Ana de Ximena and her daughter, Maria de Bracamonte, who were quickly followed by a wife, Mariana Monte de Velosillo she entering the cloister and her husband the priesthood on one and the same day. In temporal affairs Teresa was as shrewd and competent an administrator as she was great in spiritual ones. As poverty never stood in the way of her accepting a novice " I never remember my not receiving one who gave me satisfaction " and as rank and riches, even if supported by the recommenda- tions of her most esteemed confessors, could never cross the pure threshold of her convents without being accompanied by the qualifications she so rigidly exacted, so, although she kept a keen eye on virtue, it was no less keenly fixed on the dower. " In Medina," she writes to her absent brother, Lorenzo, " one has entered with 8000 ducats, and another is about to enter here (Toledo) with 9000, and this although I asked nothing." " May the Lord reward you for the alms you have decided to bestow on the convent you enter," she wrote to Isabel de Jesus ; THE FATE OF THE CONVENT OF PASTRANA 433 for it is a great deal. It will be a great consolation to your grace to do what the Lord counsels, to give yourself to him and what you have to the poor for his sake. And, considering' what your grace has received, it does not seem to me that you could have given less than what you do ; and since you give all you have, it is not a little that you do, nor will your reward be small." Again, speaking of another nun, she says, " Yesterday we gave the habit to a maiden of very good disposition, and I believe she will have something, and even a great deal, with which to aid us. She is just the thing for us." Again, writing from this very foundation of Segovia, she mentions to Maria Bautista that she has just heard of a nun of excellent parts with a dower of 2000 ducats, " which will help to pay for the house." Yet, withal, so profoundly disinterested was she for herself and her convents that, at a later date, seeing the mischief in the inevitable relaxation in convent manners and discipline introduced into them by the admission of women of high rank, she came to the firm determination to admit no more. Nor does her sanctity lose, but rather gain, by this mixture of worldly forethought and shrewdness, without which she could not have impressed herself as she did upon her century. The ecstatic would have wearied us to death long ago by the monotony of her raptures. Human nature refuses to be kept so long at such a strain. It is the twists and turns, the cranks and idiosyncrasies, the angles here, the asperities there, that we love to explore, poor mortals ever bent on dissecting our own devious nature, which as constantly escapes from us. To many minds the skeleton of an apple-tree, jagged and gnarled, and covered with rough fruit spurs, often exercises a. more powerful fascination than the regular branches and pyramidal form of the tall and stately larch. September was wearing to its close before the nuns established themselves in their new home. The day after she had seen them settled she set forth for Avila. increasing years, infirmities, and cares have begun to tell their tale upon her. For the first time she begins to complain of failing sight, and to lean more heavily on the staff (the gift of her brother from the Indies) which supported her steps through the convent corridors. To Maria de Bautista she describes herself as so worn out and old as to startle her. Death has thinned the first ranks of the Carmelite nuns. Isabel de los Angeles has passed away in Medina, and Beatrix de la Encar- nacion at Valladolid. It would be impossible, without drawing out this book to too great a length, to dwell on the virtues of 28 434 SANTA TERESA these her humble followers. Their end was such as had been their life. Isabel de los Angeles caught consumption from a sick nun she was nursing, and lingered for six months. On the day she died, to the astonishment of the nuns, who had left her prostrate with pain and agony, they found on their return from Mass that she had mysteriously rallied. When they questioned her she told them that the Mother Teresa had been with her, who after gently stroking her face and blessing her, had said, " Daughter, do not be silly, and have no fear, but great confid- ence in what your Spouse did for you ; for the glory is great, and be sure that to-day you shall enjoy it." It was noted after- wards (memory and desire play strange tricks) that at the moment she passed away, Teresa (in Segovia) fell into an ecstasy, and saw the scene that was at that moment passing far away at Medina del Campo. So great was the hold she had taken on the imagination of her enthusiastic disciples that few who had known her in life failed to see her presence in that mysterious moment when they hovered between two dim and unknown eternities. And to this day, those who enter her rule still assert and believe that their last hours are soothed by the radiant presence of their great foundress and exemplar. It had been Teresa's intention, if she could have found time, to proceed to Valladolid, where Maria de Bautista had not been without her cares. Sleepless nights spent beside the sickbed of a dying nun, and the tiresome contention in which she saw herself involved with the relatives of a novice, still little more than a child, had filled her with that longing for repose which at times sweeps over the most actively inclined. " You would not have better health, but worse," replies Teresa (who, strangely enough, considering her agitated and restless life, constantly asserted that her natural inclination lay towards solitude), " if you enjoyed the tranquillity you speak of; and this I am sure of, because I know your character, and so the thought of your labours does not distress me ; you have got to be a saint in some way ; and to desire solitude is better than to enjoy it. ... Do not be vexed with me, for I have already told you how much I should like to come : it would be false to say that I do not desire it. So many great people and so much bustle will be a great fatigue to me; but I will go through all to see you." What, however, she had dreamt was possible in July had become impossible in September. The foundation of Segovia had kept her longer that she had bargained for. She consoles her prioress gently for the inevitable disappointment. Her niece would only be startled to see her so old and worn out. THE FATE OF THE CONVENT OF PASTRANA 435 After all, her visit would soon come to an end, like everything in life, and she entreats her not to let it pain her, although in her pain she finds consolation for her own at being obliged to start for Avila without seeing her. She holds out hopes of being able, when the Lord so disposes, of making her a long visit; "for to see each other for so short a time is a great weariness ; the time all slips away in visits, and we lose our sleep for the sake of talking." For a fresh foundation was already engaging Teresa's thoughts that of Veas. Besides which, only seven or eight days remained before her term of office expired in the Encarnacion ; and her presence there was unavoidably necessary. Nor did she lose a moment; for the day following that on which she placed her daughters in the peaceable possession of their house, she bent her footsteps homewards. Outside Segovia, a narrow street winds down to the great Dominican monastery, which stands in a bower of foliage close to the lovely stream of the Eresma. Teresa must have sur- veyed with more than usual interest the splendid shrine, built by the Catholic kings over the famous cave, lost amongst the cliffs and underwood of the river bank, which was the scene of the penances of that other great founder of an Order, Sto. Domingo of Guzman. 1 Here she tarried, it would seem, as was the custom of all travellers in that age, to seek a benediction on her labours and journey at the hands of one with whom, in spite of the century that rolled between them, she felt a spiritual kinship. It was not the first time she had visited it, for it was here on St. Albert's Day (the 7th August), as she approached the altar to communicate, that, according to the chronicler, she had seen Christ on her right hand and St. Albert on the left. Presently Christ disappeared, leaving her alone with St. Albert, to whom she commended her nascent Order. It was then that St. Albert counselled the separation of the new and vigorous offshoot from the ancient stock, and its formation into a separate province. The basis for this legend may be small enough, but it conclusively proves that even at this period Teresa was nourishing the thought which afterwards came to be an accomplished fact, viz. the erection of the Discalced Carmelites into a self-governing body. Now, ere she bade farewell to Segovia, and the mules which were to bear her to Avila waited at the monastery gate, as she once more knelt in prayer in the saint's cave, she had other visions, perhaps the more carefully preserved by Yangues, who was present, as they were flattering to the Order of which he was a member. We 1 Better known to English readers as St. Dominic. 436 SANTA TERESA must accept the narrative for that of a man who, however excellent, was deeply tinged, as all were, with the superstition of the age, when piety did not stop at a little pious exaggeration even a little pious fraud (unconscious enough) to serve a pious purpose. After remaining for half an hour in prayer, to the wonder of the prior and monks who accompanied her and waited to bid her farewell, Yangues noticed that her face was flushed and radiant, and wet with tears. She replied to his inquiries that Sto. Domingo had appeared to her in great splendour and glory, and had promised to favour her Order. After shriving his great penitent, Yangues led her to a little chapel which contained a carved image of the founder of his Order. Here, he says, Sto. Domingo appeared to her again, and told her of the great conflicts he had waged with devils in that same spot, and the celestial favours he had there received. " And when the mother asked him why he always appeared to her on her left hand" (and now the Dominican's account becomes a little suspicious), "because, said he, the right hand belongs to the Lord, and the holy Mother also added that the image of the glorious Sto. Domingo that stood in the chapel was the very portrait of the saint himself." But the journey was no vision, but a very real thing ; and presently the monastery, buried amongst the stately poplars that tower against the rocky eminence, which in that place completely shrouds the city from view, faded from her sight, and the mules' slow tread mingled (with the murmurs of the river, rushing through the hollow at her feet. CHAPTER XVII HISTORY OF CASILDA DE PADILLA FOUNDATION OF VEAS ON the 3Oth of September Teresa left Segovia. She arrived at Avila in time to resign her three years' term of office as prioress of the Encarnacion. In spite of the wishes of the community, which would fain have elected her a second time, she used her influence in favour of Isabel de la Cruz, and retired to San Jose, where for a brief space she once more took up the reins of government. Her daughters, however, did not enjoy her presence long, for towards the close of the year we find her in Valladolid, where the state of her convent filled her with the most heartfelt satisfaction. Of two novices especially, the entrance of one of whom at least for the other was but a poor peasant girl must have caused a profound sensation in the little world of Valladolid, she writes in enthusiastic praise. This was Casilda de Padilla, the youngest daughter of the Adelantado of Castille x and Dona Beatriz de Acuna, who a few months before, at the age of thirteen, after a long struggle with her family, had made her escape from them and assumed the habit of a Discalced Carmelite nun. The history of this girl plunges us back into that strange century of fierce fanaticism and religious ardour. Sprung from two of the noblest houses of Castille (her father was Adelantado of Castille, and her mother a sister of the Count of Buendia), she was the youngest of four children, three of whom had so well responded to the virtuous impulses implanted in them by their mother she had been left a widow early in life that, unhesitatingly bidding farewell to a world they had scarcely entered upon, they buried their youth in the cloister. At 1 An adelantado was originally the governor in time of peace, in time of war the captain -general of a frontier province. As time went by this title became invested in the noble family of the Padillas, to whom Philip II. granted the title of Counts of Santa Gadea. Padilla, the hero of the Comuneros, was a member of this family. 437 SANTA TERESA seventeen Antonio, the heir, spurned his titles under foot and entered the Society of Jesus ; the sister who succeeded him in his estates, valuing them as little as her brother, resigned them in her turn and became a nun ; the third elected to live a life of chastity and edification with her mother ; and Casilda alone was left to carry on the traditions and heritages of her race. The last hope of two proud and ancient families, she was barely ten or eleven when her kinsmen procured a dispensation from the Pope and married her to her uncle, her father's brother. " The Lord did not will," writes Teresa, " that the daughter of such a mother and the sister of such brothers should be any more deceived than they, and so it came about as I shall now relate. Scarcely did the child begin to delight in the clothes and ornaments of the world, which conformably to her rank were enough to captivate the fancy of one of her tender years, than the Lord began to give her light, although then she did not understand it. After spending the day very happily with her husband, for she loved him more dearly than his age seemed to warrant, a great sadness came over her, when she saw how the day had ended, and that so must all days end. " She began to feel so great a sadness that she could not hide it from her husband, nor did she know the reason of it nor what to say to him, although he asked her. At this time he had occasion to take a journey, which took him to a great distance from home, and as she loved him so dearly, she felt it greatly. But now the Lord discovered to her the reason of her grief; that it was to incline her soul to what will never end, and she began to think how her brother and sisters had taken the safest road, leaving her in the perils of the world. This on the one side; on the other the thought that she had no remedy, for she knew not as yet that her betrothal did not hinder her becoming a nun, distressed her greatly, and above all the love she bore her husband prevented her taking a resolution, and so she struggled with her grief. As the Lord willed her for himself, this love gradually lost its hold on her, and the desire to abandon all grew stronger. At this time she was moved solely by the desire of saving herself, and seeking the best way of doing so, since it seemed to her that if she were plunged farther in worldly things she would forget to solicit those of eternity, for at so early an age did God inspire her with this wisdom to seek how she might gain that which has no ending. . . . She began to discuss it with her sister. The latter dissuaded her from what she looked upon as a childish whim, and told her that the fact of being married did not inter- fere with her salvation. She answered then, Why had she left HISTORY OF CASILDA DE PADILLA 43^9 it [the world]? And some time passed away during which her desire grew ever stronger, although her mother dared say nothing, for she, perchance, it was that warred against her with her holy prayers." It was at this time that the poor little distraught and melan- choly child went with her grandmother to see a lay sister take the habit in Teresa's convent. From that moment she fell a victim to the irresistible and relentless attraction of the cloister, and her fate was decided. "... One morning, when she and her sister accompanied her mother to the convent, as chance would have it they entered inside the monastery, little thinking that she would do what she did. When she found herself inside no one was able to cast her out. So did she weep and plead to be allowed to remain that every one was amazed. Her mother, although secretly glad, was in fear of her kinsfolk, and would fain have got her away so that they might not say she had persuaded her to it, and the prioress also was of the same mind, for it seemed to her she was too young, and further proof was needed. This happened in the morning; they were forced to remain until the evening, and sent for her confessor, the Father Master Fray Domingo (Bafles). ... He saw at once that it was the spirit of the Lord, and helped her greatly, enduring much from her relatives on that account. He promised her to assist her to return some other day. With great persuasion, and for the sake of her mother, so that no blame might attach to her in the matter, she went away this time. Her mother secretly began to acquaint her kinsmen with what had happened, so that if it came to her husband's ears he might not charge her with having concealed it from him. " They said it was a childish freak, and that she should wait until she was older, as she was not yet turned twelve. She asked them how it was that they accounted her old enough to be married and left to the world, and yet not old enough to give herself to God. From the things she said it was indeed patent that it was not she who spoke in this. It could not be kept so secret but that her husband was warned of it; when she knew of it she could not endure to wait for his return ; and one day it was the festival of the Conception being in her grandmother's house, who was also her mother-in-law, and knew nothing of this, she implored her to let her go with her gover- ness to divert herself a little in the country ; her grandmother, in order to please her, sent her in a cart with her servants. She gave one of them money, and begged him to wait for her at the convent door with some bundles of vine-shoots ; and she 440 SANTA TERESA made them take a roundabout road so that they brought her close to this house. When she got to the door she told them to ask for a jug of water at the torno, and that they were not to say who it was for, and she got down in great haste : they answered they would bring it to her out there ; she would have none of it. The vine-shoots were there already ; she told them to tell the nuns to come to the door to get them, and placed herself close beside it, and as soon as it was opened she slipped inside, and ran to embrace Our Lady, weeping, and begging the prioress not to cast her out. Loud were the shouts of the servants and the blows they battered on the door: she went to speak to them at the grating, and told them that on no account would she come forth, and bade them take the news to her mother. The women who accompanied her were objects of compassion ; as for her, she cared little for it all. When the grandmother heard the news she at once sped to the convent. In short, neither she, nor her uncle, nor her husband, who, when he came, did his utmost to speak to her at the grating, did more than torment her by their presence, and leave her more firmly resolved than ever. . . . When her husband and kinsmen saw how little good it was to try to get her out of her own free will, they resorted to force ; and so procured a Royal Warrant to get her out of the monastery, and constrain the nuns to set her at liberty. During all this time, which was from the Con- ception until Innocent's Day, when they took her away, she remained in the monastery without taking the habit, performing all the observances of the Order as if she had received it, and with the utmost happiness. On that day, when the ' law ' came for her, they took her to a gentleman's house. She was borne away, sobbing bitterly, and asking why they tormented her, since nothing they could do would change her resolution. Here monks as well as other persons some because it seemed to them a freak ; others because they wished her to enjoy her rank did their utmost to persuade her. . . . When they saw it was no good, in order to detain her for a time, they placed her in her mother's house, who, now wearied of witnessing such disturbances, instead of helping her at all, was, as it seemed, against her; her confessor's opposition also was extreme, so that except God she had no one on her side in whom she could confide but a waiting-woman of her mother's. So she passed through great tribulation and distress until she accomplished her twelfth year, when she found out that since they could not prevent her being a nun, they were thinking of taking her to the convent where her sister was, on account of the life not being so strict. HISTORY OF CASILDA DE PADILLA 441 " No sooner did this come to her knowledge than she resolved to take any means whereby she might accomplish her intent : and so one day, when she went to Mass with her mother, being left in the church whilst her mother was con- fessing in the confessional, she begged her governess to go and ask one of the padres to say a Mass for her, and when the coast was clear, put her chapins in her sleeve, gathered up her skirts, and set forth with all haste for the convent, which was at a great distance off. Her governess, as soon as she found her gone, ran after her, and when she got close to her, be- sought a man to detain her: afterwards he said that he was powerless to move, and so did nothing. She had barely got within the outside gates of the convent, and shut the gates and begun to call, than the governess arrived, but by that time she was already inside, and they at once gave her the habit, and so ended the good beginnings that the Lord had placed in her." "Although we look for much from Estefania, who to my thinking is a saint," writes Teresa to Don Teutonic de Braganza, " Sister Casilda fills me with astonishment, for surely I find her one both inside and out : if God keeps her she will be a great saint, for that it is his doing is clearly seen. Her vocation is great more than seems possible at her age. Her happiness and humility so great as to astonish me!" So far Teresa, and one scarcely knows which to admire most: the indomitable resolution, the force of will, the sly cunning displayed by a child of scarcely more than eleven years, in the prosecution of her object ; the folly of a grave Dominican and man of letters like Banes, finding in the escapades of the self-willed culprit the " spirit of God," and lending her a hand to defy her relatives ; or the seriousness and good faith with which Teresa chronicles misdemeanours for which an easy and simple act of grace might seem to have commended itself as the most apposite and efficient remedy. At all events Casilda got her will, and the feud she bred between the nuns and the two most powerful families of Valladolid, who considered, and perhaps with reason, that they had been unjustly defrauded of their last remaining representa- tive in the direct line, was so bitter as to defy even Teresa's attempts to heal it. Precocious sanctity, like precocious genius, is rarely trust- worthy ! Little more is known of the Adelantado of Castille's daughter, whose renunciation of her rank and vast estates to join the sisters of Valladolid must have excited so profound a sensation in the little world of her day. Her claim to the 442 SANTA TERESA notice of posterity begins and ends with the childish tragedy the last scene of which was enacted when at sixteen she made her final profession a profession which Gracian himself delayed in order to receive the vows of so illustrious a subject. In after years once at least Casilda was elected prioress : a post she no doubt owed as much to her birth and social position, to which a religious community is as susceptible as the rest of humanity, as to her merit. But whatever her excellences and they may have been many she obscured them in the eyes of the Order on which her entrance had cast a brief and fugitive lustre by abandoning it to enter a Franciscan convent at Burgos. It is possible that the disputes between her family and the community (for so far was Teresa from establishing concord that in 1579 we still find them haggling over the payment of her modest dowry of 2000 ducats) may have prompted a step which, it is said, she after- wards bitterly regretted. However this may be, few of Teresa's nuns could boast as did Casilda when, as a middle-aged woman, she gave her de- position for the saint's canonisation in 1610, that one of the earliest, as it must undoubtedly have been one of the most cherished, memories of her childhood was of being cradled and ofttimes soothed to sleep in the arms of the great Teresa de Jesus. At all events her conduct became a tradition of her house. In the following century more than one noble dame of her race and line obscured or enhanced their dignity (it is merely the point of view that makes the difference) by becoming inmates of Teresa's convents. Teresa's visit to Valladolid was but of short duration. Solicited on every side by proposals of fresh foundations, she was now bent on accomplishing those of Veas and Caravaca. She was sixty when she set forth on the longest and most remarkable of all her journeys. Hitherto her wander- ings in the cause of her Reform have been restricted to her native province; she is now to carry it into the heart of Andalucia. " Until now," says Master Julian with a touch of pathos, "our mother had only travelled in the vicinity of Avila journeys of twenty to thirty leagues each ; but when years were beginning to tell, and infirmities to increase, then she began to undertake the longer ones of from fifty to a hundred leagues." For the first time or is it fancy? a sigh of melancholy, of craving for rest, a certain note of weariness exhales from her letters ; if such a word as melan- FOUNDATION OF VEAS 443 choly applies to a spirit of resignation in which there is no sign of weakness or faltering courage, gentle and serene as some breathless day in autumn. Rather is her tone that of one whom material success can no longer either deceive or elate, nor disillusion sour; of one whose experience of the past has taught her to look for nothing from the future. It is for the young and inexperienced traveller, to encourage him to fresh exertion, that hope casts its glittering mirage over the dusty road of life ; with the buoyancy of youth and the weight of years the illusory glow vanishes, and he finds him- self face to face with a gray and relentless destiny, and with the strange fact that the endless revolutions of the world have not taught wisdom to her children. But Teresa has arisen to a loftier altitude, where the mind has ceased to need all such fictitious aid ; in her own unrivalled expression, " her soul was securely seated on its own house-top." What matter if all is a shadow : whether in the theological sense or one philosophical ; what matter if life is but a fleeting and unsubstantial phantas- magoria, if through the gloom one star alone, the star of Duty, casts its pale fine radiance to the outskirts of eternity, and she can say like the magi of old, " Vidimus stellam ejus in oriente, et venimus." It is the highest state to which humanity can attain, to which but few have attained, for it is even a reflex, however dim and obscured, of the calm impersonality of the Divinity. Blessed be God [she writes to her friend Dona Ana Enriquez, the Duchess of Alba], that we shall rejoice in him securely for Eternity, for certainly we can count on nothing here, what with these absences and changes. With this looking forward to the end, I endure life ; they say that mine is full of trials, but to me it does not seem so. Fame and she is now famous but imposed on her a more transcendental sense of responsibility, but bound down her life and will more firmly with the ligatures of duty. She is, as she writes to Fr. Luis de Granada, placed before the eyes of the world, " a erreat trial for one who had lived her imperfect life." In the letter she addresses to Don Teutonic de Braganza, Archbishop of Ebora, from Valladolid, on the eve of her long and perilous journey, we feel the weight of increasing years and infirmities : " Truly" (she refers to her journeys) " it is one of my greatest trials, and to see besides how ill they are thought of. Oftentimes I think how much better it would be for me to remain quietly in my retreat, if it were not for the General's precept. At others, when I see how the Lord is served in 444 SANTA TERESA these houses, all I can do seems to me but little." Even, she goes on to say, the journey to Salamanca seems to her too sore a burden for her feeble strength. " I should like to find myself there," she adds, " but unless it be for a foundation the journey is very irksome to me and I would not take it unless I was ordered to." Thus she wrote on the eve of what was to be the longest and in many respects the most memorable journey of her life, with foundations pressing her on every side ; in this same letter she expressly mentions four, none of which, however, she saw accomplished, and it was long before she was fated to find her- self back in Avila. " I shall start from here," she tells Don Teutonic, " after Epiphany. I shall return to Avila by way of Medina, where I do not think to stay more than a day or two ; and in Avila the same, for I shall go on at once to Toledo. I should like to get this business of Veas done with." Before following her on her journey it is necessary, since she herself has done so, to devote a few words to the two women to whose devoted efforts the convent of Veas owed its existence. Like that of Casilda de Padilla, the history of the sisters of Veas, who, long before Teresa appeared on the religious history of the age, resolved to devote their lives to the strictest Order they could found, is chiefly interesting for the curious insight it affords into the workings of the inner social life of the period. With a few unimportant variations, the history of one of these pious Beatas might do duty for all. For one luminous detail which throws light on the manners and customs of the age, we must wade through the same dreary repetition of miraculous conversions, omens, miracles, and supernaturalism. Even Teresa herself becomes but heavy and leaden reading. And yet underneath it all there runs a deep undertone of real beauty and pathos the pathos of humble virtue and heroism ; which rises sometimes into a clarion note of courage and defiance both admirable and enthralling. Twenty-seven years ago, before Teresa began to make a stir in the world, there lived in Veas, a little town situated amongst the first rising slopes of the Sierra Morena, a gentleman, Sancho Rojas de Sandoval. His worldly property was considerable, and both he and his wife 1 were of illustrious birth and unsullied ancestry " old Christians and of unblemished blood," as Teresa forgets not to record. Amongst other children they had two 1 She belonged to the illustrious house of Tamames, which has since given a ducal title to Spain. FOUNDATION OF VEAS 445 daughters the future foundresses of Veas. The eldest of these, Catalina, was fourteen when she first felt the mysterious call that changed the current of her life. Until then nothing was farther from her thoughts than to leave the world : on the con- trary, so highly did she esteem herself, that none of the marriages proposed to her by her father seemed good enough for her. One morning in the silence of her chamber which was next to that of her father, who was still asleep she was musing on one of these offers of marriage, " one that was better than she could have hoped for," and had just said to herself, "With how little is my father contented, so long as I marry a mayorazgo, I, for- sooth, who think to be the beginning of my race," when her eyes chanced to fall on the inscription over a crucifix hanging on the wall. Suddenly, even as she read, the " Lord changed her entirely." " It seemed," says Teresa, " as if a light entered her soul, which enabled her to see the truth, just as if a dark chamber had been flooded with the sun." By one of those sharp and sudden revulsions that are amongst the strangest and most mysterious problems of psychology, the beautiful and haughty girl was transformed into a humble and contrite penitent, oppressed by the enormity of her sins, her sole anxiety to redeem them by a life of poverty and chastity. In the hushed tranquillity of that early morning, whilst the rest of the house- hold were still asleep, did Catalina fight out and decide her destiny. When she awoke from her trance, " for the Lord suspended her," Catalina was a changed being. Between her and the past lay an abyss of terrible and intervening emotion. " She at once vowed to devote herself to a life of charity and poverty, and would fain have seen herself in such subjection, that for the sake of being so she would gladly have been taken to the land of the Moors." At this moment (at least, such is the narrative Catalina related to Teresa after the interval of many years) there was a noise in the room above so great that it seemed as if the whole house was coming down, and horrible howlings, which so terrified her father that he rose from his bed, slipped on his clothes, and with his drawn sword rushed into his daughter's room like a madman, to see what it was. After searching an inner room and finding nothing he bade her go to her mother, as she must not be left alone, and told her what he had heard ; " Which clearly shows," moralises Teresa, " how much the devil suffers when a soul he has made sure of escapes his clutches." From this moment the girl, whose impatience of control had led her to spurn the fetters of matrimony as an intoler- SANTA TERESA able burden, becomes the humblest, the most submissive of penitents. To spoil the beauty that drew suitors to her feet, she wet her face, and stood exposed in the corral (courtyard) to the mid- day sun. At night when they slept she kissed the feet of those over whom during the day she had exercised the authority of a mistress. She spent the hours of sleep in prayer, and the morn- ing sun still found her on her knees. During a whole Lent, strange symbol of the moral combat within, she wore her father's coat of mail next the skin. The desire of her life was to become a nun, but this her parents would not hear of. It is strange that such submission, such self-abasement, such humility, which to the profane at least would seem the sentiments of all others most calculated to soften the heart and call out the tenderest impulses of our nature, should generally transform those who experience them into bits of adamant, insensible to the pleadings of affection or the claims of duty. It would seem that sanctity and humanity are sworn foes. Despairing of obtaining her father's consent to her entering a religious life, at the end of three years she assumed the habit of a Beata. Nor was the strange and terrible series of heterogeneous maladies she suffered from for seventeen years fever, dropsy, heart and liver disease, a cancer in the breast, consumption enough to quench her resolution. Together with her younger sister Maria, who at fourteen also assumed the Beata's habit, she taught the poor children of Veas to read and sew, until, the pride of the parents revolting against receiving a gratuitous benefit, the good work was put an end to. At length, when the death of their mother the worthy knight had preceded his spouse to the grave by some five years left them free to follow their inclination, the two pious women, bent on carrying out the idea of their lives, determined to devote their patrimony to the foundation of a convent. Twenty years before the day on which Catalina witnessed the crowning triumph of her life at least, so she told Teresa in Veas, she had had a dream of mysterious and significant import. She thought she was traversing a narrow and dangerous path along the brink of a deep precipice, when she saw a friar, who, beckoning her to follow him, led her to a house filled with nuns, and lighted only by the burning tapers they carried in their hands. When she asked them to what Order they belonged, they were all silent and raised their veils from their smiling and happy faces, and the prioress, taking her by the hand, said, " Daughter, you too are wanted here," and showed her the Rule and Constitutions. One is not surprised to learn that after FOUNDATION OF VEAS 447 twenty years Catalina was still able to recognise Fray Juan de la Miseria as the friar of her dream, and Teresa and her companions as the prioress and nuns who had smiled upon her slumbers. A similar felicity of memory enabled her to write down what she had seen of the Rule and Con- stitutions, and that with such singular precision that, when years after she showed them to a Jesuit, he, with the simple and unquestioning faith that has always distinguished his Order, unhesitatingly recognised them as those of the Discalced Carmelites. Whereupon Catalina at once despatched a messenger to Teresa, then in Salamanca, to urge her to start at once for Veas " since the house was waiting, the foundress alone was want- ing." "On making inquiry of the man" (it is Teresa who speaks), " he praised the country highly, and with reason, for it is exceedingly delightful and the climate is good; but as I thought of the many leagues between it and Salamanca, it seemed to me impossible, the more so as it was useless to think of it without the Apostolic Commissary's license, who, as I have said, was averse to, or at least no favourer of these foundations, and so I was about to refuse without saying anything to him about it. Afterwards I bethought me that since he was then in Salamanca, it was not right to do so without asking his advice, on account of the precept our most reverend father general, Rubeo, had imposed on me to found wherever I could. As soon as he saw the letters, he sent to say that it did not seem worth while to discourage them ; that he had been edified by their devotion, and that I might write to them that, provided they could get the Council of Orders 1 to sanction it, the foundation should be proceeded with ; nevertheless that I might be certain that it would not be granted, for he knew of other places belonging to the comendadores, which had been years endeavouring to obtain a license for the same purpose, but without success." Fernandez's answer was, in short, equivalent to a polite refusal, as indeed he intended it to be. But the astute old friar had overreached himself. The energy and resolution of a bedridden woman scattered his pre- cautions to the wind, and the Apostolic Commissary had reason to regret that, instead of being betrayed into a conditional consent, he had not given a direct negative. " I sometimes think of this," says Teresa, " how against our will we become 1 A council founded by the Catholic kings, composed of a president and various knights elected from amongst the different military orders of the kingdom. As Veas belonged to the knights of Calatrava, the consent of this tribunal was absolutely necessary before the foundation could be proceeded with. 448 SANTA TERESA the instruments of carrying out what our Lord devises, like Fray Pedro Fernandez, the Commissary, in this case ; and so when the license was obtained, he could not refuse his." For four years Catalina and her friends had left no means untried to get the Council of Orders to grant the license, but in vain. When the messenger reached Veas with Teresa's answer her recovery seemed hopeless the license also. Her kinsfolk implored her to abandon an attempt which seemed to them little short of madness, the more so as it was in vain to hope that any monastery would admit a confirmed invalid within its walls. The sick woman, reassured by an inward conviction, or rather by what amounts to the same thing in mystical theology, " a voice that spoke within her," boldly replied, that if within a month she regained her health she herself would go to Madrid for the license. On St. Sebastian's Eve, within a few days of the expiry of the term she had proposed, Catalina, to the speechless astonish- ment of her relations, rose from the couch to which she had been confined for more than half a year, and from which she had scarcely stirred for eight, to all appearance sound and strong. " At this time," writes Teresa, " she had suffered from continual fever for eight years; she was consumptive and dropsical, with such a consuming fire in the liver that it was perceptible even through her clothes, and burnt up her chemise, a thing I should never have believed had I not had my information from the doctor. Besides these ailments she also suffered from a cancer in the breast, gout in the joints, and sciatica. So base am I," she adds, strange mixture of supersti- tion and common sense as she was, " that unless I had had it from the doctor, and those who lived in the same house with her, it would not have been too much to think that there was somewhat of exaggeration." Catalina sped to court, unopposed by her kinsmen, overawed, as well they might be, at such activity on the part of one who had twice received extreme unction. It was a miracle, and they respected it. And it is strange indeed what miracles hope can work, and how the near prospect of the fulfilment of the ardent longings of a lifetime can infuse fresh vigour into an enfeebled frame, and give it a temporary lease of life and strength. After three dreary months spent in prosecuting what seemed a hopeless suit, during which she experienced all the sickness of hope deferred, she had recourse to the King himself, and such was the esteem in which he held Teresa's character and abilities that he had only to learn that it was for one of her monasteries, to grant Catalina's petition on the spot. And thus was Fer- FOUNDATION OF VEAS 449 nandez, who had thought it quite safe to despatch a conciliatory and consolatory reply to sustain the hopes of the foundresses at Veas, so long as the prospect of a license seemed to lie in the dim future, triumphantly hoist with his own petard. Towards the middle of winter the intrepid old woman once more set forth upon her travels. Once again the covered cart, under the convoy of the Castilian priest and the Salamanca' gentleman, crept over the snowy plateaux of Spain, and little did the wild herdsman dream as, standing motionless against the sky, he watched the progress of the little cavalcade over the treeless plains, ere it became a speck amongst the other specks on the horizon, that it bore one before whose glory that of Santiago himself should pale and lose its lustre. At Medina she gave the habit to Dona Elena Quiroga, the Cardinal Arch- bishop of Toledo's niece. At Toledo and Malagon she broke her journey to rest, and inspect the interior discipline of her convents. At Malagon the little band was further increased by the addition of a priest " of the very religious ones, much given to prayer, retirement, and mortification" (so remarks good Master Julian), Fray Gregorio de Nazianceno, who accompanied them to Veas, where Teresa gave him the habit and solemnly received him into her Order. After leaving Malagon they turned aside from the direct road, so as to pass through Almodovar, where Fray Antonio de Jesus was then treating for the foundation of another monastery. In this town Teresa lodged in the house of one Marcos Garcia and Isabel Lopez his wife. As is still the custom in patriarchal Spain, their eight children were called up to be inspected by the stranger. Teresa raised her veil, and after looking at them attentively one by one, she said to their mother, " Your Grace, mistress, possesses amongst these eight, two, one of whom will be a great saint, a benefactor of many souls, and the Reformer of a great Order, as time will show." And then raising her right hand, she placed it on the shoulder of Antonio Lopez (the narrator) and said, " Little saint, remember that you will need much patience, for many are the rude blows you will receive in this valley of tears. What say you to that?" And he replied, " I will have all I can." And again she repeated her question, " But what if the blows be very great, what say you ? " And then she went on: "Time will show that when one of these eight shall have been dead five years, it shall still be seen which one of them it was." At least so runs the story related, most firmly believed in, and as solemnly ratified by Antonio Lopez, one of the eight who stood before the saint that day, in the evidence for his brother's beatification, when failing 29 450 SANTA TERESA memory had dimmed its real details, and the alchemy of time and years transmuted them into others more in accordance with the event. Still the simple pathos of its telling makes it interesting, although as evidence of Teresa's miraculous gifts of prophecy, it would be quite as convincing if the Carmelites did not tell it one way and the Trinitarians another. For one of those self-same children, Fray Juan Bautista de la Con- cepcion, did afterwards become the reformer of the Trinitarians, although the opinion of his own Order is divided as to the share he took in it, and was beatified by Rome. And not merely in his case, but in that of his sister as well, who after- wards became a pious Beata, attached to the Carmelite Order, was Teresa's prophecy fulfilled ; for when five years after her death her tomb in the friars' church of Almodovar was opened, her body was still found to be entire. It would be interesting to know how far these predictions were altered in after years to suit the event by an Order jealous of their reputation, and not over-scrupulous in their measures for establishing it. Prophecy or no prophecy and I for one do not abase the greatness of this woman by attributing to her the arts of a soothsaying gipsy it shows how strangely she impressed herself on the imagination of her age, and how those whose lives she crossed in childhood regarded the grandiose figure ; how the touch of her hand, the sound of her voice still lingered in their memory from youth to age its most precious records, until the tomb sealed them up for ever ; and she herself, one of the most majestic traditions of Spain, had become to the generation that took the place of that which dimly remembered somewhat of Teresa the woman a consecrated fetish, devoid of passion, sex, humanity, on the gilded altar of a church. That her popularity was growing, that her name has already become a talisman to the crowd, may be seen by the tendency of her nuns she was accompanied by two of her cleverest prioresses, Ana de Jesus and Maria de San Jose' to consider their hairbreadth escapes on this perilous journey as so many miracles. On the last day's journey after leaving Almod6var, the drivers lost their way amidst the wild passes of the Sierra Morena. Hemmed in on every side by savage peaks and precipices, they dared neither go back nor forward. The nuns invoked the assistance of San Jose", and sure enough, as if in answer to their prayers, a distant voice from the bottom of the valley warned them of their peril and directed them to safety. " I know not," said Teresa, as the muleteers went to look for their invisible benefactor some wandering shepherd who, himself unseen, had seen and noted their danger " I know FOUNDATION OF VEAS 451 not why we let them go, for it was my father Jose, and they will not find him." Verily, Faith is sometimes better than Reason, for the muleteers, not to be outdone, affirmed with oaths (as indeed we may be sure they did) that from that moment the mules sprang forward as if they trod on air, and stony heights and horrid precipices had been enchanted into level plains. Before they got to Veas still another miracle happened, that the Venerable Mother Ana de Jesus has not forgotten to record in her evidence for the saint's canonisation. In order to cross the Guadalimar it was necessary for the nuns to alight from the carts and ford the current on mules. But scarcely had they got to the edge of the water when, with- out knowing how, they found themselves on the other side, leaving every one transfixed with amazement that, on account of the merits of his servant, the Lord made them invisible bridges. And if it pleased these holy women in after years to consider the natural effects of blinding terror as a miracle, and, losing sight of the sure-footed mules, to attribute their passage across the rapid current of the Guadalimar to supernatural agency, who shall gainsay them ? The illusion is harmless enough, and the disregard of the actual benefactor merely human, for, after all, if a horse is a feeble thing to save a man's life, the same may be said of a mule. It is most probable, as it lay on the way, and she would surely not pass without visiting one of the principal houses of the Reform in Andalucia, that she rested a day or two at La Penuela. Thence to Veas it is about two days' journey. The landscape now was no longer the familiar arid uplands of Castille, in which earth seems to become a paraphrase of the immensity of the sky. Aloes the remains of Arab cultivation now began to send their spiny tufts of dull cobalt blue against the bright red marl of the soil, whose dazzling brilliance under the sun was almost unsupportable. The accent too had changed, and with it the manners of the people. If Teresa noted these things she has left no record of it. The fame of her miracles, losing nothing in the transmission, had sped before her to Veas, and it may be that she partly owed to them a reception more gay and joyous than any she had yet received. And yet, if the veil could have been snatched from eyes blinded by the passions and foibles inherent to humanity (alas for humanity, the same to-day as then !), and they could have seen wherein lay the real miracle, the untiring constancy, the unflinching will of the woman bent and tortured with infirmities, who feebly exclaimed, as she sallied forth from 452 SANTA TERESA Malagon, and contemplated the long and arduous journey before her, " Lord, look to it thou, that I may have strength to bear it," I doubt whether instead of joy, it would not have filled them with the profoundest sentiment of sadness. None less than she has needed the glamour of the supernatural to take her place amongst the great ones of the earth. And yet I question whether the bulk of her pious votaries now are one whit more enlightened than her admirers were then, and whether one paltry miracle " cooked up " by pious fraud does not far outweigh the heroism of her life, the genius of her writings, the strong current of rectitude and honesty which underlies even the greatest vagaries of her mysticism, the charm and fascination of her wonderful personality. But away such thoughts on this day of joy ! Let us from this nineteenth century descend into the tranquil streets of the little town, and watch, unnoted spectators, one of those scenes of simple and contagious rejoicing and devotion, than which even now, when shorn of much of their splendour and of much of their enthusiasm, nothing is more thrilling or stirs the heart more strangely. To-day the little town has aroused itself from the apathy in which it lies dully absorbed for the greater part of the year, except on some such occasion as this. The vineyards and the oliveyards are deserted, and there is an unwonted stir in the air of this tranquil winter's day. Presently a troop of horsemen, of the knights who shed a lustre over the grim old houses, which now stand like spectres of a more dignified past, as useless to their descendants as the rusty swords which then dangled by their side, ride out amidst groups of eager peasants to meet the cart which bears Teresa and, passaging their horses [" haciendo gentilezas "] before it, conduct her in triumph to the gates of the church. Presently the bells in the tower burst out into merry and repeated chimes ; the crowd breaks into acclamations; hoary-headed men and women murmur blessings on the saint of Spain not yet a saint except in their imagination whom, like Simeon, they have lived to see ; some drop down on their knees in the dust ; the clergy motionless, a white blot against the shadow of the porch. For there it comes, that travel-stained and humble vehicle, slowly creaking into the market-place, surrounded by its bodyguard of mounted gentle- men ; and from it alights and now a hush of expectancy creeps over every person there the bent form of a woman, veiled from head to foot, who leans somewhat heavily on her stick, as one by one, priest and gentleman and peasant, and methinks her eyes are bent more kindly on the last than on any of the rest, kneel to kiss her hand and seek her benediction. FOUNDATION OF VEAS 453 Then the great silver cross is raised on high in the searching rays of the February sun ; the pulse of a whole people throbs simultaneously as the triumphal chant of the Te Deum unloosens their pent-up emotions ; as slowly winding through narrow streets, every casement gay with silks and velvets, and the ground strewn with flowers and sweet-smelling rushes, the procession threads its way to the ancestral home of Catalina Godinez, to which that day was to add a more imperishable blazon of glory than the knightly arms of her forefathers mouldering from its angles, inasmuch as it was to shelter the great Teresa de Jesus, and become the eighth convent of her Order. It was the Day of St. Matthias, and the pious virgin of forty-one remembered, not without a thrill of awe, that it was on that same day twenty-seven years ago that she had first felt the mysterious impulse which had been the magnet of her life. "If now we did not wish for you, and cast you out into the street, what would you do ? " asked Teresa in her quaint and funny way, as she gave the two sisters the habit, and accepted the renunciation of all they had. " We will serve your rever- ences," they answered, " in the porteria, and if you did not give us food we will ask for alms for the love of God." Teresa's entry into Veas was the first of those triumphs which we shall soon see repeated in Seville, Palencia, Soria. The days are over when she entered Medina like a thief in the night ; and the days are still to come when her feast-day will become the occasion of national rejoicings, such as in life she never could have dreamed of. It was in Veas that Teresa first met the man with whom her life was thenceforth to be so intimately blended. It was the prologue to the stormiest and most agitated portion of her career, which from this moment takes a fresh development. Hitherto we have watched her founding her convents of nuns as busily as of yore she built up mimic ones in her father's garden. Henceforth we shall follow her, as, beaten on by storms and tempests, the victim of active persecution (for the finger of malice points most readily at those whose station or virtue makes them most conspicuous), she stands ever at the helm, guiding the frail bark of her Reform into the desired haven. In order to understand the fierce struggle into which her meeting with Gracian was at once to plunge her, and on which the Descalzos are now called upon to enter if they would save themselves from total extinction ; in order adequately to follow her history, which is now that of the Order she has herself raised into being, it is necessary briefly to retrace the progress 454 SANTA TERESA and development of the Discalced Carmelites since the day that Fray Juan de la Cruz and Fray Antonio de Jesus, " her friar and a half," as she called them with loving satire, resuscitated the Primitive Rule of San Brocardo de Jerusalem ; that Rule which first sent forth its reflex from a Syrian mountain, in a lonely straw grange lost in the brown immensity of a Castilian landscape. Within the space of four short years nine monasteries have sprung into existence, four in Castille and four in Andalucia, and one of them that of San Juan del Puerto abandoned. A college has been founded at Alcala de Henares for the instruction of Carmelite novices. How had it all come about? With the same laborious slowness as life itself; oftentimes startling us by its cumulative results, taken in its isolated acts day by day, nothing ; taken as a whole, tremendous, awe-inspiring. Year after year has seen a monastery founded ; has seen the Descalzos take firmer root and enlarge the circle of their influence: at first a grain of mustard-seed nourished in obscurity, now a forest tree, young, vigorous, full of sap and vitality. We have seen how, barely eight months after the foundation of Duruelo, Teresa had, in another distant corner of Castille, given the habit to the three men as oddly assorted as any three ever thrown together by Fate who. were to found the second monastery of her Order : Ambrosio Mariano, Fray Juan de la Miseria, and Fray Baltasar Nieto, thenceforth Fray Baltasar de Jesus. The first of these, Mariano sometime diplomatist, soldier, courtier, statesman, man of science, of lively wit and caustic tongue that bit like acid ; sharpened by a long experience of all sorts and conditions of men ; hot-headed and impetuous ; fertile in expedients ; unscrupulous, not cursed with too nice a conscience shall play no inconsiderable part in this history. Fray Juan de la Miseria, who on this occasion as on all others followed the example of his countryman with dog-like fidelity, a gentle, harmless being, noted for little except his simplicity, unostentatious virtue, and blear-eyed portraits of Teresa is, we feel, already predestined by that very goodness and guile- lessness to the obscurity of humble effort in the background. Nieto is a man of different stamp. An Andaluz, he has grown old amongst the Observants ; amongst them has arisen into fame as one of the most eloquent preachers of the peninsula. His accession, a triumph for the Descalzos, brings with it the enmity of the great and powerful Order, who cannot regard with equanimity the desertion of so illustrious a subject. To- FOUNDATION OF VEAS 455 day when all these cloister rivalries are silent, his character stands out from the dim background of the annals of the Descalzos for the jealousy with which he fostered calumnies against one whose only fault seems to have been his pre- eminence. On a hot July day these three made their way up the steep and sandy path to the hill, a quarter of a league to the south of Pastrana, where a hermitage which crowned its summit and had been for generations an object of devotion to the town- people was thenceforth to witness the devotions of more than three generations of friars. A rejoicing multitude sallied forth with them from the gates of the old walled town of Pastrana, to escort them to the spot which was soon to be celebrated as the site of the second and most famous monastery of the Order. It was a wild, lovely spot, this hillside of Pastrana, aban- doned to rough forest and scrub. Beneath it lay a green and fertile valley ; far in the distance gleamed the blue Sierras of Cuenca. Its after history was that of all the houses reared by the Carmelites. When night stole over the scene of the day's triumph, and the voice of the last straggler had died away in the distance, the three solitaries took refuge in a cave, where hitherto the wild shepherds of the district had sheltered them- selves from the tempest and the midnight cold. On the morrow the sound of axe and spade and mattock might have been heard ringing through the sweet solitudes, scaring away the wild doves from the sylvan retreat, where they and the nightingales had hitherto been the only inhabitants. A few rough sheds of pine were propped up against the dove-cot walls. Primeval wilderness was transformed by dint of the ceaseless toil of these laborious contemplatives into a blossoming garden. Terraces rose one above another on the sandy slopes; and the tender green of vine-shoots and pleasant orchards gradu- ally took the place of rough brushwood and tangled thicket. The nimble-witted Mariano displayed the engineering skill which had been in request with princes, and astonished his companions by his success in conducting water from a spring near the town on a lower level, to the top of the hill, so as to irrigate the highest of the terraces. He also excavated an underground passage through the face of the hill between the dove-cot on the slope, which was as yet the best abode they knew, and the little chapel on the summit. Here on this peace- ful hillside they renewed the traditions and stern monastic discipline of the Cenobites of the Thebaid. Each brought to the common stock that particular art or office that he excelled 456 SANTA TERESA in most. Their privations were extreme. They lived on the herbs culled from the hillside until the garden repaid their labours with its produce. Cabbage and lettuce and sorrel, sod in water and so ill prepared, such the carelessness or piety of the cook, that the particles of dirt grated on the teeth was their ordinary fare, to which on festivals, as a special treat, they added a little oil. Hunger and necessity alone could break and swallow the bread made by the monkish baker, scarcely more skilful or less devout than his brother the cook. Beside the crust of bread and the bowl of unpalatable vegetables, a skull on a plate of ashes preached its significant lesson. Some there were who mingled their food with wormwood and ashes ; others, to whom the heat seemed a weakness of the flesh, threw cold water over it. Many there were who, besides the obligatory fasts, fasted continuously on bread and water. There were men who for twelve months together had tasted nothing but a bowl of soup and bread and water, and yet screened their abstinence with such scrupulous care that none remarked it. One forgot the use of language, and had to make use of signs; a novice on his deathbed asked leave to raise his eyes on high before they closed for ever. Benches and stools were long unknown amidst the first friars of Pastrana. And yet these men their emaciated bodies bearing the bleeding marks of the scourge and the unhealed sores of the cilicium, who flitted about in unbroken silence, their eyes fastened on the earth worked harder with their hands than the rudest labourer ; and the vast monasteries built by these half-starved friars, their orchards and their gardens, are still a surprise and charm to the traveller who comes across them in the remote and forgotten corners of Spain. Not a breath ; no change of posture betokened weariness in those bodies of bronze, in which the will had been annihilated and destroyed. They despised all support. Human Reason was as dead as the will. The voice of the superior was the voice of Christ; the signal of the bell the signal of heaven. Dead to life, its joys, its sorrows, earth ceased to exist. Day and night from the little chapel on the height the watchers before the Host sent up a continuous stream of supplication for the Church, the Pope, the King and Kingdoms of Spain, theii benefactors the Dukes of Pastrana; and they who had laboured all day at the roughest toil often spent the night in vigil, pros- trate before the sanctuary. The original monastery of Pastrana has long been swept away: for the building which now rises on the crest of the hill was erected long after Teresa and her primitive friars were FOUNDATION OF VEAS 457 dead ; the Carmelites have faded into night have become an anachronism ; but as the dreamer lies on the hillside of Pastrana, under the shadow of the tall pines the descendants of those felled by the friars and the doves flap heavily in and out of the pigeon-cot, the only sound that breaks the midday silence it may be forgiven him if for a moment the primitive friars, who built with their own hands that famous monastery, cease to become blurred and misty images in a monastic chronicle, and live to him once more in time and space. For a moment he too becomes the retrospective victim of the strange fascination exercised on the imagination of their century by men who, fired with all the ardour of an older and sterner world, suddenly burst on the religious horizon of the age, at the very moment it most demanded them. Their un- familiar garb, their bare feet, the unbroken silence in which they lived ; their preference for the wildest and remotest spots ; the stern asceticism and unobtrusive heroism of their lives, made a profound impression on their contemporaries which is still not wholly obliterated. One can fancy the strange awe and veneration with which the simple country people, who saw with amazement men, some of whom had been great in station and the world, labouring with their hands harder than they themselves, greeted the advent in their midst of these cowled solitaries. As the rude arriero passed that spot at night (I speak of Pastrana) he stopped his mule with almost superstitious awe to listen to the deep-toned litanies and matins of the friars, as they mingled with the song of the nightingale and the musical croak- ing of frogs, and all the inexplicable sounds of a southern night. The good neighbours of Pastrana slept but the more serenely if, carried on the breeze, the faint tinkle of the convent bell broke in upon their midnight slumbers. They crossed themselves and fell asleep again, secure that whilst they slept the friars prayed. Nor were these feelings confined to the narrow circle of their rustic neighbours. Ruy Gomez, their powerful benefactor, carried their fame to court, to the ears of King Philip himself, profoundly rousing his interest in the struggles of a handful of friars to reassert the original rigidity and discipline of Mount Carmel on Spanish soil. In the meantime, in that other corner of Castille, a third monastery has been founded by their brethren of Duruelo. About a league's distance across the desert plain, the path now diving through oak woods, now following the meanderings of the streamlet, whose mendacious title of Rio al Mar so rouses the ire of the chronicler, leads to a little town, Mancera de 458 SANTA TERESA Abajo. The shields which hang from the pillars above the aisles of the church strangely grandiose for so small a place ; the same shield repeated over the grim front of the mediaeval Casa de Ayuntamiento, its top story, supported by carved wooden posts blackened by time, jutting over the lower, have lost all meaning for the rural inhabitants who look upon them daily. But down there by the river, in the bottom, at the other entrance to the town, a mill, still working, built of quarried stone, of solider and stronger architecture than the cluster of houses above the ruins of a palace, tell to the curious in such matters, to him who can read sermons in stones, the past history and the life and manners of that dead and gone Mancera, and its inhabitants of Teresa's time. Then that mass of stones, out of which all shape has not yet departed, here and there a heavy moulding surrounds a vacant casement, framing sky and empty space ; the gateway of honour, still massive and imposing, defies time ; was the feudal dwelling of a great family, a branch of the Toledos, Dukes of Alba. Around them, far away to Alba, stretched their wide domains. They ruled with a rod of iron, or beneficently, according to the mood of each successor, the little township on the hill. The dispensers of justice, lords of gallows and knife Senores de Horca y Cuchillo retainer, hind, and peasant tremblingly obeyed their behests. Don Luis de Toledo, lord of the Cinco Villas, possessor of these fair estates, and dispenser of happiness or misery to these humble lives, attracted by the fame of the friars of Duruelo, had also ridden forth ruffling in his velvets on feast-days and Sunday mornings, under an incandescent sun, to pour his sins and woes into their ears. He pressed upon them, and they reluctantly accepted (so affirms the chronicler, in his desire to excuse the voluntary abandonment by his dead predecessors of the humble straw grange) a church he had built within a stone's-throw of his palace walls, to be the shrine of a famous altar-piece brought by his grandfather from Flanders, and bequeathed by him to his descendants as a family heirloom. A well, a few brick walls rising amidst the arid surface of the soil, are all that attest to-day the passage of the Carmelites across the obscure history of Mancera. Even in those days although it must be remembered that when there were virtually no coaches, much less railways, and every man rode, no place was more remote or difficult of access than another it was an out-of-the-way corner, and there was nothing to bring either travellers or traffic. For us the interest of the Monastery of Mancera ends on that June day of 1570, FOUNDATION OF VEAS 459 which shone on a devout procession of monks, who, abandoning the cradle of the Order, wound a wavering line across the plain, until, disappearing over the crest of the hill, they are lost for ever in oblivion. Teresa's licenses (they were limited to two) expired with the foundation of Pastrana. It was useless to expect any further concession from the General, whose intention, far from embracing any serious increase of the Reform, seems to have been to make this little band of men of austere life and rigid virtue merely his instruments for introducing amongst the regular Carmelites a severer discipline and a more conscientious conception of their Rule the little leaven, in fact, that leaveneth the whole lump. The farther progress of the Order was at an end, had not its development been favoured by an unforeseen combination of circumstances. In 1570, the Pope, at Philip's request, had as we have seen vested the supreme control of the Spanish Carmelites in two Apostolic Visitors. The power of these Visitors was absolute and unlimited. Both were Dominicans, men of high position and acknowledged virtue. To Vargas, prior of the Dominican monastery of Cordoba, was entrusted jurisdiction over the province of Andalucia ; that of Castille was vested in Fray Pedro Fernandez, prior of Talavera de la Reina. By Philip's desire, and commissioned by the Nuncio, Fernandez's first visit was to Pastrana. He arrived before the convent gates he and his companion on foot, driving before them a donkey which bore their cloaks and the chronicler has not forgotten to record the words (so flattering to his Order) in which the old man rebuked the ill-concealed astonishment produced by the entry in this humble fashion of one holding a post of such supreme dignity. " It ill becomes him," he is reported to have said, " who comes to visit saints, to travel like a layman." Strange to find sanctity expressing surprise at conduct which would have seemed, of all others, most natural and inherent to it ! Fernandez had no cause to complain of his reception ; the friars received him with every mark of joy and veneration. It was Lent when he arrived, and it was noted that he fasted on bread and water, and followed the Rule with as much rigorous punctiliousness as if he too would fain have enrolled himself amongst the restorers of the ancient fervour of the prophets. After some days spent in these pious exercises, he disclosed his commission before the convent chapter. Although he said it did not extend to the Descalzos, nor were they bound to submit to his visit ; not only had the Nuncio ordered him to receive 460 SANTA TERESA their obedience if they saw fit to give it, but the King himself was desirous that they should do so. After a brief conference, the friars unanimously signified their submission. The reward of their judicious conduct on this occasion was a license to open a college at Alcala de Henares, a license he made no difficulty in conceding, but which the Provincial of the Carmelites was powerless to give, and which the General would most certainly have refused. What share in it the influence of Ruy Gomez had is not certain. On the ist of November 1570, the college bought and endowed by Ruy Gomez for the main- tenance of eighteen students was solemnly opened in Alcala. A year later, by virtue of the powers vested in their prior, Fray Baltasar de Jesus, by the Visitor Fernandez, who had appointed him Vicar-general of the Descalzos, the friars of Pastrana took possession of the hermitage of Altomira, on the topmost peak of the sierra that divides the provinces of Toledo and Cuenca, within a day's journey or less, as the crow flies, from Pastrana. A wild, strange spot, perched like an eagle's eyrie far above the clouds ; in summer lovely with the loveliness of these deserted uplands of Spain, a tangle of dwarf arbutus and aromatic shrubs ; in winter storm-tossed, inaccessible, its paths blocked by snow for months together. With these foundations the new Order leaps out of its obscurity into the light of day, and enters on a fresh phase of its existence. On the occasion of the opening of the Carmelite college Fray Baltasar de Jesus had roused all Alcala with his eloquence ; people, students, grave professors of the university and masters of theology alike flocked to hear the old man, who wore the garb of an anchorite of the desert, and in whom, according to the chronicler, it seemed that the spirit of St. Paul and the silvery tongue of Apollo had once more come to life. Crowds, vibrating with curiosity and excitement, gathered at the corners of the streets to watch the strange little band of Discalced students as they trudged to and fro between their college and the lecture halls. Their bare feet, their downcast eyes, their meagre and ragged habit barely reaching to the naked ankle ; their hands meekly folded over their scapularies ; the half- understood asceticism of their stern lives, appealed powerfully and irresistibly to the imagination. Fray Pedro Fernandez said truly, when on his visit to Pastrana he exhorted the friars to continue as they had begun, that the mute mortification of their lives preached a more eloquent sermon than could be heard from any pulpit. The Discalced Communities became the theme of every tongue. Every day young and ardent men, some of them FOUNDATION OF VEAS 461 graduates of the University, and nearly all men of bright promise, were drawn as by a magnet to the sunlit hill of Pastrana. People sped from far and near, led by curiosity or devotion the former often more potent than the latter to get a sight of the seven friars who braved the winter tempests up there on the wind-swept height of Altomira ; and some there were whose idle curiosity decided the course of their lives, and stayed their wandering feet for good beside the humble shrine of Our Lady of Succour. To-day a hare, a rabbit, starting from the perfumed tangle, alone disturbs the immense solitude of Altomira, where the friars dwelt. An eagle circles round the Moorish watch-tower which springs from the narrow promontory of rock on the extreme edge of the summit, and still sweeps the vast horizon with something of its old stern defiance. The groined roof and massive pillars of the hospederia, a little below it, which once belonged to the Knights Templars, uninjured by the passage of centuries, may yet serve to give a night's shelter to the impertinente curioso. A little farther down the ridge a mass of formless ruins shows where the Carmelite monastery once stood. Time or a tardy sentiment of remorse has, how- ever, spared the little hermitage which was their church ; and between the bars of the wooden grating which protects the entrance the Virgin still beams benignant. Once in the year she receives the homage of the villagers from the towns and villages dotted round its base, and the path trodden by Moors, Templars, and friars is trodden once more. Then as night sinks over the sierras she is left alone smiling into space on the wind-swept ledge, until another year shall bring her votaries to her feet again. The friars have followed Moorish adalid and Christian Templar, and faded with them into the past, but they- still live in the wild legends of the countryside, and at dead of night (so they say who have heard it) the breeze carries to distant hamlets the tinkling of the bell which once summoned them to .Matins. Even stripped of the exaggerations and hyperbole of the chronicler, the history of the seven friars who, amidst the simple rejoicing of the neighbouring peasantry, climbed these Alpine solitudes to take possession of the wild wind-swept peak of Altomira, proves one of the most romantic pages in the monastic annals of this or any other age. Here, on the topmost summit of the sierra, above the clouds which rolled over the world below, in some rough sheds they reared under the lee of the hermitage walls and parcelled out into cells and offices, these men braved the winter storms and tempests. As 462 SANTA TERESA they slept the snow fell down on them through the interstices of the roof; not only the passes but the church door was blocked up by snow for days together. On a winter's day a strange little procession of monks, headed by their gray old prior, might be seen trudging over the snowy waste to fetch wood and water from half a league and a quarter of a league's distance. The drops of water froze hard upon their habits ; their hands to the handles of the jars. They chipped out the wine in the wine jar with a knife, and both wine and water had to be melted before hot embers before they could be used for Mass. The friars defied the rigours of the first winter they spent on those barren heights on a few beans boiled in water, so as to save their scanty store of oil for the Host. And yet from that mountain fastness, covered with eternal snow, inhabited only by wolves and friars, amidst the shrieking of the winds which drowned the brothers' voices in the choir and beat fearfully around their fragile dwelling, threatening its destruction, as sweet a perfume of prayer and pure lives ascended into heaven, as from the sunlit hill of Pastrana. The fame of the anchorites of Altomira sped through all Castille. So did the Descalzos in Teresa's phrase appear from night to morning. Hitherto their obscurity, the meanness and poverty of their origin, had protected them from attack. The moment was now arrived when they were to be called upon to fight tenaciously for bare existence. It was to be the last great struggle which expiring mediaevalism was to make against the new era which was stealthily building up the Europe of to-day ; it was the last resolute stand against the disturbing influences of new thoughts and new ideas, the last attempt to reanimate and vitalise the exploded aspirations of a previous age ; it was the last time that the sound of the voice of one crying in the wilderness was to ring through Spain ; it was a Quixotic effort, for Time is inexorable, and what he has condemned to be cast into his wallet, he in his ceaseless march towards the future remembers no more. The Descalzos have begun to make a stir in the world. The men of most worth, of purer lives and higher aspirations, were fast deserting the old Order to swell the ranks of the new. When the Carmelites at last woke up to the fact that their best and most conscientious subjects were being gradually drafted into the Reform, the mischief was done. Henceforth it is to be war to the knife between the old and the new ; the conservatives grown fat on hereditary traditions and pre- rogatives, so much conventional lumber, striving in vain, strong in nothing but impotent hatred, to annihilate the FOUNDATION OF VEAS 463 dangerous march of the innovators, fresh and strong, inspired for a moment with the generous sap of old strivings that they had made new. And so they too take their place in the dreary cycle of all human things, ideas, and strivings : as certainly as human life, until stagnation and decay remove them from the world's face for ever. The battlefield was to be Andalucia, and not Castille; and it was Vargas, the dignified prior of Cordoba, Apostolic Commissary of the Carmelites of Andalucia, who first threw down the gauntlet on behalf of the Descalzos. Amongst those Carmelites who had changed the white of their Order for the spare habit of the Descalzos were several Andaluces. These, according to the chronicler, awoke so glorious an emulation in those they left behind them that they often mooted amongst themselves, and consulted their superiors (especially Fray Francisco de Vargas, Apostolic Commissary) as to how they might extend the Reform to their native province. Not finding amongst the little band of would-be reformers any one capable or zealous enough, or of sufficient reputation to warrant his being entrusted with so grave a charge, Vargas wrote to Fray Baltasar de Jesus, and earnestly besought him to proceed to Andalucia with the object of introducing the Reform into his native province, thereby repaying the benefits he had received from the Mother Order. He offered him, moreover, any one of the Observant monasteries that seemed most suitable for the purpose, and warned him not to bring as his companions any renegades from the Observance, as this might give the Calzados a pretext for opposition. The old prior of Pastrana, busy in Castille with his monasteries and the affairs of his eminent patron, Ruy Gomez, whose insepar- able confidant and counsellor he had now become, having paid but scant attention to the Dominican's letters, Vargas, now more bent than ever on his cherished scheme, seized the first opportunity that chance presented to him of putting it into execution. His plan was to turn out the Observants from one of their monasteries and replace them by Descalzos. It being impossible for the Apostolic Commissary himself directly to make so open an aggression on the rights of the body it was his commission to reform, but certainly not to despoil, he looked about him for instruments. These he presently found in two Discalced friars, one of them Heredia, an Andaluz, and a renegade from the Observance, who on their way to Granada happened to pass through Cordoba and stopped to show him their patents. Instead of allowing them to proceed on their journey, the wily Commissary ordered them to take up their lodging in the Carmelite monastery, and not to leave Cordoba 464 SANTA TERESA without seeing him again. Next day, when they came to solicit his farewell benediction, after informing them that in Andalucia they were now his subjects, and that he counted on their obedience to fulfil his orders, he laid before them his cherished scheme. Fray Diego de Heredia interposed a feeble resistance : the Commissary of Castille, he said, would take it ill that, after asking for a limited license for a particular business of his own, he should remain in another district, and that for such a length of time as the nature of the undertaking required. At last, talked over by Vargas, who promised to write to Fernandez and obtain his consent, the two friars, perhaps nothing loath to be detained, accompanied him to Seville to take possession of the monastery of San Juan del Puerto a wild, beautiful spot between Niebla and Huelva, to-day abandoned to reeds and sea-birds. This injudicious and arbitrary act filled up the measure of the Observants' wrath. They were now thoroughly exasperated, nor did the fact that those most active in the spread of the Reform in Andalucia were deserters from their own Order, act precisely as a salve to their wounded feelings. Meanwhile the Reform spread as rapidly in Andalucia as it had done in Castille. Encouraged by Vargas, and with his sanction, an Observant monk of Granada, of illustrious birth but little learning a combination not rare in those days stirred up by Heredia's example, after discalcing himself and adopting the habit of the Carmelite Reform, trudged off on foot to Madrid to get the royal sanction to a second foundation in Granada. On the way he fell in with Fray Diego de Leon, titular Bishop of Columbria, an island, explains the chronicler, anciently celebrated in Scotland (by which description I should scarcely have recognised the islands of Sodor and Man), who from the ranks of the Carmelite Observance had risen to the episcopal dignity. The two were old friends, had lived long together in the same monastery, and when the Bishop noted the change of habit and expressed his surprise, Fray Gabriel told him of his plans. As they travelled along together, the Bishop informed him of some hermits who lived at La Penuela, a lonely spot in the heart of the Sierra Morena, whose mode of life resembled that of the Descalzos he had seen in Pastrana and Alcala. The monk laboriously made his way to Madrid, through that old- world Spain, which some luminous detail is always flashing upon us, and which as constantly evades us. The King was hunting amidst the pine woods of Balsain near Segovia. Another twenty miles for sore feet and aching bones. No FOUNDATION OF VEAS 465 matter! thither the intrepid old friar followed. With little difficulty he procured an audience (for the monastic habit was ever an open sesame to the royal presence), and obtained all he desired. From Madrid, following the Bishop of Columbria's advice, he went to Alcala, and thence to Pastrana. But the good old man was fain to return to Andalucia alone. For Fray Baltasar de Jesus, on whom he had fixed to make the foundation of Granada, interposed Ruy Gomez, with whom he had so in- gratiated himself on account of his abilities that the prince would not hear of his leaving him ; and to thwart him he said was to run the risk of losing the favour of the powerful favourite, not only for himself, but for the Order. This was in October 1572. In the meantime Fray Gabriel trudges back again to Granada, and on his way turns aside to visit the hermits of La Penuela, whom (the Council of Trent having de- clared all such associations irregular) he easily induces to join the Descalzos. After giving the habit to one of the hermits, whom he bears along with him as a companion, he proceeds to Jaen to get the Bishop's license. This was refused, but, so as not to return empty-handed to La Penuela, he petitions the city of Baeza for a donation of land for the monastery, and is made happy with 50 fanegas (something like 50 acres) close to the hermitage walls. After a visit to Granada he returned to Madrid, to get the donation of Baeza confirmed. He found Fray Baltasar de Jesus still in the house of Ruy Gomez, ministering to him in a serious attack of illness. He again pleaded that no time should be lost in undertaking the founda- tions of Granada and La Penuela, and of thereby doing so signal a service to the Order. The old prior replied (I fear me he was a time-server, and that the favour of Ruy Gomez was dearer to him even than the Reform) that to leave the prince at such a critical moment was to risk all ; that he must even wait until his master's returning health allowed him to make the journey under brighter auspices. Fray Gabriel obediently retired to Pastrana, where he waited throughout Lent of 15/3, until towards the close of it the prince's recovery enabled him at last to bear off with him to Andalucia the Prior of Pastrana, whose presence alone was needed to turn the foundations of La Penuela and Granada into accomplished facts. The journey was planned with the greatest caution and dissimulation. The prince himself procured the license from the Provincial of the Observants, Fray Angel de Salazar, who, if he had known the real object it was wanted for, would certainly never have granted it, on the plea that he was sending Fray Baltasar into Andalucia 3 466 SANTA TERESA to treat with his son-in-law, the Duke of Medina Sidonia (he who lost the Armada), on private business of his own. The Pro- vincial's eyes might have been opened had he known that secret orders were at once issued to various Andaluz friars, seceders from the Observance, to set out immediately for Andalucia. To avert suspicion they were to travel in couples ; some were to remain in La Pefiuela ; others were to go on to Baeza and Jaen, there to await instructions. At Granada the heads of the expedition were cordially received. The young Count of Tendilla, son of the Viceroy of Naples, a kinsman of the Princess of Eboli, and governor of the Alhambra, lodged them in his own house. Vargas hastened to transfer to Fray Baltasar de Jesus his own commission as Apostolic Visitor. After rejecting the Archbishop's offer of a house in the Albaicin, which the " hardness of these people, vanquished rather than convinced " (the chronicler refers to the Moriscos), prevented them from accepting; on the igih of May the Descalzos took possession of the hermitage of the Holy Martyrs founded by the Catholic kings, and little more than a month later, on the 2pth of June, that of La Penuela was solemnly consecrated to Our Lady of Mount Carmel. What more Fr. Baltasar might have achieved had not the news of the serious relapse of Ruy Gomez, then lying at the point of death, recalled him in hot haste to Madrid, is not known. He arrived in time to cheer the sick courtier's last moments, and to escort the widowed princess to Pastrana. It was then that he made over the commission he held from Vargas to a young man, who but two or three months before had taken the vows at Pastrana. It is vain to speculate as to what were the prior's motives when he singled out Gracian (whom he afterwards regarded with bitter jealousy) for such a post. Probably he would have chosen Mariano if Mariano had been ordained, and the tragedy of Gracian's life might have been averted. The duel for life or death between the Observants and Descalzos was now to be fought in grim earnest. The weapons of the weak against the strong are dissimulation and intrigue, and the Descalzos made good use of them. To circumvent the sullen and powerful Carmelites, they resort to every sort of trickery, deception, and ruse. Having risen by the General's favour, and owing everything to him, aware that he is against their further extension, they resort to the Com- missary General to secure their object. When the latter has served their turn, and there is nothing further to be got out of him, they at once make use of his subordinate. They had hoodwinked Salazar once, it might not be so easy to do so a FOUNDATION OF VEAS 467 second time. So Mariano seeks Salazar, the Provincial, and tells him a cunningly-devised story as to his presence being required in Seville to conclude some urgent affairs he had left pending there when he joined the Order. The simple Pro- vincial was no match for the wily Neapolitan. It never occurred to him that two lay friars (for Mariano artfully concealed the fact that his companion was to be no other than Gracian, whose talents would already seem to have pointed him out as a conspicuous figure in the Order, and the good old Provincial never dreamt of asking) should be bent on a deep-laid scheme for the extension of the Reform, and he willingly sanctioned the expedition. Without losing a moment, in the month of August the two travellers set out for Andalucia, Mariano himself nothing loath to shake the dust of Castille from off his feet before the break- ing of the storm, which, he astutely foresaw, his having given the habit to the Princess of Eboli must sooner or later bring upon the Order and himself. Their progress was barred, how- ever, in Almodovar by a mandate from the General, insisting on Mariano's taking orders. This done, in September, dreading every moment lest the Provincial's orders for their instant return should overtake them before they reached the frontier, where they considered his jurisdiction over them at an end, they made all haste to Granada. Here they were cordially received by Vargas, who, after taking a few days to satisfy himself of Gracian's ability, at once made over to him his own powers of Apostolic Visitor of the Carmelites of Andalucia. His commission, however, was to be kept a profound secret unless circumstances should render it imperatively necessary for him to produce it. Lending a deaf ear to the incensed Provincial's impotent threats, whose orders for their instant return to Pastrana, under pain of the severest punishment, reached them whilst they still lingered in Granada ; and provided with two separate patents one for the government of the Descalzos, the other for that of the Observants, the last only to be produced in case of extreme necessity, they bent their steps to Seville. Their first act was to restore the monastery of San Juan del Puerto to its original possessors. It was quickly done. Mariano and Gracian arrived before the convent gates at the same time as did the Observants com- missioned to receive it. A chapter was convoked in which Gracian warned the friars of his intentions ; to prevent any disturbance in the town, he enjoined on them absolute silence under the severest censures. At midnight of the following day, after singing Matins in the choir, Gracian marshalled his little band of monks, carefully excluding all those who had joined 468 SANTA TERESA from the Observance, and marched them off on foot to Seville, where they arrived on the afternoon of the 2nd October, and, at Gracian's request, were permitted to take up their abode in the Carmelite monastery. But things had gone too far to be quietened by a tardy act of concession, which the Observants looked upon rather as a sign of their rivals' weakness than any- thing else. If for a time they allowed the Descalzos to shelter themselves in an upper part of their monastery, they could not long conceal the ill-disguised contempt and dislike with which from the heights of their antiquity and aristocratic traditions they looked down on the pestilent innovators who in their turn pretended to be the only exponents of the primitive traditions of Mount Carmel, and they soon came to an open rupture. But, however much the Observants longed to be rid of their unwelcome guests, they were equally determined that they should not, if they could help it, establish themselves elsewhere. They succeeded in preventing them from founding in one hermitage, and were likely to do so again, when the Archbishop, who in these domestic squabbles espoused the cause of the Descalzos, and even offered them a room in his palace, gave them that of Our Lady of Refuge, on the western bank of the Guadalquivir, which, buried in trees by the riverside, and rarely disturbed by traffic or wayfarers, seemed to have been destined by nature for the abode of contemplatives. On the eve of Epiphany of 1574 the Descalzos, unperceived by its inmates, stole softly out of the Observant monastery, and two by two took their way to the hermitage. After solemnly chanting Vespers they assembled in the hermit's grot, where they were met by the Archbishop's steward and a notary. A friar, who at the Bishop's desire was there for that purpose, then handed over the keys to the alguacil, who in his turn delivered them to Gracian ; with which simple ceremony the hermitage, its gardens, and all that belonged to it passed into the possession of the Descalzos. The news of the foundation fell among the Observants like a bomb. Our Lady of Refuge was one of the most famous images in Seville. As the stately galleons and caravels, their gay pennons and streamers dangling languidly in the hot sun of Andalucia, sailed slowly down the river, ocean-bound, their last salute before it faded from their sight was for the battle- mented shrine where the Virgin kept watch over the lives of storm-tossed mariners; and again on their return laden with the gold of the Indies, castellated poop and stately mast were wrapped in a film of smoke, as they hove in sight of the white walls gleaming amongst the orange trees. FOUNDATION OF VEAS 469 The shrine itself was filled with votive offerings of sea- faring folk. The tablets which covered the walls were full of their strange deliverances and escapes from the jaws of death and peril of the deep seas; of marvellous and reassuring apparitions of the Virgin to her votaries, in answer to their agonised prayers in awful nights at sea, when the great ship, buffeted by winds and waves, creaked and groaned in her distress like a soul in pain. The Observants, furious at the march that had been stolen on them, and at the obnoxious foundation having risen under their very noses ; far from dreaming that at that very moment Gracian was virtually the head of the Order, and could do with them what he willed, haughtily demanded an explanation of his conduct and satisfaction for the insult. They chose as their ambassador the most influential member of their community, strangely enough, that same Fray Diego de Leon, the Bishop of Columbria, who had exhorted Fr. Gabriel de la Concepcion to visit the pious hermits of La Penuela. He and the sub-prior made their way to the hermitage. They asked Gracian by what right he had dared to admit a foundation without the Provincial's consent, in express contravention, moreover, of the General's mandates, and insisted on his producing his patents and letters so that the Observants might judge for themselves of their validity. There were two courses open to Gracian : to produce his Brief and anticipate the storm which was inevitable, or to let things take their course. There was nothing now to be gained by temporising: it could not have gone worse with him than it did, and would have vastly strengthened his whole future position in the Order. But this was for a bolder or more vainglorious man, and Gracian was neither. He preferred to drift with the tide, and leave it to circumstances to open the eyes of the Observants. Perhaps, too, he himself was scarcely satisfied as to the validity of his commission ; and he was reluctant, whilst still a chance remained of conciliating the General, to cut it off for ever. His answer to the Bishop was, that his authority for making the foundation and that by which he had restored San Juan del Puerto to the Observants was the same, and it was unreasonable to accept it in the one case if they rejected it in the other. For the rest, his patents were in the hands of the Archbishop, who on the stiength of them had given him the hermitage and sanctioned the founda- tion, and to him he referred them. Upon which the Bishop, checkmated, returned to his convent no wiser than he had left it. 470 SANTA TERESA As might have been foreseen, it was not long before the Observants either knew or suspected the real state of the case ; that Gracian was acting in virtue of the powers transferred to him by Vargas ; and their anger centred on the men who, they felt, constituted by their talents and energy a veritable danger to their body. They wrote to the General (already sufficiently incensed against the visitors for interfering, and against the Descalzos for accepting their intervention in the affairs of an Order he looked upon as peculiarly his own) to urge upon him the necessity of obtaining from Pope Gregory XIII. an instant revocation of the commissions held by Fernandez and Vargas. If this was done they would soon make short shrift of the Descalzos. Vargas, who as Provincial of his Order, happened to be in Seville at the time, convinced that the Carmelites meant war to the knife, made haste to be beforehand with them. He wrote to the King warmly defending the friars of the Reform This letter he sent to Madrid, by the licentiate Padilla, a priest formerly employed by Philip in the Reform of the Orders, until his harshness and " terrible condition " made it expedient to employ him no longer. Finding his occupation gone in Spain, he had proceeded to Seville, with the intention of embarking for the " Indies," there to convert the " infidels." Happily for the bodies of the infidels, however, if not for their souls, he was robbed of all he had in a posada, and forced to take refuge in the Discalced Carmelite Monastery of the Remedios. The Pope revoked the commissions granted to Fernandez and Vargas, although the revocation was not made public until May of the following year, when the chapter general of the Order, sitting at Plasencia, issued its virulent decrees against Teresa and her friars. What they were, we shall see later on. It is possible that had the Carmelites laughed quietly and done nothing, the world would never have heard of the Descalzos ; that they would, after founding a few more convents, when the vitality which moved them had died away, have been gradually reabsorbed into the Order from which they sprang. But pride and jealousy had placed the matter on a footing the Observants had little anticipated, no one is wise before the event, and raised it into a species of State question between the courts of Rome and Spain. They had not counted with the determined obstinacy of an irresolute man. It was at Philip's request that Vargas and Fernandez had been appointed. To revoke their commission might also be looked upon in the FOUNDATION OF VEAS 471 light of a personal insult to himself. Gracian and Mariano were well known to him : he had watched the university career of the former with marked interest, often inquiring when he was to be made a doctor. Mariano he had repeatedly employed. It was besides a direct attack on the ecclesiastical autonomy of his kingdom, and true to the policy of his great-grandparents, Ferdinand and Isabella, he never brooked the interference of Rome in the church matters of Spain. If he was not, as was his father, \hzpreux chevalier of Catholic Christendom, he tacitly considered himself what he accounted it heresy for Elizabeth to style herself in England, the Head of the Church in his own dominions. His spies kept him well informed of all that went on at the Papal Court, and the news of the revocation reached his ears as soon as it was made. More than once he had found himself in direct antagonism to Rome, and had boldly held his ground ; he had no intention of flinching now. The King and the shrewdest politicians of his kingdom, Covarrubias, the President of the Council; Quiroga, Grand Inquisitor, and afterwards Archbishop of Toledo; Don Luis Manrique, his chief almoner ; his secretary, Gabriel de Zayas, laid their heads together (as great as any in Christendom, adds the chronicler) to devise the best means for parrying a stroke in which they not only saw the destruction of the Descalzos, but an encroachment on the rights of the throne. Padilla was con- sulted. Vargas, he said, already trembling at the opposition he had raised, having cooled in his projects of Reform, had transmitted it to the Father Master Gracian, " a man of great parts, letters, and ability, but somewhat fearful of attempting it," as the authority he held from Vargas did not seem to him sufficient, and in any case had now been revoked by the Head of the Church. If anything was done, it must be done quickly. The Carmelites had left one vulnerable point in their armour ; they had neglected to secure the revocation of the special powers held by Ormaneto, the Papal Nuncio in Spain. If Ormaneto was now made to anticipate the publication of the Brief by issuing a counter one re-invalidating the commission held by Vargas and appointing Gracian his substitute, the Observants would be rendered powerless. Gracian, being warned by a relative of these intentions regarding him, and advised to come to court to give the benefit of his advice and experience, after preaching his Lenten sermons in Seville to enormous and enthusiastic audiences, and leaving Mariano in charge of Our Lady of Refuge, set out after Easter for Madrid, accompanied by a lay brother, who, having been formerly engaged in business, was well acquainted with the roads. On 472 SANTA TERESA this occasion it was that, hearing of Teresa's presence in Veas, he determined to turn aside that he might see and converse with the foundress of his Order. It is now time to devote a few words to the man who, by a strange caprice of fate, has become the central figure of the Order, and whose history forms one of the most extraordinary pages in the already extraordinary annals of the Descalzos. Born in Valladolid, when Valladolid was still the court of Spain, Fr. Geronymo de la Madre de Dios, better known as Gracian, was now a little more than twenty-seven. Diego Gracian de Alderete, his father, son of the chief armourer of the Catholic kings, became in his turn, and in a different capacity, an old and trusted servant of the House of Austria. First as secretary to the Emperor Charles V., who armed him a knight, and declared his children and descendants nobles, and then as Philip's, he did them both good service in the " inter- pretation of languages, accounts, crusades, and affairs of great importance, confidence, and secrecy, on account of his unequalled skill in languages, Latin, Greek, and others." He had been a traveller too, and had studied at the University of Louvain under the learned Luis Vives, where the Flemings altered his name of Garcia into Gracian ; and Gracian it remained, and was transmitted in due course to his children. Later on his love of letters brings him acquainted with the Polish ambassador, a man of literary tastes like himself, whose daughter he presently marries, she being then twelve years old. The ambassador returns to Poland, and, " like the excellent Christian he was, gets himself ordained, and becomes successively Bishop of Cumas and Viernia." And the secretary buckles down to the business of life, and the struggle to maintain a large and increasing family. But nature had done more for the Catholic kings' chief armourer's son than even his Majesty Charles V. could do in those faded parchments with their leaden seals. One of the most sympathetic figures that flit across this history seen as in a glass darkly is that of the good secretary, scholarly, gentle, bountiful, a noble type of the Castilian gentleman. At his death (he died quietly reciting Greek and Latin verses of devotion) it was noted that where others in his position left large fortunes and estates to their descendants, he left nothing except an unblemished name, having spent all he had in charity. Something more he left : translations of Xenophon, Isocrates, and Plutarch, a History of the Conquest of the African cities on the coast of Barbary still to be found on the dusty shelves of old Spanish libraries rescue the name of FOUNDATION OF VEAS 473 Diego Gracian Alderete from the oblivion which has fallen on his personality. The Polish ambassador's daughter, Juana Dantisco, proved a worthy helpmeet of the husband who, when she was old and wrinkled, could still pen a tender distich to the face whose beauty had captivated him in youth. Of their large family of thirteen children, Gracian was the third son. Trained in the school of the Jesuits, his university career was a series of un- interrupted triumphs, and already augured for him as brilliant a one in the world, when, to the good secretary's sorrow, who had intended his son to follow in his own footsteps, and depended on him to help his brothers and sisters on in life, Gracian turned his back on the honours he might legitimately have hoped to achieve in the world, and at the age of twenty- three insisted on entering the priesthood. It is more than probable that he would have joined the Jesuits themselves anxious to secure so bright a subject had not some unforeseen delay, together with the advent of the Carmelite students in the schools of Alcala, diverted him from his first intention, and altered the whole course of his career. In vain he struggled against the influences which were drawing him to his Fate. In vain he drew the curtain over the tender face, which now seemed to him full of reproach, of the only mistress he had ever vowed to serve an Image of the Virgin ; a succession of apparently insignificant circumstances, the rustic answer of an old woman whom he reproved for her excessive mortifications ; a sermon the nuns of the Convent of the Image asked him to preach in praise of the antiquity of the Order of Mount Carmel were the obscure causes which finally led him to embrace the vocation which was to be at once the glory and perdition of his life. Gracian had inherited to the full all his father's scholarly tastes and love of curious erudition, in which at a later date he sought consolation for the disasters of his life; and we can imagine what it was like, this first sermon of a young, clever, enthusiastic man, enamoured of his subject, and exceedingly eloquent by nature. Bristling with learning, perhaps not altogether free from the alembicated conceits which were the literary vice of the period, it electrified all who heard it. He achieved a stupendous triumph similar to that which greeted him in Brussels, when towards the close of his life he preached on the same subject (the glories of Our Virgin of Carmel) before the Archduke Albert and the Infanta Clara Eugenia of Spain. All Alcala rang with the praises of the young and eloquent orator; his admirers painted his name in red ochre on the walls of the church ; nay more, so powerful its effect on one 474 SANTA TERESA at least of his audience, the Master Roca, a distinguished graduate of the University, that he straightway went off to Pastrana to become a novice, and as Fray Juan de Jesus the rock of bronze took a prominent part in the erection of the Descalzos into a separate province, as we shall see farther on. A visit to Pastrana did the rest. The nuns were captivated by the strange and winning charm of the young man who, to the lustre of talents which had filled the schools of Alcala. with amazement and admiration, added a singularly sweet and fascinating personality, and a discretion far beyond his years. The good nuns stoutly attributed the accession of so eminent a subject to their prayers; Teresa, more humbly, to the Virgin, who had, she said, guided her son to her most favoured Refuge. However it may be, certain it is that Gracian paid a visit to Roca at Pastrana, which impressed him so pro- foundly that without returning to Alcala, he remained there as a novice. It would seem from his own statement that the jealousy which pursued him through life, and eventually drove him from the Order, began from the very moment he entered it. Strange that the cloister should breed feelings so little akin to holiness ! Those who had already professed, his seniors in years and experience, saw themselves passed over in favour of the man who, still but a novice himself, was in the prior's absence entrusted with the charge of thirty others. Teresa herself unconsciously administered food to the incipient rancour by enjoining her prioress of Pastrana to give him (whom she said it had cost her a year's prayers to win) the same obedience that they rendered to herself. Withal Gracian wavered : his family were bitterly opposed to the step he had taken ; it had brought his mother to the verge of death ; when time healed the smart, all she could be induced to say was that she had not given her son to the Virgin, but that the Virgin had taken him from her : his delicate constitution suffered severely from the asperities of the Rule. Three months before he irrevocably took the vows, he was sorely tempted to abandon a vocation so contrary to the real bent of his character, and, but for the encouragement of Isabel de Santo Domingo, it is probable that he never would have taken them. It is difficult to disentangle truth from falsehood in the web of accusation, calumny, and extravagant eulogy, of which Gracian has alternately been made both victim and subject. It is often a mere blind accident of Fate that makes a man famous or consigns him to infamy. Had he entered the Society FOUNDATION OF VEAS 475 of Jesuits his name would have gone down to posterity, linked with those of Laynez and Salmeron. In an evil hour he turned aside to join the Descalzos. Perhaps in those very qualities which make him much the most lovable and sympathetic of Teresa's friars much the most human we may find the secret of his ruin. His novitiate barely concluded, he found himself, fresh from the scholarly tranquillity of a university, plunged into a movement when the feud between the Observants and Descalzos ran highest ; the leader of a faction, a post for which nature had eminently unsuited him. He lacked nerve, decision, promptitude, self-confidence. He vacillated and weakened at the most critical moments, when a bold front and steady hand would have swept away every obstacle and ensured a certain victory. That very facility and yieldingness of dis- position, that very candour and freedom from suspicion, the loftiest note in his character, as it was its greatest charm, became his greatest curse, inasmuch as it made him the prey of intriguing and unscrupulous men (and Gracian was neither), who, after using him as the instrument of their ambitions, basely turned and rent him. He was a student, not a fighter ; a man of letters with a tendency to religious mysticism, but not an ascetic ; his genial and benevolent nature often led him to consider as of minor importance those trivial details of discipline in which the more limited brains of his monkish compeers placed salvation or perdition. Alternately wavering between the advice of others and his own judgment (which was generally sound), he was incapable of adhering to a consistent line of action. Still all generalisations are eminently imperfect, and it may be doubted whether a bolder man, or one more obstinate of purpose, would have done better, or even so well as Gracian. His consummate tact; the instinct that led him to prefer conciliation to open warfare, stood him in good stead in the difficult position in which he had been placed, and helped to carry the Descalzos over many a slippery pass. Yet a great man, far greater than the narrow despots who hounded him from the Order, he rises immeasurably above them in the hour of his disgrace. The magnanimity, the constancy he displayed in circumstances of all most fitted to put them to the test, proves how keenly Teresa had gauged the character of him whom above all others she loved and venerated, and Pope Clement vill. was perhaps not far wrong when he exclaimed, struck by his humility and forbearance, " Verily this man is a saint ! " It was in Veas that Teresa first beheld him with whom her life was thenceforth to be so intimately linked. Her interview 476 SANTA TERESA with him was one of the profoundest joys of her life. Never had her heart gone out so completely to any one as it did to this young friar, who stirred it as it had never been stirred before. From that moment she vowed to him a passionate and touching devotion which ended only with her life. All praise seemed to her inadequate for one who, to her thinking, " bettered all praise," and in whom she had at last found, or fancied she had found, the only man capable of assuming the generalship of the Order ; one whom she could associate with herself in the cares and trials fast becoming a heavy burden for her declining years ; a confidant to whom she could unbosom her most secret soul, and on whose ready sympathy she could count for help and direction : nay, more than this, a disciple willing to defer his judgment to her own ; a spiritual successor to whom she could bequeath her lifelong work. It is with an unwonted outburst of enthusiasm, strange, perhaps painful to watch in a nature so strong and robust as hers ; trained by a lifetime's repression to keep her slightest emotion under rigid control, that she writes to her cousin, the prioress of Medina : Oh, my Mother, how I have longed for you these last few days ! Know that to my thinking they have been the best of my life, without exaggeration. The father, Master Gracian, has been here for more than twenty days. I assure you that even now I have not fathomed his worth. To my eyes he is perfect. . . . What your reverence and all of us must do now is to beseech God to give him to us for our Superior. At last I shall be able to take some repose from the management of these houses. For such perfection mingled with so much suavity I have not seen. May God support and keep him, for I would not for anything have missed seeing him and conversing with him. He has been waiting for Mariano, who to our delight was long of coming. Julian de Avila has lost his heart to him so have they all. He preaches admirably. Thus she unconsciously reveals to us the hidden depths of her passionate and tender character, still throbbing as faithfully to all the impulses of affection as if the cloister had never set its iron seal upon her humanity. His delicacy of constitution ; the softness and sweetness of his disposition ; the peculiar charm of his manner, perhaps his very defects, the antithesis of her own decided character, gave him a special claim on her maternal solicitude and tenderness. With this there mingled a touch of faded sentiment. He was her Pablo, her Eliseo (Elisha, an allusion to his premature baldness) : she his Angela, his Laurencia. In his hands she becomes as submissive as a child, meekly resigning her will to his. She did for him what she had never done before in the case of any of her confessors ; she vowed to obey his voice as FOUNDATION OF VEAS 477 that of God ; to give him her undivided and entire obedience : she gave her conscience into his keeping, to do with it as he listed, in this complete surrender of herself to a wisdom she accepted as superior to her own. Nor, whatever his enemies may have asserted, did Gracian ever prove himself unworthy of her generous confidence. There is nothing to show that her love for him ever changed, or that her last few months on earth were clouded by the shortcomings of her favourite and best-loved son. Nay, it is more than probable that had she lived longer she would have shared his downfall. Teresa was too great for her century. Even now it is not the Teresa I am endeavouring to set forth Teresa the high-minded, Teresa the human, Teresa the woman who is loved and reverenced by her pious votaries, but a garbled image, decked and obscured with tinsel and paper flowers, and swathed about with strange superstitions and puerile miracles, through which we must not let the sunlight penetrate for fear of exploding the monstrous creature of distorted fancy. That she was not blind to his defects she was far too shrewd never was there such a strange blending of earth and heaven as this woman, whose character is still a problem ; that she endeavoured with a woman's tact to supplement by her own experience and profound knowledge of character the easy kindliness and misplaced frankness of temperament, which often exposed him to misconstruction ; to infuse energy and decision into counsels that were often timid and irresolute ; that she recognised how the most elevated quality of his character his rare freedom from suspicion and inability to penetrate the base motives of others, which often imparted to his conduct a certain tinge of unpracticality, often laid him open to the attacks of his enemies, is certain. But for all this, I think she loved more than less. Never were reproof, censure, hints which it was quite admissible for an old woman, who had grown old amongst monks and nuns and their ways, to administer to a young and inexperienced man entering on an untried world full of pitfalls, more delicately, more tenderly given. Whilst life lasted she stood in the breach between him and his enemies, shielding him under the aegis of her reputation, for few could deceive her, and from the first she felt the buzz of malicious jealousy which threatened him, and after her death compassed his downfall. And yet it is on these self-same distorted shreds of her letters, violently wrenched from their context, that Gracian has been sentenced and condemned for more than three centuries ; and so sorely pushed were his enemies for more substantial evidence as to be forced to the expedient of making Teresa 478 SANTA TERESA express her disapproval from heaven, through the mouth of the visionary Catalina de Jesus, the foundress of Veas. It was without a protest, without a murmur that at Gracian's bidding she hastened to do what she declared nothing would ever induce her to do to found in Andalucia, for which she had all the instinctive and inherited dislike of a true Castilian. The fact is that at Veas she had already done so, apparently without knowing it ; for when Maria Bautista, her advice-loving prioress of Valladolid, had pointed out to her in one of her letters some months before that Veas was in Andalucia, a province expressly omitted from the General's commission, Teresa had answered that it was not that Veas, but one five leagues from Segovia, where she then was. Instead of starting for Caravaca, as she had intended ; instead of spending the fierce summer heats in the beloved repose of San Jose, as she had looked forward to " What a much better summer," she writes to the prioress of Medina, "should I have spent with your reverence than in the heat of Seville " she unhesitatingly abandoned her own judgment to the voice of obedience, and even, it is said, in the face of a direct revelation, took the road to Seville, which was to be to her her Garden of Gethsemane ! "In short," she writes to D. Alvaro Mendoza, " we set out for Seville in the coming week, Monday fifty leagues. I believe perfectly he would not have forced it upon me, but he wished it so strongly that if I did not go I should have felt some scruple that I had not fulfilled obedience as I always desire. As for myself it has distressed me, and moreover it has not pleased me much to go with this heat to pass the summer in Andalucia." CHAPTER XVIII SUPERABUNDO GAUDIO IT was close on Easter 1 Pascua florida flowery paschal-tide when the little band of Castilians set out to traverse what seemed to them the " fiery furnace " of Andalucia, and the ramshackle carts once more creaked along the dusty road, a thin white streak on the calcined landscape. How they longed for the cool plateaux and sierras of Castille, she and her nuns, as they panted in the suffocating atmosphere of the cart ! They who had never been so far from home before, oppressed by the strange-featured country around them, exiles and wanderers in an unknown and unfamiliar land. Some alleviations of their sufferings they did find in dwelling on the superior torments of hell. " I assure you, sisters, that as the sun fell full upon the carts, to enter them was like being in purgatory. Sometimes, what with thinking on hell, at others that we were doing some- thing and suffering for God, these sisters travelled with great content and cheerfulness ; for the six who went with me were such that I think with them I would have even dared to go to the land of the Turks." One of the nuns she thus eulogises was that Maria de San Jose\ Da. Luisa de la Cerda's waiting- woman, who, having abandoned her kinswoman's palace in Toledo to follow the fortunes of the foundress, is presently, as prioress of Seville, to become one of the most prominent figures of the Order. Hell and the land of the Turks : so it seemed, or worse, to the woman of sixty, her brain conjuring up the miniature of a gray town cropping up amidst gray boulders, walled and grim ; around it waste moorland and streams ; mountain peaks tipped with snow ; dark and mysterious at sunset ; covered with silvery haze in the light of early morning ; where the powerful sunlight heals rather than oppresses ; and down in the valley where gleams the Adaja, a streak of silver, an old rambling convent ; 1 So says Master Julian, but he must mean either Ascension Tide or Pentecost, which in the year 1575 fell, the first on the I2th, the second on the 22nd of May. By this count the journey to Seville took them a fortnight or ten days at least. 479 480 SANTA TERESA behind it the evening sky, molten of all precious jewels the topaz, the turquoise, and the amethyst. On this journey to Seville [writes Master Julian but he had travelled thither before in his adventurous youth, and felt not the same homesickness, the " saudades " of his mistress] there were noteworthy incidents which, as they have been related by our mother, I shall not mention here. The heat with which we started, it being close on Easter, was so excessive, that the provisions we brought with us from Veas, and which were to have lasted several days, could not be eaten the following day. The mother took with her a large pig-skin full of water for the journey, but so great was the scarcity of water that at a venta on the way the smallest jugful cost two maravedis each, being dearer than wine. I know not whether it was at this same venta or another, that some perverse people so sharpened their tongues at fr. Gregorio's expense, who had just before taken the habit in Veas, that his conduct on that occasion was more than enough to test his virtue : they were either fools or drunk. At last, at the end of all this, they set on each other with knives to the terror of our nuns, who were still inside the carts, the ground being too filthy to allow of them alighting. At length the fighters, in dread of being taken by the authorities, took to their heels, and left us in peace. It is more than likely that the white venta where this scene occurred so rapid, so vivid in its brevity still gleams, carelessly oblivious of time, in the hot midday sun, as it did on that day of the sixteenth century. The travellers alone have changed. And yet, at the bidding of a dry and scanty detail, all the strange, heterogeneous elementswhich composed that picturesque, out-at-elbows, poverty-stricken society, and nevertheless in spite of it all, one full of a serious, old-world dignity, troop in phantas- magoric procession before our eyes. The roads of Spain once again swarm with that distant, faintly-discerned life and move- ment. Wandering friars ; messengers on horseback or on foot ragged Gil, or Bias, or Llorente speeding to and fro between Andalucia and court post from one part of the kingdom to the other ; pseudo and real pilgrims bound to distant shrines, the cockleshell of Compostela gleaming amidst their rags ; fine gentlemen and pages ; swashbucklers, with mustachios twisted a la Borgonona ; swarthy men who had been in the Indies and could tell strange and marvellous stories ; carters and muleteers ; students, ragged, thievish, and hungry for the matter of that, so they all are; so goes on the seething medley of life and movement, some dim relics of which still remain in the group of beggars I saw the other day before the gateway of San Este"ban de Salamanca, waiting with their wooden bowls for the distribution of the Sunday dole. Finery and rags, mirth and starvation ; dignity gravely supported on empty stomachs ; passing them all, mingling with them all, the rickety carts which SUPERABUNDO GAUDIO 4 8 r bear our nuns to Seville, escorted by a Salamancan gentleman booted and spurred, a Castilian priest, and a barefooted Carmelite friar. Still, with all its difficulty, it is easier to reconstruct the external aspect of this Spain of theirs than that of any other country of Europe. Here, at least, civilisation has not been so busy as elsewhere effacing ancient landmarks. The dreamer who would fain penetrate himself with the distant flavour of this past epoch, catch something of its intermittent and obscure aroma may still dream as he threads these " caminos vecinales" winding through a maze of beautiful and ever- varying landscape fields of green grain, ripening in the sun, full of scarlet blots of poppies ; oak glades, green and silent and and burnt-up wastes shut in by lines of far-away mountains' blue undulations on the vast horizon that he treads the same paths which were trodden by Teresa de Jesus three good centuries ago. Such were, indeed, the roads of Spain as she knew them, and no other. Roads in the modern sense did not exist ; and the same thing might be said of the bridges, few and far between. Towns and villages were linked together by these same " caminos vecinales," little more than paths frayed by donkeys and travellers, few of them accessible to carts, following every undulation of the soil. The nearest approach to the modern " carretera " or high road was occasionally a little bit of paved causeway, left as often as not by the Moors, which ended within a quarter of a mile or less of the town to which it formed the entrance. In winter, when the streamlets were swollen by rain, neighbouring towns and villages were often cut off from each other for months together. A journey in those days was one of very real risk and peril. Most men made their wills (and a Spaniard never makes his without extreme reluctance) before they trusted themselves to the risks and accidents of the road. And yet here are a nun and her companions, a parcel of weak women, undaunted by privation and fatigue, creaking along in an old cart through the heart of Andalucia. Her enemies said she was a gad-about and restless woman gad-about and restless ! And, stranger than this, a modern historian, untouched by this spectacle, so all-pathetic, where valour takes the place of youth, and brave heart makes up for decaying strength, repeats the accusation in a wooden essay. So she might have been gad-about and restless if she had gone to please herself; although I imagine there was little pleasure to be found, except the satisfaction that comes from Duty done, to pant all day in a wooden cart without springs, 3' 482 SANTA TERESA and be jolted over leagues of Spanish mediaeval road under the fierce June sun of Andalucia. And so the cart and its burden creaks slowly on, past the glories of sunrise and sunset, past the white, dusty, shrivelled- up landscape of midday until, on the day preceding Easter Sunday, to the consternation of her nuns, Teresa became delirious. They threw water on my face, so heated with the sun that it gave little or no refreshment. Nor must I forget to tell you how bad was the posada for such an extremity ; for they gave us a small room with a roof of open tiles ; it had no window, and if the door was opened the sun streamed full into it. You must consider [says Teresa] that the sun in that country is not like that of Castille, but very much more importunate. The bed on which they threw me was such that I was obliged to take refuge from it on the floor. Here it was so high, there so low, that I could not lie still, for it seemed as if it had been made of sharp stones. What a thing is sickness ! for it is easy to put up with anything if one has only health. In short, I thought it better to rise and set forth, for the sun of the open country seemed to me preferable to that wretched room. . . . Shortly before this, probably two days, something else happened to us, which put us into a sore predicament, crossing the river Guadalquivir in a boat. When it came to the carts, it was impossible to keep alongside of the rope, and we had to head down the river a little, although by dragging the rope along with us, it helped us a little ; but it happened that those who held it let go, or I know not how it came about, so that the boat drifted down the stream with the cart, without either rope or oars. I was much more concerned at the ferryman's distress than at the danger ; we set to work to pray, all the others to shout. A gentleman who was watching us from a castle close by, pitying our plight, sent some one to lend us a hand this whilst we still had hold of the rope, at which our brothers were tugging with all their might ; but the force of the current proved too much for them, and knocked some of them down. In good sooth, I shall never forget the devotion I felt at the boatman's son : he must have been about ten or eleven years of age, but his distress at his father's plight made me praise the Lord. Nevertheless since his Majesty ever gives trials proportioned to our strength, so it was now, for the boat happened to strike on a sand-bank, on one side of which there was low water, and so we were able to get out. It was now night, and it would have gone ill with us to find the road, had not he who came from the castle put us on the right way. I did not intend to treat of matters so unimportant for many are the tales I could relate of misadventures on the road had I not been urged to dwell more at length on this one. How her quaint narrative flashes the scene to us ! The dusk falling over the wide bosom of the river ; the red gleam of the setting sun fading behind the gray fortress on the hill ; the bevy of shrieking women she perhaps the only one silent at this moment of supreme danger floating down the river, they and the cart, in the gathering gloom. Before daylight, a day before the Festival of the Holy SUPERABUNDO GAUDIO 483 Ghost (Whitsunday), they arrived at Cordoba. They would fain have entered the town unseen and unnoticed, but (to facilitate trade) no carts were allowed to cross the bridge without a license from the governor. It would have been curious to know Teresa's impressions at sight of the Moorish town, its yellow walls whitening in the pale light of dawn on that hot May morning, those yellow walls cracked by sun and age, and stained by time, that had once enclosed the most polished and brilliant civilisation Spain has ever known. To all outward seeming doubtless, it looked much the same to her as it does to us. The Moorish water-mills in the stream ; tumbled lines of flat-roofed houses rising high on the slope above the river ; slender minarets and church towers, gleaming like pearls against blotches of dusky orange leaves ; here and there a palm-tree, bearing with it that same dim reminiscence of the East that once upon a time brought tears to the eyes of a great Caliph of Cordoba. One building stands out more conspicuous than the rest. What though the heavy and tasteless hand of the Christian has spoilt the delicate harmony of its lines by substituting a Renaissance bell-tower, for the graceful minaret, scaly and glittering like a lizard's back, surmounted by a golden ball, from which the sun struck strange glows and sparks of fire, that had once welcomed the Moor to Cordoba it still served to mark out the spot where stood the marvellous mosque, more famous than that of Baghdad, more gorgeous than that of Irak, once the glory and the boast of Islam. And so as they wait in the sun the May sun of Cordoba sparkling on the broad bosom of the river, turning all to gold, changing water- mills and tottering cabins and dirty, tortuous streets into a fairy city, making the air to quiver with its intensity, and the fleas began to bite, and the nuns peep timidly through the awnings the expiring spirit of Gothic mediaevalism looks out from the faded eyes of Teresa, its last great production, on the shell left by that other civilisation so alien to it, which it had crushed out of Spain for ever. At length, after they have waited two mortal hours (time is worth nothing in Spain), the priestly robes of Master Julian appear across the bridge. He has brought the license, but the gates are too narrow to admit the carts, which have to be sawn down, or otherwise reduced to the proper size. By this time the crowd the crowd that is always ready in Andalucia, then as now, dirty, ragged, every rascal a gentleman, every gentleman a rascal have gathered to stare and chatter round the stranger carts. "Pedro, dost thou see the nuns, the strangers ? " " Yes, little one, how ugly 484 SANTA TERESA they are" (everything foreign is ugly to a Spaniard, be he Castilian or Andaluz). This though the awnings of the cart were closed, and except to the eye of faith (a' rare article in Andalucia), nuns ugly or beautiful were alike invisible. Fancy the scene ; the jaded women, the invisible centre of attraction to Pedro, Juanito, and Ramon : ugly, bare imps chattered, withered brown hags jabbered, donkeys brayed. Old men, brown as mahogany, leaning on sticks as gnarled as their fingers, glared intently. Girls with a carnation stuck behind their right ear, their unkempt hair black and coarse as horses' tails, wrapped in gay shawls, leaned lazily out of opened lattices. The bells ring on the mules' head-stalls as they jerk back from their halters ; the cocks crow from under the arms of the people going to the cock-fight ; the yelp of yellow, half-starved curs, the guttural accents of the semi-Moorish crowd all mingle together in this indescribable pandemonium. " One would have thought that the Holy Father himself was to make his entrance into Cordoba that day." Soon rumour began to be busy. An intermediate line of carts stretching far into the plain had been descried. Grave and reverend fools closely wrapped in their brown cloaks (a cloak is good in Spain against either heat or cold) laid their addle heads together, and were of opinion that all the nuns of France were coming, vienen monjas por millones nuns like locusts. It was a danger, a menace to the city, to the State, to Religion. We must fetch the governor, warn the alguaciles. These cannot be nuns, they must be some heretics. For this is an excitable population, finding in the occurrences of everyday life more marvels than many find in fairy tales. In the church, at least, they will have a moment's peace from the curiosity and comments of the populace. So to a church they betake themselves, only to find themselves in the thick of another crowd almost worse than the one on the bridge. As ill luck would have it, it was the Festival of the Advocation of the Holy Ghost, and they had been guided to the very church where it was to be specially celebrated with feasts and dancing. " When I saw this," writes Teresa, " I was greatly distressed. If it had depended on me, we would have gone away without hearing Mass, rather than make our way through such a turbulent mob. Father Julian, however, thought differently, and he being a theologian " (not the first time that theology has been in opposition to reason), "we had perforce to abide by his opinion, for the rest would perhaps have been fain to SUPERABUNDO GAUDIO 485 follow mine. We alighted close to the church, and although none could see our faces, over which we always wore long black veils, it was enough to see us with them, and our white serge capes and alpargatas, to convulse every one ; and so it was. That fright it must have been that drove my fever away, for certainly we all got a shrewd one. As we entered the church, a worthy man came up to me to force a passage through the crowd. I begged him earnestly to take us to some chapel ; which he did, shutting us in and keeping guard over us until it was time to leave the church " an act of courtesy for which he was well rewarded, for " a few days after he came to Seville and told a father of our Order how he believed that God had repaid him for the service he had done us, for he had come into a large fortune when he least expected it. I tell you, daughters, that although this may perhaps seem to you nothing, it was for me one of the worst moments I have ever gone through ; because the excitement of the people was as great as if bulls had entered. And so I was all impatience to get out of that town : although there was no place near to pass the festival in : we celebrated it under a bridge." Thus far, Teresa. Let us now listen to the vivacious and circumstantial narrative of her chaplain, Master Julian, who in his turn, unprotected by his theology, had come to loggerheads with the priest in whose church he was saying Mass : Never since Cordoba was Cordoba had festival been celebrated as it was that day. For besides the procession of priests and people, there was one of nuns, better worth seeing than all the rest, for they entered the church in procession, with their white capes, their faces covered by their black veils, whilst I sped with all haste to get everything ready to say Mass and give them the Communion. ... It was God's will that, in spite of the curate of the church not being present, they gave me what I required. I had already begun Mass when he arrived, and I know not what possessed him, but he puts me on his stole and surplice, and places himself at the corner of the altar. I suspected that he had taken offence at my having made so bold as to administer the sacrament in his church, and that he had come to do so himself. At the proper time with great determination I turned round, and gave our Lord's body to the nuns, whereupon he said nothing. But at the church door I found him waiting for me, and he gave me a sharp reproof, asking me how it came about that I had said Mass without his leave. I replied with great calmness and serenity (if it had been before I believe I should have treated him to a little sourness), for since I had now done what I came to do, all I wanted was to get away from him and the sound of his tongue. Escape from the crowd was impossible, unless we had all remained without our Mass, for if we had gone to another church we should have been followed by a crowd throughout the city : to have left it unsaid had also its drawbacks, for we were a goodly company ; and of the two courses, I decided to take the one that was most in accord- ance with our conscience ; more especially as the day before, which was the Vigil, we had gone without Mass, as we had nothing to celebrate it with, 486 SANTA TERESA at which I had felt a terrible melancholy. This being so, what should I have felt if Whitsunday had gone by in the same way ? Delightful, prosy Master Julian, so soon, alas ! about to disappear from this history, with so transparent a simplicity revealing to us his foibles, his little weaknesses, his guileless- ness, and his real goodness ! At length, under the grateful shadow of a bridge, too glacl to take the place of the pigs they drove out, they slept the siesta, and forgot the mortifications of that memorable morning. The Whitsun festival they there celebrated remained eternally graven in the memories of those whose fate it was to survive the great companion who had been the life and soul of it. Melancholy and discouragement fled before the magic presence of the little old woman, shrewd of eye, witty of tongue, taking in at a glance the fun, the humour, and the folly of it ; turning their adventures into food for merry laughter. " Her very laughter was contagious, and they could not but laugh in concert." It was on such occasions, in the unrestrained and familiar intercourse of fellow-travellers who share together all the peril and mischances of the road, that Teresa was at her best, her witty satire being followed by graver words of wisdom, but in all moods entrancing the soul of her listeners, who, listening, forgot hunger, discomfort, and privation, charmed and fascinated in spite of themselves. Our Holy Mother [writes her faithful and constant companion, Master Julian] put fresh life into us all with her excellent and most witty discourse ; now giving utterance to things of great weight, now moving us to laughter. At other times she composed couplets, and very good ones they were, for well did she understand the art, although, unless something happened on the journey to furnish her with a theme, she did not exercise it ; so that, in spite of all her prayer, it did not prevent her from holding a holy and friendly intercourse of great profit to both soul and body alike. Would that all saints were like her ! On the 26th of May Teresa and her nuns arrived in Seville, to find, instead of an Archbishop eager to welcome her and her foundation, as she had confidently expected, and both Gracian and Mariano had led her to believe, a prelate piqued and angry that they should have come at all. Her first motion was to take possession of the small, damp, and wretched house Mariano had hired for her in the Calle de las Armas, as she generally did, by celebrating a solemn Mass. The uneasy evasions of Mariano, the delays he interposed, first revealed to her the truth, which he presently confessed, that so far from his having been SUPERABUNDO GAUDIO 487 able to get a license from the Archbishop, he (the Archbishop) had energetically declared that neither now nor at any other time would he countenance a foundation without endowment. The news fell like a thunderbolt on the devoted head of the fever-stricken woman and her nuns, who thus saw the extinction of the hope which had lured them over fifty leagues and more of hot, dusty Andalucian road ! Both she and her monks had made so sure of the license that they had not even taken any steps to get it. The Des- calzos were high in the Archbishop's favour ; had he not written several times to Teresa herself in terms of great affection ? and here, when they had come to do him a service, " as such in truth it was," writes Teresa, " and so he knew afterwards, only that the Lord willed that no foundation should be made unless at the cost to me of great suffering, some in one way, others in another," he turned his back on them in dudgeon. They had not taken into account, muses the chronicler, that superiors yield to humility and submission what they do not to equality. " As to endowment," says Teresa, " he might just as well have told us not to make the monastery at all." For one thing, even if she had been able to, it was against her conscience to found an endowed convent in a city like Seville, when she had never done so except in small places, where, unless she had provided some settled means of subsistence, it was useless to dream of founding. Besides, even if she consented, how was she she whose whole belongings were a "blanca" left over from the journey, the clothes she and her nun stood up in, and a spare tunic or two to endow a convent ? Antonio Gaitan had been forced to borrow money to take himself and Master Julian home; the house was as bare and poverty-stricken as its inmates. Mariano had, indeed, on the night of their arrival provided some rushes to sleep on and a few plates ; but icy were borrowed from the neighbours, who reclaimed them next day. So that all the bed they had was the bare floor, on which they lay covered over with their capes. Had it not been for Mariano, who provided them with bread (he could dp no kiss), they must have starved ; as it was, says the chronicler, suet was their patience and love of poverty, that they were satisfied than if they had been in the tents of Ahasuerus Where were the rich novices, or indeed any novice at all, ot those Gracian had promised her? One lady, indeed, cook pity on them ; but, entrusting her gifts to one of those pious 1 with which Seville (and indeed all Spain) swarmed, tl carried them elsewhere, until the lady found it out, anc them more effectual assistance. 4 88 SANTA TERESA True, the Archbishop, importuned by Mariano, " now more submissive to his authority and repentant of the blunder," relented so far within the next three days as to allow them to celebrate Mass on Trinity Sunday, and even sent one of his chaplains to officiate, but he would allow no bell to be rung, or even hung up, unless it had already been placed. If it had been for any other but Gracian, Teresa would quickly have shaken from her feet the dust of this rich and populous city, where she and her nuns were starving, face to face with a poverty more abject than any she had yet experi- enced, even in Toledo. And yet in their misfortune one or two brave hearts endeavoured to alleviate it. A priest, Garci Alvarez, came to say Mass for them every day, in spite of the fierce sun and the distance of his house. " If he had had it to give, we should have wanted for nothing." The gray-headed prior of Las Cuevas (this a little later), himself from Avila of the Pantojas of Avila ministered to their necessities ; "and it is just, sisters, you who read this, that you should commend to God those who helped us so well, be they alive or dead ... to this saint we owe much." Meantime Gracian writes from Madrid, and Mariano leaves no stone unturned to move the Archbishop's heart. And at last one day (the nuns have struggled and endured as best they could for a month) a gorgeous vision in purple silk, his green hat carried before him on a velvet cushion, appears before the damp, small house of the Calle de las Armas, great people not then, as they do now, masking the insignia of rank, to make the world more ugly, but displaying to the joy of their neighbours' vision all their gorgeous pomp and ceremony. This Don Cristobal de Sandoval was a prelate not without ability, although it had displayed itself more conspicuously in the Council of Trent than it did now in the financial affairs of his household ; in money matters, indeed, he had shown so little as to get him- self deeply in debt. Perhaps, however, it is better for his fame which recks so little of dead men's difficulties that he governed his diocese well and wisely, and gave much to the poor, than that he died with a balance to his credit. A martinet in all points connected with discipline or government, a stickler for his dignity, to him the head and front of Teresa's offending was that she had neglected to obtain his consent before she set forth for Seville ; although, indeed, as she drily observes, " If he had known of it before I started, I am sure he would not have consented." At all events, he came to see her, was charmed, fascinated, SUPERABUNDO GAUDIO 489 won. The end of it was that he gave her his full permission to do what she liked and as she liked ; and " from that time forward he always showed us grace and favour in all that concerned us." And so the long, hot days and short nights of the Andalucian summer wore to their close, and it was now August, August which was to fill the heart of this old, worn-out nun with intense joy ; she who imagining that she had freed herself from all the ties of earth now prepared to welcome two at least of the scattered family who had grown up together beside their father's hearth in the old, gray fortress house of Avila. For the treasure ships which bear Lorenzo de Cepeda and Pedro his brother back home again are already anchored in the roads of San Lucar. Lorenzo's wife he has left behind him, dead and buried in Peru, where he has exchanged the years of his youth and manhood for golden doubloons and a dyspeptic liver. But his four children are there, safe and well Francisco, Lorenzo the name of the third is vague and little Teresita. The same letters which convey these glad tidings tell her of the death of another brother, Geronimo de Cepeda, at El Nombre de Dios in the Isthmus of Panama. "Weep not for him who is in heaven," she writes to her sister, Juana, in distant Alba, " but thank the Lord for having brought these others back in safety. As to Pedro, give my congratulations to Dona Mayor (some old sweetheart) on his arrival, for I think he was once very devoted to her." In her joy, losing sight of time, and thinking of this peevish, melancholy, disappointed brother of hers, who as a soldier of fortune had pursued and never found her, still as the gallant stripling of the days of yore. Teresita, Teresica, Teresa's little niece, at once became an inmate of the convent, her small limbs clothed in a diminutive Carmelite habit, to her father's infinite delight. " She is already here, with her habit, and seems the sprite of the house . . . and they are all charmed with her ; and she has a temper like an angel, and amuses us in recreation hours with her stories of Indians and the sea, much better than I could tell them," exclaims her delighted aunt, that elderly Teresa, who perhaps saw in the little figure which bore her name a possible successor in the work of her life. Much consultation was held with the Doctor Henriquez as to whether Teresica could take the habit at once ; but as the Council of Trent had decreed that it was to be given to no one under twelve years of age, Teresa was fain to content herself for the present with bringing her small namesake up in the shadow of the cloister. In October, Juana de Ovalle, her husband, and children also arrived in Seville to welcome the travellers, but Lorenzo had 490 SANTA TERESA already gone to court, better than when he arrived, for he " came very thin and ill." In December he returned " in sufficiently bad health, although the fever has left him, having effected nothing, but as what he had (perhaps some pension) is now safe, he is well enough off. He is highly delighted with his sister and Juana de Ovalle, . . . and they not less with him." But if thirty-three years as governor of a Peruvian town had left Lorenzo an ailing, atrabilious, and melancholy man, it had, unlike Pedro, filled his pockets with good store of ducats ; and he came to his sister's aid at a critical moment. No one would think [writes Teresa] that in a city so wealthy as Seville there should be less disposition to found than in any place I have been ; so little was there that I thought sometimes it was not good for us to have a monastery there at all. I know not whether the climate itself of the country is the cause of it, for I have always heard it said that there the devil has more license to tempt than elsewhere (it is God who must give it him). . . . But never [she writes the aspect of things without and within, alike black, dismal, hopeless, striking an unwonted chill into this stout heart] never in my life have I seen myself more faint-hearted and cowardly than there ; it is certain I did not recognise myself. Although the confidence I use to have in the Lord did not desert me, yet my disposition was so different from what it usually is since I set about these things, that I understood that the Lord partly took away his hand from me ... so that I should see that if I had had courage, it was not mine. In spite of the Archbishop's favour, Lent was fast approach- ing, and her stay in Seville was drawing to an end, and still no word of a house, nor money to buy one with, still less any one to go security for them as in other places. Teresa's great heart was full of sorrow, as she thought of her daughters left without a roof over their heads. She and her nuns betook themselves to processions to Our Lady and St. Joseph, when Lorenzo, now returned from court, " taking it more to heart than I that they should be left without a house of their own sets to work to find them one." Perhaps after all, on this occasion, doubloons and good broad pieces of eight were quite as potent as processions and orisons. A house was found, and they were all highly pleased with it, on account of the position, which was a very good one. The purchase was concluded ; the deeds of sale were on the eve of being drawn up, when the owner repented him of his bargain (which was a very good one for him, notes Teresa), and the negotiations fell through : happily for the nuns ; " it being so old and rotten that it would have taken a lifetime to repair it, and they might have had hard work and been sorely pushed to it for money." So did the Lord who had told her in her tribulation that he had heard her, and that she was to leave it to him protect SUPERABUNDO GAUDIO 491 the interests of his spouses of Mount Carmel. At last they bought a house in " good condition " for 6000 ducats, little more than the price they were to have given for the site of the other. But still Teresa's troubles were not ended. The tenants of the house refused to leave it. A neighbouring monastery of Franciscans opposed their entrance. There was an error in the deed of sale, and, although it was to the prejudice of the purchasers, Lorenzo as surety was forced to take privilege of sanctuary in the Monastery of Los Remedies, to escape all the nameless horrors of a Sevilian prison : " Which here is like a hell," adds Teresa, "and everything with no justice whatever, for they ask of us what we do not owe, and of him as our security." Well might she, the old Castilian, nurtured in the honourable traditions of Avila, exclaim against the little truth and the double-dealing of the people of Seville. " The injustice customary in this country is a strange thing the little truth, the double-dealings. I assure you it is not without reason it bears the fame it has. . . . Had my brother not been here it would have been impossible to do anything." There were other reasons why she should speak like this, as we shall presently see. A month passed by ; spring was wearing on, and the hope of possession seemed to drift farther away than ever. " Had not the deeds been drawn up so firmly," says Teresa, " I would have thanked God could they have been undone, for we saw ourselves in danger of paying 6000 ducats, the price of the house, without being able to enter it." Nevertheless one April evening, a little before the convent gates were closed for the night, arrived a messenger to say that the people living in the house, who had hitherto refused to give it up, were willing to let them enter without delay. Trembling and in silence did Teresa, her prioress, and two nuns, a fearful company, flit through the narrow streets of Seville at dead of night to take possession of the disputed house, seeing the stealthy figures of Franciscan friars lurking in every shadowy angle and dusky corner, under black arches where some flickering oil-lamp lights up a mouldering painting of the Virgin. O Jesus ! how many frights have I passed through in these takings of possession 1 If one feels such fear when one goes, not to do harm, but to serve God, what, I wonder, is the case with those who are set upon doing harm both against God and their fellows ! I know not what can repay them, nor what pleasure they can seek with such a counterpoise. At sunrise next morning, the worthy Garcf Alvarez he who had toiled through the heated glow of the Sevilian streets to 492 SANTA TERESA say Mass for them celebrated the first one in the new house. Lorenzo was not present, being still hidden in the Remedois. Nevertheless, after some difficulty and a lawsuit, "so that trouble might not be wanting," Lorenzo, having given full security for the price, was free to superintend the construction of the monastery. Whilst he transformed the rooms into a church, busied himself with the workmen, and arranged all so well, that when it was finished " there was nothing left for the nuns to do," Teresa and her daughters remained shut up in some lower rooms strange life that of these Carmelite found- resses ! living on good Lorenzo's bounty, who, for the matter of that, had provided for their wants for long ; " for since every one did not know it was a monastery, on account of our living in a private house, we got but few alms, except from the sainted old prior of Las Cuevas of the Carthusians, a great servant of God." Another month passed away, and all was ready. Teresa, ever averse to giving any one unnecessary trouble, was for placing the Host on the altar as quietly as possible. Not so the good Garcf Alvarez and her worthy countryman, the old prior. "They could not," she writes, "have taken the matter more to heart if it had been their own " (nay, I am sure these simple souls did so look upon it, and that each of them was morally convinced that if it had not been for himself alone the convent would never have been founded). And so they betake themselves to the Archbishop, and the three, laying their heads together, decide that the Host shall be carried from a neigh- bouring parish church with great solemnity ; and the Archbishop orders his clergy and several confraternities to assemble and the streets to be decked. None of Teresa's foundations took place with greater pomp and ceremony than this of Seville. On the 3rd of June 1576 a procession passed through the Sevilian streets, the like of which at least so affirmed the aforesaid gray-headed prior of Las Cuevas had never been seen before. From every narrow casement, so dark and mysterious with its stern gratings of twisted iron, hung gorgeous velvets and silks ; the narrow Moorish streets below were gay with flowers, and thronged by myriads of curious spectators. Down below they passed : the great Archbishop bearing the Host, under the pall of cloth of gold and silver borne by cathedral dignitaries, sweeping from light into shadow ; followed by pursy canons, their shoulders bending under the weight of broidered copes stiff with Gothic embroidery. Then came brotherhoods and confraternities, in their diverse coloured robes and insignia; choir boys and SUPERABUNDO GAUDIO 493 acolytes, scarlet robes and lace stoles dazzling in the sun ; torches gleamed, censers swung, minstrels filled the air with triumphant music, banners waved. Never since Seville was Seville, says the old prior of Las Cuevas, who to-day breaks through the customs of a lifetime to walk in the throng on purpose to do honour to his countrywoman one Teresa, a founder of convents had the like been seen before. And what words shall describe the labours of the good Garci Alvarez? the altars and quaint conceits, fountains of orange-flower water and the like, with which he decked the church and cloisters ? or that most moving scene of all, when the saint in the rear of the procession, throwing herself down on her knees before the Archbishop, implored his blessing, and he, never surely greater than in that moment, fell on his knees likewise, humbly imploring hers ? " Consider how a wretched old woman like me must have felt to see so great a prelate kneeling before her. See here, daughters, the poor Discalced nuns honoured by all, so changed was everything from the time when it seemed as if, for them, there was even no water in the river, although it is full enough. The crowd was excessive." As the Archbishop raised the Host above his head and conse- crated Teresa's labours, the air was rent by volleys of artillery, and rockets and fireworks flashed and blazed into the sky, lasting until it was nearly night. And a notable thing happened at least so said all who saw it. An accidental explosion of some gunpowder nearly set the cloisters aflame, " it being a great marvel, too, that he who bore it was not killed." And behold ! the crimson silks and yellow damasks which adorned the cloisters were not even scorched, as if no such thing had been, although the stones underneath were blackened with the smoke. " All were amazed at the sight ; and the nuns (thrifty nuns !) gave praises to God that they would not have to purchase fresh silks and damasks. It must have been the devil, angry at so great a solemnity having been made, fain to avenge himself in something, and the Lord prevented him. May he be blessed for ever and ever ! Amen ! " Such was the scene that took place in that month of June 1576 when the sixteenth century was already drawing to its close, before that flat-roofed house, which exists to this day, now, as then, its white impenetrable fagade dotted irregularly with windows of all sizes, shutting in the mysteries of so many lives, and still preserving the secret of the strange and moving scenes it has seen during the course of the centuries, in the Calle de la Pajeria, opposite to the gardens of the Franciscans. Other events, too, filled her life during this year's sojourn 494 SANTA TERESA in Seville. It is to them she refers in the Fundaciones. " The gravest trials I suffered I do not set down here : for it seems to me that, with the exception of the foundation of Avila, . . . none has cost me more than this, on account of most of them being inward ones." We have seen by what steps Gracian had been chosen by Vargas as his substitute in Andalucia ; how Pope Gregory xin., Pope Pius V.'s successor in the papal chair, had, at the instance of the General of the Carmelites, revoked the patents of the Dominican Visitors, Fernandez and Vargas ; how this blow was swiftly parried by the Papal Nuncio, Ormaneto, who, having first assured himself through the Pope's secretary that the brief in no way curtailed his authority as Nuncio and legate a latere, nor yet his more special commission to reform the Orders, by virtue of his Apostolic powers superior to the General's, rein- stated Vargas in his commission on the 22nd September 1574, and consequently Gracian, whom Vargas had invested with his powers. In April of 1575 Gracian received the Nuncio's man- date to proceed to Madrid to take possession of the fresh brief that had been made out in his favour. In May of that same year the general chapter of the Carmelites at Plasencia publicly revoked Fernandez's and Vargas's commissions, and fulminated their edicts against the Descalzos. The Observants were to admit no visitors unless appointed by the General, and to resist any unduly elected. The Discalced convents of Andalucia, and such of those in Castille as had been founded without the General's license, were to be broken up within the space of three days, under pain of the Apostolic penalties and censures, assisted, if needs be, by secular force. Here then the situation : on one side the King, the Papal Nuncio, Teresa, and her excommunicate, disobedient, rebellious friars ; on the other, the Pope, the General, and the powerful Order of Carmelites. The air had long been full with the first faint rumblings of the storm. It had now broken with a vengeance. When Gracian arrived at Madrid, the Carmelites refused to give shelter in their monastery to an excommunicated man ; upon which there are high words between the Nuncio and the Pro- vincial, Fr. Angel de Salazar " Let them (the Carmelites) beware before they again dared to call those excommunicated who were there at his " (the Nuncio's) " bidding " the result being that Gracian is admitted into the monastery, and preaches at court. His brother Antonio, the King's secretary, would fain have had him refuse the dangerous commission, and, to do Gracian justice, he accepts it with the extremest reluctance, SUPERABUNDO GAUDIO 495 after in vain alleging the shortness of time he had been in the Order, his lack of experience, and other circumstances essential to such an office. Teresa, the nun, writes to Philip, the King, from Seville, calling on his Majesty to do her this service, of " ordering the charge of the Order to be given to a Discalced friar, Gracian, who, in spite of his youth, has made me praise the Lord for what he has bestowed upon that soul." The King is determined, and there is no help for it but to submit, the first act of the tragedy of his life being thus played out on the 3rd of August of 1575. What fills him with terror, for the first part of his commission, which makes him Visitor over the Discalced communities of Castille and Andalucia, he accepts willingly enough, is that other clause in it, whereby he is appointed Apostolic Commissary over the embittered Observants of Andalucia. It was with very real dread, for he went in fear of his life, a fact he had not dared to communicate to the King, that he went to kiss the hands of the Arch-inquisitor of Spain, Don Caspar de Quiroga, and beseech him to intercede with the King to release him from this part of his commission. But the prelate flew into a " holy fury " : " Let them kill us, let them kill us ! " he cried ; " to whom are we to confide this business but to a man of blood and nobility, known as you are not to fear death ! " So with the bezoar stone the Mother Teresa had given him hung round his neck, eating nothing but boiled eggs, lest his food should be poisoned, Gracian set forth on his three months' visit to the Reformed Convents of Andalucia. In Toledo the angry mutterings of the Observants, who declared that the Nunico had outstepped the bounds of his authority by appointing a Visitor in the face of a Papal revocation, forced him to obtain permission to show them his faculties and warrants. The storm rumbles on, and another element gathers in the black cloud which hangs threateningly over the devoted friar, speeding onward to his fate the rivalry and jealousy of the Descalzos themselves. For Fray Baltasar de Jesus, in terrible dudgeon at the preference given to Gracian, avoids meeting him at Pastrana, and only returns to his " lair " when the coast is clear and the Visitor gone. In the meantime Teresa in Seville, rejoicing in this first triumph, paves the way for her Eliseo's coming. We hear of visits to the convent : Yesterday the father Provincal of los del pano [those of the cloth, she means the Observants] was here with a master [priest], and then came the prior, and then another master. The day before fray Caspar Nieto was 496 SANTA TERESA here. I find them all determined to obey your paternity, and assist you in removing anything wrong, so long as you do not push them to extremes in other things. I assure them from what I know of your paternity that you will act leniently, as it seems to me you will. Father Elias [Fray Juan Evangelista, sub-prior of the Observant Monastery] is more serene and resolute. I repeat that if you begin quietly and gently you will achieve much, for everything cannot be done in a day. This, written on the 27th of September, is followed by another towards the end of the same year : I assure you that your falls fill me with such pain that it would be well for you to be tied on, so as to prevent them. I know not what sort of a donkey that can be, nor what necessity there is for your paternity to travel ten leagues a day, which on an albarda [rough saddle] is enough to kill one. I am anxious as to whether you wrap yourself up warmly now that the weather is cold. . . . Elias is less fearful ; as for me, I have lost all the fear I had before ; I cannot feel any even if I wished to. How she loves this man, young enough to be her son, distressed by his falls from his donkey, maternally solicitous as to his being warmly clothed at night in the cold Castilian climate ! In his judgment and capabilities she feels unbounded confidence, guiding his steps not by superior wisdom, for this is impossible, but by her greater experience, riper years ! " Lorencia," she writes, " can no longer feel for her confessors as she was wont, and, as that was her only consolation, she now has none. How delicately does our Lord mortify ! for she fears that with so many hindrances in the way she will enjoy but little the confessor he gives her, on account of his many occupa- tions." And it is a curious fact that from the date he came into her life there is scarcely a letter addressed to any other director. At last Gracian, with Fray Antonio de Jesus for his travel- ling companion, arrives in Seville. An anxious consultation takes place between Teresa and her friars. Teresa, Gracian, and Fray Antonio (he less decidedly) are all for firm and gentle measures. To make full use of his com- mission as regards the Discalced communities, to allow the Observants to see the Nuncio's mandate, let them have a copy of it if needs be, and give them every means of opposing it, this, in Gracian's opinion, was the wisest course. He was over- ruled by Mariano, hot and fiery of temper as he was sharp and caustic of tongue. " They now possess the power, let them use it Let Gracian force the Observants to recognise him as Commissary, and show the King and Nuncio that they had not admitted the commission for the Descalzos alone, but for the entire Order. This done, then, and then only, would it be time to soften harshness with kindness. What if the General should SUPERABUNDO GAUDIO 497 call them contumacious rebels ? such epithets of opprobrium are glorious when shared with the Reformers of the Benedictines and Franciscans." Gracian kissed the Archbishop's hands, paid a visit to the Deputy-Governor, the Count of Barajas, and delivered to them the royal letters of which he was the bearer, for the prudent King, foreseeing a tumult, had taken care to enlist on his side both the civil and ecclesiastical authorities alike. On the day of the Presentation ever-memorable day for Teresa, cowering with her nuns before the altar, praying for their Visitor's safe deliverance from the perils which, none doubted, menaced him Gracian, accompanied by Fray Antonio de Jesus and a secretary, proceeded to the Observant Convent of Seville to present the Brief. It was read before the assembled heads of the convent, who asked for a copy to institute a plea in the ordinary form. This Gracian, acting against his better judgment, reluctantly refused to give. A wild scene of uproar and confusion followed, so wild and fierce that Mariano rushed off to fetch the Archbishop and Deputy-Governor, and Teresa was overwhelmed with the news that Gracian had been killed and the monastery gates closed. The Bishop of Columbria, just returned from Rome, at length succeeded in restoring peace ; and in the presence of the Arch- bishop and Governor the Brief was again read. The sub-prior alone, Fray Juan Evangelista the " Elias " of Teresa's letters signified his submission. He was at once made vicar of the monastery. The Provincial, Fray Agustin Suarez, was ordered to retire to the monastery of Osuna, and Fray Antonio de Jesus was sent to receive the obedience of the province, Gracian him- self undertaking the important office of master of novices. Such was the scene enacted in the tranquil Sevilian monastery on that day of the Presentation 1575. In the same month, and almost at the same time, the first intimation reached Teresa's ears of the decree which had been levelled against her in the general chapter of the Order at Plasencia. Fray Angel Salazar, after publishing it in Madrid, had sent it on to a brother Observant in Seville, to convey to her, and he, thinking it would give her pain, " this being the intention of these friars when they procured it," kept it back until, hearing of it from another source, she herself caused it to be given her. She had hoped that her journey to Seville might have been the means of pacifying the disputes between Carmelites and Descalzos. One of her first letters from Seville of those that remain had been to the General. If she had but known it, she might as well have written to the winds ; for already, even as 3 2 498 SANTA TERESA she journeyed over the dusty Andalucian roads, the chapter of Plasencia had decreed the extinction of the Descalzos root and branch, and the mandate was already on the way to Spain ordering her to the seclusion of a Castilian convent. This letter, dated the i8th of June, is in answer to two letters from the General, the one written in October, the other in January, which had reached her hands the day before : I wrote to your lordship about the foundation of Veas ; and how another is asked for in Caravaca, and that they had given the license with the condition I mentioned I also wrote to your lordship the reasons why I came to found at Seville : please our Lord that I may see accomplished the end I came for, which is to pacify these matters of these Descalzos, and to prevent them giving vexation to your lordship. Your lordship must know that I took great care to inform myself when I came to Veas that it was not in Andalucia, for it was never my intention to come here. And so it is that Veas is not Andalucia, but a province of Andalucia. This I did not know until the monastery [Veas] had been founded for more than a month. When I then saw myself in Andalucia with my nuns, it also seemed to me advisable not to leave that convent deserted and alone, and it had something to do with my coming here ; but my chief object is what I wrote to your lordship, to look into this matter of these fathers ; for although they justify their cause, and truly from what I know of them, they are your lordship's most loyal sons, and desire not to vex you, I cannot exonerate them from blame. Already it seems they are beginning to find out that it would have been better to have taken some other road, so as not to vex your lordship. So she exculpates her own inadvertence in founding at Veas, and pleads with him to take Gracian and Mariano into favour. Her preference for Gracian is shown most transparently : We fell out about it greatly, especially Mariano and I, whose temper is very quick, for Gracian is like an angel ; and had he been alone, it would have been done in another sort ; and the reason of his coming here was because he was ordered to by fray Baltasar, who was then prior of Pastrana. I tell your lordship that if you knew him you would be glad to have him for a son, and truly do I know that such he is, and even Mariano also. This Mariano is a virtuous and penitent man, whose genius makes him remarked by every one ; and your lordship may rest assured that he has been solely actuated by zeal for God and the good of the Order, save that, as I tell you, he has been rash and indiscreet. As for ambition, I can see none in him, save that the devil, as your lordship says, stirs these matters up, and he himself says many things that look like it. I have borne a great deal from him sometimes, and as I see he is virtuous, I overlook it. If your lordship could hear him you could not help being satisfied. This very day he told me that until he places himself at your lordship's feet he will not rest. I have already written to you how both have besought me to write to your lordship, since they have not the courage, and give you their excuses ; and so here I will say no more but what it seems to me I am bound to do, since I have already written it before. . . . Father and my lord [she continues, gentle and persuasive as only Teresa de Jesus can be, but so firm and decisive that the General might well have SUPERABUNDO GAUDIO 499 paused a moment to consider the nature of the woman with whom he was even then bent on waging war to the knife] Father and my lord, at the pass things now are, it is no time for this [she refers to the decrees fulminated against the Descalzos in the chapter of Plasencia] ; for this Gracian has a brother who is near the King, whose secretary he is, and whom he loves much ; and the King, from what I have heard, is not averse to his taking up the Reform. The Calzados say that they know not how it is that your lordship treats such virtuous men thus, and that they would fain dwell in amity with the Contemplatives, and see their virtue, and that this your lord- ship has prevented them from doing with this sentence of excommunication. She on the spot, amongst the mines and counter-mines, the bickerings and heart-burnings, jealousies and enmities, the hypo- critical tongues and double faces, can form a juster judgment as to what is going on than the absent general. They say one thing to your {lordship and another here. They [the Descalzos] go to the Archbishop and say that they dare not punish, because they [the Observants] at once go to you. They are a strange folk. I, my lord, see both one and the other, and our Lord knows that I speak truth, for I believe the most obedient now and in future will be and are the Descalzos. Your lordship away there sees not what takes place here ; I do, and tell you of it, for I know well your lordship's sanctity and how great a friend you are to virtue. Some of them [the Observants] have come to see me. The prior especially is an excellent man. He came to see the patents by which I had founded. He wanted to take a copy ; but I was fain not to give him one, so that since he saw I had the power to found, they should not institute a lawsuit. For in the patent your lordship sent me in Latin after the visitors came, you give license, and say that I may found everywhere, and such is the construction placed upon it by " letrados " ; because your lord- ship neither fixes house nor kingdom, nor is any limit assigned, but all parts alike. And, moreover, it was accompanied by a precept which has made me exert myself more than I am able, J "or I am old and -weary. ... As to those friars they have taken [she continues, giving us an insight into the underhand doings and dissimulation of otherwise worthy, almost heroic men, and not an edifying one ; the old Observant friar, for instance, the virtual founder of La Penuela and Granada, capable of trudging twice to Madrid and back to get licenses, and yet equally capable of a lie], I have already spoken about it to Mariano : he says that Penuela took the habit through a falsehood ; for he went to Pastrana and said that Vargas, the Visitor of Andalucia, had given it him ; and when it came to be known, he had taken it himself. For long they have been thinking of expelling him, and so they will : the other one is not with them now. The monasteries were made by order of the Visitor Vargas with the Apostolic authority he had ; because hereabouts they hold that for the principal reformation there should be a house of Descalzos : and so the Nuncio as reformer gave them license to found monasteries, when he ordered fray Antonio de Jesus to prosecute his visit ; but he did better, for he did nothing until he had be- sought one from your lordship : and if Teresa de Jesus had been here, perhaps this would have been looked to more ; for there was no proposal to found a house without your lordship's license but what I stoutly opposed, and on this point fray Pedro Fernandez, the Visitor of Castille, acted well, and I owe him much for the care he took not to displease your lordship. 5 oo SANTA TERESA The one here (Vargas) has given these fathers so many licenses and faculties and moreover supplicated them to accept them, that if your lord- ship could see those they have in their possession, you would know they are not so much to blame ; and so they say that they have never wished to admit fray Caspar, nor to have anything to do with him, although he has besought them greatly, nor others ; and that they at once left the house which they had taken from the Order. And thus they allege many things in their defence whereby I see they have not acted so maliciously ; and when I consider the great troubles they have undergone, and the penitential lives they lead, it gives me pain that it should get about that your lordship dis- countenances them. For truly they live good lives and in great retirement, and amongst those they have received there are more than twenty who have university degrees (cursas, 6 no J/ cdmo se llamari), and who are very holy and of good understanding. And between this house and that of Granada and La Penuela, I think I have heard them say that there are more than seventy friars. I know not what is to become of all these, nor how it will now appear to the world, being in such esteem as they are ; but that perhaps we shall all end by paying for it dearly ; for they are high in credit with the King, and the Archbishop here says that they alone merit the name of friars. For them to abandon the Reform, now that your lordship will have none of them ; believe me that although you have all the right in the world on your side, it will not seem so ; since you, who are a servant of the Virgin's, will not wish, nor will they consent to, your withdrawing your protection, and it will grieve her that your lordship should abandon those whose only fault is to augment her Order by their sweat. Things are now at such a pass that great consideration is necessary. Your lordship's unworthy daughter and subject, Teresa de Jesus. This letter, and three or four others in the same tenor, Teresa despatched from Seville to Rome. They were never answered, for even as she wrote, the thunderbolt had been hurled, and the General was in no mood to listen either to reason or probability. Towards the beginning of 1576, little more than a month after she had received notice of the decree, she made a last attempt to gain the General's ear in a truly admirable letter. We who have watched with what serenity, when ordered back to the Encarnacion, she faced the laughter of all Avila, and (so it seemed to those around her) an ignominious defeat ; we who have watched her fearlessly and firmly quelling the mutiny of the rebellious nuns of the En- carnacion, we at least shall not be surprised at the cheerfulness and willingness of her ready obedience to the decree carefully framed to give her pain (to make the affront more notorious, Salazar had purposely published it in Madrid before she herself knew anything about it), which condemned her to the seclusion of a Castilian convent, and to meddle in no more foundations. If it was a condemnation ! For how little had they fathomed the depths of her nature! Had she indeed been the pre- sumptuous, disobedient, restless woman therein described, an SUPERABUNDO GAUDIO 501 insult like this might have stung her to the quick ! But no ! her first thought is not for herself, but the Reform ; her first impulse to plead not for herself but for Gracian and Mariano ("poor Mariano, sometimes so hard to understand"), "than whom I make bold to say that none of those who affirm so much are truer sons than they." I have already mentioned to your lordship the commission given to the father Gracian by the Nuncio, and how he has now sent for him again. . . . to visit the Descalzos and Descalzas, and the province of Andalucia. I know for certain that he did all he could not to accept this last, although report says otherwise ; but this is the truth ; and his brother the secretary was also averse to it. ... But once it was done, if these fathers had but listened to me it would have been carried out without fixing a stigma on any one, and as lovingly as amongst brothers. ... I am always willing to make a virtue of necessity as they say, and so I should have wished that once they (the Carmelites) were bent on resisting, they would first have considered if they could do so effectually ; on the other hand [for Teresa is always impartial], I am not surprised that they are sick of so many visits and innovations as, for our sins, there have been these many years back. . . . I again repeat my supplications to your lordship, for love of our Lord and his glorious Mother ... to reply to him [Gracian] favourably, and let bygones be bygones, even though he may have been somewhat to blame, and accept him for your true son and subject, as in very truth he is. ... Let your lordship consider that it is for sons to err, and for fathers to pardon and be lenient to their faults. For love of pur Lord I supplicate your lord- ship to grant me this grace. Think that it is important for many things which perhaps you, far away as you are, do not see so well as I who am here j and that although we women are not fit to counsel, sometimes we hit the mark. . . . If there were many to commend it to ! But since to all seeming he is the only one who possesses the necessary ability . . . why should not your lordship show that you are pleased to have him for a subject, so that all should know that this Reform (if it succeeds) is through you and your counsels and advice. And she was right ! The sublime contemplative, the absorbed mystic, the grandest and noblest of her friars the farthest too from human nature San Juan de la Cruz, was not made to cope and struggle with that atmosphere of deceit, lies, and calumny which characterised these bitter quarrels of a religious Order divided against itself. His fate would in all likelihood have been more tragic than Gracian's, whose brilliant talents, seeming to foreshadow success, were better fitted for active warfare. As for herself, the decree which was to wound her to the quick Would, I tell your lordship, in good sooth have been to me a great comfort and content had your lordship sent it to me in a letter, and I had seen that it was out of pity for the great labours that I (who am not for much suffering) have passed through in these foundations ; and that, in 5 02 SANTA TERESA reward, you ordered me to rest. Still, even although it has come to me in the way it has, it has afforded me great consolation to be able to take some repose. As the love I bear your lordship is so great, spoilt as I am, I could not help but feel that, as if to a very disobedient person, it should come in such wise that fray Angel was able to publish it at court before I myself knew anything of it. As he thought I was being unduly constrained, he wrote to me that I could alter it by having recourse to the papal camera ; as if, on the contrary, it was not a great relief to me. And in good sooth, even if it were not, but a most great hardship to do what your lordship orders, it would never enter my thoughts to disobey . . . for I can say truthfully (and this our Lord knows) that if I have found any alleviation in the trials, loss of tranquillity, afflictions, and murmurings I have gone through, it was because I thought I did your bidding, and was giving you pleasure ; and the same pleasure it will give me now to do what you order. I wished to comply with it at once : but it was close on Christmas, and the journey is so long, they did not let me, as they thought it was not your lordship's desire that I should risk my health ; and so I am still here, although I do not intend to remain in this house for good, but only until the winter is over ; for I do not get on with the people of Andalucia. And so she takes her leave of him stately, dignified, as it became the descendant of her father's house with a touch of solemn pathos, leaving the rectification of his judgment to that Eternity which has no end : " When we stand together before God, then you will see what you owe to your true daughter, Teresa de Jesus." That was all, the answer to the blow that was meant to crush her. She can even laugh about it with Maria Bautista: "A great benefit it will be to me to find myself away from these hurly-burlys of reforms ! " ; her irre- pressible activity bubbling out at the end of her letter : " My life is short ; I would like to have many. To-morrow is New Year's Eve." Teresa had indeed drained the cup of bitterness to the dregs before she left this Seville "whose people," she confesses, " are not for me " for what seemed to her, this exile in a foreign and antipathetic country, the "land of promise" of Castille. She may well sigh, as she thinks of her laborious journeys, of the difficulties so gigantic as to dismay any but a heart so stout as hers ; as with painful intensity she follows the struggles of Gracian in Seville : " Oh ! the trials we suffer in these reforms ! for to me has fallen a greater share of grief than happiness since he came ! " Almost at the same time as she received the General's mandate to retire to a convent, she and her nuns were denounced to the Inquisition. Let Maria de San Jos appear on the scene, who tells the story. A somewhat curious personality this Maria de San ]os6, sometime waiting-woman to Da. Luisa de la Cerda ; for in those days, when the sons and daughters of the lesser nobility thought it no lessening of their dignity to swell the SUPERABUNDO GAUDIO 503 retinue of pages and ladies-in-waiting to a wealthy kinsman or patron, such a post implied neither disgrace nor servility, and was eagerly sought after for her daughters by noble and impoverished families perhaps too poor to pay a dower to a convent, then a very convenient and usual mode of get- ting rid of a superfluity of females. Irresistibly attracted by Teresa's personal influence, she had taken the veil in Malagon six years before. A woman of decided ability, of more educa- tion than was usual in those days for her sex, her inopportune displays of erudition often aroused Teresa's good - natured satire, Teresa, who could not by any means away with learned women. " That about Elisha is good," she says in answer to one of her prioress's letters, " but as I am not so learned as you, I do not know what you mean by the Assyrians," an expression which has passed into the Spanish language. By no means a mean authoress ; leaving behind her various tercetos, that she has quaintly styled The Garland of Myrrh, dimmed a little by too many classical allusions, but devoid of neither grace nor tenderness, and which well might find a nook in an anthology of the ascetic literature of the seventeenth century. Teresa and her prioress, however, were not always agreed. The worst of these capable clever women was that they had a will of their own, and I fear me it often clashed with hers. Teresa complains bitterly of her coldness to her, even during this stay of hers in Seville. Nevertheless, both were too large-minded and magnanimous not to respect and admire one another, and the bulk of Teresa's letters are addressed to this very Maria de San Jos6, who in her turn, when Death had for ever severed them, suffered exile and a broken heart in her attempt to preserve Teresa's Order as she had left it. So much for Maria de San Jose*. Now for her story: At this time a great beata, in high repute for her sanctity, had entered our house, and not being able to suffer our life, unknown to our mother or to us, she bethought herself of concerting her departure through some priests to whom, to console her, our mother gave license to hear her in confession ; and when the poor thing had gone, in order to palliate her own shortcomings, she bethought herself of accusing us to the Inquisition, saying that in certain things we resembled the " alumbradas " (illuminated). Amongst the things that either through carelessness or ignorance she said were bad, was that the sisters received the communion unveiled : it being our custom for one sister as she draws near to communicate , to pass her veil on to the next ; this she said we did for the sake of ceremony. As we had not then finished the house, we communicated in a patio, which which was full of sun, and to shield ourselves from it, and for the sake of being quieter, each of us after she had communicated took refuge in any corner she could, turning her face to the wall, so as to escape from the 504 SANTA TERESA brilliancy of the sun : this she also put a bad construction on, together with many lies and false accusations against our Mother. . . . The good that came to us from this trial of being accused to the Inquisition, so that it may be seen that there is no evil which God does not turn to good, was that as our Mother was so obedient and punctual in all our prelates ordered, and desired to please the most reverend General, and he had bidden her to go to some convent in Castille and not to leave it, nor to found, nor to meddle with those she had founded, she persuaded the father Visitor [Gracian] to let her go to fulfil this obedience ; and the General's orders on the one side, and the Apostolic Visitor's on the other who, opposed to her being inactive, commanded her to conclude her foundation, together with the loneliness and unprotected state in which she was about to leave us, added to the tribulation of her spirit. And I remember me one day [adds worthy Maria de San Jose] that she complained to me greatly because I left her alone, and she assured me that since the afflictions of the convent of San Jose of Avila, she had not seen herself so hard pressed ; and I soothed her by saying that her departure was not to be thought on in such a juncture, since the Inquisition was busy examining into the truth of that woman's accusations against her, for if it was necessary to take her before the Inquisition, and they came for her, and did not find her, how would it be then ? " True, daughter," said Teresa, " you are right ; and now I see it is God's will I should remain." Afterwards she was greatly amused at it, and often said to me : " So then, all the consolation my daughter could offer me in so deep an affliction, was to tell me that the Inquisition was coming for me!" There were other and graver charges against Teresa and her nuns than merely communicating without veils, or even binding down the nuns and flogging them, which was another of the " great beata's " inventions. " Would to God she had accused us of nothing worse," says Teresa to Maria Bautista of Valladolid ; for even the fair fame of this tired-out old woman of sixty-one did not escape, and only to hint at the calumnies against her, according to the chronicler, would be to give offence to the least modest of ears. A chance like this of venting their venom against the Descalzos in the shape of the foundress and her nuns was not to be neglected by the Carmelites, and all Seville was agog with expectation to see the dtnoftment of the drama. Gracian was thunderstruck when he arrived one day at the convent to find the street thronged with the mules and horses of Inquisitors, and the priestly denouncer lurking round a corner to feast his eyes on the grateful spectacle of the nuns being dragged through the streets to the dungeons of the Inquisition. But he was disappointed ! For even the Inquisitors found nothing to condemn, and the persecution of their enemies only made the virtue of the poor Castilian nuns shine forth more resplendent. It is a satisfaction to know (as Teresa does not SUPERABUNDO GAUDIO 505 forget to mention to Maria Bautista) that such was the pious beata's grief at leaving the convent that it upset her brain and drove her mad. Persecution not unmixed with triumph ! For on the ist of January (new style) 1576, four months before the splendid scene which crowned the conclusion of the Sevilian convent, that too of Caravaca was brought to a triumphal ending. The foundation of Caravaca owed its origin to three maidens of distinguished birth, who, going one day to hear a sermon preached by a Jesuit, were so impressed by what they heard that, instead of going home, they took up their abode in the house of a lady, widow of an oidor (judge) in the Indies, until such time as a monastery was founded in their native town in which they could take their vows. The noble widow thereupon set aside a portion of her house for them, fixed up a wooden grating whence they could hear Mass, and sent to the Bishop of Cartagena for a license to celebrate it. She also sends off a messenger to Teresa in Avila, on the point of starting for Veas, to inform her of what has been done, and request her to undertake the foundation. " When I saw the fervour and desire of these souls, and that from such a distance they sent to seek Our Lady's Order . . . and being informed that it was near Veas, I took a larger number of nuns . . . with the intention of going thither after I had concluded the foundation of Veas." A difficulty about the license (Caravaca like Veas was under the jurisdiction of the " Consejo de las Ordenes ") ; the sudden change of Teresa's plans which took her to Seville led to its being abandoned at least for the time being. " It is true that when 1 had informed myself in Veas as to its whereabouts, and found that it was difficult to get at, and the road between it and Veas so bad as to make it difficult for those who should have to visit the nuns, ... I did not care much about founding there. But as I had held out favourable hopes, I begged Father Julian de Avila and Antonio Gaytan to go there, to see if it was possible, and to cancel it if they though fit." Whilst she had waited in Veas, therefore, the two set off for Caravaca, return- ing in time to take Teresa to Seville. For the last time, for we shall now accompany him no more (it is doubtful whether we shall even get a furtive glimpse of him again) let us follow the priest and the worthy Gaytan over the hills and dales of this old-world Spain : In the journey there and back we suffered much from snow and other misadventures, for I should never be done if I were to relate them 5 o6 SANTA TERESA all ; still I will not leave untold what happened to us at the entrance to Caravaca. We arrived at nightfall at a place called Moratalla, very tired, for we had done a long day's journey ; and the inn for there was only one in the place was so crowded with people that we had not room to turn round. It seems to me less painful to do the remaining two leagues, said I to my companion, than to stop here for the night. There is only one thing against it ; that, as it is night, and we do not know the road, we may lose ourselves ; but that we can easily remedy by getting a guide here. He being agreed, we at once looked for a man, hired him, and set forth, bent on entering Caravaca within two hours. We were now going at a great pace, it being somewhat rainy and very dark, when we saw him, the man in front of us, flounder down a precipice, and called out : Brother, have we lost our way ? Yes, replied the man, quite calmly, Si, Sefior. I will not repeat what we said when we heard this, and saw ourselves wandering along these impassable roads, except that my companion blamed me for it all, because, said he, as we came along I had been giving him lessons in contemplation ; the fact being that I had been telling him the commandments which were to take him to heaven, and so he thus lost his road on earth, as those often do who travel it well [the road to heaven]. And, doubtless, the real reason was that before we started the man had slung a big keg of wine over his shoulders, and must have been so drunk that he knew not whither he was going. At last, what with this misfortune of being lost, we would have nothing more to do with him, and sent him off about his business : we were left alone, not knowing whither we were going any more than if we had been blind. As we went along thus, for we had gone a long way in this fashion, we saw a shepherd's fire burning on a hill. We shouted to him to show us the way, and he, to save himself the trouble of coming down, answered : This way, that way. So that we soon lost ourselves again, and this time in such a fashion that we could not even make our way back to the shepherd ; but began to seek about in vain for some sheltered nook to stop in till morning. We groped about with our hands seeking for some road ; go whither it would, it was sure to lead us to a hamlet of some sort, and so when we at last found one, we hoped soon to come upon some village. We knew not whether we were going back or forwards. We saw the form of a man, and thought we had come across some one who could direct us somewhat, and he turned out to be the very man we had dismissed, wandering about like ourselves, without knowing where. We did not feel enough pity for him to take him on with us, and so he went one way and we another, for we would not even be beholden for so much as putting us on the right road to one who had guided us so ill. At length, after we were completely tired out with walking along such a road, we heard the bark of dogs, and when we had assured c^ selves that we were not mistaken, we listened to them with more attention than if it had been the best music in the world. And so it was that when we got to where the dogs were bark- ing, we came upon the walls of the village, which we had not seen before because of the darkness. At the first house we came to, we woke up the owner from his slumbers with our shouts to ask him the name of the place. When he answered Caravaca, our soul came back again to our bodies, and we thought little of our past troubles, although we ceased not to talk of what a cara -vaca (dear cow) it had been to us. They took us in in a posada, where we waited for daylight, to which it wanted but little. SUPERABUNDO GAUDIO 507 The narration is so naive, picturesque, and quaint that I have quoted it in full. Inimitable this glimpse of the grave Castilian gentleman and the priest wandering along in the dark, the latter so engaged in pointing out the road to heaven to a drunken man, that they lost their own. The shepherd's light gleaming red on the bleak hillside; the barking of dogs, sweeter than the sweetest music, inasmuch as it hails their approach to the sleeping town ; the feeble pun on the name of the hamlet which had cost them so dear good, garrulous Master Julian ! Without knowing it thou hast left a picture painted in a few masterly strokes, bridging for a brief moment the chasm which separates thy century from ours ! The rest of the history of Caravaca is told in a few words, Teresa's : The nuns (I mean those who were to be) were so determined, that they were able so well to gain over father Julian de Avila and Antonio Gaytan to their side, that before they left the deeds were signed. Whereupon they started on their journey back, leaving the would-be nuns highly pleased, and they themselves so much so with them and the country, that they were never done of talking of them and it, as well as of the badness of the road. As for me, as soon as I saw it all arranged, and that the license was long of coming, I again sent the good Antonio Gaytan back there once more, who for love of me underwent the labour gladly, and was, together with father Julian, set on the foundation being accomplished ; because in good sooth it is to them that we must be grateful for this foundation, since unless they had gone there and made the arrangements, I should have done little enough in the matter. I told him to go, so that he might see about putting up a torno and gratings in the house where we were to take possession, and the nuns to dwell, until such time as a better one turned up. So that he remained there a long time, and as Rodrigo Moya, who as I have said was the father of one of these maidens, gave him part of his house, he stayed there a long time doing all that was necessary with right good-will. When the license arrived, I being then on the point of setting out for Seville, I found that one of the conditions in it was, that the house should be subject to the comendadores and the nuns under their jurisdiction ; which I could not allow in the case of the Order of Our Lady of Carmel ; and so they set about getting a fresh license, which in this case, as well as that of Veas, there was nothing left for it but to do. But the King he who is now Don Philip, so great a friend to showing favour to such monks and nuns as he knows keep their Rule, that as soon as he knew the nature of these monasteries, and that they belonged to the Primitive Rule, he has favoured us in everything did me so great a grace that when I wrote to him he ordered it to be granted ; and therefore, daughters, I beseech you greatly always to make particular prayer for his Majesty, even as we do now. Well, as they had to go back for the license, I set out for Seville by the mandate of the father Provincial, who was then and now is the father master fray Jerdnimo Gracian de la Madre de Dios, as has been said, and the poor maidens remained prisoners in their retreat until the New Year's Day of the following year, it being February when they had sent to me in 5o8 SANTA TERESA Avila. The license was brought at once with all speed ; but, as I was so far away, and in the midst of so many trials, I could not go to their assist- ance, and pitied them greatly ; because they oiten wrote to me in great distress, and thus it was already out of the question to interpose any further delay. As it was impossible for me to go to them, as much on account of the distance as because the foundation [Seville] was not completed, the father master Jerdnimo Gracian, who, as has been said, was Apostolic Visitor, bethought himself (even although I did not go myself) of sending thither the nuns I had brought with me for that purpose, and left behind in San Jose of Malagon. I took care that she in whose abilities I confided most, as being likely to carry out everything exceeding well (because she is much better than I am), should be appointed prioress, and, taking everything requisite for the journey, they set off with two of our Discalced friars ; for father Julian de Avila and Antonio de Gaytan had gone home long ago, and I was averse to bring them from so great a distance in such bad weather, it being the end of December. On their arrival, they were joyfully received by the people of the town, especially by the imprisoned maidens, the monastery being founded and the Host placed on the altar on the igth of January [old style] 1576. CHAPTER XIX LETTERS FROM TOLEDO WE have watched the Reform first shaping itself in misty outline in a woman's brain ; gradually growing out of the Mist until it becomes a living and potential Reality, firmly rooted in Spanish soil. The hatred and fear felt by the older Order for this young, new, ardent body that had met them so firmly and held their own so stubbornly in their first rude encounter in Andalucia had been echoed, as we have seen, in the decree fulminated by the chapter of Plasencia in May of I 575> against "certain disobedient, rebellious, and contumacious individuals, vulgarly called Descalzos, who, against the patents and provisions of the prior-general, have been inhabiting, and still inhabit, beyond the limits of the province of Castille, called the Old . . . who shall be required under the apostolic pains and censures, having also recourse (in case of necessity) to the aid of the secular arm, to leave these places within the space of three days," etc. Nor did the chapter confine itself to thundering out comminations against the Descalzos from a distance. An astuter measure, likely to be far more efficacious than any threats of vengeance, was the appointment of Fray Geronimo Tostado as Visitor-general of the Descalzos, with plenary powers over the Carmelite Order in Spain. This Portuguese monk, energetic, resolute, clever, and intriguing, was to mask the cunning of the serpent with the guilelessness of the dove. He was to tickle the King with judicious flattery of his zeal for the Reform ; to represent to him that his instructions were merely to redistribute. In fact, so far from extinguishing or persecuting, what could be more reasonable or harmless, or indeed more productive of good than that the posts of trust in the Calced communities shall be filled by the Descalzos most worthy of them ; and that others of the Calced friars should be drafted into the Discalced monasteries, the first to teach, the others to learn ? Nevertheless, this innocent and plausible system of shuffle concealed an ingenious trap. Once scattered and separated 509 5io SANTA TERESA from one another in different communities communities that we may be sure would keep a sharp watch on their actions the Descalzos, their power broken, were no longer to be feared, whilst the General, who in his own muddle-headed way, and by his own methods, was as anxious as Teresa to cleanse out the Augean stables of the Carmelite monasteries and renew their primitive discipline, would thus achieve a double object, viz. the Reform of the ancient Order that had baffled so many of his predecessors, and the gradual reabsorption of the new. In March of 1576 Tostado landed at Barcelona. In the following May the Observants held a chapter of the Order at San Pablo de Moraleja, at which the Carmelites and the Descalzos came to an open rupture. The chapter, after all, is but a fact imbedded in the Carmelite Chronicles, with but little fruition to be gathered from it. It is in Teresa's letters those windows she has opened for us on the past, a past so misty and blurred that we may catch some fugitive glimpses of these storms and tumults, of the current of human fears and hatreds that seethed beneath them. It is the pth of May of 1576, in Seville, and in one of its many convents, the most recently founded of them all, a nun sits writing in her cell. Wafted through the open casement comes the scent of orange-blossom from the patio below, a patio surrounded by fairy-like columns of alabaster, gleaming through dusky foliage and flowers, glittering, as the sun streams full upon them the golden sparkling sun of Seville like (as she says in this very letter, with prosaic Castilian imagery) " a sweetmeat made of snowy sugar." Perhaps in the distance, when she lifts her eyes from the paper paper to-day so faded and dim she follows the silver line of the Guadalquivir, the movement of white sails on its broad bosom, or the arabesques of the Moorish tower of the Giralda. The letter she writes is to Mariano in Madrid. Let us look over her shoulder, all invisible to her, and read it : The grace of the Holy Spirit be with your reverence. Oh valame Dios, and how fitted is your disposition to make one fall into temptation. I tell you, that my virtue must be great, since I do this ; and the worst of it is, I fear something of it will stick to my father, the sefior licenciado Padilla ; since he neither writes to me, nor sends his compliments, just like your reverence. God forgive you both ; although I owe so much to the sefior licentiate Padilla, that, however much he may neglect me, I can never neglect him, whom I beg to consider this as addressed to him. When I think of the perplexities your reverence left me, and how un- mindful you are of everything, I know not what to think, except that " Cursed the man," etc. But, as we must return good for evil, I have desired to LETTERS FROM TOLEDO 511 write this, so that your reverence may know that we took possession on Santiago's Day, and the friars have been as still as death. Our father spoke to Navarro, and he, I believe, it is who made them be quiet. The house is such that the sisters are never done of giving thanks to God. May he be blessed for all ! Every one says we got it for nothing ; and so they certify that now we should not have got it for 20,000 ducats. The situation is as good as any in Seville. The good prior of Las Cuevas has been here twice (he is highly pleased with the house), and fray Barto- lome Aguilar once, before he went, for I already wrote your reverence how he was going to the chapter. It has been great good fortune to hit upon such a house. We are in a great dispute about the alcabala [a duty levied on sales or purchases]. In short, I believe we shall have to pay it all. My brother was about to lend it us, and he is looking after the workmen, for he saves me great labour. The mistake about the alcabala was in the notary [the men of law, it would seem, being as foolish in that age as this]. Our father is highly pleased with the house, and every one. Father Soto speaks most favourably of it (he has just been here), and says he will not write to you because you do not write to me. The church is being made in the gateway, and it will be very pretty. Everything is just as if it had been made on purpose. So much for the house. As regards El Tostado, a friar just now arrived (he being a conventual of this monastery), who left him in Barcelona in March, brings a patent from him and he assumes the Vicar-generalship of all Spain. Cota came yesterday. He is lying hid in Don Geronimo's house, waiting, so they say, for fray Agustin Suarez [the Observant Provincial], who is to arrive to-day. The first two things are true, for I saw the patent, and know that Cota is here. This about the Provincial is given out for certain, and that he is coming to resume his office, and brings along with him a Motu from the Pope,, which, for the objects of the Calzados, is all that can be wished for, according to what they say ; and moreover the prior told me to-day that he knows it for certain from one in whom they have confidence. So she writes on that sweet May day in Seville, and muses, as well she may, on the ominous mustering of forces. Gracian has fled, advised thereto by " his ilustrisima senoria of our good Archbishop," the governor and the fiscal. To escape the clutches of his enemies, he is already on his way to Madrid by a roundabout road, to consult the Nuncio (for, as to visiting, it is not now to be thought of, the Carmelites are in such a state of uproar), leaving behind him Evangelista, prior of the Carmelite monastery, whom he has appointed his vicar pro- vincial, to meet the blow as best he may. Good Evangelista, however, is full of courage. " I tell him," writes Teresa, " that as he is not one of the heads no notice will be served on him. He keeps up his spirits well, and , the deputy- governor is ready to fly to his assistance if anything takes place." As to the denoiiment of the comedy like enough to prove a tragedy we hear nothing ; for on the 4th of June, little less than a month later, a week after she had witnessed the imposing ceremony which brought her labours at Seville to a triumphant 5i2 SANTA TERESA conclusion, she was herself on her way to Malagon. She travelled in a coach with her brother and his children, a fact which gave room to a wicked world ever wickeder as it grows older, so goes the commentator's odd little note at the bottom of her letters (one dreads to think the depths of wickedness it has got to by now) to spread abroad the report that the austere and virtuous nun now kept company with squires and dames. That other little eight-year-old Teresa enlivened the journey with her childish sallies. With them too went Fray Gregorio Nacianceno, the friar to whom Gracian had given the habit in Veas. Their way lay through Almodovar, and in five days' time, on the second day of Easter, the travellers alighted before the gateway of the convent of Malagon. Teresa is at once plunged into the cares and duties of her office, as we may see from the two letters she at once sits down to write to the faithful Gracian and Maria de San Jose. Indeed, such is the state of Malagon, and the ill-health of the nuns, that she contemplates transferring them to Paracuellos, a property of Doila Luisa de la Cerda's : About three leagues from Madrid and two from Alcald, so I believe, and a very healthy place, for I would fain have made the monastery there, and she would never hear of it. I am greatly averse to their going away from this, now that they are here, as it is a place of much traffic and so many pass this way : but since there is no help for it, may it please God that this may be effected, and that your paternity will be agreeable to it, as I believe you will be, for we shall not await the license, and there is no other remedy ; and to break up the monastery, as was done at Pastrana, is not to be contemplated for a moment. In short, if she does not answer favourably, I shall go to Toledo, to get various persons to speak with her about it, and thence I shall not stir, until this is settled either one way or the other. I arrived well, for it has been better than coming in carts, since we could travel at the hour we chose, and my brother paid great attention to my comfort. He kisses your paternity's hands, and has arrived well, and is well ; he is an excellent man : if he would only leave me in Toledo and go until that business there is settled ! for we should then have news of your paternity, but this there is no hope of. Teresa came amusing us all on the journey, and giving no trouble. Oh ! my father, what a disaster happened to me ; for, being in a parva [a shed for storing unthreshed corn] nor did we think little of such a shelter close to a venta, in which it was impossible to stop, an enormous lizard gets me in between my tunic and the flesh of my arm ; and it was a mercy of God that it was not in any other place, for I think I should have died, so terrified was I, although my brother seized it quickly and flung it from him, hitting Antonio Ruiz on the mouth, who has been very useful to us on the journey, and Diego also ; for that reason give him (Diego) the habit without more ado, for he is a little angel. The mother prioress commends herself greatly to your paternity. She says she does not write so as not to weary you. She is now up and going about ; and as she is so fond of looking into everything, and so particular, it will prevent her getting well so quickly as she ought. When your paternity LETTERS FROM TOLEDO 5I3 goes to our house [Gracian is still in Madrid, but she refers to the convent of Seville, whither he was on the point of starting], make me much of San Gabriel, whom my departure left in sore trouble, and she is an angel in simplicity, and of an excellent spirit ; and I owe her much. Order them on no account to give any one to eat in the locutorio ; for this unsettles them greatly, and excepting your paternity (for this is not to be taken into account, when necessary), they do it with extreme unwilling- ness, and I am more unwilling still than they, and so I told them when I left, and there are many objections. And it is enough that they will not have sufficient to eat themselves, if they do it, for the alms are small, and they will not say anything, but will go without food ; and this is the least. Everything is in the beginning ; and this is a beginning that may lead to much evil : for this reason your paternity may see that it is of great im- portance, and it will console them greatly to know that you wish them to keep the rules made and confirmed by padre fray Pedro Fernandez. They are all young women ; and believe me, my father, that the safest way for them is to have nothing to do with friars. Of nothing have I a greater dread in these monasteries than this : for although all is holy now, I know what it may come to if it is not remedied at once, and this makes me insist on it so much. Forgive me, father mine, and remain with God. To Maria de San Jose", prioress of Seville, she writes on the same day much to the same effect May the grace of the Holy Spirit be with your reverence, my daughter ! Oh how I should like to write at length ; but as I have other letters to write, I have no time. I have told fray Gregorio to write fully all about the journey. The fact is, there is little to tell, because we travelled very comfortably, and it was not too hot ; we arrived well, glory to God, on the second day of Easter. I found the mother prioress better, although not quite recovered. Be sure to commend her to God. I have been greatly pleased with her. Often have I remembered me of the business you were left with. Please God that nothing may be wanting. For charity's sake I beg you to write to me by every means you can, so that I may always know how you are. Do not fail to write by way of Toledo, for I will warn the prioress to send them on in time, and, moreover, perhaps I shall be detained there some days, since I fear that I shall have some trouble before this business is concluded with Dona Luisa. Let all of you commend it to God, and commend me much to the mother supriora 1 and all the sisters. See that you make me much of San Gabriel, who was almost out of her wits at my leaving you. Commend me much to Garcf Alvarez, and tell us about the lawsuit, and all the news, and above all, of our father, if he has arrived. I write to him charging him strictly that you are to consent to no person eating there. See that you do not begin it, except for him, who so much needs it, and it can be done without it coming to any one's ears ; and even if it does get wind, there is a difference between the head of the Order and a subject ; and his health is so important to us, that all we can do is little. The mother prioress (Brianda) will send some money with fray Gregorio for this purpose and whatever more is necessary, for truly she loves him greatly, and so does it willingly. And it is meet that he should know this ; for I tell him, that you will have few alms, and that so it may happen that you will be left without anything to eat yourselves, if you give 1 Sub-prioress. 33 514 SANTA TERESA it to others. I greatly desire that you should suffer uneasiness in nothing, but that you serve our Lord much. May it please his Majesty, that it may be even as I shall beseech him ! As for sister San Francisco, she must be a good historian in all that takes place relating to the friars. Coming from that house has made this seem worse to me. These sisters suffer from many trials here. Teresa came, especially the first day, downcast enough on account of leaving the sisters, she said. When she got here, she was just as if she had been with them all her life, and the night we arrived she scarcely ate her supper for joy. I am delighted because I believe her affection for us is deeply rooted. I will write again by father fray Gregorio. No more now, except that may the Lord keep and make you a saint, so that all may be so, Amen. To-day is Friday after Easter. Be careful to deliver the accompanying letter to our father ; and should he be absent, do not send it him except by a very sure person, as it is important. Your reverence's TERESA DE JESUS. Teresa does not write to you, because she is busy. She says she is prioress, and sends you many messages. On the 1 8th she again writes, in answer, apparently, to Maria de San Jose : Jesus be with your reverence, daughter mine ! I assure you that if my absence gives you somewhat of pain, you indeed owe it to me. May the Lord be pleased to accept such trials and troubles brought about by leaving daughters so dearly loved ; and I trust that your reverence and all of you have had good health, as I have, glory to God. By this you will have got the letters sent by the muleteer : this is a very short one, for I intended to have been here longer ; and as Sunday falls on San Juan, I have cut short my stay, and so have little time. As padre fray Gregorio is the messenger, this matters little. I am dis- tressed about whether your reverence may not find yourself hard pressed as to the payment of those censos [interest on the bonds over the house at Seville] this year, for by next the Lord will have brought some one to pay them. A sister of Santdngel [a nun of Malagon] who is here, is loud in praise of the mother prioress, and I should have liked her better than the one who entered here. She says that they will give 300 ducats of the dowry of the one here (for in August she will have been a year), and the other she says will bring as much more, so that they can pay this year. It is little enough ; but if what they say of her is true, she is good even if she had nothing ; and since she is from here, treat of it with our father, and if you have no other remedy, take this. The worst of it is that she is only fourteen, and for that reason I advise you to take her only as a last resource : you will see about it there. It seems to me advisable that our father should give orders for Beatriz to make her profession at once, for many reasons and one of them to put an end to temptations. Commend me to her, and her mother, and to every one you see, and to the mother supriora and all the sisters, especially my infirmarian. God keep me you, my daughter, and make you very holy, Amen. My brother wrote to you the other day, and commends himself to you greatly. He is more loyal than Teresa, for he does not succeed in loving any better than you. As the mother prioress will write (with whom cer- tainly I have had great delight), and fray Gregorio will tell you all the news, no more. LETTERS FROM TOLEDO 515 Early in July, Teresa was in Toledo. Know that I remain here for the present [she writes to Maria de San Jose], for my brother started yesterday, and I made him take Teresa ; for, as I do not know whether I shall not be ordered to return to Avila by a roundabout way, I do not wish to be burdened with a child. I am well, and glad to be quit of this clatter ; for, in spite of my love for my brother, I was anxious for him to get home. I know not how long I shall be here, for I am still busy seeking the best way of accomplishing what is to be done at Malagon. Her biographers have misrepresented Teresa's residence in Toledo at this time as a period of enforced imprisonment. Nothing was further from being the case. If she departed from her original intention of accompanying her brother to Avila, it was owing to the critical position of Malagon, and the difficulty of getting Dona Luisa de la Cerda to come to an arrangement. Her further sojourn was imperatively demanded by the serious aspect of affairs in Andalucia ; where for day by day the plot was thickening the Observants and the Descalzos were engaged in that duel for life or death which was only ended by the erection of the latter into a separate province. Gracian, who as the Nuncio's special delegate owned a superior and more immediate jurisdiction over her movements than even the General himself, desired her to remain, and his orders coincided with her own wishes; since in Toledo she could get quicker information from the scene of war in Anda- lucia than she could have done stuck away in Avila. Nor was the sentence issued against her by the General by any means one of enforced imprisonment, although it was then so con- strued by the Carmelites, to serve their own ends, as it was afterwards by the Descalzos, in their desire to make her the victim of persecution. The fact being that, although her foun- dations were abruptly cut short, she had perfect liberty of choice as to the convent she wished to retire to. For indeed her presence in Toledo at this juncture is of singular importance. There, from the retirement of her pleasant cell looking out upon a garden, "cosa muy sabrosa," bidden by Gracian, not only does she conclude the history of her Foundations, but copes with her enormous correspondence, ever increasing as time goes on, to all outward seeming a season of uninterrupted tranquillity, in very truth the most anxious and agitated of her life. Watch her well, this old woman, as the sunlight, streaming through the little casement, creeps over the red brick floor of that pleasant cell, and outlines the laborious figure, whose pen skims over the paper so swiftly that her nuns declare she is inspired, for it is she and she alone who is 5 i6 SANTA TERESA making the Carmelites totter to their foundations ; she it is, and not Gracian or any blustering Descalzo of them all, who constitutes the veritable danger that menaces that most ancient and powerful Order. Far from the fight, keenly balancing the probabilities of victory and defeat, hers is a silent role, but the greatest one of all. Alternately checking and spurring her sweet and gracious Gracian (too weak and pliant), loyal to friends and enemies alike, petted by prioress and nuns of Seville; even this rigid old disciplinarian relaxing somewhat of her austerity in his favour, allowing him all manner of privileges, " that must never be allowed to any other," who is it but the woman who stands behind him that gives his conduct that backbone, energy, and consistency in which it is so fatally lacking the moment she is dead ? Who but she can conciliate the various characters of her friars, bending their activities, making their very weaknesses and defects converge to the central object? There they all are, pale enough, struggling into life again through her letters : Mariano, impetuous, violent, hot of temper and sharp of tongue ; Fray Antonio de Jesus, peevish, jealous, already nursing in his breast the seeds of that animosity against Gracian and the clever capable prioress of Seville, which was to break out with such disastrous conse- quences after Teresa's death ; Fray Juan de la Roca, inflexible as bronze itself, altering Gracian's more beneficent institutions in accordance with his own rigidity open books (if they could but know it) to those clear, sharp-sighted eyes. They but the puppets dancing, perhaps somewhat clumsily, it is true, but dancing still, as she pulls the strings from that Toledan convent. If not, watch them when she, the principle of cohesion, is gone ; each little individuality struggling to assert itself, all these heterogeneous elements she alone possessed the spell of binding together and fusing into one common action, battling together, hither and thither in dark confusion and disintegration that no man, or woman either, shall ever piece together again. On the nth of July, Gracian is still in Madrid "in great tribulation, and writing very shortly, it must be he has not time for more," she notes, always anxious to mask his failings, to Maria de San Jose. Tostado is also in Madrid, but his star is waning. The King has ordered Gracian to have recourse to the President of the Royal Council (Covarrubias) and Quiroga, chief Inquisitor, in all matters relating to the Order. " Please God he has succeeded in laying a heavy hand on those friars. . . . Please God all goes well. I assure you he needs all our prayers. Still he is well, and the Nuncio well pleased that he did not return to Seville." LETTERS FROM TOLEDO 517 Early in September the Descalzos reply by a rival chapter in Almodovar to the measures taken against them in that of San Pablo de Moraleja. It is now war to the knife. Gracian, hurrying through Toledo to attend it, snatches a brief interview with Teresa. After electing four definitors a step equivalent to severing themselves from the main body of the Carmelites the assembled friars decide to send Fray Juan de Jesus Roca, prior of Mancera, and Fray Pedro de los Angeles, to Rome, there to circumvent the machinations of the Observants, the rest of the time being wasted by these 'excellent but unpractical men in a barren discussion as to whether contemplation alone, or prayer and preaching as well, should be the principal occupa- tion of the Descalzos' life, and this when their very existence was trembling in the balance, and not a moment should have been lost in despatching the ambassadors. Gracian, true to the traditions of his training, contended for the latter, and, seconded by Fray Antonio de Jesus, carried the opinion of the chapter unanimously with him. One only, the greatest of them all, those present remarked that he spoke like one inspired ventured to impugn the decision, although he owned that action could not be entirely severed from contemplation. It was as if a breath of fresh air had swept over the chapter, for the man who spoke was Fray Juan de la Cruz ! And, indeed, there is great reason not only for energetic action but positive elation. For Tostado, always seen through a glass darkly a very phantom of a man, never emerging into bodily shape, or showing himself to us face to face, worsted in Madrid, has fluttered off to Portugal, and left the coast clear. " Blessed be the Lord for having so ordered it ! " piously ejacu- lates Teresa, who from Toledo keeps a sharp lookout on the movements of the enemy, and lets none of his manoeuvres escape her, as she promptly transmits the jubilant tidings to Gracian in Almodovar. Nevertheless, there is no time to be lost. God helps him who helps himself. That sharp old watcher in Toledo is not to be deceived by any illusory or temporary triumph : Know that they of the Council say, that if the license [for further foundations] is to be given according to the suit at law, they will not give unless we produce further evidence ; that they have only to see a word from the Nuncio signifying his approval, to give it without more ad.-. An oidor [a judge or magistrate] informed Don Pedro Gonzalez of this out c friendship. Let me know by those coming from the chapter what we shall do ; and it would be well for some persons of the court like the Duke others to ask him [the Nuncio] to do so. I have suspected that he is being hampered by letters from Rome, so as not to give us these licenses. ... I 5i8 SANTA TERESA have also thought that if these [the Observants] place these false testimonies before the Pope, and there is no one there to answer them, they will obtain as many Briefs against us as they like, and that it is of the utmost import- ance that we have some one there ; for when they see the life our friars lead, they will not fail to see the hatred, and I believe we shall do nothing until this is done ; and they would bring back with them a license to found several houses. Believe me it is most important to be ready for what may happen. . . . I have already written to you [she writes the following day] by two separate ways, how Peralta [Tostado] left for Portugal, the very Thursday your paternity arrived here. Santelmo [Olea, a friendly Jesuit] has written to me to-day that we have nothing to fear, since it is certain that Methuselah [the Nuncio Ormaneto] is set upon accomplishing our desire of getting rid of the eagles [Observants], for he sees indeed that it ought to be done. [Indeed, Tostado's absence has so daunted the ardour of the Carmelites in Toledo, that] Infante [an Observant] came to speak with me ; he wanted a letter from Pablo [Gracian]. I told him you would do nothing through me, and that he should speak to you yourself : he finds himself guilty of nothing. I believe if he had any hopes of Peralta's return, he would not have been so submissive. They have written to me to-day from Seville as to the hurly- burly that is taking place there about the convent and the publication of Peralta's Brief, and how they are saying about the whole town that the butter- flies [Uiscalced Carmelite nuns] are to be subjected. On the 2oth of September she congratulates him on his conduct in the chapter. Somehow we dimly discern whence comes that outburst of courage he presently makes proof of in Seville which wins him even the applause and admiration of his detractors. They arrive highly pleased [it is to be presumed she refers to the priors of Pastrana, Mancera, and Alcald., who would naturally seek an interview with her as they passed through Toledo, on their way home from the chapter to their respective convents], and I exceedingly so, to see how well it has been done, glory to God : certainly this time, at least, your paternity does not remain without great praises. . . . He also tells me a good deal of the measures taken to procure the province, by means of our father-General, for it is an intolerable battle to go on incurring the displeasure of the head of the Order. If it can be done at the cost of money, God will give it, and the companions shall have it ; and for love of God spare no diligence in starting them off without delay. Do not account it an accessory, since it is the principal thing ; and if that prior of La Penuela knows him so well, he might well go with father Mariano ; but the other one would be much better, and it is now a most felicitous conjuncture. And seeing what we see in Methuselah, I know not what we wait for, since we expose ourselves to be left without any one here on our side, and to find ourselves abandoned when we least expect it. In the meantime the balance hangs on a thread ; nay, perhaps on something even less elastic the lives of two old men, either of whom Death may remove at any moment, the Nuncio and Covarrubias, the President of the Royal Council. It is probably to the latter, and not to the King, as has LETTERS FROM TOLEDO 519 been erroneously supposed, that she refers in the following passage of the same letter as Gilberto : Know that a priest, a friend of mine [Velazquez], told me this very day for he treats with me on matters relating to his soul that he considers it very certain that Gilberto must die shortly, and moreover he told me this very year ; and that in the case of other persons, about whom he has had similar revelations, he was never mistaken. Although we can attach no importance to this, it is possible ; and as it is not impossible, it is well your paternity, for the sake of the business it behoves us to attend to, should bear in mind, that it may happen, and should so act in the things pertaining to your visit as if it were not likely to last long. Fray Pedro Hernandez en- Crusted the execution of all his behests in the Encarnacion to the hands of fray Angel, although he himself was at a distance, and did not on that account either cease to be Visitor or to carry out his intentions. For, whilst the friars have been arguing whether contempla- tion or action is the mainspring of the Barefooted Carmelites' life, Fray Augustin Suarez, believing evidently in the more immediate efficacy of the latter, has quietly resumed his office as Provincial of the Andalucian Carmelites ; convoked a chapter in Ecija ; despoiled Teresa's Evangelista, prior of the monastery of Seville, of his post, and sent him off about his business to join the Descalzos who had appointed him. " I never forget how the Provincial (Suarez) treated you when you were in his house [she writes to Gracian] ; and I should desire, if possible, to show him we are not ungrateful. They complain that your reverence is swayed by the father Evangelista : it is also well to consider that we are none of us so perfect as to make it impossible for us to be prejudiced against some, and show favour to others : and it behoves us to take everything into account!' advice could scarcely have been given than for Gracian to transfer his task of visiting the Observants and the odium of it to the Observant Provincial Suarez. " I repeat," she writes again, " my belief in the necessity of making use of the least guilty of them, to execute your paternity's orders. The Pro- vincial (Suarez), if he had not been corrupted, would make an excellent executioner !" Again she returns to the most important _step of " I beseech your paternity to hurry forward this of do not wait until the summer, for now is the fitting season; and believe me that it is advisable." Her prudent counsels would seem to have fallen on deal ears. Gracian rushed off to Seville, faced the turbulent and defiant Carmelites, and, aided by the Archbishop and Deputy-Governor of the town, quelled the storm, and the mutinous monks to accept and obey his cpmmis; "This once at least," writes the prejudiced chronicler, our 520 SANTA TERESA good father displayed greater valour and constancy than his temperament promised." So Gracian to Seville to reform the Observants too assiduously sometimes for his own safety : " My father, do not hope to bring things to perfection by a single stroke " ; whilst Teresa in Toledo, watching the course of events, warns and admonishes alas ! not often listened to the only person of them all who had grasped the situation and formed any clearly-defined plan of action. So through her letters do we catch passing glimpses of these storms and tumults, to us engaged in the storms and tumults of our own little world as unreal as the medium in which they passed. Maria de San Jose also plays a principal part in the drama. All means are fair in love and war, and in those agitated days each side was intent on intercepting the other's letters. Thus, strangely enough, some of Teresa's fall into the clutches of Tostado : " I have been troubled about the missing letters ; and you do not say whether those which appeared in Peralta's hands were of any importance " ; whilst on the other hand we find Gracian in possession of some of Tostado's, how they found their way there, history omits to relate. Maria de San Jose is the trusty intermediary between Toledo and Seville. To her Teresa entrusts the task of keeping her minutely informed of the health and movements of this beloved son, and of the events so rapidly following each other on the theatre of Seville. In the bundle of letters so constantly speeding to and fro between Toledo and Seville, Gracian's are distinguished by two crosses. For this reason also the danger they incur of being intercepted on the way she refers under assumed names to those whom it would be unsafe to name outright, making an enigma impossible to unravel except by one actually in the secret. Thus Tostado figures as Peralta ; Gilberto is probably Covarrubias, the President of the Royal Council ; the Pope's Nuncio, Ormaneto, is Methuselah; Quiroga, chief Inquisitor, Archangel ; etc. I beg you of charity's sake [this on the 7th September to Maria de San Jose of Seville] be careful to write to me what is happening when our father [Gracian] is unable to ; and to give him my letters, and receive his for me ; if you who are on the spot go through so many frights, you can think what it must be when one is so far away. Happily, however, the postmaster is a Toledan, and more- over a cousin of one of the nuns of Segovia. "He has been to see me, and says he will work marvels for you ; his name is LETTERS FROM TOLEDO 521 Figueredo, being, as I say, the director of the posts here. We have settled it between us, and he says that, if care is taken there to give the letters to the postmaster, I shall be able to hear from you in close on eight days. Look what a great thing it would be ! He says that if my packet is placed in a cover, addressed to Figueredo, the ' correo mayor ' of Toledo, however many there may be in it, none of them will be lost . . . But be careful," she adds, the old formal Castilian, " that you address him properly, and find out whether he is styled magnificent or what. For this reason I have been delighted to remain here at this time, for in Avila there are not the same opportunities for this, and even for other things." " For charity's sake," she repeats on the 22nd (the chapter of Almodovar is now over, and Gracian is hourly expected in Seville), " be careful to send me news of our father, by the way I wrote you of in the letter that I sent you by his paternity. I am excessively anxious to know if he arrived well, and how it has fared with him." How it did fare with him we may vaguely conjecture from the following, written six days later: "For charity's sake write at once and particularly about what is going on, and do not rely on our father, who will not have time." Darker fears haunted her. If those fathers of the cloth (who, like Habakkuk, seem to have been capable de tout) should rid themselves of their obnoxious Visitor by poison ! Teresa was not a woman to distress herself with fanciful imaginings, and it is certain that Gracian ran a very real danger of assassination or being poisoned. We have seen how from Malagon she had impressed on him that none were to be allowed to eat in the locutorio of her nuns' convent at Seville, and the same arriero who carried the letter bore another to Maria de San Jos6 containing the same injunction. An exception, however, was to be made for him " whose health is so important to us that all we can do is but little !"..." Look well to it," she says to her prioress, " that you feast our father occasionally. He is as much convinced as we are that no friar is to set foot there. So much have we insisted on this point, that I would not wish you to carry it to its extremity, since I see his necessity, and how important his health is to us." But even Gracian is not to eat in the locutorio at the expense of the community. She is far too keenly alive to their embarrassments to impose on them an additional burden. What they spend on him, as well as the carriage of the letters from Seville sometimes even we find her including the cost of postage in her own, thereby somewhat wounding the good prioress's amour propre must be rigorously deducted from the forty ducats sent from San Jos< of Avila; 522 SANTA TERESA " and look to it, if you should run short when occasion offers to regale our father, that you let me know, and do not stand on your dignity, for if so it will not be courtesy but folly." Repeatedly she harks back to the same theme : " Warn him not to eat with those Observant friars ! I know not why he goes there, except to fill us all with anxiety. I have already told your reverence to deduct the expense from the money of San Jose. . . . Let the good sub-prioress, who would count water if she could, take heed to this." But the poison reserved for Gracian was perhaps more lethal and more subtle in its working than that Teresa feared. He is surrounded by spies ; his every action is watched and the worst construction put upon it. His frankness and na'ivetf of character, a certain genial imprudence which was characteristic of the man, makes him an easy prey to his enemies. He has become the victim of the most odious calumnies on the part of the Observants calumnies which, however triumphantly he may refute them now, will hang a dark cloud round his life, and scarcely be dispersed by death. " Your paternity will indeed do well," advises the shrewd counsellor in Toledo, " to transmit your orders (to the Observants) from your monastery, where they cannot watch whether you go to choir or not ; I tell you that it is the best way of doing things. Here there is no dearth of prayers, which are better arms than the ones those fathers use." Gracian, however, reinstated in his commission by the Nuncio, pursues his course firmly. " Greatly have I praised the Lord," writes Teresa on the 23rd of October, " for the manner in which the business goes, and the things Fray Antonio told me they said of your paternity have horrified me. Valame Dios ! how necessary has been your paternity's departure ; although you did no more than in conscience it seems to me you were bound, for the honour of the Order. I know not how it was possible to make public such grave accusations. God give them li^'ht, and if your paternity had only some one you could confide in, it would be an excellent thing to give them the pleasure of appointing another prior; but I do not understand it. I am amazed at him who gave such advice, as to do nothing. It is a great thing that there are still some there who are not entirely opposed." What these calumnies were we shall see later on. One of them at least is connected with an incident on which Teresa herself touches in her letters. With a credulity that speaks little for his judgment, the simple friar has fallen headlong into the toils of one of those religious impostors who swarmed in the LETTERS FROM TOLEDO 523 Spain of that age, a woman who got him to believe that she had an unholy commerce with the devil ; whereupon Gracian defies him to single combat. " Tell him," he says, " if he thinks himself omnipotent, to come to my cell at midnight, and I will cudgel him so soundly that he shall soon see whether he is omnipotent or not." The challenge is accepted. " So he thinks to play with Lucifer, does he ? " is the answer the woman brings back next day ; " in less than eight days he shall find out who Lucifer is." " Within five days," Gracian wrote in the sad record of his ruined life, " began my trials, which have now lasted for more than twenty-five years, and will I believe last to the end of my life, with such entanglements, tvvistings, and inventions, that although I have borne them, and still bear them, I have not got to the bottom of them, nor know how else to describe them than as the inventions of Lucifer." But Lucifer was no match for the shrewd Teresa, and when her Pablo wrote to her in his tribulation she answered thus : As to that maiden or woman, I feel convinced that it is not so much melancholy as the devil which inspires her to practise such deceptions for they are nothing else so that he may deceive your paternity in something, since he has already deceived her ; and so you must proceed with great reserve in this matter, and on no account go near her house, lest what happened to Santa Marina 1 (I ithink it was) should happen to you, for they fathered a child on him, to his great suffering. . . . Consider, my father, that if she did not give you the letter under the seal of confession, it is a case for the Inquisition, and the devil can entangle you a thousand ways. The truth is, I do not think she gave it to the devil, for if she had, he would not have returned it to her so quickly ; nor do I believe anything else she says, except that she must be some impostor (God forgive me !) and it pleases her to converse with your reverence. . . . But how malicious I am ! Still it is all wanted in this life. ... If there is anything to denounce against her (I mean beyond what you have heard in confession), be warned ; for I fear that when it comes to be more public, they will blame your paternity greatly, for having known it and kept silence. I see I am talking nonsense [O most ingenious and tenderest of diplomats !], and that your reverence knows more about it than I. ... I repeat, my father, that you ought to try to sleep. Consider how much work you have to do, and that the weakness is not felt until the head is in such a state as to be beyond cure, and you must see how important is your health. . . . A week afterwards : I wrote last week to Pablo by means of the post here [the good correo, brother of the nun, "an excellent man"], in which I answered Pablo as to the tongues [the impostor spoke in unknown tongues], and consulting with Jose" [Christ], he told me to warn him that he had many enemies visible and 1 See Voragine, " Legenda Aurea." Sta. Marina was a woman who assumed the habit of a friar, and lived as one, until the incident referred to above led to her sex being discovered. 524 SANTA TERESA invisible, and to beware. For this reason, I would wish you not to trust so much in the Egyptians [the Calzados], nor in the birds of midnight. There are other enemies, however, besides these Egyptians and night birds ; the worse inasmuch as they are of one's own house, and these wise old eyes pierce through the incipient jealousies that already begin to buzz about the devoted friar. For charity's sake, remember me most warmly to my father fray Antonio : although it would be better, whenever you can avoid it, not to let him see how often I write to your paternity, and how seldom to him. Indeed all the wealth of her affection is concentrated round her Paul. Perhaps, too, a touch of tender envy mingles with the love of this lonely-hearted old woman in Toledo, whose earthly ties have been so few. God pardon those butterflies [the nuns of Seville], who enjoy so much at their ease what I enjoyed there with such great difficulty. It is impossible not to feel a little envy, but the diligence they show in ministering somewhat to Pablo's comfort, without exciting observation, is a great joy for me. I have already written them a good many foolish counsels, so as to revenge myself. Was I to deprive myself of the consolation I experience in the thought that you also enjoy somewhat, since you are so much in need of it, and your labours so great ? But my Paul is more virtuous than that, and understands me better than he did formerly. So that there may be no occasions for any shortcoming, this I ask of you, not to be their chaplain, except for that end only. So it is ; for I assure you that, if only for this, I would account all the suffering I went through in this foundation amply rewarded, and it makes me praise the Lord afresh, who did me this favour, that you have some one there with whom you may breathe freely, without having recourse to secular people. These sisters give me great pleasure (and your paternity a favour) in writing so often, for they say your paternity orders them to do so, for this alone to see you do not forget me is a great delight to me. Time will take away a little of your frankness, which I indeed see is saintly. But as the devil objects to all being saints, those base and malicious like myself would fain remove opportunities. I can converse and feel great love for many reasons ; whereas not all nuns can, nor will all superiors be like my father, who puts up with so much familiarity from them. And since God has commended this treasure to you, you must not think that all will guard it like your paternity, for I tell you truly, that I fear more the robberies of men than devils ; and what they see me say and do (for I know with whom I converse, and my years give me liberty) they will think they can do also, and they will be right ; and this is not to cease to love them, but to love them in very sooth. And true it is that, base as I am, since I began to have daughters, I have tied myself down so tightly and watched myself so closely so as to give no cause for the devil to tempt them through me, so that, to God's glory, I believe few have been the things very grave ones at least (for his Majesty has favoured me in this) that they can find fault with ; for I confess that I have sought to hide my imperfections from them ; although so many are they, that they will have seen enough and to spare, as well as the love I bear to Pablo and the care I take of him. LETTERS FROM TOLEDO 525 But how wearisome I become ! Let not the hearing of these things displease my father, for your paternity and I bear the weight of a very great responsibility, and must give account to God and the world ; and because you know how lovingly I speak, you can forgive me and do me the grace, which I have besought of you, not to read in public the letters I write to you. Consider how minds differ ; and that superiors must never speak openly about certain things, and it may be that I write about a third person or of myself, and it is not wise that any one should read them, for there is a great difference between saying what I do to you and saying it to other people, were it even my sister ; for as I should not wish that any one should overhear my conversation with God, nor hinder my being alone with him, even so it is with Pablo. Her letters to Maria de San ]os6 are of the same tenor : I envy you greatly the ease with which you enjoy our father's company : I do not deserve so much solace, and so I have nothing to complain of ... withal [here comes in the thrift and economy, not for herself, but for her nuns in Seville, sorely stressed sometimes how to keep the wolf from the door, as we shall see presently] ; withal, I repeat, that you order the supriora in my name to deduct all the cost from the forty ducats of San Jose. . . . 1 laugh about the way in which the good prioress will put down even the water, and she will do well, and so I desire. ... I would wish that it should not be known in the Remedios where he eats ; for no other prelate must have this door opened to him. Believe me, we must consider the future, so that we who have commenced it, may not have to give account to God. To which Maria de San Jose* may have replied rather testily. It did not enter my mind, I think [she adds in her letter of a week after- wards], to say he is not to eat there (since I see how great is his necessity) ; but, unless it is for that object, not to come often . . . rather such is the charity you do me by the care with which you minister to his paternity, that I can never repay you for it. But in spite of all, to Teresa's distress, Gracian still continues to eat in the Carmelite monastery, and is moreover accompanied by one Fray Andre's, who cannot keep his tongue quiet. " For God's love, warn him always, and let him go to the Remedios when he has finished there, for it seems nothing less than tempting God." For Gracian is working wonders. The nuns of Seville too have had their share in the labours of the Reform, and several of them have gone to Paterna to introduce their own discipline into the Carmelite convent there. I envy those who went to Paterna greatly [writes Teresa, condemned to inaction in Toledo], and not because they went with our father ; for I forgot that in the fact that they were going to suffering. Please God that it may be the beginning of our doing him some service. With so few as they are 526 SANTA TERESA there, I believe they will not have to go through much, except hunger, for they tell me they have nothing to eat. God be with them, for heartily do we beseech it of him here. Send them this letter with the greatest caution, and send me theirs, if you have any, so that I may see how they get on. This on the 26th of November. Towards the end of the same month to Gracian, full of the same subject : I assure you that if God had not given me to understand that all the good we do comes from his hand, and how little we are able to perform of ourselves, it would not be out of the way to feel somewhat vainglorious over what your grace does. May he be for ever blessed, and his name praised for ever and aye, Amen ; for the things that are taking place are enough to make one lose one's head, and the peace with which your paternity accomplishes them is what amazes me most, leaving your enemies friends, and making the Observants themselves the authors, or rather the executors, of your decrees. I have been amused at padre Evangelista's election ; for charity, let your paternity remember me to him, and to father Pablo, whom God repay the diversion he gave us with his couplets and Teresa's letter, delighting me with the news that it is not true about the cigarras [crickets Observant nuns], and the departure of the butterflies [Descalzas]. They have many enviers [the Descalzas at Paterna] for, as regards suffering, we are full of desires ; God help us when we come to put them to the proof. . . . Blessed be God that your paternity has been there amidst these tumults ; what would the poor things have done without you ? Withal they are fortunate since now they are doing some good, and I hold in great account what you write me of the Archbishop's visitor. It is impossible but that that house will be productive of great benefit, since it cost us so dear : it seems to me that what Pablo [Gracian] is going through now is nothing in comparison to what he went through with the fear of the Aguilas [Observants]. I am greatly amused at your going about begging, and you have never told me yet who is your companion. You say that you sent Peralta's letters amongst the documents, and the packet has not come. . . . Oh, how gladly would Angela have given Pablo food when he was so hungry as you say. I know not why he seeks more trials than those God gives him when he goes about begging : it must be that he thinks he has seven souls, and that when one is done he will get another. Scold him, for charity's sake, and thank him from me for the favour he does me in being so careful about writing. On the 3rd of December great news arrives in the old sombre convent of Toledo, which she hastens to transmit to her prioress of Seville. " I desire greatly to hear about my nuns of Patnera ; I believe they will get on famously, especi- ally with the news which our father will tell you, that Tostado is not to be admitted ; so that the Reform of the Descalzas will not end with that convent alone. God keep him, for the way in which things are now going seems little less than miraculous." It was true; for on the 24th of November a Royal order had been issued, ordering Tostado to display his commission LETTERS FROM TOLEDO 527 and powers within fifteen days. Evidently the Descalzos are winning all along the line. To Maria de San Jose, 7th December : You oblige me so much by the care you say you take to regale our father, that it makes me love you even more : and so, that it is done with the caution I have suggested, I am exceedingly content ; for I believe that neither now nor at any other time will it be possible to treat any other so. For as the Lord singled him out for these beginnings, and they only happen once and not every day, so I think there will be none like him. . . . But neither will there be greater need than now, for like as in time of war, it behoves us to proceed with greater caution. ... I am exceeding glad that you are beginning to see what there is in our father. I saw it from the time at Veas. For Quiroga, Grand Inquisitor of Spain, has summoned Gracian to Madrid. Whatever reason your paternity might have for remaining, seeing that Angel's letter [Angel is Quiroga] is so pressing, I would fain [says the shrewd counsellor], however much your work suffered for it, that you failed not to go when you have done with those senores marqueses ; for, although he is not right in his conjecture, these things cannot be done by letter ; and we owe him so much, and it seems that God has placed him there to help us, that even an error through his advice will do us no harm. Look to it, my father, and vex him not, for the love of God, for where you are, you are entirely bereft of good counsel, and it would give me great pain. Her advice was as usual disregarded. Gracian let the opportune moment slip by, and still lingered on in Seville. Amongst other things we note in this same letter are the first symptoms of the mutual antipathy between Maria de San Jose and Fray Antonio de Jesus, only awaiting Teresa's death to break out into a flame of hot animosity. It also pained me that the prioress says that Santoyo [Fray Antonio] does nor fulfil his office of prior as he should, over and above which he shows little spirit. For God's love, tell him of it in such a way that he may know there is justice for him as well as the others. ... I write this in such haste [we can see her sitting far into the night in the little white- washed cell, a flickering oil-lamp hanging from the wall], and the muleteer is waiting for it ; and, since it is certain, I wish to impress on you again that the Royal Council has issued an edict to the effect that El Tostado is not to visit the four provinces . . . (so he told me who had seen it, he who wrote it, and the letter was read to me). Although I do not con- sider the reader a very truthful person, I believe he spoke truth this time, and had no reason to lie. In one way or another, I hope in God that all will be for the best, since he is making my Pablo an enchanter. . . . Oh, my father, and who would not desire to share these cares with your paternity ? And how well you do in making your plaint to her who feels such pity for your sorrows*. . . Be careful of what you eat in those monasteries. 528 SANTA TERESA Towards the middle of December she again writes to the man who held her so completely under his spell : Oh, what a happy day I have had to-day, for father Mariano has sent me all your letters ! ... At last, my father, God helps you to unfurl your banners to the winds [so had those dead and gone ancestors of hers done, whose blood leaps in her as she writes], as they say : there is no fear but that you shall go forward in your great design. Oh, how I envy you and father fray Antonio for bringing about the abandonment of so many sins. And here I am with desires alone ! [oh the pitiful helplessness that the accident of sex imposes on this great and valiant spirit !]. Let me know what foundation there was for the false accusation of the nun who was a virgin, and yet had borne a child, for it seems to me the greatest folly to put such a thing about as that. But none goes so far as what you wrote me the other day. Do you think it a small favour on God's part that you bear these things as you do ? ... I have been delighted with the letter which the prioress of Paterna has written to you, and the dexterity that God gives you in everything. I hope in him that they will bring forth great fruit, and it has inspired me with an ardent desire for these founda- tions not to cease. ... I am thoroughly aware that there is no remedy for convents of nuns, if there is not some one to keep watch within. Oh, how desirous I am to see all the nuns rid of the control of the Calzados ! The Encarnacion is in a state to praise God for ! The moment I see the province effected I shall devote my life to this, for hence arises all the mischief, and it is without a remedy. Because, although other monasteries are relaxed, those subject to friars are not so bad as the ones under the Bishops, for they are terrible. And if the superiors only understood the responsibility they took upon themselves, and were as careful as your paternity, there would be a different tale to tell, and it would be no small mercy of God to have so many prayers of good souls for his Church. What you say about the habits seems to me exceeding well, and a year hence you can make all the nuns wear them. Done once, it cannot be undone, for, although they may shout a few days, if a few are punished, the rest will calm down, for such is the nature of women, for the most part timorous. ... I have been amused at the rigour of our father fray Antonio [this is what Maria de San Josh's complaints amount to] : let him understand that it would not answer ill with one or other of them [the nuns], for I know them. Perhaps their words might be freed from more than one sin, and they would even now be more submissive ; for there must be leniency and rigour both, for so our Lord himself leads us, and there is no other way with the very headstrong ones. To Mariano, I2th December: I have only one great sorrow and envy to see how little I am worth for all this ; for I would fain be in the midst of dangers and trouble, so that to me too should fall some share of these spoils of those who knead the dough. Sometimes so base am I, that I am glad to see myself here in peace ; but when it comes to my ears how you are labouring there, I am broken-hearted and full of envy of the nuns of Paterna. It fills me with intense gladness that God is beginning to get some good out of his Descalzas, for often, when I see such valiant souls in these houses, it seems to me impossible for God to give them so much, except for soW great end ; although it be only for the time they have been in that convent, I am full of deep content ; LETTERS FROM TOLEDO 529 how much more so, when I hope in his Majesty that they are to bear ereat fruit. So she writes, this wonderful, many-sided woman; in- structing, warning, encouraging, following every movement of her father and nuns at Seville with the most exquisite tact, the most unparalleled grace. It is in her letters, tender] pathetic, playful, humorous, always earnest and sincere, un- conscious revelations of the moods and fractions of moods that made up the very human and lovable reality of Teresa de Jesus, who fought and sorrowed as deeply, and laughed as merrily (perhaps more so) as any other of her age, that she charms and captivates us most. Look not in these letters for any sign of sour disgust of life, any pretensions to superior goodness, any trace of pose. She flings herself into the minutiae of her daily life with the keenest zest, and makes them even as interesting to us as they were to the friars and nuns who read them first. In spontaneous and simple fashion and homely phrase she paints us the very interior of convent life ; nor would it seem to have been an unhappy one, nay, rather a merry and a healthy one. Simple minds and peaceful hearts, not cut off from the world, for the world entered largely into their lives was not all Spain itself one vast monastery ? but theirs indeed the better part, and so they feel it. Innocent enjoyments, many cares the greatest often to stave off hunger triumphs, too, ah, how free is the mind where there is no sense of property to breed feud and discord, and the weal and woe of one are the weal and woe of the community ! Certainly monasticism, as then understood in Spain and by a Teresa, was one of the noblest manifestations of national life. We' see them all again, these excellent nuns, as they pass before our eyes, conjured up in a few brief phrases : the prioress of Seville with her aches and pains, blood-lettings, and purgings. Nay, we can see her as she sits at her spinning-wheel in that old dim convent of Seville, swinging her arms about so vigorously, and spinning such quantities, that " she will never get rid of that fever if she does not desist." The sub -prioress, who in Teresa's happy phrase "would count water if she could"; Gabriela, or San Gabriel, her infirmarian, whom she misses most of nights ; Sor San Francisco, the excellent letter-writer, who deserves to figure in "print," struggle once more into life in these faded letters. All the little threads that made up these humble lives so long ago forgotten, the drama of their existence becomes palpable to us. I can see the prioress, Gabriela, and San Francisco jubilant over that famous feasting with which they celebrated the Octave of the Santissimo 34 530 SANTA TERESA Sacramento, sitting down each one to indite a laborious account of it, that drew from the old saint the observation " that withal she was not vexed, but exceeding glad, it was so handsome done." The constant communication kept up by Teresa with her nuns of Seville and her various convents, the letters that pass to and fro between them and Avila, show us a state of things analogous to nothing existing now, if we except perhaps Morocco and the East. Those roads and tracks, to-day so desolate and so lonely, were then thickly thronged with lines of travellers ; recueros with their strings of laden mules sweltering along in the sun between Avila and Seville ; muleteers singing as they go, honest souls indeed, safer than the post Spanish officialdom was always infamous, does not Teresa expressly warn the prioress of Seville that she is only to send the cost of postage if the bearer is an " arriero," for if not, neither letters nor postage will ever appear again ? The arriero's donkey not only carries letters the bundle of her nuns in Seville is often so extensive that Teresa declares herself " delighted with San Francisco's, and all the rest, so long as they do not expect a reply" but gifts of quinces, tollas (spotted dog-fish), fresh tunny, and other luxuries, to the old foundress in Toledo ; many of them, in- deed, never getting farther than Malagon, poor consumptive prioress Brianda having more need of them than she. It is a " recuero " from Avila whom Lorenzo entrusts with the collection of the money due to him by the Sevilian convent. Watch him as he gravely stands, cap in hand, before the locutory grating, as the nuns behind it laboriously count it out to him, in greasy maravddis (to make payment easier, and the weight heavier), scratching his head dubiously as he guards them in his sash. Lorenzo, too, writes frequently from Avila ; punctiliously enclosing four reals for the apothecary who lives close to the convent, " for an ointment I think he got from him when his leg was bad." " If you have not got the letters," writes Teresa, "pay them, and fail not to write to him, for although I send him your messages, I think he is hurt at your not doing so " a behest faithfully accomplished by Maria de San Jose, for a month after we hear of Lorenzo laughing heartily at her letters, and showing them to the nuns of San Jose " He will write soon, for he is very fond of you, and 1 also assure you that he is not more so than I am." We have seen her directing every movement of the Reform ; how acutely she has grasped the situation ; how she sweeps the whole field, and marshals and directs her forces with the intuitive LETTERS FROM TOLEDO 53I insight of a general ! Besides this the central theme of her life never for a moment does she relax her rigid surveillance over her convents. Let us now watch her as an administrator. Both convents of Malagon and Seville are over head and ears in debt. Brianda, prioress of the former, is in bed spitting blood : of her, too, we catch fugitive glances in these letters, and things are altogether so bad that Gracian suggests that Teresa herself should go there to put them right. This she valiantly resists, " since she has neither health nor chanty to look after sick folk " ; besides, her presence in Toledo is absolutely necessary to keep Dona Luisa de la Cerda up to the mark, for although that lady has refused to allow the community to be moved from Malagon to Paracuellos, she is building a new convent for them, " and has as good as promised 4000 ducats this year instead of 2000," in which case the master-builder promises that it shall be ready for habitation within a year from Christmas. Moreover, Alfonso Ruiz is there superintending the work, and the nuns have nothing to do ; " and although I was really needed it is an evil moment, as your paternity sees, for me to go away from here." Even in extremis as she is however, prioress Brianda possesses a decided will of her own ; regardless of Teresa's suggestion to give the charge of the house to Juana Bautista, she has appointed Beatriz de Jesus, " who, she said, was much better : perhaps she may be, but so it does not seem to me. Neither would she hear of Isabel de Jesus as mistress of novices, they being so many as to give me great anxiety, although the latter has already filled that office, and if not very clever is an excellent nun, and has trained up good enough novices." This office, too, she confers on Beatriz, who is "very much fatigued." Teresa's greatest anxiety, however, is Seville, where the prioress is overwhelmed with censos, alcabalas, etc., and nothing forthcoming to pay them with ; yet they are valiant enough, poor souls ! knitting stockings, spinning, doing such work as may eke out their slender budget. Never- theless, their only hope is in well-dowered novices, and these indeed seem difficult enough to get. Here, again, in the choosing of novices, the business qualities of the saint come out clear and distinct so clear and distinct that one suspects she would have been an admirable dealer at a Castilian fair. This one has a blemish ; still she is not to be lightly dis- missed, " as I know what it is to be in distress for money, and how hard it is to get there, if only her friends will undertake to pay her dowry of 400 ducats at once." Another is unblemished, but undowered, still, on the principle of throwing out a sprat 532 SANTA TERESA to catch a mackerel, even she too may be admitted ; although " only for the sake of God alone can it be done, since we have as yet taken none there for charity, and he will help us ; and perhaps bring others if we do this for him." A third is wealthy, but her dower cannot be counted on until her father's death. How admirably does this show that the popular idea of a saint as an ecstatic being, quite weaned from the affairs of this world, is totally erroneous. No horse-dealer could have displayed more worldly wisdom in the selection of a lot of colts from the pastures of Cordoba than does Teresa in the selection of her novices. A fourth (one of two sisters, nieces of Garci Alvarez, both desirous of admission into the convent) is afflicted with extreme melancholy : " I was informed clearly she was mad. Besides, their father too is living, and you will see yourself in trouble before you get anything out of them." Indeed, " money down " is the saint's maxim in every case. " As regards the renunciation of the good Bernarda" Bernarda being a would- be novice, daughter of a certain Pablo Matias, who had become surety for the nuns in the purchase of the house " be warned ; for as she has parents, her fortune will go to them, and not to the monastery ; if they died before her, to the monastery. This is certain, for I know it from competent " men of letters " ; l since father and grandparents are heirs-at-law ; and failing them the monastery. What they are obliged to do is to give her a dower, and if by great good luck they are ignorant of the former fact, they will praise God that you are willing to come to a settlement with them. At least, if they would give her the amount of the bond they hold over the house it would be a great thing." Which shows a very competent knowledge of law, that does not seem to be shared by the good Pablo Matias. Then she adds this in another letter : " You must not let him imagine you want his daughter unless she renounces " (for the same legal reasons given above). " And know that it is better she should do so for many reasons : since people in business " (the good Matias was a merchant) " are rich one day, and lose all they have the next." She also in Toledo "keeps a sharp lookout if anything should turn up to suit you." One, indeed, with a beautiful voice, does turn up ; but I know not what passed between her and the saint, or if the competition was keen amongst the convents for such a quality, but she of the beautiful voice, she writes regretfully, never returned ; but she still keeps Nicolao's 1 In the Teresian sense, a "letrado" was one generally an ecclesiastic, well versed in the mysteries of canon law, which then included all other branches of jurisprudence. Its modern sense is widely different. LETTERS FROM TOLEDO 533 novice, " the one of the 400 ducats and more, and plenishings," prudently in view as a last resort. The money made my mouth water at once, for they will give it when you like, because I should not like you to touch that belonging to Beatrix's mother and Pablo, since it is for the principal payment ; and if you go on gradually using it for other things, you will be left with a heavy load, which is certainly terrible, and therefore I would wish to find some remedy here. I will inform myself thoroughly of this maiden ; they speak loud in her praise, and, in short, she belongs to this place. I will try and see her. I repeat to you that I would fain you did not go on selling yonder sister's "censos," but that we look out for some other means, since if not, we shall be left with the burden, and it would be a grand stroke to pay it off altogether along with what we owe to Pablo, and would relieve you. . . . Don't take the daughter of the Portuguese (or whatever he is) unless she deposits the sum she is to give in the hands of some person beforehand [excellent business capacity], for I have heard that you will not get a " stiver " but of him, and in these times we cannot afford to take people in for nothing ; and see that you stick to it. In the meantime the Jesuits have prevented a novice with a fat dowry from entering the convent at Seville. Teresa, how- ever, meets them on their own ground. " Endeavour sometimes," she writes, this most consummate of diplomatists, " to get some one of the company to hear your confessions, for it will help greatly to make them lose their fear of us, and, if you could, Father Acosta would be the best. God forgive them," she adds, " for with her, if she was so rich, all would have been ended, although since his Majesty did not bring her, he will look after you." A little later on we find her inculcating the same advice, when troubles were thickening around the nuns of Seville, and the prioress had fallen out with Garci Alvarez, whose intolerable pretensions to bring whom he liked to the convent as spiritual directors were hampering her authority and filling the convent walls with discord : " An excellent custom it would be," remarks Teresa drily, who hated anything to do with Andalucia, especially the heat. " I am not astonished at what you tell me of your sufferings, for I myself went through much there," going on to suggest, with much worldly wisdom, that their best remedy is at once to make friends of the Jesuits, and get them on their side. " It will not be a small matter if the rector there would take i upon him, as you say, and would be a great help for many things. But they will have obedience, and so you must give it ; for although sometimes what they say may not suit us, still, so important is it to have them favourable, that it is well to submit. Be sure to think of things to ask them, for this they are very fond of, and rightly, for when they charge themselves with a thing they are careful to do it well. This is very important in that 534 SANTA TERESA wretched world you are in, for when our father is gone you will be left entirely alone." Nor were the "censos," the equivocal conduct of Garci Alvarez, the selection of novices, the only matters that distressed the sorely-perplexed brain of Maria de San Jose. The notary had made a blunder in drawing up the deed of sale, and they were threatened with a lawsuit. " Be warned always," writes the cool, sensible Teresa, " that a peaceful settlement will be the best, and do not forget this, for our father wrote me how a great ' letrado ' of the court had told him that we were in the wrong, and even if we had all the justice in the world on our side, lawsuits are rude things. Don't forget this." Interest, too, in her opinion, is another "stubborn thing," and for this reason she urges on her prioress to add whatever she can to the sum required for the payment of the house " so that you may not have to pay so much interest." In fact, the poor nuns of Seville owe money everywhere : to Lorenzo in Avila, who assisted them with the alcabala; to good Alonso de Ruiz of Malagon, who must be paid up promptly, as " his daily bread depends upon his having money to buy cattle with in Malagon." For if Teresa is tireless in endeavouring to procure likely novices for her prioress, with Castilian rectitude she keeps a sharp lookout on the interests of the creditors. " You must try, at least," she says, " to get those 3000 ducats that must be paid this year ; and not to give the money to Alonso Ruiz lies heavy on my conscience, because of the little help he has there. Even if Nicolao's novice is not so perfect as might be wished, I would not refuse her." She also suggests that Maria de San Jose" should compound with Pablo (novice Bernarda's father) for 1 500 ducats, and the amount he had become surety for on the house " for these inheritances are never good for us, since they end in nothing; and do not accept a hereditament, . . . nor let it cross your thoughts to take landed property ; say that you cannot, since you must not possess an income." Although, however, they are not to accept landed property, they are not to come to terms for less than she has said ; " if you could get more out of him, get it. Get some one to ask him why he wants to leave his children in the intricacies of inheriting through the convent. Even if he gave 2000 ducats it would not be much. As for the Portuguese, they say that her mother can pay the dower; she is, I believe, better than those others. In short, the money will be forthcoming ; for when you least expect it, God will send you one who will bring more than you want. It would not be ill if that captain took the high altar. Do not forget to send him your compliments, so that you may seem LETTERS FROM TOLEDO 535 grateful, although you may have no reason for being so." Neither Teresa nor her prioress, however, seems to have been successful in their hunt for novices. " I took a nun in Salamanca" [she writes somewhat ruefully after urging upon the prioress not to wait until things are hopeless, but before she finds herself overwhelmed in difficulties, to look about her and try to get some money out of Garci Alvarez's nieces, who are about to be received in the convent, to help to pay the interest (" for that hereditament cannot be worth anything")] "who, they told me, brought her dower with her, so as to send you 300 ducats, of what you owe in Malagon, and to pay the 100 owing to Asensio Galiano, and she has not come ; pray God to bring her. I assure you, you owe me much, so desirous am I to see you free from care. Why do you not try to get that money of Juana de la Cruz paid at once, so as not to be so crippled, and to get that Anegas (Vanegas = Mario de los Santos) to bring, at least, enough to pay Alonso Ruiz, which as I have already told you, since you now see his necessity, you are in conscience bound to give to him at once." Excellent accountant shrewd arithmetician! as interested in things of earth as in those of heaven. And yet not for herself, be it remembered, but for her convents. And yet it is precisely this accentuated capacity for business this rapid and sharp insight into terrene affairs, this dpretf for money, this acute eye for the ducats not for herself, but for her convents that charms me most, and furnishes the clearest proof of her greatness. To great minds, to minds impressed with a profound sentiment of self-respecting dignity, no detail that touches themselves or those connected with them is sordid or unworthy of attention. The false and contemptible pride that pretends not to taint its fingers with such a mean and insignificant thing as money, whilst underneath it is corroded by greed and envy of those wealthier than itself; that pretends to despise a sixpence, whilst it kneels down bodily before millions ; that does in reality despise all the humbler duties and responsi- bilities of its station, was altogether unknown in that age. I have no doubt that Lorenzo (we have seen what importance he attached to the payment of four reals to the apothecary in Seville) sold his sheep and cattle personally at the fair in Avila ; haggled, too ; counted the money over carefully to see he was not cheated ; and trotted off on his hack his dignity not a whit impaired to his manor-house of La Serna. For these people neither glorified nor worshipped wealth, nor yet despised six- pences, or even the humbler farthing. All this is the growth of a later age an age without dignity, without self-respect, false at 536 SANTA TERESA heart and rotten to the core, with its lackeys, its lickspittles, its pampered and subservient menials, its brutal and disgusting snobbishness. I doubt whether a housemaid now would not consider it beneath her to dwell, as does Teresa, minutely on the price of a piece of serge. It is the nineteenth century that has separated mankind into two classes, the swindler and the swindled. On one side the fine gentleman, who can do nothing except through his lawyers, agents, or bailiffs, on the other the man who, sitting in his office at the head of a soap-works or sausage manufactory, too proud to sell a cake of his own soap or a pound of his sausage, is impairing the complexions and ruining the digestions of millions with his soap and sausages. Indeed, our social code has undergone a moral, or rather immoral, revision in the interests of wealth ; petty swindling being still punishable, as it always was, whilst swindling on a gigantic scale is universally respected, and is, as commercialism, accounted one of the bulwarks of society. I dwell, then, on this part of Teresa's character with peculiar pleasure this alliance of genius and sanctity with qualities that are now regarded by ignorance and folly and the contemptible foible of despising the day of small things whereas there is nothing small as of baser alloy. Shakespeare leaves his second-best bed to his wife his second-best bed ; whereas to-day he would have been justly despised for knowing how many beds he had in his house, or indeed that such vulgar things existed at all. Mankind in its woful lack of imagination likes its ideal people run like candles from a mould all one piece, either impossibly good or hideously bad ; it would have a saint or a genius soaring above humanity and its affairs, in regions where such a vulgar thing as business cannot enter ; likes them to save it trouble by answering to some preconceived pattern it has forged for itself in its purblind mind ; would fain stretch them on its own Procrustean bed. They care not for the multifarious emotions that ruffle the face of beauty and destroy its repose, having never felt any themselves in their gross, material self-satisfaction ; nor for the complex and con- tradictory problems of character to be observed in every one worth observing, as if the very stones in the street would not rise up against a perfectly bad or inhumanly good character. If Teresa had been a mystic alone, I should never have written her life ; had she been only a clever and successful business woman, she would have had no interest for me. As it is, it is her completeness and diversity ; this mixture of the terrene and spiritual ; the Idealism and intense Realism of her nature, that make her to me altogether fascinating and enthralling. LETTERS FROM TOLEDO 537 And all this accompanied with the greatest rectitude: no swerving to the right or to the left. We have seen how she pleads the claims of poor Alonso de Ruiz on her nuns of Seville. Although the welfare of her convents is all-important to her, the admission of a well-dowered novice the only means to stave off financial ruin, never once does she hesitate to refuse both nun and money if the candidate does not fulfil the first and most important requisite that of being suitable for her con- vents. On this point she is invariably firm: read the quiet, gentle, but resolute refusal she gives the Jesuit Olea, preferring rather to incur his enmity than to palter with her duty by order- ing her nuns of Salamanca to take back again a novice whom they had found unsuitable, and therefore deprived of her habit. I believe you know already that I am not ungrateful, and so I tell you that if it was at the cost of my own health and tranquillity, it would already have been effected ; but even friendship cannot weigh against a thing that belongs to conscience, since I owe more to God than to any one. Would to God it had been want of dower, for your reverence also knows [she writes to Mariano], and if not, you have only to inform yourself, of the number of nuns there are in these monasteries without any ; how much more so when she has an excellent one, for they give 500 ducats, with which she can be a nun in any convent. As my father Olea does not know the nuns of these houses, I am not astonished he is incredulous ; I who know they are servants of God, and the purity of their souls, will never believe they will ever deprive any one of the habit unless they had grave reasons for doing so ; and as we are few, the inquietude caused by any one not suitable for our order is such, that even a base conscience would have some scruples in undertaking this ; how much more so one who desires not to displease our Lord in anything. Pray tell me, your reverence, if they do not vote for her themselves, how can I or any prelate force them to take a nun against their will ? And do not think because father Olea has written to me that he has nothing more to do with her than with a person passing in the street, that he looks upon it as a matter of no importance ; but on the contrary such is the charity which for my sins he has been inspired with, in a thing that cannot be done, nor I serve him, that it has given me great pain. And certainly, even though it were feasible, it would not be doing her a charity to allow her to remain where she is not wanted. In this matter I have done even more than I ought to have done, for I make them keep her another year, much against their will, so that further trial may be made of her, and so that if I pass that way when I go to Salamanca I may inform myself better of everything. This is only to serve father Olea, and for his greater satisfaction ; for I indeed see that the nuns are not lying, for even in trifles your reverence knows how far these sisters are from doing so, and moreover it is not a new thing that nuns should leave these houses, for it is very often the case, and they lose nothing by saying that they were not strong enough to bear such a rigorous discipline ; nor have I seen any accounted less worthy for this reason. Warned by this, I shall be careful as to what I do in future ; and so I shall not take Nicolao's novice, however much it might have pleased you ; for I have got information from other quarters, and I do not wish, for the 53 8 SANTA TERESA sake of doing a service to my lords and friends, to stir up enmity. Strangely enough, your reverence asks, Why did we speak of it at all then ? In that fashion, we should never take a nun. I answer : Because I wished to serve you, and you gave me a different account from what I have afterwards learnt; and I know that Senor Nicolao is more desirous of the welfare of these houses than of an individual ; and so made no more ado about it. . . . Do not treat of it again, your reverence, for love of God ; for she has got an excellent dower, with which she can enter elsewhere, and not where, from their being so few, they must be well chosen. And if, up to now, we have not with one or other of them carried this point to such an extremity as we might, although they are very few and far between, we have suffered for it so severely, that we shall do so henceforward, and do not put us into this embarrassment with father Nicolao, for we shall only have to turn her out again. Your reverence's saying that you have only to see her to know her, amuses me. We women are not so easy to know, for you hear them in confession many years, and afterwards you yourself are amazed at how little you knew them : and it is because they even do not know themselves sufficiently enough to recount their own shortcomings ; and you go by what they say. My father, when you wish us to serve you in these houses, send us nuns of good intelligence, and you will see how we shall not fall out about the dower ; but without this, I can do nothing whatever for you. If we are struck by Teresa's exactitude, shrewdness, and thrift, we are no less so by the latitude of her ideas, the moderation and width of her views as regards discipline. We may, I think, put down to a later age, anxious to exaggerate her piety at the price of her sense, the monstrous traditions that would have her crawling into the refectory whilst her nuns were at meals, saddled like a donkey under a load of stones. Such an action on her part, we may roundly dismiss at once as a fabrication. Take, for instance, her conduct in regard to Malagon. As Brianda gets worse "God is life and can give it her " ; " Dios la hizo de menos " (God made her of less), which shows how hopeless was her recovery, although indeed she eventually got better, and died at the ripe old age of ninety the convent got worse too, and in November Teresa writes to her prioress of Seville, warning her to take example by the ridiculous and uncalled-for mortifications which, she says, " it seems that the devil teaches them under the pretext of perfection, to endanger souls, and put them in the way of offending God ; know" (she writes) "some mortifications have come to my ears that they practise in Malagon, the prioress ordering them suddenly to give one another a sounding slap on the face, an invention they say they learnt here. ... In no way order or consent to this being done there (pinches are also mentioned), nor rule the nuns with the severity you witnessed in Malagon, for they are not slaves, nor must mortification be for any other end but to do good. I assure you, my daughter, it is needful to keep a sharp lookout on what these ' prioritas ' strike out of LETTERS FROM TOLEDO 539 their own heads, for things now crop up that make me pitiful." To Mariano she writes it is only an amplification of the same theme, and only shows how, even in discretion, she towered head and shoulders above her good clumsy friars and nuns in their mistaken notions of perfection endeavouring to abate somewhat of the rigorism which, if pushed to an extreme, threatened to cut short the existence of her friars, without attaining any useful end What fray Juan de Jesus says, that it is I who wish you to go barefoot, amuses me ; since I am the very person who always forbade it to fray Antonio de Jesus, and he would have erred if he had taken my advice. My intention was to enlist men of intelligence and aptitude, whom too much asperity would have scared away, and everything has been needed to mark the difference between us and those others [the Observants]. I may have said that they would feel the cold as much [with alpargatas] as if they had nothing on their feet at all. If I said anything that may have seemed like it, it was when we were discussing how ill it looked for Descalzos to be seen riding good mules, which should never be allowed except in the case of a long journey and great necessity : that the one did not tally with the other, for some young friars have arrived here who, it seems to me, might, if they had journeyed slowly, with the help of a donkey or so, easily have come on foot. And so I repeat that it is not seemly to see these Discalced lads mounted on mules and saddles. . . . As to the point on which I strongly insisted with our father, it was [oh ! incomparable prudence] that he should see they were not stinted of food ; for I bear much in mind what your reverence says, and it often gives me pain (and it did so no later than yesterday or to-day before I got your letter), since it seemed to me, seeing the way in which they treat themselves, that in two days hence nothing would be left of them. . . . The other thing that I besought him greatly is that he would appoint the work, even if it were only making baskets, or whatever else, and that, during the hour of recreation, when there is no other time ; for it is a matter of extreme importance where there is no study ; know, my father, that I am in favour of exacting much in the way of virtue, but not in rigour as you will see by these our houses. It must be because I myself am so little of a penitent. Indeed her energetic brain is full of care as she traces these characters, to-day so faded, to-day all that remains of that complex and agitated life of hers. If Seville is head and ears over in debt, Malagon is worse. Besides a sick prioress : I know not what to say of so much trouble as God has given there, and with the other misfortunes, great necessity ; they have neither wheat nor money, but a world of debts. I doubt whether even, please God, the eighty ducats owing to them in Salamanca, which I intended for that house, will be enough to tide them over. The expenses they have had there, and in many ways, have been heavy. For that reason, I would fain not have the prioresses of these endowed houses, or indeed of any, too liberal, for it is to come to utter ruin. The whole weight falls on Beatrix, the only one who had good health, and she has charge of the house, for it was given her by the mother prioress " a falta de hombres buenos " [" my husband Alcalde, for want of a better," an old Spanish proverb] as they say. 540 SANTA TERESA At Veas, on the contrary, all goes merrily as a marriage bell. They, too, had groaned under lawsuits, and bravely faced starvation, encouraged by Teresa, who wrote to them that it was To have little confidence in our Lord to think their wants should not be provided for, since his Majesty is careful to provide for the sustenance of the smallest " animalico " [little animal]. Daughters mine [and her words turned out to be prophetic], put all your care and diligence in our good Jesus, and see that you serve him, for I assure you that he will not fail nor abandon us. Also, as it is so short a time since that house was founded, it will not appear well to uproot it ; wait a few years ; and if our Lord does not send a remedy it will be a sign that it is his will that it be removed, and then it may be done if the prelates should think fit. And lo ! barely a few short months afterwards, in high glee, to Maria de San Josd she writes : So that you may say whether my nuns cannot do as well as your reverences, I sent you a bit of the prioress of Veas's letter. See if she has not looked out a good house for the friars of La Pinuela [so Teresa spelt it]. Indeed it has given me great pleasure. Certainly your reverences would not have managed it so quickly. They have received a nun with a dower worth 7000 ducats. Two others are about to enter with as much more, and they have already received a very principal lady, niece of the Count of Tendilla, and the silver things she has already sent, candlesticks, altar vessels, and many other things, such as reliquaries, a crystal cross, are worth more ; indeed it would be long to recount them. And now they spring a lawsuit on them, as you will see from those letters. Such are some of the multifarious details that occupy the time and thought of the old foundress in her Toledan cell, wreathing themselves around that central object on which both her eyes and her heart are fixed. But not even for that, the successful termination of all her aspirations and labours on earth, does she relax the reins of government of her scattered convents, regulating their money matters, summing up their possibilities and a novice's dower with the precision of a chartered accountant ; frugal, generous, austere, and gentle ; shrewd and satirical of tongue, but melting into accents of indescribable tenderness to those she loves ; as human life is but a patchwork of shreds, so are her letters, but in them we know her best as she veritably was. But for the existence of these self-same letters, I dread to think what a stupid block of nauseous cloying insipidity this great woman might have become through the pious efforts of her votaries. But there they are to all time, and in them we find her as she really lived and thought and breathed. I am only able to give the briefest and most summary idea of their contents, for they fill two respectable volumes ; but in them we catch the very aroma of the past, if somewhat LETTERS FROM TOLEDO 541 faintly. After the lapse of over three centuries, even such unconsidered trifles as the old-fashioned remedies (" King of the Medes " is one) culled from the quaint domestic pharma- copoeia of the age, which she prescribes to her sick prioress, become invested with I know not what quaint charm and interest. The quinces and marmalade of her own making, doubtless that she sends to her brother in Avila, take their rank as facts not devoid of importance. Only once she touches the great current of history, and that when she writes to Maria Bautista of Valladolid to commend to God Don Juan of Austria, who has gone in disguise to Flanders as the servant of a Fleming. In these faded letters we may construct somewhat of her own life in this sombre old Toledan convent ; see some of the dead and gone forms that flit through its locutorio and corridors, all the strange old-fashioned figures, in the world's latest fashion then, that group themselves around her. Early in July, Lorenzo, on his way to Avila, had left her reluctantly behind him in Toledo. Strange how in a few months this old nun has woven herself into the existence of the sombre middle-aged man, who so many years ago had watched by what was then thought to be her deathbed in Avila. Yet between duty and inclination there was no choice, and Lorenzo was fain to go without her. "Truly it has given me pain to see how everything has happened so contrary to the satisfaction he had in the thought of having me with him, and he needs me ' for many things.'" She endeavours, however, to supplement her absence by a memorandum as to those points she was most anxious he should not forget, which she gave to him as they bade one another farewell in Toledo. His sons who, she is afraid, if they are not at once well looked after, may soon get amongst the rest of the wild youths of Avila he is at once to place under the tuition of the Jesuits at San Gil : " I write to the rector, as your grace will see when you get there." Should the good Master Francisco Salcedo and Master Daza advise it, let them wear " bonetes " (the four-cornered caps now confined to the priesthood). He must remember that unless he goes to their houses, since they live far from that of Peralvarez, he cannot see much of Salcedo or Daza, and, moreover, it behoves that his conversations with them should be private. For the moment he is not to take a set confessor, and must ha\ 3 as few people in his house as possible; "it is better to go on engaging more than dismissing." She has written to Valladolid to tell them to send the page; however, since there are two of them, and they can go together, it does not matter even if they do go 542 SANTA TERESA about unaccompanied for a short time. She reminds him that he is inclined, and even accustomed, to receive great deference, and it is necessary that he mortify himself in this, and not listen to every one, but take the advice of Father Munoz of the Company if he sees fit, although in grave matters Daza and Salcedo are sufficient, and he may abide by their decision. " Beware," she concludes, " as to commencing things you do not immediately see the harm of, and remember that you will gain more in having the wherewithal to give in alms to God, even as regards the world, for your sons will reap the benefit of it. For the present I would fain you did not buy a mule, but a hack fit for journeys and work ; there is no occasion for the moment for those boys to go about except on foot : let them keep to their studies." By the 24th of July the travellers arrived in Avila the little Teresa having amazed every one by the perfection she observed on the journey. We may imagine with what childish wonder the Peruvians, Teresa and her brothers, fresh from hot Moorish Seville, looked for the first time on the gray old upland town, the cradle of their race, no less strange to them than a place in the Yorkshire wolds would seem to a southern Frenchman, born and bred say, in Carcassonne. We may imagine Lorenzo, world-worn and storm-tossed, wistfully retracing every feature of the familiar landscape; pointing out to them every church and convent tower and well-known corner, as the town grows larger and larger on their vision ; becoming a boy once more, as the retrospective memories of his youth surge back into his brain trifles light as air, little incidents long ago forgotten, flashing over him with all the freshness of yesterday. To his children it meant the future ; to him the past, dead faces, van- ished hands all that has been and never shall be again. So he settles down ; hires a house from Peralvarez, his cousin (a soldier of fortune, whom he afterwards leaves guardian to his children), and becomes once more a familiar figure in the Avila of his youth. " Oh, how long a fortnight this has been," writes Teresa on the 24th of July. " You have consoled me much, and what you tell me of your service and house does not seem to me superfluous. I laughed heartily at the master of ceremonies [some dead and gone joke, fading away even as they laughed vanished com- pletely into limbo], ... I am much concerned about your ailment. Quickly do you begin to suffer from the cold " ; for Lorenzo, inured to the tropical climate of Peru, not only misses Seville, as indeed do they all, but pines for the heat in the more rigorous climate of Castille and yet it was July. LETTERS FROM TOLEDO 543 He is pestered, too, by needy relatives. Juan de Ovalle, out at elbows and needy, for all hidalgo as he is peevish and touchy, conceives himself aggrieved that Lorenzo has taken Peralvarez Cimbr6n into his confidence rather than himself. He has written me a very long letter [says Teresa], in which he dwells much on how he loves your grace, and what he would do to serve you ; and his whole temptation sprang from his thinking that Cimbrdn was everything to you, and that you entrusted him with all your business, and that was the reason why my sister did not come. His resentment comes entirely from jealousy ; and certainly I think so, because it is his nature, for I too suffered a good deal with him on account of Dona Yomar [de Ulloa] and I being friends. All his plaint is of Cimbrdn. He is very childish about certain things ; but he acted well in Seville, and with great good-will ; and so for God's sake put up with him. I wrote to him telling him my opinion, and how much I saw your grace loved him, and that he ought rather to rejoice that Cimbron should act in what concerned you, and pressed him to content you and to send you the money if you should ask for it ; that it was better for each one to keep to his own house [an allusion to the familiar proverb, Cada uno en sit casa y Dios en la de todeseach one in his own house, and God in them all] ; that perhaps God had ordered it so, and laying the blame on him, and exculpating Perdlvarez. The worst of it is, I believe he will come here, and that not all I have said to prevent him will be of any avail. Certainly I pity my sister greatly, and so we must put up with much ; for, as for him, I will swear his desire to please you and be of use to you is great. God gave him no more. For that reason he makes others good- tempered, so as to bear with them ; and even so must your grace do. From Toledo, it having been Teresa's intention to accom- pany her brother forthwith to Avila we have seen how^ it was frustrated their things, " the trunk and all the bundles "- one can fancy the trunk, small at best, of calf-skin studded with brass nails arranged in curious patterns, probably in the centre an I.H.S. and a cross bundles tied together, heaven knows how, for, when mule or donkeyback was the only means of trans- port, luggage took up as little space as possible had been sent forward to Avila with an " arriero," and Teresica's Agnus Dei and two emerald rings are missing. " The Anusdei " (sic), she writes to Lorenzo, " is, I think, in the little coffer, if not in the trunk, together with the rings." Nevertheless they do not appear ; and a month later the perplexed Teresa writes uneasily to her prioress of Seville, " whether when the things were being unpacked, or how I know not, but neither Teresa's large Agnus Dei nor the two emerald rings can be found, nor do I remember where I put them, nor if they were given to me. ... Remember whether these articles were in the house when we started, and ask Gabriela if she recollects where I put them. Ask God to make them turn up." At all events, whether owing to the interposition of Providence I cannot say, she informs Maria de 544 SANTA TERESA San Jose, in October, of their having been found : " Glory to God, for at first I was anxious about them." I now tell the sub-prioress [of San Jose] to send the coffer to your grace [she writes to Lorenzo], so that you may take out of it the papers of the Fundaciones ; these he is to wrap up in paper, seal, and return to the supriora, who will send them to her in Toledo Together with I know not what of my companion's, and a cloak of mine (for we are in a great hurry for them) ; and I know not what other papers it contains, and would fain no one saw them, nor even those of the Funda- ciones, and so I want your grace to take them out, for as for you it does not matter. The key of the coffer was broken ; the lock can be taken off and kept in a chest until the key is made. It also contains the key of a letterbag, which I tell them to send your grace, for in it likewise are some papers, I believe, relating to things of prayer. These you may well read, and take out from amongst them a paper in which are written various things about the foundation of Alba. Send it to me, along with the others ; for the father visitor Gracian has ordered me to finish the Fundaciones^ and I need these papers to see what I have said, as well as for that of Alba. I do not do it with pleasure ; for the moments I have free from letters, I should like to be alone and rest. It does not seem God's will. May he please to accept of it. ... I will write about what you say to Seville, for I know not if he would get the letter. Why make such a fuss about four reals ? [the famous four reals for the Boticario " apothecary "]. If the messenger who took them found out that there was something inside the letters he would not give them. . . . I send you some quinces, so that your housekeeper may make them into conserves for you, to eat after meals, and a box of marmalade, and another for the supriora of San Jose, who they tell me is very thin. Tell her that she is to eat it : as for your grace, I beseech you to give none to any one, but eat it yourself for my sake, and when it is finished let me know ; for here it is cheap, and not bought with convent money ; for father Gracian ordered me under precept to do as I was wont, since what I had did not belong to me but to the Order. On one hand I am sorry for it ; on the other (as so many things come to where I am, even if only despatches) I have been glad ; for I am troubled that they cost so much, and many are those that occur. Such the dignified, sober, self-respecting life she sketches out for Don Lorenzo, and he no doubt lives in one of those old houses of Avila, now impossible to identify. Dressed in his suit and short cape of black velvet, like his sovereign in the Escorial, a sad hue, and one fitted for his years and melancholy, he once more becomes a familiar figure in the Avila of his youth. See him then as he takes his morning stroll, carefully keeping the sunny side of the street, gravely to inquire after the health of the good nuns of San Jose" ; or as closeted with Master Daza, Salcedo, or Julian de Avila in some little patriarchal white- washed room smelling of cleanliness and freshness, with its open beams of chestnut wood, he discourses of matters appertaining to his soul. Of Teresica, who does such honour to Maria de San LETTERS FROM TOLEDO 545 Jose's training, we also get occasional glimpses: Gracian even snatches a moment amidst his occupations in Seville to write a letter full of fun to the demure child. For these monks and nuns were full of innocent mirth. " Do you not see how funny is his paternity's letter for Teresica ; they (the good nuns of San JosJ) are never tired of talking about her and her virtue. Julian, which is unusual, says wonders." In September Dona Juana de Dantisco, Gracian's mother, spends three days in Toledo for the purpose of leaving one of her daughters in Cardinal Siliceo's college for maidens of noble birth. "Although I did not enjoy her company so much as I should have liked " for the secretary's wife had many visitors, chief amongst them the good canon Velazquez they remained great friends. I assure your paternity [we know to whom she writes] that God has given her the best of dispositions, and as for her abilities and good temper, I have seen few, and even I think none, like her in my life. A frankness and clear- ness such that I have quite lost my heart to her : indeed in this her son is nowhere. Most greatly would it comfort me to be where I could converse with them often. We got on so well together that we might have known one another all our lifes. She says she enjoyed hereself greatly here. God willed that she should find a lodging in the house of a lady widow who was alone with her women. She was quite at her ease, and close to this, which I accounted a great good fortune. We sent her her meals ready dressed from here. I am sure Teresa cooked them, and saw that the little dishes were arranged " as God orders." She at least, by Gracian's request, sees Teresa's face (a privilege allowed to but few out- siders), unshrouded by the long black veil foreshadowing the denser one with which superstition has covered her since ! Your paternity amused me by telling me to lift my veil ; it seems you do not know me ! Would that I could have opened her my heart. Dona Juana had her daughter with her to the last day, who seemed to me very pretty ; and it makes me sad to see her amongst those maidens, for in very sooth, as she said, she has more to go through there than [she would have] here. Right gladly would I give her the habit in this house, with the little angel of her sister, who is as pretty a child as you need wish to see, and fat too. The Senora Dona Juana does not cease to be astonished at the sight of her. Periquito her brother, who came here with all his wits about him, does not recognise her. She is all my diversion here. Indeed so pleased is Dona Juana with all the nuns and all she has seen, that she goes away determined to send the Senora Maria [another daughter] to Valladolid as soon as may be. She went away very happy, as it seems to me, and I believe that she is in no way a dissembler. Yesterday her grace wrote me a letter with a tuousand endearing expressions, and says that here she forgot her pain and sad- ness. . . . The day she started she says that the Senor Lucas Gracian had no return of the tertian fever, and that he is now well. And, oh ! what a pretty creature is Tomis de Gracian ! I was greatly pleased with him : he also came here. 35 546 SANTA TERESA And before this happy wife and mother, rejoicing in the love of her husband and numerous offspring, the old nun's heart becomes somewhat sore, and she feels a pang of longing envy. " I find, when I wonder which of the two your paternity loves best, that the Senora Dona Juana has a son and other children to love, whereas the poor Lorencia has nothing in the whole earth but this father." One of Gracian's sisters, a little child of eight, sheds the perfume of her innocent devotion through these dim gray convent precincts. Particularly noticeable in Teresa is her affection for children, and she herself would seem to have had a special fascination for them. When Teresa joins perhaps but rarely her daughters in their brief hours of recreation, "your mistress Isabel," as she terms her playfully to Gracian, "jumps up from her work and sings," no matter what she sings the little stanza of delight scarcely bears translation. " And at other times, so absorbed in her Child Jesus and the shepherds in her hermitage, that the thoughts she gives expression to make one praise God." In fact, a certain sort of rivalry at once sets itself up beween Teresa and her prioress Maria de San Jose as to the relative charms and virtues of these two children of the convent. " She is of a softer disposition than Teresa, and of extraordinary cleverness," remarks the old saint, as keenly observant of the character of a child as she is of that of mankind. This, however, the good prioress of Seville, who plumes herself greatly on having been the first to train up Teresica in the way she should go, will by no means admit. It is pleasant of you not to have it that she is not to be compared to Teresa. Know then for certain, that if this my Bela had the natural and supernatural grace of the other (for truly we saw that God worked some things in her), her understanding and ability and docility, so that we are able to do what we like with her are better. The ability of this little creature is quite remarkable, for, with a few luckless little shepherds and nuns and an image of Our Lady that belong to her, not a feast comes round that she does not make a picture of it in her hermitage, or in recreation, with a couplet or so, to which she gives such inflections that she holds us amazed. The only difficulty I have is, that I know not how to get her to fix her mouth, for it is quite devoid of grace, and she laughs very sillily, and is always going about laughing. Sometimes I make her open it, at other times close it ; again, I order her not to laugh. She says, not she but her mouth is to blame ; and she speaks truly. Whoever has seen Teresa's grace in body and everything, will perceive it more, for so they do here, although I will not own it, and tell her about it in secret : don't tell any one, for you would be pleased if you could see the life I lead in trying to get her mouth right. I believe, when she is older, it will not be so silly, at least the sayings that come from it are sharp enough. There ! I have painted your girls for you, so that you may not think I lie about her being superior to the other. I have told you of it to make you laugh. [To Gracian] : I made your mistress Isabel write to you, so that if you do not LETTERS FROM TOLEDO 547 recollect her name, hers is the enclosed letter. Oh what a lovely little thing she is growing, and how fat and pretty. Again : " A great amusement she is to me, if it were not that this writing leaves me but little time to enjoy it. She is an angel. To-day the doctor happened to go out by a room he does not generally pass through, where she was ; although she ran away as fast as she could, when she found he had seen her, she wept sorely lest she should be excommunicated, and cast out of her house." A terrible training, this disnaturalisa- tion of all human instincts which can bring a child not to wish to " see her own mother, since she belongs to the world," but it was a training well in accordance with the fierce creed of these grim mediaeval Spaniards. Then there is Velazquez, the lettered canon of Toledo, who was better satisfied, he said, to have Teresa for a penitent than if they had given him a bishopric a misty figure, who grows clearer by and by, when we shall meet him again as the blind Bishop of Osma. "You know how Angela," she writes to Gracian, " took the prior of the Sisla for her confessor, who used to see her often, and since this began [her acquaintance with Gracian] scarcely ever. Neither the prioress nor I could understand the cause. Once when this wretch of an Angela was conversing with Jose [Christ], he told her that it was he who had deterred him, the Doctor Velazquez being better for her. ... So that, my father, she is very happy at having gone to him for confession ; the more especially so, as, since she saw Pablo, with none did her soul find either consolation or joy." . . . And so the year wears on, as sitting in her cell she keeps up a constant intercourse of letters with her prioresses, some- times writing far into the night ; directs her friars ; writes to great personages in Madrid (the Count of Olivares is one to get him to write to Seville in favour of her persecuted nuns), and concludes her Fundaciones. " I am well," she writes to Maria de San Jose towards the middle of October, " and it is about to strike one, and so I will not be long. I wish to know about my good prior of Las Cuevas. Last week they sent on the tunny from Malagon, raw, and it was delicious. We enjoyed it. I have not broken a single fast-day since the Day of the Cross. You can judge if I am well or not. Our prioress of Malagon, who wrote to me she was better, did so (the saint !) so as not to pain me, for she is no such thing. To-day I have had a letter from her, and she is very ill and cannot eat, which is the worse, as she is so thin. . . . Dofla Yomar (Dofia Luisa de la Cerda's daughter) was married to-day. She is greatly delighted to hear how well your reverence is getting on, and 54 8 SANTA TERESA Dona Luisa, who never loved me as much before, takes great care to regale me, which is not a little." On the last day of October the Fundaciones are drawing to an end. I believe [she writes to Gracian with simple jubilation at the conclusion of her task] that you will be pleased when you see them, for it is a " savoury thing." See if I am not obedient ! I think each time that I possess this virtue, for even if I am ordered to do a thing in jest I would fain do it in good earnest, and I work at it more willingly than at these letters, for such a confusion of them kills me. I know not how I found time for what I have written, and yet I have some left for Josef [Christ], who it is that gives me strength for all. I also fast, for in this country the cold is little, and so does not hurt me as elsewhere. . . . To-day is the Eve of All Saints. On All Souls' Day I took the habit. Pray God, your paternity, to make me a true nun of Carmel, for it is better late than never. . . . Your paternity's unworthy servant and true subject, blessed be God, for I shall always be so, come what may, Teresa de Jesus. . . . Already I am becoming quite a nun, pray God it lasts [she says merrily to Maria de San Jose as she describes how the prioress of Caravaca has sent her that same day a serge habit, the most to her liking she has ever worn], for it is very coarse and light. I was very grateful to her for it, for the old one was too worn to keep out the cold, and they use it for chemises and all, although there are no chemises here, nor a sign of them throughout the summer, and much fasting. Nor does the foundress in her turn forget her distant community in Caravaca. It will be remembered that the nuns for that foundation were drafted from amongst those she had taken with her to Seville. I am just going to send to Caravaca [she writes to Maria de San Jose by the same recuero who is to bring back the answer from Seville as to the vexed question of the dower] an image of Our Lady I have got for them, very excellent and large and undressed, and I am having an image of San Jose made for me, and it will cost them nothing. She discharges the duties of her post very well. In connection with these same images, she sends a note to some unknown person in Toledo, probably the donor of them and one of her own votaries The arrival of my father San Jose has consoled me greatly, and that your grace is so devoted to him. It will be a great consolation to those sisters, who are away there in a strange country and far from any to console them : although I believe for certain that the true consolation is very near them. For charity, your grace, do me the favour to order him [some Toledan carpenter] to take the measures of width and length, and it should be done at once, so that the case may be made to-morrow, for on Tuesday it is impossible, it being a feast-day, and the carts start first thing on Wednesday morning. And not a little do I do in giving up the image of Our Lady so soon, and I shall feel exceeding lonely without her : so that for charity let your grace make up for it with the one you are to give me at Christmas. LETTERS FROM TOLEDO 549 In another letter written at the same time to "the very magnificent" Antonio de Soria we see how scrupulously she fulfils the commissions entrusted to her. The hundred reals and the rest, brought by the bearer of this, I duly received ; may our Lord give long life to the sender, with the health I beseech of him. He takes the bed along with him ; and if the Senor Sotomayor is there, I beg your grace to tell him to order it to be examined, to see that it has had no ill-treatment. ... I am concerned that this should be such a wretched place that, although we have hunted high and low, we have not been able to find what your grace asks of me. We have searched for them everywhere, as this good man will tell you, and we have not found more than those three, and please God they may be what you want, for we were unable to make out that part of your letter in which you say how they are to be : here we call the best of them " yerba " [she refers to the silks and brocades of Toledo, famous throughout Europe, and by the term " yerba " she would seem to mean a flower pattern], and the other kind is worth nothing. Truly I have been thinking what I could send, that you cannot get there, and I do not find anything worth sending, for it would have given me great pleasure. ... I send seven pieces in all, two of green damask and five of gold brocade. Nor as the year draws slowly to its close does she forget her sick prioress of Malagon, whom she would fain have brought to Toledo long ago, had not the doctor " who cures us here," said that if we do so, she will not live a month, whereas she might otherwise live a year. To her she writes in tender and loving fashion : The Holy Spirit be with your reverence, my daughter, and give you an exceeding great love of him this Christmas-tide, so that you may not feel your illness. God be blessed, for it seems to many that a happy Christmas depends on health and joys and presents ; and yet on that day in which we shall give account to God, they may be evil. Of this, however, your reverence may well at this moment feel no concern, for on that bed you are gaining glory, and more glory. It is a great thing not to be worse with such severe weather. Do not be terrified at your thinness, for you have been ill a long time. The cough must come from some cold you have caught, and without seeing what has brought it on, it is impossible from a mere description to prescribe for you from here. It is better to leave it to the doctors there. And so another Christmas found Teresa still in Toledo, a happy and tranquil Christmas, writing to her prioress of Seville to send her " confites (comfits), if they are ? very good, since she would like them for a certain necessity"; well too, although these days before Paschal-tide her health has been none of the best, and she is worn out with business. Neverthe- less she notes with pride that she has not broken Advent. A happy and tranquil Christmas ; for the cloud which menaces her Reform is as yet hidden behind the horizon, and all seems 550 SANTA TERESA bright and clear, even as the morning light which rises sparkling over its frosty streets. And as the old year wears to its close, and the world pre- pares to welcome the dawn of the new, her thoughts wander back to the home of her youth and middle age to gray old Avila, lying so serenely there amidst the powdery snow ; to Lorenzo, who by this time has taken root in his native town, and bought a property about three miles distant from it, a country house with its cornfields, pasture-lands, and belt of scrub oak. " It is," says Teresa to her prioress of Seville, " a termino redondo," that is, exempt from the jurisdiction of any neigh- bouring town or village, so that Lorenzo is in fact lord ot knife and gallows in his own domain. Besides which he has rented from Hernan Alvarez de Peralta a house in Avila (one wonders which it was), " in which I heard," says his shrewd sister, " there was a room on the point of falling : look well to it" Already he is looking about him for suitable matches for his sons (this is a subject in which Teresa also takes the deepest interest, and we shall presently see her negotiating in Segovia for a well-dowered bride for Francisco), studying under the Jesuits of San Gil ; whilst Teresica, in her aunt's convent of San Jose", plays at being prioress, and charms the hearts of the good nuns by her grace and virtue. Surely the worthy treasurer of Quito, with whom the world has sped so well, has had his heart's desire? Perhaps who knows but he had by this purchase accomplished a dream, an ambition that he had looked forward to this distant prospect now fulfilled of ending his days in Avila in well-earned repose and dignity, ere he too should lay down his bones beside those of his fathers and become like them, a memory a dream long nursed in the far-away heats of Peru, as cyphering all that this world can bestow. So perhaps was his heart strengthened and his hands nerved to the fight during long and laborious years. But alas, alas ! the future only becomes the present at the cost of the past. There he had left his youth behind him behind him too the wife of his youth ; and if the streamlets rushed as merrily through brown paramera and jagged pine forest, the eyes were altered that looked on them, and never more could they be the same to him as in his boyhood. There he is, then, torturing himself with vain imaginings for want of anything better to do, regretting barely three months after that, instead of buying La Serna, he had not laid out his money in purchasing bonds or mortgages, in those days an easy and lucrative source of income ; discoursing of the state LETTERS FROM TOLEDO 55 of his soul with the little knot of Jesuits and priests, amongst whom we may discern Salcedo, Julian de Avila, Master Daza, and the like. For it is to this date that we must assign that curious document the " Vejamen Espiritual," or jocular criticism, so called from an old custom long prevalent in the University of Alcala it was still in vogue in 1830 which formed part of the ceremonies whereby the degree of Doctor of Theology was duly conferred. The candidate made his appearance before the whole body of the University, wearing their doctorial insignia, whilst one of the two students seated on either side of him taunted him in Castilian verse with his physical, moral, and intellectual defects, and the other covered him with hyperbolical and derisory laudation. The origin of this curious contest, in which Teresa was th judge, and Lorenzo, together with Salcedo, Julian de Avila, and Fray Juan de la Cruz, entered the lists as competitors, is said to have been suggested by a letter she wrote to her brother, in which she asked him the meaning of the words " Buscate en mi" which she had heard in the form of a divine locution. This Betting to the ears of the Bishop of Avila, Don Alvaro de Mendoza, he enjoined on each one to declare what it was that God required of the soul thereby, and when they had all nande in their papers, he sent them to the saint, so that she might pronounce on them her vejdmen. This she does in an acute and witty criticism, summing up in a word (perhaps without knowing it), by a subtle and delicate instinct, the various characters and tendencies of the Jesuit (Salcedo now belonged to the Company), the friar, the chaplain, and the worthy gentle man, whose leaden-footed and ponderous verses amuse most of all. If I were not forced thereto by obedience, I nor would I accent the iudgeship for several reasons, although not for those gfven by the siSrs heVe, who tLk that, since my brother enters ; amongs The opponents, judgment will go by favour; because my ve for t is great, as they have all helped me to bear up against my labours, and brftheronly came when I had well-nigh finished a^^V^^S he has not been without his share, and will have more if he L him. May he give me grace not ^ say anything that deserve a their denouncing me to the Inquisition, such is the state of business matters and the many letters I have written be ween >; night and now. But obedience is all-powerful, and so, well lO, I what your senorfa orders. Salcedo is far wide of the mark. The words are, "Seek thyself in me," which shows that the Seflor Franciscc jd Salcedo errs in insisting so much that God is in everything, since he knows that he is in everything. 552 SANTA TERESA He also speaks much of understanding and union. We already know that in union the understanding does not act ; if then it does not act, how are we to seek ? I was greatly pleased with that verse of David's : I will listen to what the Lord God speaks in me, for it is important that this of the active powers being at rest should be generally understood. But as I have no intention of praising anything they have said, I say that it has nothing to do with it, since the word is not listen but seek. And the worst of all is that, if he does not retract, I shall have to denounce him to the Inquisition, which is close by. For, after the whole paper is full of: "This is St. Paul's saying," " the Holy Ghost's," he adds that he has signed his name to nonsense. Let me have this corrected at once ; if not, he shall see what happens. As for father Julian de Avila, he began well and finished ill, and so the glory is not for him. For in this case he is not asked to treat of how uncreated and created light are united, but how we are to seek ourselves in God. We do not ask him what a soul feels when it is so close to its Creator, if united with him, or whether it differs from itself or not. Since in that state I think there is no understanding left for such disputes ; for if there were, the difference between the Creator and the creature would be easy to understand. He also says : when she is purified. It is my belief that in this case neither virtue nor purification are of any avail ; for it is supernatural and given by God to whomsoever he wills ; and if anything paves the way it is love. But I forgive him all his mistakes, because he has not been so lengthy as my father fray Juan de la Cruz [for even he does not escape her gentle satire], who in his reply gives excellent doctrine, for him who is about to follow the exercises practised in the company of Jesus, but not suited for us. It would cost dear if we could not seek God except when we were dead to the world. Neither the Magdalen, nor the woman of Samaria, nor she of Canaan were dead to it when they found him. He also dwells much on becoming one with God in union ; and when this takes place, and he bestows this favour on the soul, he will not tell her to seek him, since she has already found him. God deliver me from such spiritually-minded people who would leave no choice, but make everything consist in perfect contemplation. Withal, we thank him for having explained to us so well what we did not want to know. For that reason it is well always to speak of God, for we get profit where we least expect it ; as it has happened with the senor Lorenzo de Cepeda, whom we are very greatly obliged to for his answer and couplets. Lorenzo de Cepeda's is the only document that has been preserved the only scrap of his writing indicating somewhat of his mental development. We will quote it, and then read her criticism. So as to make up for the shortcomings of the reply [says the worthy gentleman sententiously], I will first take for my authority this saying of St. Paul's : Oh altitudo divitiarum, etc., as far as quoniam ex ipso et per ipsum et in ipso sunt omnia. Ipsi gloria in saecula saeculorum. The reply is, then, that he who profoundly considers this fact, that God includes within himself all his creatures, and that none of them is outside of him ; and that consequently God himself is in them, more than they themselves, LETTERS FROM TOLEDO 553 and that he is the centre of the soul, if it is so pure as not to prevent this admirable union, it must necessarily find itself in God, and God in it. I must renounce the translation of his verses. To this his greater sister answers : If he has said more than he understands we will forgive him his lack of humility in adventuring himself amongst such lofty themes, as he says in his answer, on account of the recreation he has given us with his couplets, and for the good counsel he proffers without being asked, to practise the prayer of quiet (as if to do so depended on ourselves). He already knows the penalty to which he who does this is subject. Please God, since he is so close to the honey, some of it may stick to him, for he comforts me greatly, although I see he had good cause to be ashamed. On the whole I cannot find that any one of the papers is better than the rest, since, without prejudice, none of them is free from fault. Order them to amend themselves [she concludes to the Bishop]. Perhaps I too will amend, if only not to appear like my brother in his want of humility. [She herself sums up the answer in two words] : All these gentlemen are so lost in the clouds that they failed by saying too much ; for he (as I have said) to whom this favour shall be granted of his soul being united with God, he will not tell him to seek him, since he already possesses him. It is to Lorenzo, then, that she writes her first letter of this New Year of 1577 for 1577, strange to say, was once a New Year. Serna some Aviles peasant in a hurry to be off is waiting to take back the letter. Heaven knows what little presents and tokens of affection he has brought with him to gladden her heart that day. If at times she is impatient of her brother's claims on her time, afraid that his affection may twine too closely round her heart " I cannot account for it, unless it is that for me the contents of this life are a weariness: it must be from my dread of attaching myself to anything in it, and so it is better to avoid the occasion" to-day the old saint gives herself up fondly and freely to all tender and loving impulses. After again counselling him to look well to that room about to fall in Peralta's house, she bids him send her the little coffer, together with any of her papers that were in the bundles sent on to Avila, one bag of papers she thinks it was that went, this to be carefully sewn up. If Dofia Quiteria should send a bundle with Serna, it can come inside. She also asks for her seal, " Since I cannot bear to seal with this death's-head, but with him whom I would fain was stamped on my heart as on that of San Ignacio." (Teresa used two seals, one with a skull, the other with I.H.S., the one she asks for here.) No one is to open the coffer (for I think the paper of prayer is in it) except yourself, and in such a way that, if anything should catch your eye, 554 SANTA TERESA you will not mention it to a soul. So beware, for I do not give you leave to do so, nor is it expedient ; since although your grace might deem you were doing God a service, there are other drawbacks which make it impos- sible ; and it suffices that if I hear of your grace divulging it, I shall take good care to read you nothing. The Nuncio has sent to me telling me to send him a copy of the patents whereby these houses have been founded, and to say how many houses there are, and their whereabouts, and the number of nuns, where they come from, and their ages, and how many I think suitable for prior- esses ; and these writings are in that coffer, or I know not whether they are in the bag : in short, I need everything there is in it. They say he wants it in order to make the province. I fear, however, lest his object be not to send our nuns to reform other convents, as has been broached before ; and this is not good for us, for it is even now going on in the convents of our Order. Inform the supriora of this, and tell her to send me the names of those belonging to that house ; and the ages of those who are there at this moment, as also how long ago it is since they entered, written in a good hand on five sheets of paper, and signed with her name. I have just remembered that I am prioress there [once or twice, in these letters, strangely enough for such an acute and active mind, we come across lapses of memory on Teresa's part, she often does not know where she has put things, as in the case of the Agnus Dei and the emerald rings], and that I can do it myself, and therefore she need not sign, but send me all the rest, even if it comes in her own writing, for I can transcribe it. There is no need for the sisters to know anything about it. Be careful, your grace, as to how it is sent, lest the papers should get wet, and send the key. . . . Nor does she forget Francisco de Salcedo, to whom she advises Lorenzo to apply in all his spiritual difficulties; nor yet Pedro de Ahumada, her other brother (of whom more anon), to whom she would fain have had time to write, so as to get his answer, "for I enjoy his letters." Lorenzo is to remember her to him, as also to whomsoever else of their mutual friends he thinks best. Tell Teresa [she adds] that she need not be afraid of my ever loving any one else as I do her ; and not to keep the pictures for herself [with the exception of the ones she, the elder Teresa, has set aside for her own use], but to give some of them to her brothers. I long to see her. What you wrote to Seville about her made me praise God (for they sent on the letters to me here), for the sisters were not a little delighted, and read them during recreation, and I also ; for my brother will as soon cease to live as be a gallant, and as it is all with saints everything seems to you permissible ! I know not what faint aroma of "that peace which the world cannot give " creeps through these homely joys and sorrows of convent life, and fills me with a poignant regret that such an existence should ever have been condemned by the so-called utilitarian principles of which to-day we see the failure in the ever-increasing misery, vulgarity, and restlessness LETTERS FROM TOLEDO 555 of the world. Of all types of existence that have ever been consecrated by time and human longing after peace, that of the monastery seems to me the noblest, however relaxed its discipline may have become in the times I treat of. No wonder that perturbed spirits, and consciences troubled with many scruples, looked forward to its rest as a distant foretaste of the celestial repose : that young minds found in it the serene and innocent impulses, that sympathy with others, that shed a glow over the darker features of the society around them. Let us think of all this as we read Teresa's letters, looking over her shoulder, as it were, into that dim atmosphere, filled with hopes, desires, and vibrating with life and humble duties now covered with eternal dust. There is indeed very little of herself in them. She flashes herself on us here and there un- consciously, but it is characteristic of her to fling herself into the life and doings of the little world around her. Yesterday [she continues] we celebrated with great rejoicings the name of Jesus. God reward your grace. I know not how to thank you for all the favours you bestow on me, if not by these villancicos I composed ; for my confessor ordered me to make them merry, and I have spent these last few nights with them, and I knew not how to do so, except in this way. They have a gracious air, if Francisquito can manage to sing it. See how well they make use of me. [Then comes some advice about his methods of prayer to be quoted farther on when that sudden flux of blood shall have rid the good gentleman for ever of his scruples and his melancholy.] Some of the replies given by the sisters made me laugh. [The nuns of San Jose had also taken part in the famous contest in which Lorenzo and his companions had fared so ill.] Others are excellent, and have thrown light on what it is ; for I do not think I understand it. I did no more than mention it to your grace by accident, and left the rest to tell you when I see you, if God so wills. The worthy Francisco de Salcedo's reply amused me. His humility reaches an extraordinary pitch ; for the fear with which God leads him is such, that he might even disapprove of speaking of these things in such a way. We must conform ourselves to what we see in different souls. I assure you he is a saint ; but God leads him by a different road from what he does your grace. In short he leads him as one already strong, and us as weak. For one of his temper, he said a good deal. I have read your letter again. I do not understand you to say that you got up at night, but that you sit up in bed. Even this seems to me too much, for it is important to have enough sleep. On no account get up, however great the fervour you may feel, and especially if you can sleep. Do not be afraid of sleep. If you had heard what fray Pedro de Alcantara used to say about this, you would not be amazed even if you were awake. Your grace's letters do not weary me, for they console me greatly, and it would even be a comfort to me to be able to write to you very frequently ; but I have so much work that it cannot be, and even to-night my prayer has suffered for it. Not that I feel any scruples about it, only distress that I have no time. The scarcity of fish in this town is a sore trouble to the sisters, and I was delighted with the sea-bream on that account. The weather is such that there is no need to send them in bread [perhaps some old-fashioned mode 556 SANTA TERESA long forgotten for keeping them fresh]. If there happens to be any when Serna starts, or some fresh her rings, give the supriora some money to send them to us with, for it was very well packed. This is a terrible place for us who do not eat meat, for there is never even so much as a fresh egg to be got. Withal, I was thinking to-day that for years I have not been so well as I am now ; and I keep the same rules as the rest, which for me is a great consolation. The couplets which are not in my writing are not mine, for as the nuns of San Jose* compose their own, so did one of the sisters here make these, but they seem to me suited to Francisco. This Christmas-tide during recreation we have had great store of them. To-day is the second day of the New Year. P.S. I thought your grace might have sent us your villancico, for these have neither head nor tail, and yet we sing them all from beginning to end ; and I remember me now of one I made once upon a time when I was deep in prayer, and it seemed to relieve me, and I seemed to have more time then than now. They ran (it is so long ago that I know not now if they ran thus) if only to show you that even at this distance from you I strive to administer to your amusement i Oh hermosura que ecedeis A todas las hermosuras ! Sin herir, dolor haceis ; Y sin dolor deshaceis El amor de las criaturas. i Oh nudo, que ansi juntais Dos cosas tan desiguales ! No se porque os desatais : Pues atado, fuerza dais, A tener por bien los males. 1 I remember no more. What a brain for a foundress ! And yet I assure you I thought I had not a little when I wrote it. God forgive you for making me waste my time like this. I think you will be touched by this couplet, and moved to devotion ; do not repeat it to any one. Dona Yomar and I were together at the time. Remember me to her. So the old year of 1576 wears to its close, and the new advances with stealthy strides to take its place. The stars glitter in the frosty heavens above Toledo, far above the dark outline of the convent walls. Over the waste places of the earth where man has never trod, over seas which no ship has ploughed, do they glitter too, as they have done since the 1 Oh beauty that exceedest All beauties rare ! That causest pain without a wound, And without a x pang dost sever All love of earthly creature. Oh knot that in this manner binds Two such unequal things ! Why shouldst thou strive to be undone, Since, bound, thou givest strength, And turnest evil into good? LETTERS FROM TOLEDO 557 world began ; sparkling as brightly, where no human eye may ever see them, as on this one little spot of the earth's surface. And yet, as she watches them through the wooden shutters of her cell, they fill the foundress's brain with specific fancies, with I know not what pictures of Eastern plains modelled on those of Avila. For at this season of all the year a flush of unwonted life and joy lightens up the dusky corridors and brings bright gleams into eyes faded and mortified. Before the counterfeit presentment of the opening scene of the grandiose drama of the Redemption, the hearts of these simple women are strangely stirred. They too, by the beneficence of their faith, taste somewhat of the reflected joys and grace of maternity. The little nifto Jesus they have spent long hours in arranging is their child a child that no age shall overtake, whose love shall never grow cold, whom they may for ever nurse in his pristine innocence in their bosoms. And amidst it all Teresa is alone ! " You must indeed have had a happy Christmas- tide," she writes to Maria de San Jose", "since you had my father with you, as I also should have had in the like case, and a good New Year. Oh the ice here ! There is almost as much as in Avila. ... I have been wondering what you sang at Matins on Christmas Eve." . CHAPTER XX FROM AUGUST TO CHRISTMAS DAY 1577 JANUARY and February passed tranquilly away in that Toledan convent, with but little to interrupt the monotony ** of its existence, or rouse it out of its ordinary atmosphere of tranquil repose and humble devotion Teresa's greatest anxiety the illness of Gracian, who, having left Seville, is now visiting the Observant monasteries of Andalucia. And yet we can fancy how the community ripples with excitement when the dusty recuero and his mules arrive from Seville, and the pious exclamations as the excellent women unpack all those good things, the generous gifts of Maria de San Jose. All manner of things she sends to tempt the foundress's appetite sweet potatoes and oranges, which rejoice the hearts of the invalids ; spices, orange-flower water, that the prioress of Toledo esteems as much as she does her life ; old - fashioned sweetmeats, brinquinillos, confites (comfits), and the like ; strange Indian resins, rejoicing in such names as Anime and Tacamaca, which Teresa will persist in calling Catamaca. Nor is this all. The foundress has but to hint to her trusty and devoted prioress the advisability of sending some little tokens of gratitude to Dona Juana Dantisco, Gracian's mother; or to lament that she has nothing to bestow on that worthy administrador of Dona Luisa's " a man of authority, who has laboured so hard, and will labour, in the house of Malagon, and there is nothing she can think of but what he does extremely well," and lo ! it is a sight to see the Agnus Deis, pomes, reliquaries, balsam, etc., that come on that recuero's donkey. What matter if the glass case of one of the reliquaries comes broken, and the foot some- what twisted ! An artificer soon puts it to rights, and I only hope that they gladdened the hearts of the recipients half as much as they did the giver's. Amongst them too comes a little jug, " calderica," as the old Castilian calls it in true Aviles fashion ; the prettiest one she ever saw, her prioress's special present to herself. " But do not think," she laughs, " that because I wear 'jerguilla'" (a lighter sort of serge than that 558 FROM AUGUST TO CHRISTMAS DAY 1577 559 generally worn by her nuns, and in her case made necessary by old age and infirmity), " I have got the length of drinking out of anything so lovely," and straightway she gives it away to the friendly and influential administrador. As for the orange-flower water, which I believe would have gone too had not the nuns insisted on her keeping it, " she dare swear that it was Maria de San Jose who packed it, it came in such good case." Nor does the recuero return back empty. If Maria de San Jose" sends corporals so lovely that, to Teresa's taste, they far surpass that altar-cloth sent her by her prioress of Segovia, entirely made of lace with seed pearls and garnets, worth about 300 ducats, although she laments the sterility of Toledo (where nothing is to be got but quinces in the season, and there are much better ones in Seville), and her inability to send an equivalent, still there are such things as bolts for choir gratings, which, although they will not please the fastidious Maria de San Jose, on account of their rough workmanship, still she must even do as they do in Toledo, " where we do not account ourselves any coarser in our tastes than you " ; also crucifixes, which she gets some artificer to make for them in some little dark Toledan street ; " they only cost nine reals, and even, I think, a cuartillo less," she writes, with great pride in her own bargaining or thrift, having in a previous letter stated the probable price at a ducat, which inclines me to believe that the artificer has also fallen a victim to the charm of the old nun, with whose personality, as Yepes tells us, none ever failed of being struck. However, there they go, exactly as they came, arriving just in time on Easter Eve to go with the recuero on the morrow, and they must get a turner to bore the holes through them in Seville. Amongst the most noticeable of her January letters from Toledo is the one she writes to Gracian. There has been great tribulation in Teresa's convents, for the good friar has been ill, and she had written at once to such of them as she could to commend him to their prayers. But he is now better, and as zealous as ever, finding time amidst the cares and trials of his visit throughout Andalucia to compose a manual for the confessional, " as if," writes Teresa, highly amused, to whom it seems a very supernatural thing indeed," he had nothing else to do." Withal [she adds] we must not ask God to do miracles [s^e spells it miraglos, as she no doubt pronounced it, although the meticulous com- mentator points out that she meant to say mirdculos], and it is necessary ft your paternity to consider that you are not made of iron, and that many good heads in the Company [of Jesus] have gone wrong through too much work. Oh ! how delighted I am with the perfection with which your paternity 5 6o SANTA TERESA writes to Esperanza [Esperanza is Caspar de Salazar] ; because it is advisable to write thus when the letters will be seen by others. And how exceeding right is your paternity (in what you say is needful for the Reform) that souls, like bodies, must be conquered by main force. God preserve me it, for it fills me with great joy. I should like to be exceeding good, so as the better to commend you to God ; I mean that my desires and spirit might be of some avail to me ; as to the latter, glory to God, I never find it cowardly, if not in things that touch Paul [Gracian]. She would fain kiss his hands over and over again, and assures him that he need have no anxiety as to her affection, " since he who joined them together was such, and the knot he tied so tight, that it will last as long as life, and death will only draw it closer." In Seville, too, affairs are going well. Negotiations are on foot with an " excellent nun " excellent, indeed, for not only does she bring 6000 ducats in ready money, but also tejuelas de oro worth 2000 more, whose entry will free the convent of its load of debt. " Please God there be no hitch," writes the old saint. ..." For love of God, if she enters, bear with her defects, for well does she deserve it." In the meantime, worthy Maria de San Jos governs well, and wisely ; sends her carefully-worked-out memorandums of their little earnings by stocking-knitting and the like, and the alms which would at last seem to have begun to flow in. Pray God you tell me true [writes the old saint], for I should rejoice greatly, except that you are a fox, and I suspect you are throwing dust in my eyes, and I fear the same thing happens with what you tell me of your health, so pleased am I. Our prioress of Malagon is but so-so. I have often asked our father to let me know whether the water from Loja would be of any good brought from such a distance, so as to send for it ; pray remind him of it. I sent him a letter to-day with a priest who was going to see him merely on a matter of business, and so do not write to him now. You do me a great charity in sending me his letters ; but be very sure that even if there were none from him, yours will be well received ; of this you need have no fear. I have now sent all your gifts to Dona Juana Dantisco, although as yet there has been no reply. In the case of people like her, it does not matter even if we spend some of the convent money, above all now that we are no longer in such need as we were at first ; and even if we were, the greater the obligation she is under to the community. Oh how vain you will be now that you are a semi-provinciala (both Seville and Paterna being now under the sway of Maria de San Jose). And how I laughed at the scornful way in which you say : the sisters enclose you those couplets ! whilst all the time you are at the bottom of it all. And since as you say you have no one there to say anything to you, I {do not believe it will be ill that I should tell you what I think from here, so that you may not grow too vain. At least you neither wish to say nor do any folly, which is very like you. Please God that your intention may be always to his service, for this of itself is not evil. I laugh to see myself over-burdened with letters, and yet sitting down at my leisure to pen such FROM AUGUST TO CHRISTMAS DAY 1577 561 trifles. I will indeed forgive you for boasting that you will have no difficulty in managing her of the golden ingots, if you accomplish it ; for I am deeply anxious to see you free from care, although my brother is making such strides in virtue, that he would willingly assist you in everything. I would have you to know that no one wears or has worn light serge here except myself ; for even now, in spite of the ice, my kidneys have not allowed me to do otherwise, for greatly do I dread this ailment ; and they remark on it so much, that I feel scruples about it, and as my father took away the very old one I had of coarse serge, I know not what to do. ... Read [for is not the prioress half a provincial already?] this letter for Paterna, and if it is not right, correct it as superior of the house. I willingly allow that you will know better what to do than I. It was with no small pride and satisfaction that Teresa had told Lorenzo and her prioress that she had not broken a fast- day since the Exaltation of the Cross. Nature, however, exacted her penalty, and the result was a severe attack of illness, which affected not only her head but her heart, as she tells her brother in the charming letter she sends him in February. She does not write herself, and indeed is getting accustomed to write by another's hand. Her only fear was lest it might have left her fit for nothing. He is not to be anxious, for she is taking care of herself in every way she sees is necessary, which is not a little, and even more than they are used to here. She is longing to get well. The mutton is so bad that she is forced to eat birds, for all the trouble comes from weakness and having fasted from the day of the Cross in September, together with trouble and age (that old age has crept in upon her is seen too evi- dently ; but her bright and joyous spirit is that of youth), and in short she has already become of so little use, that it vexes her, " for this body of mine has always worked me harm and hindered the good I would fain have done." One may imagine nay, not imagine, for we know the concern of the good Lorenzo, and how he hastens to speed off Serna with hens, eggs, and sweetmeats, and a bundle or two of the famous goose-quills, cut for her doubtless by her nephew Francisco, whom she charges with this commission, " for good ones are not to be got in Toledo, and such as there are give her great displeasure and labour." Indeed, in this very same letter, which, probably begun by her secretary, she has doubt- less insisted on finishing herself, " has she not changed so many pens that Lorenzo will think her writing worse than usual, and set it down to her illness ; whereas it is nothing of the sort, but only on account of the pens." Nor is the good prioress of Seville any less anxious as she burdens the recuero's mules with oranges, sweet potatoes, and fresh shad preserved in bread anything that may tempt the sick foundress's appetite or ad- 36 562 SANTA TERESA minister somewhat to her comfort " God deliver me," writes the grateful saint, the mother of so many daughters, "these good nuns are amazed at what you send me," for I am glad to think that if those to whom she wrote so lovingly did not immediately recognise all her greatness, for that they will not, cannot do, such is the hard fate of humanity, until she has gone for ever from amongst them, they all love and cherish her with a devotion which shows how greatly she deserved it. And whilst she writes of goose- quills, corporals, ebony crucifixes, sending messages to good Mistress Ospedal, the attached old servant of Francisco de Salcedo, a little cloud no larger than a man's hand is slowly gathering over the horizon, and steadily creeping nearer and nearer. For it was certain that Tostado, foiled in his attempt to visit the Observants of Seville, by the appearance of the Deputy- Governor armed with a decree from the Royal Council, is once more like a bird of ill omen flitting back to Madrid, and the family quarrels of the two branches of the Carmelites are now to be played out before the court and the world. Teresa knew full well how court favour ebbed and veered, and how small was the depend- ence to be placed on it. If the Nuncio and Arch-inquisitor Quiroga had managed to clip his wings and send him back crestfallen to Portugal, until he saw fit to lay the warrants for his visitation before the Royal Council, in pursuance of Philip's invariable policy to admit no interference from Rome in the ecclesiastical affairs of his kingdom, they might not be able or willing to do it a second time if stronger reasons should make it expedient for the King to admit his visit. Reform, indeed, must go to the wall if it interfered with graver affairs of state. It was evident that stirring times were apprehended, and that the duel for life or death between the Descalzos and Carmelites could no longer be deferred. In Rome the Observants unopposed had worked heaven and earth against the Descalzos, and that they had been successful and were already sure of the victory might be seen from the changed attitude of their brethren in Spain, who as long as the wind blew in their faces had cleverly assumed the mask of obedience and submission, content to bide their time until a fortuitous turn of events should enable them to throw it off, and wreak their vengeance on their adversaries. Now, however, they take a bolder attitude : the prior of the Carmelites of Madrid resolutely asserts that he will resist to the utmost the foundation of any Discalced monastery in Madrid, where Mariano and his three friars have been for months manoeuvring in vain to effect it, and as good as snaps his fingers in the FROM AUGUST TO CHRISTMAS DAY 1577 563 Nuncio's face. The Nuncio, too, would seem to be wavering under the influences brought to bear on him from Rome, " where they hold him tighter than we think." " I am not amazed," writes Teresa from Toledo to her hot-headed friar, Mariano, " that you are ill, but that you are alive, according to what you must have gone through there in mind as well as body." Still he must remember that he is in the midst of enemies, and it behoves him not only to be patient and restrain that sharp, satirical tongue of his, but to retire when Passion Sunday is over either to Pastrana or the Observant monastery, so as to give them (the Observants) no loophole, " since it is no time for monks to be outside their monastery walls, nor will any one approve of it, least of all the Nuncio, who is so strict in these matters. Consider," she adds, " that all the devils are making war against us, and that it behoves us to hope for protection from God alone, and this must be with obedience and forbearance, and then he will take it into his own hands." Now when a person's (even one so religious as Teresa) only refuge is God, I generally find that their position is pretty desperate : and I am not surprised to hear her warning Mariano that her letter is written with great deliberation, and not without substantial, and moreover very grave, motive, although it is one she cannot tell him (for fear, doubtless, of the letter being intercepted). " I am amazed at what your anger endures; but at this moment of all others prudence is needed. It is given out for certain that Tostado is coming through Andalucia ; God bring him, whatever comes of it : I believe it would be better to struggle with him than with those against whom we have hitherto been contending." And as he draws nearer and nearer, the air is full of the rumblings of the coming storm. The Observants, sniffing the battle from afar, begin to lift up their heads. Not only have they foiled the Descalzos' cherished project of founding in Madrid, but in Salamanca they have even gone to law with the Bishop for having given them a license. And in the meantime Teresa and her nuns of Seville find themselves in the most perilous of positions, and on the brink of finding themselves in flagrant rebellion against the General. It will be remembered how, during her sojourn in Seville, she had received the General's mandate she being at the time a con- ventual of Salamanca, in accordance with the patent of Fray Pedro Hernandez, the former visitor ordering her to retire to one of her convents in Castille, and on no account to stir from it to any more foundations. This, however, Gracian, in his capacity as Commissary-General, had overruled, detaining her 564 SANTA TERESA not only in Seville, until the conclusion of that foundation, but again in Toledo, on account of the distracted state of Malagon. In November of the previous year, full of disquietude in view of the possibility of the Nuncio's death, she had implored Gracian to tell her what she was to do in case it did take place, and his commission be suddenly brought to an end ; " since, whether we do the right thing or not," she added, " it is sure to be made public." He had apparently soothed her alarm without giving her any definite answer ; for now in January matters assume a still more threatening aspect, the Observants of Toledo having got hold of the General's Brief, and being evidently bent on making the most of it against her. For the first time she realised that she had been lulled into security on the brink of a precipice, and found (what she does not hitherto seem to have suspected) that the prohibition to leave her convents included not only herself but all her nuns. So that if Gracian's commission ceased, as, in her own graphic phrase, it might do, " from one hour to another," not only she, but those of her nuns of Seville as well, who had left their cloister to reform the Observant Convent of Paterna, would find themselves in the disagreeable position of having openly and wantonly disobeyed the General, the head of the Order, and possibly, as soon there- after as might be, safely consigned to a convent dungeon. For, as the Observants shrewdly conjectured, this old woman alone it was who constituted their most formidable adversary, with her cool brain ; the charm she exercised over princes, pre- lates, and those other great and noble men and women whom she so dexterously twisted around her little finger. She alone could unravel the twisted tangle of difficulty they were weaving around her, and guide that frail bark of her Reform triumphantly into the port of safety. Indeed I am inclined to believe that the rumour of the plot formed by the Observants of Seville to kidnap her and send her to the Indies, which so exercised good Maria de San Jose*, and roused such hearty laughter on Teresa's part, was not so entirely devoid of foundation as she herself seemed to think. Without her to counsel and to restrain, to plead and to warn, short shrift indeed would those wily Observants have made with that hot-tempered, impulsive Mariano, who, in spite of all his capacity for intrigue, was always by his ill-considered words and actions getting himself and his associates into trouble ; with that feeble, peevish old Antonio de Jesus ; with Gracian, the best of them all, so fatally weak when it came to the point, but whom she managed to endow with her own strength of will and adroitness, so long as she stood a sheltering presence at his back. It was not to be FROM AUGUST TO CHRISTMAS DAY 1577 565 thought that the keen-eyed Observants would let slip such an opportunity of working her ruin ; and her ruin meant the annihilation of the Reform. As yet, however, the Nuncio was still alive, Gracian was still Commissary-General of the Order, and he could still issue a mandate safeguarding them from the machinations of their enemies a mandate which, if his com- mission ceased to-morrow, would yet be valid, unless, indeed, El Tostado brought special powers (and this there was no reason to suppose) impugning the acts of the visitors before him. However it may be, if they are to be saved from utter extinction, it behoves them to lose no time in getting Gracian, then quietly pursuing his visit in Andalucia, to sign and seal a counter- mandate setting forth that it is entirely by his authority that she has remained in Toledo, and her nuns have reformed at Paterna, and send it to her at once in Toledo. With this document in her possession, shielding her from all eventualities and future imputations, she is safe from any attack on the part of the Observants. It is to Maria de San Jose, doubtless better informed of Gracian's movements than it is possible for her to be from such a distance as Toledo, that she confides the delicate and all- important mission of forwarding her letters to Gracian without loss of time. She is at once to communicate with Fray Gregorio, and beg him in her name" for he will do it willingly for love of her"; and indeed for love of her what is there that they will not all do ? " to send them with a sure person (Diego if he is there), it being impossible to trust them to any one but a person they are very sure of ; and he must start at once, . . . and the messenger must wait until it is done, for it can be done without delay, and bring it to your reverence, and do not send to him [Gracian] unless it be with an arriero, and pay him well for his pains." For in very truth their lives depend on the speed of Juan, Pedro, or Diego whatever the honest arriero's name may be who bears those letters to Granada, Antequera, Loja, or Malaga, and brings back the reply. j We may assume that the matter was concluded to Teresa s satisfaction, for in May Gracian himself arrived in Toledo on his way to Madrid, called thither by the Nuncio, anxious to see the papers relative to his visit, and to discuss the constitutions he has meditated for the firmer establishment of the Reform, with the view of convoking a general chapter, in which it may be that the separate existence of the Descalzos will for ever be ensured. And so, " well and fat," as Teresa does not forget to inform her prioress, after preaching his Easter sermon in the Convent of Las Damas Nobles, he too speeds on to court, " where it seems, 566 SANTA TERESA says Teresa, " as if our business was doing well," following close on the heels of his rival, El Tostado, who five days before also passed through Toledo, barely spending three or four hours there in his haste to reach Madrid. And as he does so (for news travels but slowly in those days at the pace, you may say, of an arriero's donkey), the affairs of the barefooted friars look bright indeed to the woman he has left behind him in Toledo. " Now is the time when the prayers of all are needed," she writes earnestly to her prioress of Seville. . . " For now with the Lord's favour we shall see the triumph of good or the contrary. Never was prayer so necessary." Never, indeed ! for even as she wrote, Fate had for ever solved the question, and in June the Nuncio was dead. Gracian had one interview with him one interview only, in which nothing was resolved ; at the second, he was lying on his deathbed. In Rome, where Reform was never relished, the wags had made merry at his expense, and ironically dubbed him Reformator Orbis ; but at least poor old Reformator Orbis, who had devoted his life to purging monasteries and chastising dissolute friars, was neither grasping nor greedy, and the absolute poverty he died in might have taught a humiliating lesson to more than one simoniacal cardinal and purse-proud prelate. Philip himself paid for the funeral ; and so good old Ormaneto, Cardinal Legate of the great Roman Church, disappears off the stage, where, in his little day, he had made no inconsiderable stir. On the 2nd of July we hear of Gracian at Pastrana, " well, but full of trouble," as Teresa writes to her prioress, Mother Ana de San Alberto at Caravaca, where she too would be rejoiced to find herself, " if only to be beyond the reach of letters and business, and near those little ducklings and water, which must make her daughters of that convent feel like hermits." No wonder that the good Gracian is full of trouble, and that the nuns of Toledo do their best to help him in such fashion as they may by prayers and devout processions ; for although he has once more worsted the manoeuvres of his rival, in their second encounter in that " theatre of the world " (such is the title the chronicler pompously bestows on Madrid), and forced by the King and his ministers once more to resume his difficult and onerous office, re non Integra, sorely indeed against his will, and after pleading hard to be released from it, he stands alone in the breach, ready to fall a sacrifice either to the King's policy or his enemies' manoeuvres whichever way the breeze shall veer. It was for this reason, doubtless, that, oppressed by an uneasy sense of the falsity and untenableness of his position, and no longer daring to detain her as he had hitherto done on the strength FROM AUGUST TO CHRISTMAS DAY 1577 5^7 of an authority which was more than doubtful, he now resolved to transfer Teresa from Toledo to her primitive convent of San Jose of Avila. And so, towards the middle or end of July, we find him again in Toledo for the purpose of accompanying her to her native town, tranquilly cracking cocoa-nuts with the foundress and her nuns, full of childish glee and excitement at sight of the strange Indian fruit sent them by their sisters of Seville, so little suffices to bring a gleam of joy into lives undisturbed by ambition and mundane cares. So do the in- finitely little and the tragical immensity follow and precede each other in this strange tissue of alternate laughter and tragedy which goes to make up the sum of a human life. For even as they cracked the nuts, the storm was brewin g. Such at least is the scene she shows us in the last letter (the last that remains) penned by her from Toledo to Maria de San Jose", and in which we are sorry to learn that the latter's commercial speculations have proved unfortunate, the linen (doubtless spun by herself) she sent from Seville having been hawked round the houses and monasteries of half Toledo, every one holding it all too dear at four reals, and Teresa conscientiously refusing to let it go for less. We may imagine the leave-takings ere she sets out for Avila, for already death has been busy in that Toledan convent. Only a few weeks have passed away since some nameless nun has, in Teresa's phrase, " left them for heaven," and one voice the less rings through the little church. In the common sentiment of their loss those who are left only cling to one another more closely. We may fancy the heart-broken sobs of little Isabehta, whose joy at the brinquinos and serge from Seville are duly chronicled in these letters (poor little child, her bones crumbled to dust long centuries ago in some forgotten convent cloister !), as the last echo of the donkeys' feet dies out of the convent court, and the nuns, their faces stained with tears, once more bar the massive doors against the world and sounds cf men. We know nothing of her journey, but it is one that she remembers for many a long day afterwards, for besides old Fray Antonio de Jesus, did she not travel in the company ( her beloved son? "and was not he who had joined them together such, and the knot he tied so tight, that it can only be severed with life, and death will only draw it closer? In August we once more find her an inmate of San Jose (Gracian has already left for Alcala, to despatch the messengers to Rome), engaged in a difficult negotiation with the Bishop, Don Alvaro de Mendoza, and not only difficult, but one demanding consummate delicacy and tact. Indeed, it was 5 68 SANTA TERESA no less a business than to withdraw that convent from the prelate's jurisdiction, and to place it under that of the Order, thus assimilating its discipline and government to that of the other convents she had founded. What arguments she used we know not ; nor how she managed to achieve her purpose without wounding the sus- ceptibilities of the generous benefactor, to whom she and her nuns owed so much. Yet that she succeeded (Don Alvaro was already Bishop-elect of Palencia, and to this fact, that his episcopal connection with Avila was all but severed, his ready acquiescence in her proposal may have been greatly due), and even brought her nuns, many of whom were averse to the change, to her own way of thinking, may be seen by the letter she sent to him at Olmedo in August. I kiss you [she writes " your hands," she meant to say ; but Teresa was as subject to slips of the pen as the most unsaintly] for the favour you do me by your letters. ... If your lordship had seen how necessary it was for them to have as visitor one who can declare the constitutions, and knows them from having practised them, I think you would be greatly pleased, and know how great a service you have done our Lord, and benefit to this house, in not leaving it at the mercy of one who might be ignorant where the devil could and was beginning to enter, and until now without its being the fault of any one, but with the best intentions. Do not be distressed lest we should be in necessity or want for anything should the Bishop do nothing for us, for it is better that the convents should help to bear one another's burdens than that this should be in the hands of one who never in his life will feel the same love for us as your lordship. As for the rest, if we only had you here to enjoy your company (for hence comes our pain), it does not seem that we have made any change ; for we shall always be your subjects as much as ever, and so will all the prelates, especially father Gracian, whom it seems we have infected with the same love to your lordship that we bear ourselves. Well may the simple folk of her day call her Teresa the Omnipotent. For in this same letter she achieves a double object, and procures for Master Daza good Master Daza, who, after a laborious life, with old age creeping on him, would fain end his days in a fat cathedral canonry the fulfilment of his heart's desire. Not only does Teresa point out to his lordship that both God and the world (when did she ever forget it ?) will regard with favour the promotion of one who had done him much good service, but that it is a small matter on the eve of bidding farewell to Avila in comparison to leaving every one happy behind him. In short, the love borne him by every one is not as disinterested as that of the Descalzas of San Jose. And then, with the old-fashioned Castilian courtesy which never deserts her, mingled with the delicate flavour of flattery that none ever used more dexterously, she brings her letter to FROM AUGUST TO CHRISTMAS DAY 1577 569 a close: "We are vexed that you should tell us afresh to commend you to God, for of this you ought already to have been so sure, that we feel it an affront." In September a new disaster befell the Descalzos in the death of good old Bishop Covarrubias, President of the Royal Council, which gives the chronicler occasion to remark that in that same month, or the previous one of August, " a comet of extraordinary size appeared between the tropic of Cancer and the Arctic Circle, close to the sign of the Scales and the planet Mars, with a remarkably long tail, that seemed to us to sparkle like a star. It caused great astonishment, for not often has so large a thing been seen. Those who said it portended the death of some prince, accredited themselves with that of the King, D. Sebastian of Portugal, which took place the following year. The Carmelite Order was divided against itself, and the disturbance extended to others. Who shall know whether they were not the effects of the comet ? " And it seemed indeed that some evil star had shone on the fortunes of the Reform, and that it was to be swept off the face of the earth. All Teresa's worst fears are now realised. It has happened even as she said it would. If any proof is needed of her greatness, her immeasurable superiority to her friars, excellent, though dunderheaded, as they were, it may be seen in the clear, incisive manner in which she had grasped all the bearings of the struggle between the Carmelites and Descalzos, and foreseen every eventuality more than two years before in Seville, when she had written to her niece, Maria Bautista of Valladolid, that the existence of the Reform hung on the slender and precarious thread of three lives, the Pope's, the King's, and the Nuncio's. "Whichever of them fails us," she said, "we are lost, on account of our most reverend (the General) being as he is." From the first she had warned her friars returning to her theme with the weary iteration of hope deferred that nothing would be done until they boldly took the war into the enemy's camp, and sent emissaries to Rome to lay the real state of the case before the Pope and General, firmly believing, as she did, that the sight of their humble and rigorous lives would be of itself the most convincing and unanswerable reply to the calumnies of the Observants. " Believe me," she had written, "that it is a great thing to be prepared for whatever may > happen." Still, although it had been decided in the chapter of Almodovar to send Discalced friars to Rome, in spite of her warnings and appeals, every day more urgent, that no time should be lost, that money should be procured, and two com- panions sent off without delay (" do not think it an accessory 570 SANTA TERESA thing ; since it is the principal ") ; in spite of her supplications to Gracian to hasten their departure before the spring came on, the foolhardy, self-willed men around her, bent not on the "principal thing," but on frittering away their energies in founding refuges for fallen (sic) women and hypothetical monasteries in Madrid, when their very existence and that of the Order hung in the balance, deaf to the solitary voice crying in the wilderness, let the golden opportunity slip by them for ever. And at length, her dearest hopes dashed to the ground by folly and incompetence, she was fain to write with all the sadness and bitterness of a great spirit chafing against the limitations imposed on her by circumstances and sex, the following pathetic words : Know that I can do very little as to what your reverence says about going to Rome, since I have been imploring them to do it this long time, and I have never influence enough even to get them to write so much as a letter to him to whom there is so much cause to write [she refers to the General] . . . and it does not lie with our father visitor, who would already have done it. There are so many who counsel differently, that I avail little. It is painful enough for me to be able to do no more. If, barely three months before, they had listened to her when she urged on Mariano the extreme importance of placing the Reform under the protection of some cardinal, of employing an advocate amongst the curiales, no matter at what price, to circumvent the machinations of the Observants ; of getting the Spanish Ambassador to speak a word in their favour to the Pope and General, it might still have been time, and both she and they might have averted the troublous days in store for them. But nothing of this had been done, and now, when suddenly roused to a sense of their danger by the Nuncio's death, and to their own incredible folly in neglecting the so obvious precautions she had so ceaselessly impressed on them ; now, when it was too late and the mischief was done, when the friendly Nuncio was dead, and buried at the King's expense, and the no less friendly Covarrubias gone to a longer consult- ation, can no more espouse their cause in the Royal Council Chamber, we hear of Gracian rushing off to Alcala to hurry forward the departure of the messengers. It is indeed too late. For the Observants have made the most of their opportunities, and the poison has worked only too well. For our " most reverend " (the General), in spite of having fallen from his mule and crushed his leg to pieces, is unfortunately for the Descalzos still alive, and every day more embittered against Teresa and her friars. The menacing shadow of Sega's presence already envelops them as with an FROM AUGUST TO CHRISTMAS DAY 1577 571 approaching doom. For the Carmelites, enlisting on their side the powerful influence of their protector Cardinal Buonocom- pagni, whose creature Sega was, have left no stone unturned to gain the ear of the new legate Philip Sega, Bishop of Ripa in the March of Ancona, and a distant connection of Pope Gregory XIIL, and it is notoriously prepossessed against the Reform that he takes ship that July day of 1577 from the shores of Italy. In the meantime the Carmelites, wily and stubborn, confident in the expectation of his coming, prepare to give short shrift to the pestilent innovators. Tostado, sheltering himself behind the authority of the dead Nuncio, who, he alleges, had told him with his last breath that he had revoked Gracian's commission, now no longer paralysed by fear, boldly constitutes himself, pending Sega's arrival, Vicar-General of Spain, and pours out the vials of his wrath on the disobedient friars ; his commands being seconded with alacrity by his subordinates, more wrathful still. "No further foundations shall be made, no fresh novices received into the Discalced communities. All heads and superiors of monasteries to present themselves before him to receive his instructions": so Tostado thunders from Madrid. Nor does he confine himself to thunders. As Fray Antonio de Jesus passes through Toledo on his way back from escorting Teresa to Avila, the prior of the Carmelite monastery lays violent hands on him and throws him into prison, whilst Gracian, hiding in a cave of Pastrana, is afraid to show his face, lest he too should be secretly conveyed off to some Carmelite dungeon, and there quietly assassinated. All Madrid rings with the scandals daily taking place between the Carmelites and their brethren. Memorials de- famatory of Gracian and (stranger still) of Teresa herself rain in upon the Grand Inquisitor, and penetrate into the royal closet, and these not signed by the Carmelites, so true it is it is one of her own proverbs, and I may therefore use it that El pear ladron es el de casa, the worst thief is a domestic one. Fray Baltasar de Jesus the aged prior of Pastrana, whose sermons had electrified all Alcala at the opening of the Carmelite College, who had consecrated the first foundations of the Order in Andalucia, was one of the calumniators. He had never forgiven the man he had himself placed at the fronl of the Reform for having risen over his head, and it was this moment of all others that he took to wreak on him a mean and pitiful revenge, and to bespatter his fair fame with every calumny that malice and his enemies could devise. Two years before, in Seville, Teresa's keen eyes, so doubly 572 SANTA TERESA keen in anything that touched her " Sancto Sanctorum " (so she construed it), had seen the personal animus he nourished against Gracian ; and now it was his signature, the signature of one of her first friars, that the Carmelites flourished triumphantly in the eyes of the court and the world. As for the other, he was a madman, and unaccountable for his actions, and his solemn retractations were perhaps as worthy of credence as his no less solemnly attested accusations. Whereupon Teresa, stung to the quick, wrote an indignant letter to the King : The grace of the Holy Ghost be ever with your Majesty, Amen. A memorial has come to my notice which has been given to your Majesty against the father master Gracian, and I am amazed at the artifices of the devil and the Calced friars ; since, not satisfied with defaming this servant of God (for such he truly is ... ), they endeavour to sully the fair fame of these monasteries ; . . . and to this end they have made use of two Dis- calced friars, one of whom, before he became a friar, was employed in these monasteries, and has done things which clearly show that he is often not quite right in his head ; and the friars of the cloth have made use of him and other of the enemies of the father master Gracian's (since it is his duty to chastise them), making them sign such ravings, that were it not for the harm the devil can do, I should be amused at the things they ascribe to the nuns. . . . And since it is possible to inquire into the motives of the writers of these memorials, for love of our Lord, look to it, your Majesty, as a thing which touches his honour and glory ; for if they of the cloth see that notice is taken of their evidence, they will, to escape the visit, accuse him who makes it of being a heretic ; and where there is but little fear of God, it will be easy to prove it. I pity the sufferings of this servant of God, such is the rectitude and perfection with which he proceeds in all ; and this obliges me to beseech your Majesty to favour him, or to order him to be released from the occasion of these dangers since h^ is the son of your Majesty's servants, and it is not for himself that he suffers ; for truly he has seemed to me a man sent from God and his blessed Mother, his devotion to whom (and it is great) drew him to the Order, for my assistance : because for more than seventeen years I have borne with these fathers of the cloth, and I scarcely knew how to bear it longer, for my feeble strength was not enough. I beseech your Majesty to pardon me for having been so lengthy, since the great love I bear your Majesty has made me daring, considering that, since the Lord bears with my indiscreet complaints, your Majesty will do so also. And as much as any appeal could move him, the King was moved by the heartfelt appeal of his unworthy servant, Teresa de Jesus, the Carmelite. Both retracted. Fray Miguel, the madman, swore before the Host and a notary that he had written nothing of the libel, but had been forced into signing it by the menaces of the Carmelites. As for the other calumnies, they were found, on being examined into by the Royal Council, equally unworthy of credence. So that, as Teresa writes to Maria de San Jose\ " all recoils on their own backs, and turns to our good." And so old Fray Baltasar disappears into the FROM AUGUST TO CHRISTMAS DAY 1577 573 night of his obliquity (and I for one feel a pang of regret that yonder bright June day in Pastrana should end thus) to bemoan his sin, and die an exemplary death at Lisbon. In Avila the Encarnacion becomes the scene of an in- describable and unseemly scuffle between the nuns and the Calced Provincial Fray Madalena, Teresa calls him sent thither by Tostado's orders to prevent them by main force from carrying out their intention of electing Teresa a second time their prioress. And the nuns, who, to do them justice, in spite of San Juan de la Cruz and his five years' leading of them in the way of spiritual perfection, do not forget that they are sprung of the Avilas, the Munoz, the Blasquez, the Tapias, the Aguilas, the old conquistadores of their native town, are not only ready to defy fifty provincials, but Tostado into the bargain, rather than abate a tittle of their rights and privileges. I assure your reverence [writes Teresa to Maria de San Jose in Seville] that I believe nothing has ever been seen before like what is now happen- ing in the Encarnacion. About a fortnight ago to-day the Provincial of the Calzados came here by Tostado's orders to preside at the election, bringing with him severe censures and sentences of excommunication against those who should vote for me, and withal they cared no more for them than it they had not existed, and fifty-five nuns voted for me ; and at every vot they gave the Provincial, he excommunicated and cursed them and poundec [machucaba] the votes with his fist and burnt them ; and for a fortnight from to-day they have been under sentence of excommunication, without hearing mass or entering the choir, even when there is no divine service and no one, neither confessors nor their friars, are allowed to speak with them, and the most amusing part of it is that, next day -after Jhis "machucada" election, the Provincial summoned them afresh to rnak election, and they replied that there was no object in their making a ires election that they had already done so ; whereupon he again excommu, cated them, called the remaining forty and four, elected another prioress sent to Tostado to confirm it. It is already confirmed, but the rest are resolute, and declare they will not obey her [the new prioress] except as a substitute. Men of letters say they are not excommunicated ; and that t friars have gone against the Council [of Trent] in electing as prioress her who had the least number of votes. The nuns have sent to Tostado to tell him how their desire is to have me for prioress. He answers no, that if I like I can .retire there, but as for prioress, they cannot hear c patience. What manner of woman is this, who has so wound herself into the hearts of these turbulent and defiant nuns the same nuns who had awarded herself some such reception five years ago as to make them suffer imprisonment and contumely I her dear sake ? . , Whilst anarchy runs riot in the peaceful cloisters Encarnacion, Teresa, deeply distressed, writes to .Alonso de Aranda, a priest of Madrid, "to find out for chanty, il 574 SANTA TERESA possible for Tostado or the Provincial to absolve them, and to write to Master Julian de Avila, to see if he cannot get them to obey Dona Ana." . . , But this was not all. Against all right and reason, as Tostado's powers were still under discussion in the Royal Council Chamber, and it had not yet given its decision, on a cold winter's night (it was the 4th of December) an armed rabble of friars burst open the frail door of the little hut, which stood in a retired corner of the convent garden, where for the past five years Fray Juan de la Cruz and Fray German de Santo Matia had lived their simple and humble lives. For days before, in prevision of some such attack, the most dis- tinguished gentlemen of Avila (probably Lorenzo amongst them) had kept watch and ward over the dwelling of the two friars. But the Carmelites were too wily to provoke a popular tumult, and the rumour had died a natural death. The two friars were handcuffed and marched off to the Carmelite Convent of Avila, where, after receiving a sound scourging, they were locked up in separate cells until morning. Fray Juan, however, gave his jailors the slip, sped swiftly to his hut, locked the door, tore up his papers, swallowed others; after which he calmly surrendered himself up to his pursuers, who were threatening every minute to break it open. Once more constrained to wear the Carmelite habit he had renounced seven years ago in Duruelo, he was conveyed, with the utmost secrecy, to Toledo, and Fray German to Moraleja. An aggression so flagrant as to outrage every instinct of justice stung Teresa to the quick. That same night she penned an indignant appeal to the King : I believe it has come to your Majesty's ears how these nuns of the Encarnacion have endeavoured to procure my return there, thinking I might help them to free themselves from these friars. ... I placed a Discalced friar, with another companion, in a house there, so great a servant of our Lord, that they are greatly edified, and the city amazed at the enormous improvement he has effected, on which account they con- sider him a saint, which in my opinion he is and has been all his life. . . . And now a friar, who came to absolve the nuns, has so tormented them, contrary to all reason and justice, that they are in great distress, and are still subject to the same censures as before. And above all, he has deprived them of their confessors, for they say they have made him Vicar Provincial, it must be because he has more capacity than others for making martyrs. The whole town is scandalised, that, without being a prelate, nor showing any authority for acting thus (for these friars are subject to the Apostolic Commissary), they dare so much, in the case of a place so near to where your Majesty is, as if there was no such thing as justice or God. ... I would rather [she goes on] see them amongst Moors, for even they, perchance, would have more mercy. And this friar, and such a servant of God as he is, is so thin with the suffering he has gone through, that I FROM AUGUST TO CHRISTMAS DAY 1577 575 fear for his life. ... If your Majesty does not order some remedy, I know not how it will end, for we have no other on earth ! And in this instance likewise Philip showed her favour. The nuns laid their plea before the Royal Council. How it was eventually decided we do not know : but certain it is that Teresa had no mind to accept the post thrust upon her by her former subjects, although they stubbornly insisted in con- sidering the prioress elected by the minority as a mere temporary makeshift. They have sent to Tostado [she writes], to say how that it is me they wish for prioress. He says no, that I can go there if I like, but as for my being prioress, they cannot away with it. ... I would willingly excuse them (the nuns) if they would only leave me in peace, for I have no wish to see myself in that Babylon. Never to my mind has Teresa presented a nobler, more pathetic figure than when, her strong and valiant spirit great to dare and to do chafing against the limitations of sex, "which permit her to do nothing but eat and sleep," she defends her friars and nuns with powerful and heartfelt words from persecution and calumny. It is left to her, the old worn- out nun of Avila, this poor old woman on whom for more than half a year has rained every species of persecution and calumny, to hold up the banner aloft from the midst of her seclusion like the brave and valiant captain she was which was to lead the struggling band of friars and nuns behind her to sure and certain victory. It was not herself she defended, Teresa de Jesus the instrument, nor yet the Reform that Teresa de Jesus had achieved. Behind her stood unseen to all eyes but hers a woman's figure, but a woman crowned with the halo of Divinity Maria Sacratissima. Hers the Reform, Teresa de Jesus the humble follower, who for a moment had endeavoured to breathe a purer spirit into the Virgin's Order. Christmas Eve approaches once more, and a frail old woman sits always in her cell at Avila. Laying down her pen, she seems at moments to be caught up into the cloud, so does her rapt face glow with a shining and radiant glory, not surely of this earth ; at moments, crying aloud with tears and prayers, as she thinks of her banished and imprisoned sons. Amidst the raging of the storm, and the beating of all the tempests of heaven let loose upon that patient writers head, on the Eve of St. Andrew's Day she brings to a close and lays down the pen of the Moradas. In her own conception, it was far above anything she had ever written, for she says in words strangely pathetic : " It treats of nothing but him, and with 576 SANTA TERESA more delicate ornaments and enamels, for the silversmith who made it knew not so much then. The gold is of greater purity, although the gems are not so easily to be discovered as in that other one" (her Life}. On Christmas Eve she fell down on the stairs and broke her arm. As she rose, she was heard to say, " Valgame Dios, he wished to kill me " ; to which she heard an inner voice reply, " He did, but I was with thee." This made no break, however, in her voluminous correspondence (even in Toledo she had been forced to trust much of it to a secretary, who wrote from her. dictation), embracing as it did the intricate affairs of the Order, and the private difficulties and affairs of eight convents, every one of which was more deeply in debt than the other, and all of them depending on her for advice and guidance. CHAPTER XXI FROM JANUARY 1578 TO CHRISTMAS DAY HpHIS year of 1578, a strangely stirring one for the Reform opens sadly for it in Avila as elsewhere. Teresa with a broken arm ; the Convent of the Encarnacion looking so peaceful in the keen light of the winter's day down in the hollow below the town full of perturbation and distress ; Fray Antonio de Jesus hidden in the cellars of Archbishop Tavera's hospital in Toledo ; Gracian playing hide-and-seek, wielding an intermittent authority as the wind blew fair or foul Mariano watching the progress of the storm from the safe shelter of the house of powerful friends in Madrid ; Fray Juan de la Cruz a prisoner, no one knows where (Teresa thinks in Rome, but is not certain). The Carmelites, all-powerful breathing dire threats of vengeance. In the background the King and the Nuncio loom forth dimly, the two Dei ex machinA of the dark drama of intrigue and oppression, which every day becomes darker and more intricate. Events' follow each other in quick succession, rousing alternate hopes and fears, chiefly the latter: for beyond the walls of Avila, in the Court of Spain itself, the struggle has commenced wh'ich will only be ended by the total extinction of the Reform, or its creation into a separate province. In Avila, too, Teresa has much to trouble her: those poor nuns of the Encarnacion, exposed to the malicious persecu- tions of the Carmelites; she herself in bad odour with the Jesuits, and threatened with the vengeance of that powerful Order, who ascribe to her counsels and influence the resolution formed by Fray Caspar Salazar (to whom years ago she had owed so much during the troublous period preceding the foundation of San Jose) of leaving the Society of Jesus to enrol himself amongst her friars. Such are the immediate difficulties. Her letters tell us how she solved them. As for the Encarna- cion, the nuns, intimidated by the Provincial " Fray Madalena " and Valdemoro, the " terrible " friar of the Carmelites of Avila, have been terrified into signing the exact opposite of the plea' 37 578 SANTA TERESA they had already signed and laid before the Royal Council Chamber of Madrid ; Teresa herself counselling them to obey ; " for I do not think they would have done so if I had not sent to them to say that they were prejudicing their case." But she is a dangerous adversary, that little old nun of Avila, and by no means to be played with. Well may the Carmelites wish her at the bottom of the deep sea. The Provincial, with those signatures in his wallet, already tasting the delights of an anticipatory triumph, may spur on his mule as fast as he likes over the snowy plateaux, in his haste to brandish them in the faces of the nuns' advocates at Madrid ; but she is beforehand with him, and ere the friar alights at his monastery gates, I doubt not that her letter, in which she parries the stroke as best she can by making it clearly under- stood to Roque de Huerta, Mayordomo of his Majesty's woods and forests, and Secretary of the Royal Council, that they have been obtained by force, " so that the Council may not be misled by the representations of those fathers, since it has been a tyranny throughout," is already in that gentleman's possession. In spite of which, however, having no mind to find herself again in "that Babylon of the Encarnacion," she is equally clear that the nuns' suit to make her prioress should not be pressed forward in the Council, and so she tells him. A warn- ing which was quite unnecessary. Their cause dragged on its weary course amidst the usual impediments of official delays, and perhaps, for all we know, lingered on for years more. The last we hear of the nuns of the Encarnacion is that it has reverted to its usual state that is, laxity and disorder. As for the Jesuits there was no Jesuit of them all that could outwit her to the angry remonstrances of the Provincial Juarez and the Rector of Avila, Gonzalo de Avila, who desired her to write a peremptory refusal to Salazar, and send a man- date to the heads of her Order not to receive him, she returned a reply so aigre douce, and withal so powerful and convincing, that it would seem to have deprived them of any further wish to return to the subject. I have [she writes] read the father Provincial's letter twice over, and still find in it such a want of consideration for me, and himself so convinced of what has not even entered my thoughts, that his paternity need not be astonished that it gave me pain. This of itself is of little consequence, since if it were not for my imperfections, I ought rather to be gratified that his paternity should mortify me, as it is in his power to do with one who is his subject. And as the father Salazar is his subject also, it seems to me that it would be more efficacious for you to stop him than for me to write what your Grace desires to those who are not under my control ; since it is the duty of his superior to do so, and they [her friars] on their side would be FROM JANUARY 1578 TO CHRISTMAS DAY 579 perfectly justified in paying scant attention to what I said to them. . . Judging by what he says, I know he will not take such a step without the Provincial's knowledge, and if he does not speak or write to his paternity, it means that he will not. And if by refusing him his permission his paternity can prevent him taking it, I should injure so grave a person, and so great a servant of God, in defaming him throughout the Order (even supposing they paid attention to me) ; it being a grave libel to say that he wishes to do what he cannot do without offending God. I have spoken to your Grace with all truth, and in my opinion I have done what I was obliged to do in honour and in Christianity [we may be (certain she did]. The Lord knows I speak truth in this ; and to do more than I have done, would be to act contrary to both. ... I am almost sure that if the business does not turn out according to your Grace's wish, I shall be blamed as much as if I had done nothing ; and to have spoken with him [Salazar] is enough to cause the fulfilment of the prophecies. The Provincial's letter [she writes to Gracian, to whom she forwards it in Alcald] displeased me greatly, so much so that I would fain have answered him more sharply than I have ; for I know he [Salazar] had told him that I had nothing to do with this change, as is true, for, when I knew it, I was greatly distressed, and exceeding desirous it should go no farther. I wrote him as strong a letter as I could, using the same words, I swear to you as in my answer to the Provincial ; for they have got to such a pass, that I thought that, unless I insisted on it as strongly as I did, they would not believe me, and it is important for them to do so, on account of the revelations he [Salazar] speaks of, so that they do not think that by that way I have per- suaded him, since it is so great a lie. But I tell your paternity that I fear their threats so little that I am amazed at the freedom God gives me ; and so I told the father rector that neither the Company nor the whole world would make me abandon any- thing I knew was to his service, and that I had had nothing whatever to do with this matter, nor would I take any part in persuading him to abandon it. He besought me, that although I refused to do this, to write him [Salazar] a letter, telling him what I tell him in this, that he cannot do it without being excommunicated. I asked, if he [Salazar] was aware of these briefs. He replied, better than I am myself. I then said, in that case I am certain that he will do nothing that he knows is an offence to God. He answered, that still his eagerness might be great enough to make him deceive himself and drive him into it ; and so I wrote to him a letter by the same means whereby he wrote me this. Behold, your paternity, what simplicity ; for I know clearly by certain indications that they had seen the letter ; although I did not tell him so. And I told him therein not to trust his brethren, for they [who betrayed] Joseph, were his brothers also ; because I knew they would see it, since his very friends must have disclosed it ; and I am not surprised, for they take it overmuch to heart. Their dread must be of ever allowing even the beginning of such a thing. I asked him if some amongst them had not been Discalced friars. He said, yes, Franciscans ; but that they had been cast out of their own order first, which had afterwards granted them licenses. I answered ; that they could do the same now : but this they by no means agree to, nor do I agree to tell him not to take the step, only to warn him, as I do in that letter, and leave it to God, for if it is his doing they will give way, for (as I tell him therein) I have informed myself, and cer- 5 8o SANTA TERESA tainly it can be done in no other sort, because they will appeal to common law as at the time of the foundation of Pastrana, when another lawyer per- suaded me to take the Augustinian, and he was in the wrong. That the Pope will give him license I do not believe, for there they will be beforehand with him. Let your paternity also inform yourself and warn him, for it would distress me greatly if he were to commit any offence against God. I certainly believe that as soon as he knows it is one, he will desist. It gives me great anxiety ; because if he remains amongst them after they know the desire he has of joining us, they will no longer hold him in the same reptfta- tion as formerly ; and I ever bear in view what we owe to the Company ; for I do not believe that God will let them do us harm. If, being able to do so, we do not receive him, solely through fear of them, this is to treat him badly, and to requite him but ill for his affection. God direct it, for he will guide him, although I fear lest he may have been moved by these revelations [literally " things of prayer "], for they say he believes them too readily. I have often told him so, and to no avail. It also distresses me to think that the nuns of Veas must have had something to do with it, so eager about it was Catalina de Jesus. He is certainly a servant of God, and if he deceives himself, it is because he thinks that he wishes it, and his Majesty will look after him. But he has put us in a hurly-burly : and, as I wrote to your paternity, if I had not heard what I did from Josef (Christ), believe me I would have left no stone unturned to prevent it. But although I do not believe these things [revelations] so much as he does, I am loath to put impediments in the way. How do I know if by doing so I am not standing in the way of his soul receiving some great good ? Salazar did not, so far as we can learn, carry out his inten- tion ; for we find Teresa regretting afterwards that an undue regard for the friendship of " those of Jesus " may have led her to stand in the way of a veritable vocation. It is in the letters, unceasingly flowing, spite of broken arm and all, from the active pen of this old woman sitting in her quiet cell at Avila, that we must follow the strange history of the Carmelite Reform. Misty and uncertain as it is ; such a faint ghost of the emotions which filled her heart and so many other hearts of friars and nuns, still it is less misty and uncertain than the confused account of the chronicler. We feel that we here grasp the truth, or the reflex of what was once the truth that is, until some diligent inquirer, losing his time in investigating the obscure growth of an old-world Order in the archives of Simancas and the National Library of Madrid, shall give the result of his researches to a commercial world which will not care for them. Here, though, we have the visible events as they touched on, and were reflected from, one Teresa de Jesus, the author of them ; and can watch her (all other action being denied to this strong and capable spirit by the accident of sex) as she guides that Reform which it has been her Life's labour to achieve through the shoals and pitfalls which at every moment threaten to engulf and bring it to nought. The marvellous clairvoyance, the FROM JANUARY 1578 TO CHRISTMAS DAY 581 swift and unerring instinct with which she strips this troublous affair of all its mazes and complications from the most con- tradictory reports smelling out the truth, in her grasp of the whole, losing sight of no detail, however insignificant (as no detail if properly considered ever is) is akin to genius rather is it the practical essence of genius. A profound psychologist, knowing how the greatest shocks and most violent tempests may be traced to some trifling weakness, some almost impercep- tible flaw, she alone can manage the various characters of her headstrong friars, and weld them into harmonious action; putting at their service her own consummate tact and knowledge of things and people ; knowing at once when to conciliate and when to stand firm. They were all good men, might perhaps have been remarkable men had not their individuality been shadowed by her own these friars who propped up the Reform, and all as equally convinced that their own methods were the best. All except Gracian, whose fatal ductility made him the easy prey of a stronger will. Differing exceedingly in character, Mariano, impetuous and fiery, with a biting tongue which cut like acid, and made the Nuncio writhe ; a persona grata with the King ; shifting, intriguing, consumed with activity, ever full of new schemes for extending the Reform, and neglecting the most rudimentary precautions to protect its very existence, losing by some headstrong sally the ground gained by painful effort. Fray Antonio de Jesus, full of the peculiar susceptibilities and narrownesses which so often belong to the consciousness of rigid virtue; inclined to small jealousies, itching to take a prominent part in the affairs of the Order ; for the most part a shadowy figure in the background. Gracian, the King's secretary's son, sweet-tempered, lovable, fascinating, " who wrote like an angel and feared like a man," of tender and scrupulous conscience, " not fit," says Teresa, " to struggle between the contending forces of contrary opinions," mild as milk, unsus- picious, gentle. If left alone Teresa could have moulded him to her will. As she watches the faltering action of her friars in Madrid, her great spirit chafing often at their blunders, want of tact, adroitness, initiative, and energy, when all depended on it ; at opportunities neglected, and made little of, and points by the score given away to the enemy, she feels what she cannot help but feel, that never were the qualities that shone in her so conspicuous amidst all her sanctity so urgently needed by the Reform as now. From the first, when two years ago she hac written to the King from Seville, she had foreseen that the only possible solution to end the discords between the two branches of the Order, perhaps the only condition of the Descalzos 5g2 SANTA TERESA remaining in existence at all, was to sever the latter from the Observants and erect them into a separate province. A bold and energetic step, which she had proposed in bold and energetic words. " For forty years," she wrote to Philip, " have I lived in this Order, and, all things considered, I clearly know that if the Discalced friars are not formed into a separate province, and that, shortly, much harm will be done, and I hold it impossible that they can go on." But he to whom she wrote was neither bold nor energetic. The letter was read yes, carefully docketed, we may be sure, probably some foolish remark (for Philip's extreme prudence was of the kind most akin to folly) scrawled on the margin in his untidy handwriting but that was all ; and now the troubles, then scarcely larger than a man's hand, have become so fierce and burning as to arouse the attention of all Spain. Long before Ormaneto's death we have seen how earnestly she advised and how her advice was as persistently disregarded that the Descalzos should strain every nerve to send emissaries to Rome, to countermine the manoeuvres of the Observants, already busy poisoning the minds of the Roman Court against them. In her plaintive letter to Roca she mourns that she is not able to get them to write even a conciliatory letter to the General, much less to send advocates to Rome ; for to the last the loyal woman clung to the hope that as he had laid the foundation, so he (Rubeo) might conclude this edifice of the Reform. " I tell you," are her heartfelt words to Gracian, the most facile of them all, " I am in despair that I have not the freedom to be able to do what I tell you to do." Of the expediency of the latter step of sending representa- tives to Rome, she would seem at last to have convinced them, since at the close of 1577 she mentions Gracian as being in Alcala, to hurry forward their departure; but the matter languished during the brunt of persecution subsequent to the arrival in Madrid of the Bird of Evil Omen, Tostado, who had returned determined to crush out the Discalced Carmelites, root and branch. Re non integra, the theologians of Alcala and Madrid, having decided that Gracian's commission was in no way invalidated by the Nuncio's death, Covarrubias, President of the Council, ordered him to continue his visit, when the arrival of Sega, the Papal legate, presents a new and terrible factor in the difficulties which every moment seem to be crowding thicker and faster round the devoted friar's head. Already violently predisposed against the Descalzos, the Nuncio had barely landed in Barcelona when he was deafened with the loud and bitter complaints of the Carmelites, who had FROM JANUARY 1578 TO CHRISTMAS DAY 583 sped thither to meet him and conduct him to Madrid, and all he now heard served to make that prepossession stronger, and to breed a rankling irritation in his mind against the Descalzos that was not slow of manifesting itself. The Nuncio's first act sufficiently showed his intentions as regarded the Reform. The orders of Tostado his bold assertion of supreme authority had left the five friars, Gracian and his companions, irresolute as to what steps to take, when the King, who feared neither Pope nor censure where the religious affairs of Spain were concerned, interposed the Supreme Council, and Tostado found himself again baffled in his attempts to stifle the Reform by a royal mandate ordering him to deliver up his commission and the secret orders by which he acted, and he had nothing for it but to obey. Such was the state of things when Sega arrived in Madrid ; Tostado, actively engaged in persecuting and extirpating the Reform, on the one hand stubbornly maintaining the powers given him by the Chapter of Plasencia ; on the other, dragging on a slow and lingering suit with the fiscal of the Council. Whilst it was still dragging itself along, the Nuncio landed. With the train so well prepared for him, the Nuncio had only to light the match, so he may have thought, to end the Descalzos for ever. He was destined, however, to find it a tougher business than he had bargained for, and to leave Spain a sadder and a wiser man. From the first Philip's attitude had been anomalous and undecided. Was it that he took a strange delight in watching the bitter struggles going on around him of two branches of the same Order ; or that, still desirous of maintaining friendly relations with Rome, he would do nothing to imperil them ; or that, engaged in other matters, his interest in this was merely intermittent? Or was it merely another instance of the inherent indecision and irresolution of his character? None shall ever know. Yet he held the balance, and at the precise moment when the Calzados were surest of their victory, and had their enemies in their clutch, without finally ending the struggle, he gives the Descalzos a breathing space, and gives them just enough strength, and no more, to renew the contest. The Nuncio's first act was to renew Tostado's edicts against the Discalced friars, forbidding them to make any further foundations without his permission. His next, to rummon Gracian before him to deliver up his powers and the papers relating to his visit, especially those relating to his proceedings against delinquents. And this the friar would gladly have done, if besides the 584 SANTA TERESA Nuncio he had not had to reckon with the King. As it was, prudently refusing to comply with a mandate which would have left both himself and the Order at the Nuncio's mercy, he shelters himself behind the King, alleging that, since it was by Philip's orders that he had undertaken the office, he could not deliver up his papers without his permission. The Nuncio, not daring so early in the day to provoke an open rupture with Philip, dissembles his anger as best he may, although it is only too distinctly visible to the trembling friar. Retiring in some confusion from the presence of the irritated legate, he takes counsel with Archbishop Quiroga, who, after telling him con- temptuously that he has no more spirit than a fly, bids him go to the King, and when the wretched man fears that by so doing he may make the Nuncio more angry still, meets him with the cold response " that to the Superior all may go ! " Excellent advice, no doubt, for the High Inquisitor and Archbishop of Toledo ; perhaps not so good for the Discalced friar, who finds himself placed between two opposing forces, who would most probably, nay, most certainly, agree in one thing only, in laying the blame and odium of whatever happened on the weakest of the trio. So to the King he went a brown, whitecaped figure, with sandalled feet, brushing for a moment through royal corridors ; yet bearing on his shoulders the present fortunes and future fate of a powerful Order; and was bidden by his Majesty (one would have given much to be present at that interview) to retire to his monastery until the matter could be looked into. And during an interval of nine months, whilst the King's secretaries write to Rome, and the Royal Council, bent on foiling the Nuncio, insists on seeing his authorities for interfering with the religious Orders of Spain, Gracian remains inactive at Alcala, or concealed in one of the caves on the hill- side of Pastrana. As for Tostado, the Royal Council makes short work with his Vicar-Generalship, the Fiscal Chumacero opposing him at every turn, until, baffled and worsted, he once more disappears as he had come, some said to Portugal, others to Rome ; his destination a matter of indifference to the Descalzos, so long as they are rid of the shadow of his presence. In February Gracian emerges from his cave to preach his Lenten sermons. " For God's sake, take care that you do not fall on those roads," warns Teresa, thinking ruefully of her own broken arm, "still swollen, and the hand too, and with a bandage on like a coat of mail," besides the danger of travelling in such troublous times, except in a case of the greatest necessity (for the Carmelites are now so blinded with rage as to dare FROM JANUARY 1578 TO CHRISTMAS DAY 585 anything). " I know not what tempts you to go from place to place, since there are souls [to look after] everywhere." At last, driven to extremities and well-nigh desperate, the Descalzos resolve to convoke a Chapter and elect a Provincial of their own. It was a step fraught with the most important consequences. To elect a Provincial meant the erection of the Reform into a self-governing province, and its complete severance once and for ever from the main body of the Carmelites. Such is the scheme that the prior of Mancera, Fray Juan Roca, as he passes through Avila, breathes into Teresa's ear. Anxious is the consultation that takes place, when he is gone, in that little dark locutory of San Jose. From the great leathern chairs, polished by age, which still stand before the grating, the Doctor Rueda, " a great man of letters," and good Master Daza, gravely proffer their advice advice which she embodies in that memorable letter she sends to Gracian early in April, in which she does her best to dissuade him from an ill-considered and illegal action, whose consequences must recoil upon himself and lend colour to the calumnies of their enemies. Both, she writes (for she characteristically suppresses herself), unite in saying that it is an arduous thing to attempt, unless Gracian's commission contains special powers to that effect; the more difficult, inasmuch as it involves a question of jurisdiction, the power to elect a Provincial being exclusively confined to the Pope or General. Thus not only will their votes be worthless, and the whole proceedings null and void, but the Observants will need nothing more in order to appeal to the Pope, and cry out loudly that the Descalzos are openly rebellious, and arrogate to themselves an authority they have no right to, "which would have an ugly sound." Moreover, any election they may make will have to be confirmed by Rome, and it will be far more difficult to get the Pope to sanction it after it is made than to get his license in the first place to make it ; for he has only to see one word written by the King to his ambassador to give it willingly, especially if he is told how the Descalzos are faring at the hands of the Observants. " It might be," she adds, " that if the matter was brought before the King he would gladly do it, since, even as regards the Reform, his favour would be of great assistance ; as it would make the Observants hold us in more esteem, and think twice about undoing us." From a few passages in this letter we can see how she la her delicate intuition and woman's wit at the service of her rougher-handed friars ; indirectly bringing before us that strange world of superstition and conviction, we of a modern age have 586 SANTA TERESA kept the superstition, but lost the conviction, in which Teresa de Jesus the Carmelite was such a prominent figure. If the King is to speak that saving word to his ambassador in Rome, he must be got at through his confessor, the wills of the great Roman princes and ambassadors of the Church conciliated by a judicious tickling of their palms. I know not whether it were well that your paternity should treat of it with father Master Chaves [Philip's confessor aforesaid], who is very judicious, and would perhaps, if we get him to use his influence on our behalf, get the King to do it ; and if so, the same friars [the ones already fixed upon] must at once set forth with his letters to Rome . . . for, as Dr. Rueda says, the direct road and way is through the Pope or General. I assure you that, if father Padilla and all of us had joined in effecting this matter through the King, it would have been accomplished now ; and moreover, your paternity yourself might bring it before him and the Archbishop (Quiroga) ; for if, after the Provincial's election is made, it has still to be confirmed, and you need the King's favour for that purpose, it is better to secure his protection now ; and even if you effect nothing, you will not incur the stigma and disgrace that you will if, after making the election, you cannot get it confirmed, and it remains a lasting blemish ; and your paternity is discredited for having done that which you had no power to do, and for not having known it. The mere thought that they will lay all the blame on you, and with some show of reason, makes me become a very coward, which I am not wont to do, rather does my boldness wax greater when they act thus without any ; and so I have lost no time in writing this, so that you may look well to it. Do you know what I have thought ? That perchance some of the things I have sent our father General are being made use of against us (for they were of great esteem) and have been given to cardinals, and it has occurred to me to send him nothing until these matters are settled ; and so it might be well, if occasion offered, to give something to the Nuncio. I see, my father, that when your paternity is in Madrid you do much in a day, and that, what with speaking with one and another, and the efforts of your friends in the palace, and father Antonio with the Duchess [of Alba or Pastrana ?], much might be done to induce the King to grant this, since his desire is to preserve the Descalzos ; and as father Mariano speaks with the King, he might bring it before his notice and beseech him to do it ; and remind him how long that "Santico" of fray Juan has been a prisoner. In short, the King gives ear to all : I know not why he should not be spoken to about it, nor why father Mariano especially should not urge it. But alas ! alas ! what can a woman do, tied to a quiet cell in Avila, except pray and mourn, whilst her friars blunder for want of capable personal direction. In spite of all Teresa's remonstrances and cogent reasoning, the Chapter was held a few months after. Its immediate results were disastrous, but indirectly the Descalzos owed their deliverance to this bold act of rebellion. That word from the King to his ambassador, which would not only make them rise in the esteem of their enemies, who in the face of it would no longer dare to urge their extermination FROM JANUARY 1578 TO CHRISTMAS DAY 587 with such animosity, but would give them a fresh lease of existence, was never sent ; and two days afterwards she again implores Gracian not to risk the danger of being taken prisoner by the Carmelites, " since now they are all on the lookout for your paternity," by accompanying his mother and sister to Avila on their way to Valladolid, where the latter is about to enter Teresa's convent. The visit, which she had not expected so soon, fills her hospitable mind, anxious that her visitors should see her convent at its best, with distress ; for the choir is unroofed and full of workmen, and it is impossible for her to salute Da. Juana through the grating as she had hoped. The travellers arrived in Avila at nightfall on the 25th of April. A strange little company, if you could have seen it but not at all strange then clattering through those old gray twilight streets on donkeys and mules to Lorenzo's house Lorenzo himself having gone to Madrid and Seville. They too listen, from some stately old bedchamber hung with arras we can fancy it, to the clang of the great cathedral bells tolling out on the midnight air, until falling asleep, the brain still repeating by some reflex action the rhythmical cadence of hoofs sinking in the sand, amidst distorted dreams of mountain passes hemmed in by mountain fastness and boiling river, and para- meras green and flowery with the promise of spring, the little world of Avila, and every other world, are blotted out as completely from experience and sensation as if they had never been. On the morrow Teresa embraces her friend at the convent door, and the day after they set out for Valladolid. " I should have much desired that the Senora Da. Juana had not gone on, but your paternity has made this angel so in love with Valladolid that our prayers were unavailing to induce her to remain here. Oh, how I long for her sister, her of the Doncellas" (the school for noble maidens founded by Archbishop Siliceo), " who from ignorance will not let herself be remedied, although she would have a much easier life than where she is.' But she at least will have none of Teresa's convents, and eventually marries an honest oidor of Segovia. On the ;th of May the news that Tostado has left Spain is confirmed " there is nothing to fear. . . . But oh ! my father, I forgot, the woman sent by the prioress of Medina at no small cost to her, as the cure was no less to mine, came to set my arm. The wrist was useless, so the pain and agony was terrible, it being so long since my fall ; withal I rejoiced in being able to taste, however little, somewhat of the sufferings endured by our Lord." The nuns remembered other details of this cure, which are diligently set down by Yepes. After sending them 588 SANTA TERESA all away to the choir to pray for her whilst it was going on, she was left alone with the " curandera " and her companion, a stout peasant woman. The two pulled at her arm by sheer force until the shoulder-bone cracked in the socket, leaving her arm little better than it was, and the sufferer in intense pain. Neither cry nor murmur escaped her lips during the cruel process, and when the nuns returned they found her as tranquil and composed as they had left her. The famous " curandera " again a picture of manners lodges in Lorenzo's house, and is sorely put to it by the crowds of people who flock to her to be " cured." On the 4th of June, a letter one of those sheets of paper so familiar to us, the large irregular writing become by this time a little tremulous (it may still be seen by those curious in such things in the convent of Valladolid) starts with the mule train for Seville. In it she thanks Maria de San Jose for her jars of orange-flower water and conserves : " Do not think, however, I eat such a quantity as you send ; but I shall never in my life lose this habit I have of giving." Her arm is better, but she cannot dress herself, nor will she ever again, although they asure her that the warm weather will make it well. Maria de San Jose, too, is in distress pains in her side, fever, and a mad nun, for whose ravings Teresa recommends a cudgel, " people out of their minds being less sensitive to pain than others." We also learn an important bit of news a bit of news which shines like a ray of light amidst the chronological confusion worse confounded of the chronicler : " Our father, with the Lord's favour, will go thither (to Seville) in September, and perhaps before, for he has now had orders to continue his visit, as you there will know." For Gracian has now had that famous interview with Pazos, the successor of the dead Covarrubias as President of the Royal Council. Once more has he pleaded to be released from his commission, which Pazos, phlegmatic, slow-brained, inspired himself by a certain dogged sense of Duty, tells him is impossible, it being God's will and the King's (chiefly, indeed, I think the latter's) ; that he, Pazos, would also be fain to be rid of the office he holds, if it were not for this same dogged sense of Duty. Gracian despairingly says he will go to the Nuncio ; to which Pazos, determined as only phlegmatic people can be, answers " No ! " And so, with good store of edicts in his wallet, with which to enlist the aid of secular force if needful, he starts off to commence his visit in Valladolid. The position of the Carmelite Reformers becomes every moment more precarious. Tostado, indeed, has flitted away; FROM JANUARY 1578 TO CHRISTMAS DAY 589 and the shadow of his presence no longer hangs threateningly over them : but Sega, the Papal Nuncio, has himself resolved to take the reins of government into his own hands. Stung to fury by what he chose to regard as his subjects' insubordina- tion, losing sight of all the restraints which prudence and the anomalous attitude of Philip himself imposed, he rushed into a precipitate and ill-considered action an action which seemed immediately to portend the ruin of the Reform, and eventually proved its salvation. Heedless that his powers rested on a most tremulous foundation, for he had not yet displayed his warrants to the Royal Council, on the 22nd of July he issued a brief annulling Gracian's visit, and ordering him to deliver up his papers under pain of excommunication latce sententia. On the 9th of August the Royal Council parried the Nuncio's brief by a warrant to the governors of all cities and towns throughout the kingdom to intercept the circulation of the Nuncio's briefs and mandates. And in the meantime, although in March the Count of Tendilla's journey to Rome seemed to afford a favourable opportunity for the friars to travel in his train, March has come and gone, and with it June, July, and August, and nothing has been done to lay the true state of the case before the aged General, or to circumvent the machination of their enemies. In May, Teresa had written to the procrastmators that the " time is going by without our sending to Rome, and we are all ruined with hoping, and may hope on for a thousand years more. I do not understand it, nor why Nicolas does not go." . . . Thus with no hope of redress from Rome, the Descalzos had nothing for it but to humbly obey the Nuncio; Mariano even curbing his hot temper, briefly signified his obedience. The prioress of Valladolid followed his example ; Teresa's active advice to all her convents is to obey. Gracian alone, writing to Teresa from Valladolid, so o changing his cyphers without warning that she can no longer read them, manages to evade the Nuncio's brief. For on one of those August nights a strange scene took place in Valladolid. The moonbeams fall full on a band of stalwart monks (headed by Fray Hernandez de Medina, a former Descalzo, "for the worst thief, etc.") battering at the gates of San Alejo, in pursuit of Gracian. As this was going on Don Geronimo de Tobar (who he may be we know not, nor why he so quixotically espouses a quarrel not his own, although we can see him rapier, cape, plumed cap, and all) sets on the 590 SANTA TERESA friars' following. The street rings for a moment with the clash of swords, and blades flash bright in the moon-rays ; whilst the two friars, Gracian's companions, scale the walls unnoticed, and slip away into the neighbouring fields. All Valladolid wakes up. Bishop Mendoza (Teresa's Don Alvaro) sends out his servants with torches to look for the fugitives, and shelters them in his palace one of the great grim old palaces which have witnessed in those dim days so many strange scenes and notable events. Here from the street before it, through the open door, the notary intones the brief, presently assuring the Nuncio that he had served it on Gracian himself. Which was false (like most other things done in the name of the law), for, warned beforehand, he had remained that night in the house of a certain " relator," his relative. On the loth of August the brief was served on the nuns of San Jose* of Avila. All the Discalced convents are tremulous with excitement and anxiety. Teresa, always self-possessed and tranquil, calmly weighing every issue in that shrewd old head of hers " To-morrow we will arrange for Julian de Avila to go to Madrid for the purpose of recognising the Nuncio as our head, and pleading with him warmly on our behalf not to deliver us over to the Calzados ; and I will likewise write to several people to soften him with regard to your paternity." For Gracian was now a fugitive, giving the slip to his enemies, already on the alert to arrest him. Between the loth and nth of August he stole through Avila on his way to the Escorial and Madrid. The sight of the son she loved more deeply than any of her friars, fleeing like a male- factor, afraid to show his face in the light of day, affected the brave old woman deeply. Better could she have borne that the blows should have fallen on herself than on her Paul ; but her steadfast confidence in the final issue of the struggle not a whit abated, Teresa only saw the extreme danger of his position, placed prominently in the breach, ready to fall a victim at any moment to the King's diplomacy or the Nuncio's vengeance. " As far as you can without angering the King, keep aloof from this fire, whatever Father Mariano may say," Mariano, the hot- tempered and choleric, whom she still blames for those first disasters at Seville, " for your paternity's conscience is not for these affairs of contrary opinions, since you are distressed even by that which there is no cause to fear, as has happened lately, and all the world will look upon it as wise : let them settle their disputes themselves. In order, as I have said, to keep aloof, your paternity needs all your wisdom to prevent it looking like fear, except that of offending God." . . . The only remedy left to them is the erection of a separate province. " Treat of the FROM JANUARY 1578 TO CHRISTMAS DAY 591 province in every way you can, no matter on what conditions ; for all lies in this, and even the Reform itself. And this ought to be negotiated with the King and President, Archbishop, and all of them, who must be told of the scandals and warfare that have arisen from its not having been done. . . . Your paternity will know how to say it better than I," adds this most consummate of diplomatists and humblest of saints, " and it is very foolish of me to mention it here, except that, amongst your other anxieties, it may escape your memory. I know not whether it will be Pedro who will bear this to you, for he cannot find a mule,"- Pedro being that muleteer whose unseemly jest she had once reproved on one of her journeys by telling him he would yet be a friar, and now her faithful servant. Just now Pedro and his mule (a borrowed one it would seem) are kept hard at it, riding between Madrid and Avila, and farther afield yet, for these are stirring times, and Teresa is as busy warning her nuns how they are to receive the Nuncio's brief as the Carmelites are in serving it. So daily from her cell in Avila, does her firm and skilful hand navigate this frail bark of the Reform through the storms that lower over it into a calm and peaceful sea. On the 1 9th, in five days, Pedro is back in Avila, with a letter from her friar at court, full of buoyant hope. To which Teresa, whom no hopes could elate unduly nor storms cast down, serene and unmovable, answers calmly : " The letter Pedro has brought has delighted us greatly, so full is it of good hopes which apparently will not fail of fulfilment. May our Lord bring it about, according as it may be most to his service. Withal, until I know that Paul has spoken to Methuselah [the Nuncio], I am not without anxiety. ... By every possible means, or however you can, on whatever conditions, let your paternity effect the matter of the province, for even though other trials will not be wanting, it is important to be in safety. When your paternity shall understand," continues the prudent Teresa, who has studied human nature, and probed its weak- nesses far more deeply than her friars, "that it is advisable to make some acknowledgment to the Nuncio, advise us." It would also be well, she adds, that his first visit to the Nuncio should be made in company of that resolute partisan of the Reform, the Count of Tendilla ; and if God should favour them so far as that the Descalzos are made into a separate province, messengers must be at once sent to the General in Rome ; for to the last she clings to the hope that her Discalced friars will still become his most cherished subjects. " Withal, until I know that Pablo has spoken to Methuselah [the Nuncio], and how it 5Q2 SANTA TERESA has fared with him, I am not without anxiety." Pedro bears other news as he rides into Avila on his tired mule at the close of that August day, news which has electrified all Spain the death of the King of Portugal, the brave and quixotic Don Sebastian, the knight-errant of those times, who has been swallowed up in Africa nay, has been swallowed up so com- pletely and mysteriously, that even to-day strange dreamers on Portuguese soil are awaiting his return ! And Teresa's pen writes on : letters to the Nuncio (what has become of them no one knows) ; to the Dominican Chaves, who holds the keys of the royal conscience ; to the Jesuit, Hernandez, the countryman and friend of the President of the Royal Council; a whole volume of letters, so says Yepes, who had seen them, to Roque de Huerta, his Majesty's mayordomo of woods and forests ; to Mariano, whom she beseeches to plead with the Princess of Eboli for the release of San Juan de la Cruz. But August drawing to its close still finds Gracian hiding like a criminal in the house of Don Diego Peralta, whom Teresa had besought in a former letter not to leave her hunted friar until he had seen him placed in safety and beyond the danger of assassination, " for I am terrified at these wayside murders." Fearful of appearing in the light of day, he has baffled all the efforts of the Carmelites to serve him with the brief; but the interview with the Nuncio is as far off as ever, and his letter to Teresa is full of gloomy and melancholy foreboding. And Teresa deprecates as folly his placing himself in the Nuncio's power until the latter shall have been smoothed over by the President in whose presence the first interview should, if possible, take place. In the meantime, Roca, prior of Mancera, going to court to settle some disputes as to a foundation in Valladolid, in doubt whether to apply to the Royal Council or to the Nuncio, was advised by his friends to have recourse to the latter. " Certain I am," he said, " that I shall at once be made a prisoner ; but let us go, and rather err by the advice of others." The event proved that he was right. The Nuncio, refusing to listen to him, confined him in the Carmelite convent. At last, in answer to his repeated supplications for a hearing, one day the Nuncio arrives at the convent gates, where he is met by the friars and brethren, all but Fray Juan. It is for him, however, that the Nuncio has come, and he is sent for to the choir. He prostrates himself at the legate's feet, who bids him rise. " Are you that Fray Juan de Jesus who has written me so many notes ? " " Si, seilor." " Well, what do you want ? " " On behalf of my FROM JANUARY 1578 TO CHRISTMAS DAY 593 Descalzos it behoves me to speak to your most illustrious in secret." The prior and friars file out, leaving the two alone in the empty choir. Boldly did good Fray Juan defend the Reform and its originator ; but at Teresa's name, the Nuncio, convulsed with rage, broke into violent invectives. " That restless, roving, disobedient, contumacious female, who under the cover of devotion invents evil doctrine ; leaving the retirement of the cloister to gad about against the order of the Council of Trent and her superiors : teaching as if she were a master, against the teachings of St. Paul, who ordered that women should not teach." This was his mildest language. For a moment the friar stood thunderstruck and speechless before the Nuncio's fierce gestures and towering rage ; but only for a moment. The " Rock of Bronze " was not to be moved so easily. With warmth and energy he undertook Teresa's defence, endeavoured to show what manner of woman this really was whom the Nuncio abused so roundly ; defended, indeed, her and her Reform so eloquently as to leave the Nuncio musing and half convinced. Then, seeing him calmer and more reasonable, he proposed point-blank the formation of the Descalzos into a separate province. After a long argument, in which Roca displayed all the resources of his wit and ingenuity, the Nuncio rose to go, saying significantly as he did so, " I give you my word not to subject you to the Calzados. Write to all the convents to come to me in all that may occur, for I myself will take charge of your government and increase." But the warrant of the 9th of August, which intercepted his briefs and restrained him in the exercise of his authority, changed these favourable sentiments into animosity and anger, and he swore to deliver over the Descalzos bound hand and foot to their adversaries. It was then that the friars, oblivious alike of Pope and General, whose authority alone was competent to such an act, were hurried into the fatal course of separating themselves from the main body of the Carmelites and erecting themselves into a province of their own. We have seen how, so early as April, Teresa had pointed out to Gracian, who would also seem to have conceived some such project, he, with some show of reason, being still Apostolic Commissary, tha 4 -, in the opinion of such learned and capable counsellors as Daza and the Doctor Rueda, the Pope or the General alone could take a step so decisive and momentous ; that for them to do so would only give colour to the reports of their enemies, who would be sure 38 594 SANTA TERESA to make the most of their disobedience and breach of discipline ; that it would be more difficult to get the Pope to confirm it than to get his consent to the province in the first place. But now there was no time for reflection : they all seem (Teresa among them) to have been hurried on to the precipice by the turn events had taken. On the pth of October, Fray Antonio de Jesus, as Definitor- General of the Descalzos, convoked the Chapter of Almod6var ; and the friars, oblivious of Pope and General, set to work to separate themselves from the main body of the Carmelites. Fray Juan de la Cruz was there, just escaped from his nine months' imprisonment in Toledo ill, emaciated, his shoulders mutilated for life with the cruel scourgings of his gaolers. " The life Fray Juan has gone through, and that he should have been allowed (being so ill as he is) to go there at once, has distressed me deeply," writes the old saint, whose hot indignation welled forth as she heard the story of his sufferings, to Gracian. " See that they take good care of him in Almodovar. ... I assure you that if he dies you will have few left like him." His appearance in the Chapter produced a strange emotion amongst the assembled friars. He, like Teresa, protested against the election of a Provincial, as being a step they had no power to take, and an encroachment on the special prerogatives of the Papal See. But the same malign influence must again have been at work that Teresa mentions so bitterly in her letter to Gracian on the occasion of the General's death ; for, in spite of Fray Juan's remonstrances, Fray Antonio de Jesus was elected Provincial. It was then unanimously decided to send delegates to Rome. The choice fell upon Nicolas Doria the Nicolas, sometimes the " good Nicolao," of Teresa's letters, who on the 24th of March 1577, less than two years before, had received the habit in Seville from the hands of the man whom by a strange contrariety of fortune he afterwards deprived of it. He was now just about forty. A Genoese by birth, a member of that illustrious family " which has filled sea and earth with such victories and trophies that it can rival the most ambitious families of ancient Rome," it was the lot of young Doria to be bred to commerce. At an early age, in the pursuit of the business which generally brought his countrymen to Spain which business, as far as I can gather from the euphuistic phrase of the chronicler, chiefly consisted in lending money to the Spanish monarch and his bankrupt government at usurious rates of interest he went over to Seville. Here he became known and respected as a shrewd financier, when, by one of those revulsions of feeling so common in that age, he suddenly FROM JANUARY 1578 TO CHRISTMAS DAY 595 turned his back on the world, had himself ordained a priest, and became a diligent student of arts and theology in the College of Sto. Tomas. Nevertheless the priest was still doubled with the financier. The renewal of an old friendship with Mariano, when the latter came to Seville to arrange for a foundation of a Discalced monastery, brought him acquainted with the Arch- bishop Don Cristobal de Rojas who, over head and ears in debt, and his papers in an inextricable state of confusion (it is consolatory to know that what the good Archbishop lacked in practicality he made up in charity and piety), entrusted him with the administration of his affairs. And the keen-witted Genoese fulfilled his commission with such dexterity and skill as to earn that prelate's warmest favour and the King's notice. If we may believe the chronicler, it was the advent of Teresa herself in Seville that finally drew him into her Order. Not that he roused in her any such overpowering flush of enthusiasm as had the gentler-natured Gracian. That indeed was an event in her life. She respected Doria for his austere virtues, his evident ability, but when presently the rivalry between him and Gracian grew too evident to be mistaken, it is the latter whom she exculpates, to the latter that her great heart goes out with the wistful affection of a mother. It was Doria, then, whose talents, birth, knowledge of the country and of affairs pointed him out as the most likely to serve their cause and save it, whom the friars assembled in Almod6var fixed on as their ambassador to Rome. The news of the Chapter fell like a thunderbolt in Madrid. Roca, released from his two months' seclusion, rushed off to Almodovar to see if he could do anything to remedy what he was too late to prevent. He implored them to reconsider the steps they had taken, the illegality of an election especially reserved to the sovereign pontiff; that the shadow of authority they might have derived from the fact of Gracian's being Apostolic Commissary had ceased from the moment he renounced his powers and warrants into the Nuncio's hands. In vain : he was thrown into prison by the very men he had come to save from the consequences of their folly. Already might be clearly seen the mutual distrust which only awaited Teresa's death to show itself without disguise. Teresa's attitude in regard to this Chapter is vague. All the blame of this transaction has been hitherto accorded to Gracian. Do facts, do Teresa's own letters, bear out the assertion ? On the 1 5th of October she writes to Gracian, clearly ascribing to the evil influences of "those who care little for your paternity's sufferings" (Fray Antonio de Jesus and Mariano?) the delay 596 SANTA TERESA that had cost him so dear in giving up his papers to the Nuncio. " I am glad that you will now know by experience how to direct this business in the proper way, and not against the current as I always said." Is is not certain, indeed, whether Gracian ever attended that disastrous Chapter of Almodovar, for which he has hitherto borne all the blame. For she beseeches him and Mariano (and they would both seem to be in Madrid), to send a message to Almodovar, not to settle the journey of the friars to Rome. " I now see, my father, what a martyr " (it is the renunciation of his papers she refers to) "your paternity has been on account of conflicting opinions, and if they had left you to yourself one can see that you were indeed guided by God." Again, " I am very glad they are not to elect a Provincial, which, as your paternity says, is very proper ; although, as Fray Antonio told me that without risk of sin they could not do other- wise, I did not gainsay him. I thought all had been concluded here; but if it is necessary to go to Rome for the confirmation, they will also have to go for the province." Thus far the Chapter of Almodovar ; but this old woman, sick of heart and weary of spirit " yet strong in desire " has other news to tell. During these past months the constant burden of her letters has been to enlist the General in their favour. In March, April, May, to the last moment she had repeated it with painful iteration. " I now see," she had written to Gracian, " that your paternity is more anxious than any one [about sending delegates to Rome] ; but it cannot in any way hurt to acquit ourselves with the General, and it is a good time now ; and if this is not done, I hold not the rest to be lasting. It is never bad to take pains, even if they are many." In spite of all, at the end of September we still find her harping wearily on the same theme. She still hoped that from the General himself might come the solution that would end their difficulties. " For mercy's sake, let us now live no longer on hopes. Every one is amazed at our having no one there to plead for us, and so those others do what they list." But the friars had been too tardy, for the General was dead ! To the last she had clung loyally to him, and to the hope that the salvation of the Reform was to be through him that its first protector even at the eleventh hour would turn and cherish and protect the movement he had inaugurated. No means had she left unturned to win his ear and his heart ; the presents she had sent apparently elicited no word of thanks, no sign of softening. Ill news travels fast, and on the 5th of October she writes to Gracian, overwhelmed with sorrow at the General's death, her heart turning to the dead FROM JANUARY 1578 TO CHRISTMAS DAY 597 man in a passionate outburst of generous grief almost akin to remorse. " I am deeply grieved, and the first day I wept bitterly, unable to do aught else. I mourn for the sorrow we have given him, for indeed he did not -deserve it ; and if we had but gone to him, all would have been right. God forgive him who has always hindered it, for with your paternity I should have had no difficulty, although in this matter you have given me little credit." The dead General would never now receive those moving messages from the woman so loving and so grateful that a sardine could suborn her ; his ears were eternally closed to the old and wearied woman in Avila, oppressed with the sadness and desolation of old age, who prayed him " not to believe what they have told him of Teresa de Jesus, for truly she has never done a thing which did not become a very obedient daughter, . . . and not to condemn without justice, and hearing both sides; and even if only that which they have told him must prevail, let him punish her, inflict penance, that she may be no longer under his displeasure, for any punishment will be easier for her to bear than to see him angered; for even fathers are wont to pardon their children great sins, how much more so when there is ^ none, she, on the contrary, having passed through great trials in the foundation of these monasteries, thinking that she was giving him pleasure ; for apart from his being her superior, she bears him a most deep love." Their reconciliation was indeed to be remitted, as she had unconsciously prophesied three years ago in her letter to him from Seville, to that dim eternity when surely the crooked things of earth shall be straightened, and human misunderstanding vanish under the clear rays of the Sun of Truth. It was now useless to send friars to Rome, she adds in this same letter to Gracian, which would only be to expose them to the risk of imprisonment, and to the loss of their documents and money. The General gone, they would only find themselves in Rome, utterly inexperienced in the ways of doing business there, wandering about the streets, and finally be taken up for fugitives without any redress. Useless, indeed ! for on the i6th of October, a few days after the Chapter, the Nuncio issues a second Brief more terrible than the first, delivering over the Descalzos to the government and visitation of the Carmelites. His fury, indeed, knows no bounds when he hears of this Chapter of Almod6var. Reform and its authoress fare at the Nuncio's lips, as, mad with passion, he loaded the Descalzos, both absent and present, with 598 SANTA TERESA opprobrious epithets and insults, "most unworthy," adds the chronicler, " of their persons." The friars, after the Chapter, had retired to Pastrana, and there, indeed, if they had chosen, they might in the King's name have still defied the Nuncio, his emissaries, and his briefs ; since Mariano had taken care to provide himself with a royal warrant. I think we know what Mariano's counsels would have been ; but in this supreme crisis the friars, again forcing on Gracian the burden of decision as to whether they were or were not to accept the Nuncio's authority, once more made him the scapegoat of their rashness or their fears. Juarez and Coria (the Observant friars sent to receive their obedience) are thundering at the gates ; the Governor and an armed crowd are in readiness outside to enforce the royal warrant and hound them from the convent precincts and out of the town. It was a terrible moment for this really good and conscientious man, tormented with many doubts and fears as to what precisely was his duty, tormented with many searchings of conscience. In despair, unable to take a decision, he resorted to the puerile expedient of accepting as an oracle the ravings of a half-mad friar. Instead of resisting, as a bolder and perhaps a worse man might have done, he himself opened the gates to Juarez and Coria ; delivered up to them the royal warrant ; and in the Chapter, before the assembled friars, placed the Nuncio's brief upon his head in token of submission, causing the rest to follow his example. He has now retired voluntarily from the contest, and so forfeited the favour of the King. This took place on the eve of All Saints. The three friars were at once ordered to appear before the Nuncio, and complied. The acts of the Chapter were forthwith annulled, and after being publicly excommunicated, the friars were secluded in separate monasteries ; forbidden to celebrate or hear Mass ; to write or receive any communication. The Monastery of Atocha was assigned to Mariano, he being afterwards transferred to Pastrana, the Nuncio fearing his proximity to the King, with whom he was a favourite. Fray Antonio was shut up in the Convent of San Bernardin ; whilst Gracian, paying for the faults of all, was condemned by the wrathful Cardinal to chew the cud of bitter fancy in the Carmelite Convent of Madrid. Doria, too, would have felt the weight of the legate's wrath, and been banished from court, if a Genoese gentleman, the Nuncio's friend, had not pleaded for him to remain to look after the interests of his brother (Horacio Doria). And the wily, capable Italian made the most of his opportunity, secretly working things round in favour of his Discalced brothers with FROM JANUARY 1578 TO CHRISTMAS DAY 599 such dissimulation that even his Caked companion conceived no suspicion. In December the Nuncio's second brief, by which the Discalced Communities of Castille and Andalucia were rigor- ously subjected to the Fathers of the Observance, was notified to Teresa in Avila. " It has been a morning of judgment, she writes to Roque de la Huerta ; " the authorities, men of letters, and gentlemen who were present, were all astounded at their want of religion ; I am in great distress. I would gladly have given them a hearing, but we dared not speak. Peter, the good Peter, was happily at the gate when they arrived, and went to fetch Lorenzo, who presently bustles in with the corregidor- swords, capes, ruffs, velvets, and all. "Little good, she adds, " did those fathers get from their royal warrant [she refers t< submission of the convents of Pastrana and Alcala to the Observants]. I know not even if they would obey the King, they are so accustomed to do whatever they like." ... Never had a darker hour overshadowed the Descalzos. seemed at last as if the Reform was to be indeed crushed out. Gloom and despair filled every heart every heart but one Fray Juan de la Miseria, quietly painting in the cloisters oi Alcala when the Observants made their furious raid, a fugitive at Rome ; her convents at the mercy of the Fathers of the Observance, her sons in prison, Teresa's confidence never for a moment wavered, and her letters bear no trace of discouragement. God will do it all," she wrote. She suffered keenly in the sufferings of her children. " I feel little about the rest, for God will remedy it, since it is his business." A solitary, serene, and steadfast figure, she stood alone, unshaken, braving the tempest which bowed the heads of her friars to the earth. He must be no recreant knight, she whispered to Gracian, sunk in gloom and hopelessness in his cell at Madrid, to desert the banner of his sweet and gracious Lady at the moment of her greatest need. "May God give you strength," she adds in simple earnest words, " to be firm in justice, although you see yourself in great perils. Blessed trials, however great they may be, if they deviate from this in nothing. I tell you that there is much to glory in, in the Cross o: Lord Jesus Christ." . f , . Consumed with pain and anxiety at the tribulation of him who was to her far more than a son, she consoled his mother. "My lady, may your grace know that all your prayer for i long time has been to pray God with great desires to send you trials ; I saw that his Majesty was disposing you for those he about to give you I And such as they have been ! Now will you 6oo SANTA TERESA find yourself with so much improvement in your soul, that you will not know it for the same. . . . The pain of your grace has been indeed present to me, but you will also have derived benefit. " If I only saw them free, I shall be entirely happy, for, as I have said, I hold for certain the principal matter ; our Lord will take particular care of it ... and will do what will be most for his glory and service." For in the searching radiance of that Glory, fugitive glimpses of which had been revealed to her, Life and this present moment stood revealed to her as it truly is, in all its baseness and weakness and infinitesimal value, its trials and sufferings con- cealing treasure that pleasure and content are powerless to buy. As for herself, the intimation that she was to be ordered to another convent only elicits the dry remark, " If it should be one of theirs (the Carmelites), what a much worse life they would give me than they did Fray Juan de la Cruz." Christmas morning again broke bright and clear over Avila, and faded into night. And in one of its many convents, as the nuns sang matins in the cold and shadowy choir, a frail old nun wept bitterly. The tapers quivered in the chill blasts of air, and flickered for a moment on the vague, mysterious outlines of that kneeling figure, and left it vaguer, more mysterious, a shadow amidst the other shadows that filled the icy church and choir. CHAPTER XXII LA VERDAD PADECE PERO NO PERECE T is to this date that I would fain attribute the following story told by Yepes from personal recollection, although, for even the memory of a bishop is subject to the hazy influences of he places the scene in Toledo three years earlier : I When towards the years '75 and '76, her Order was in such grave straits that Gregory xin. sent a very learned and prudent legate to undo it, aided with all his strength by a commissary sent by the General to this effect, and to reduce the Descalzos to the mitigated rule of Carmel, she received a letter from father Geronimo de la Madre de Dios [Gracian], brought to her in Toledo by Mariano ; the letter was so hopeless, and father Mariano so despairing, that I (who happened to be present) almost gave up the Reform for lost ; nor was I alone of this opinion, but it was shared by many others, and certainly it was a vehement occasion to lose all confidence, for the friars were very few, and those few there were poor, known to few, looked askance at by many, and without support or influence ; the only assistance the nuns could give although they were more numerous, was to commend it to God ; the Holy Mother Foundress driven to a corner, loaded with abuse ; their enemies many, powerful, and daring, with liberty and power, and the Apostolic Authority on their side. Well, as she was listening to these things, she mused a little within herself, ceasing to speak with us, who left her alone on purpose, as we knew she was communing with God ; and as we continued our conversation, she broke out suddenly, and said, "Trial indeed is in store for us, but the Reform shall not go back." I know not how those who were present answered her ; but from that moment I had no more anxiety about the matter, and nothing of all the things that came to my ears gave me any concern, since I took this for a prophecy. . . . She must at that moment have had some greater light, which reassured her in the greatest peril. And it would seem, indeed, that the good Yepes was right, and that the Reform was to be wiped out, had it not been for that curious contrariety in things and men which makes them draw strength and vigour out of calamity, hope and buoyancy out of total ruin. No man is wise but by his own experience : would seem decreed by some obscure law that no generation can inherit the accumulated experience of its predecessors, can avoid their blunders or profit by their wisdom. And Persecution, the mainspring of the greatest and sublimest upheavals, once more 601 6o2 SANTA TERESA in the case of the obscure Order founded by Teresa de Jesus, saved the cause it was intended to destroy. For even as she wept, good news was on the way to Avila. A few bitter words spoken by a courtier, the Count of Tendilla that Don Luis Hurtado de Mendoza, Governor of the Alhambra, who sold his diamond buttons and his wife's jewels to aid the Descalzos of Granada, irritated by the Nuncio's obstinacy, had brought matters to a crisis. The court itself was not the Nuncio a pestilent Italian, and what had Italians to do with the affairs of Spanish convents? took the part of the Discalced Carmelites, and with a happy inconsistency " forgetting," says the chronicler, " the imprudence of the Chapter," the cause of all this tumult, " which it set down to ignorance, not malice," turned round upon the Nuncio. " And as the victim of persecution," adds this most worldly-wise of monkish chroniclers, " has generally the people and those who are disinterested on his side, many there were, and they of the gravest sort, who in public and in secret defended the Descalzos, and resented the Nuncio's measures and the con- duct of those he chose to execute them." Foremost amongst these " grave personages " was Mendoza. He appealed to the Nuncio, if he would do nothing else, at least to hear the Discalced Carmelites on their own defence. The Nuncio was obdurate. At last, stung to the quick, the Spanish noble got to high words, and turning on his heel left the Nuncio's presence, and went straight to Chumacero, the Fiscal of the Royal Council. The result of their interview was that warrant suspending the publication of the Nuncio's briefs in Spain, which, as we have seen, the Descalzos were afraid to use, all indeed except those of Granada, where the skirmish between the King's officers and the Carmelites, busy fixing up the sentences against the Descalzos on the church doors, ended in fighting and bloodshed. The Nuncio, still writhing under Tendilla's plain speaking, and bitterly resenting the active part he had taken in the affair of the warrant, complained to the King. Philip heard him with the immovability and impenetrability of a sphinx ; gravely assured him of the grief he felt that any one in his kingdom could be found to give cause of complaint to one for whom he himself professed such profound veneration, and offered to reprimand Tendilla ; and then making his icy manner still more withering than was its wont, and fixing his cold blue eye on the dismayed prince of the Church, he said, " I hear of the opposition the Calced Carmelites are making to the Descalzos, which may give rise to suspicion, inasmuch as it is against those who profess rigour and perfection. See that you favour virtue, for they tell me you are no friend of the Reform," upon which he turned on LA VERDAD PADECE PERO NO PERECE 603 his heel, leaving the Nuncio to stomach the rebuke with such relish as he could ! The King has spoken ! The fiat has gone forth, and now the game is to be one of skill between King and Cardinal. Tendilla is reprimanded, as Philip has promised, and being absent from Madrid, writes to defend himself, and not himsel only but the Descalzos, from the imputations of their enemies. A letter which, although written to the President Pazps, is read by the King,-a fact not to be imparted to the Nuncio to whom he immediately orders the letter to be forwarded that might see for himself (perhaps the proof was necessary) that 1 had kept his Royal Word. It was the generous and hasty courtier himself who on his return to Madrid, confident of Philip's approval, first informed Sega that his letter had been seen by the King. The Nuncio feels that he is losing: the Pope, swayed by Archbishop Quiroga, gives an uncertain sound ; the King is an immediate and powerful antagonist, and behind him are the greatest nobles in the kingdom and the general feeling of the court. The Nuncio is in a corner. . "Sir "he says to Tendilla, "to show you how unfeigned y I desire to serve his Majesty, I shall be glad that he should appoint other persons to assist with me m deciding these matters in question, so that with their authority they may settle these differences between the kingdom and the King and me; rewarding virtue and chastising vice/; T .... . Ah, ah! I have caught you, old fox! thinks Tendilla to himself, as he answers that, if these words of his most illustrious lordship are not a mere compliment, then nothing can give Majesty greater pleasure than to hear them ; and that no step could better prove his freedom from all passion; and himself offers to carry the note to the King, and bring back the reply Tendilla struck whilst the iron was hot. With the letter in his pocket, he left the Nuncio's lodging, himself deliven it to Santoyo, a gentleman of the Bedchamber who at once took it to the King, who opening it scrawled a brief ex- pression of gratification at the Nuncio's zeal on the ^ ar g in ; But if the Nuncio concedes so much, his wounded dignity demands a victim-who but the man who has so long ; stood .1 the way of his exercising his jurisdiction? < I do not complain of the Descalzos," says he; "only of that wretched Father Gracian, who has revolutionised and brought them to nought! And seeing that Philip has penetrated the motives of this personal rancour, he makes haste to add, "that it was not because he had prevented him (the Nuncio) assuming his 6o 4 SANTA TERESA usual jurisdiction over the Orders, oh dear no ! but simply because of the serious charges that had been made against him ; which made it expedient that he should be tried and sentenced, before he (the Nuncio) could set to work in good earnest to prevail upon the Pope to erect the Descalzos into a separate province : indeed, to prove to his Majesty how little he is moved by passion in this matter, his Majesty may appoint other judges to assist him in the inquiry." Philip took him at his word, and straightway named his head chaplain and almoner Don Luis Manrique; Master Fray Lorenzo de Villavicencio, Augustinian ; and two Dominicans, Fray Pedro Fernandez and Fray Hernando de Castillo, whose unanimous decision is that the Community of the Descalzos must be sustained and raised into a self-governing province. Gracian, however, blocks the way, the Nuncio firmly main- taining that, before anything else is done, he must first be tried and sentenced. He was given the option of being condemned without a trial or of having the matter fully investigated and making a defence. This [writes Marmol] was the greatest conflict this servant of God had seen himself in in all his life, since, if, in order that his cause might be tried by dispassionate judges, he allowed himself to be sentenced merely on the evidence of the memorials against him sent from Andalucia, he feared two things : first, the cruel sentence of the Nuncio ; secondly, to allow himself to be condemned, and to remain with a slur on his reputation for all his future life, he being innocent, thus depriving the Church of the benefits his talents might do her ; the more especially knowing, as he was too good a theologian not to know, that for a public man it is a mortal sin to let himself be defamed, and that it is obligatory on such an one to stand up in defence of his honour. On the other hand, if he acted as the Nuncio proposed, which was to ask for a commissary to proceed to Andalucia to sift the charges against him, and defend his cause judicially, there were three very great drawbacks. The first, that he had no money ; the friars would not give him any, nor could he reasonably ask his relatives to pay the person sent by the Nuncio to open the suit anew. Secondly, he feared that, on the commissary's arrival, those very people who had calumniated him to the Nuncio would again sign the defamatory memorials ; and thus, not only would his innocence not be proved, but his reputation suffer more gravely than it had done before. The third objection, and the greatest of all (for the others seemed to me of little moment), was that, if the Descalzos were left subject any longer to the Calzados, after a certain time the King might forget them, and the Nuncio being equally oblivious of the Province and of severing them from the Calzados, the project would be allowed to drop, and the primitive rigour of the Reform die a natural death. Shall he yield to the instincts felt by every honest man, give his traducers the lie, and assert his own innocence? "If you are desirous that this matter of the Province be effected," counsels Don Luis Manrique, " take your sentence, and make LA VERDAD PADECE PERO NO PERECE 605 no defence." Which shall he do sacrifice the Reform or his own fair fame? Can he doubt? " I would do more than this, nay I would let myself be burned alive, for the sake of the Reform," he answers stoutly; "for, even should they repay this my determination with ingratitude" (and they did as has been the way with mankind ever since the world began) ' [hope in God and the Virgin Mary (whose the Order is) that I shall have my reward, for in this life there remains nothing for me crosses and more crosses ! " Could he but have looked into the future, he might have thought it 'well, even in the interests of the Descalzos themselves, to sift, as he could easily have done, those obscure calumnies which were already weaving their dark web about his life. And so Gracian allowed himself to be sentenced. Deprived of voice and station in the Order, he was bundledv,off to th College of Alcala there to fast and do penance until such time as the Nuncio should soften. Not a word, be it remembered n the sentence of the real grievance, which was that Gracian had hampered him (the Nuncio) in the exercise of his powers, and brought him into conflict with the King. The Nuncio was far too wide-awake for that ; nor did he even listen to the friar s defence, and "he could," says Marmol, "have given an ample one. It is a significant fact that the chronicler, a zealous partisan of and his faction, says nothing of this act of abnegation ; the more significant, as his silence proves that the trumped-up allegations against Gracian rested on an altogether unsustainable basis as he would, if he could (so does party warfare pervert the best of men), have been delighted to show that they were not utl- UI He does not, however, omit ("indeed, it is not a thing to lose" he says) the following anecdote relating to Dona, which he discovers written by a "person in every way trustworthy, am witnessed by others no less so." Whilst the Commission thus sat in judgment on the attairs of the Discalced Carmelites, Fray Nicolas de Jesus Maria (Dona), accompanied by another friar, on his way to and fror Carmelite Monastery and the Convent of the Atocha, where the Commissioners resided, was followed by a black and white dog, the symbol of the Dominican Order. "A though they were astonished, they were not afraid," the chronicler remarks dog every now and then turning round his head to look back at them, led them when they got to the Atocha to the cell of the father Master Fray Pedro Fernandez, and then disappeared This happened several times, until at last it seemed to them s mysterious that they went thither through other streets, but 606 SANTA TERESA always, when they found themselves at the outskirts of the town, there was the dog waiting to accompany them. When they mentioned the circumstance to Fernandez, he, like themselves, being unable to account for it, nor to guess what dog it was, they came to the conclusion that it contained a mystery ; and that the glorious Santo Domingo had chosen that way of showing how ardently he had taken upon himself the affairs of Teresa and her Order, even as he had promised to her when she prayed to him in his house at Segovia. Let us now leave these grave and reverend signers consulting in Madrid, and proceed to Seville, where an indiscreet con- fessor it pains me to say that he was no other than the good Garci Alvarez and two melancholy imaginative nuns one of them that Beatriz de la Madre de Dios whose miraculous vocation Teresa records in the Fundaciones have armed a revolution, and, with the assistance of the triumphant Carmelites, deposed Maria de San Jose", and elected another prioress in her stead. Very vague these events of Seville chiefly interesting to us as seen through the vision of one Teresa of Avila. There are denouncings to the Inquisition, who, having learnt wisdom, will have none of them ; questionings of trembling nuns for six hours at a stretch some of weak intellect signing they know not what tissues of nauseous absurdities. Maria de San Jose accused of illicit relations with Gracian ; Teresa figuring as a wicked old woman, who, under pretence of founding convents, carried young women about from one part of the country to the other, to prostitute them ; such, and much more, " unfit to be named in chaste ears," was set about by these Christlike friars. " It is a baseness even to disprove such things," exclaimed Teresa ; " since if they must lie, it is better that they do it in such a way that no one will believe them, but only laugh at them!" Teresa enlists the generosity of her countryman, the old prior Pantoja, in favour of her persecuted nuns, makes him, in fact, her ambassador to them the bearer of the letter "which I should not be sorry should fall into the Provincial's hands it being written for no other object." Brave words they are too which the aged prior of Las Cuevas reads to the nuns of Seville in some little dark locutory, the sisters rapt in mute attention in the shadow behind the grating. It is the only time in her epistolary correspondence (models of reality, spontaneity, and simplicity) that she rises into eloquence. Know that I never loved you so much as now, nor have you had such an opportunity as now to serve our Lord, who bestows on you so great a favour as to enable you to taste somewhat of his Cross, and something of the LA VERDAD PADECE PERO NO PERECE 607 forlornness his Majesty then suffered. Happy the day you entered that place, since such a fortunate time was awaiting you. Greatly do I envy you ; so that when these changes came to my knowledge . . . instead of them giving me pain, I felt an intense interior joy that, without your having to cross the sea, his Majesty has willed to discover to you mines of eternal treasures, with which I hope in his Majesty you will be exceedingly enriched, and share with us here ; for I am confident that he will of his mercy enable you to bear all without offending him in aught ; therefore do not be afflicted that you feel it greatly ; for perchance our Lord wishes to show you that you are not so strong as you thought when you were anxious to suffer. Courage courage, daughters mine. Remember that to no one does God give more trials than he can bear ; and that his Majesty is with those in trouble. ... p ra y er prayer, my sisters ; and let your humility and obedience now shine forth resplendent, so much so that none amongst you is more submissive than the late mother prioress to the vicaress they have placed. Oh what a seasonable opportunity to pluck the fruit from the resolutions you have made to serve the Lord ! Consider that he often wishes to prove if our works and words agree. Bring out the Virgin's daughters and her sisters with honour from this great persecution, for if you help yourselves, the good Jesus will help you : for although he sleeps at sea, when the tempest rages, he makes the w'inds be still. . . . You are amongst your sisters and not in Algiers. Let your spouse alone, and you shall see how before long the sea shall swallow up them that make war on us, even as it did King Pharaoh, and he shall set his people free ! It is no uncertain sound this this clarion note which rings out so true and brave, bearing on its wings the very spirit of triumphant victory. In May, however, things have calmed down ; the calumnies of the Carmelites have been partially examined by Sega and his colleagues and found destitute of foundation : already the convent has reverted to its usual condition of monotonous calm. What shall be done with the culprits ? Know [counsels Teresa] that there are some persons of such weak intellect that they think they really see all that comes into their head ; for the devil must assist them, and my pain is that he must have made that sister think she saw what, as he thought, would bring the house to nought ; so that perhaps she is not so much to blame as we think, any more than a madman. . You must compassionate her as if she were your father's daughter, as indeed so she is of that faithful Father to whom we owe so much, and whom the poor thing has desired to serve all her life. For many reasons (which I am astonished at your reverence for not having seen), her leaving the convent must not be so much as dreamed of. Thirdly. Endeavour to forget the thing entirely, each one considering how she would have liked to be treated if it had happened to her. But here comes in the touch of Jesuitry the secret of Teresa's strength as an administrator : I shall be exceedingly angry if you give any occasion for them to think they are ill-treated. They ha-ve already written to me here, that the Com- pany will take it ill if they arc ill-treated. Be careful to be on the lookout. 608 SANTA TERESA Neither must she speak to any one except before a third person, or confess except with a Descalzo : bear in mind that these two do not speak to each other in secret ; do not press them too hardly, for we women are but weak . . . and it would not be ill to give her some occupation, so long as she has no communication with any one outside the house ; for solitude and brooding will do her injury. ... Be on your guard, especially at night, for, as the devil is prowling about to destroy the credit of these monasteries, he sometimes makes what appears impossible, possible. If these two sisters fell out, and could be got to provoke one another, you would get to the root of the matter. ..." En fin, en fin, la verdad padece pero no perece " (Truth may suffer, but will not perish). On the 28th of June, Maria de San Jose" was restored to her post of prioress, which she refused, perhaps through a mistaken notion of false humility a vaporous bladder, which Teresa quickly pricks with the sharp old Castilian proverb " A falta de buenos mi marido alcalde " (For want of a better, my husband the mayor) also desiring to know whether those nuns have con- tradicted each other in anything, " as I am greatly distressed about their souls." Beatriz de la Madre de Dios, it is said, wept herself blind, and died at eighty-six in the odour of sanctity : it will scarcely surprise the psychologist to learn that before her death she was taken with the gift of prophecy. In the meantime, Gracian is in seclusion at Alcala, Mariano gone to Jerez, commissioned by the King " to extract minerals from certain waters." Events have marched rapidly. Knowing the tendencies of the King and court, it was a foregone conclusion that the accusations against the Descalzos would be found to be without an atom of foundation. On the 1st of April, Salazar was appointed by the Nuncio's Brief Vicar- General of the Descalzos, pending their erection into a province. No better selection could have been made: nor one less obnoxious to the Descalzos, or more so to the Observants. Novices were still to be received in the monasteries ; anything that had been altered by the Carmelite visitors was to be restored to its original condition : everything was to go on as before, until instructions came from Rome. For the King and Nuncio had kept their promise and written to Gregory xill. warmly recommending the erection of the Reform into a separate province. Fray Angel, a man of blameless life and gentle and pacific instincts, was notably prepossessed in favour of Teresa and her Descalzos, especially so of Gracian. Seeing that his term of office must be short, he resolved to let well alone, to make no change in their government, nor to admit the assistance of any other Observant in the execution of his duties. Moreover, he did what he could to get Gracian's sentence revoked, and was so successful that, on the Nuncio paying a LA VERDAD PADECE PERO NO PERECE 609 visit to the King one day, the latter had only to observe that' Father Fray Geronimo had had punishment enough (so powerful were the syllables that dropped from the royal lips), for the Nuncio straightway to revoke the sentence; and, re- stored to his old rank in the Order, Gracian finds himself once more, so says Marmol, in the thick of sending the ambassadors to Rome. Him too this later on did Salazar select as his companion in the government of the Descalzos, or rather on him did he lay the whole weight and burden of it, the Vicar-General confining himself 'to signing such documents as were required of him. Surely we can imagine Teresa's calm, steadfast joy as she watched the mending fortunes of her Reform, still : May he [Salazar] enjoy it only for a short time ; I do not mean that his life should be cut short ; for he is in truth the cleverest amongst them, and will treat us with consideration, especially as he is so shrewd that he will know how it will end. In some respects it is doing those fathers as evil a turn as ourselves. For perfect people, the Nuncio has left nothing to be desired, since he has made us all suffer. The auspicious moment has now arrived for sending the delegates to Rome. The first embassy despatched by the friars of Almodovar had ended in failure, the Nuncio having purposely detained Doria (who had been originally fixed upon to go) in Madrid, on the pretext that he could not be deprived of so sage a counsellor. The mission had then been entrusted to Fray Pedro de los Angeles, who had left the Carmelites to join the Reform, and a lay friar his companion. It was a miserable fiasco. When they arrived in Italy, they found the General dead. They tramped to Naples to report themselves to the new General, Cafardo. He deprived them of their powers, letters, and despatches ; but for the rest, treated them benignly enough. Don Bernardino de Mendoza, the Viceroy's son, lodged them in his palace. Fray Pedro's virtue was not proof against the luxurious entertainment of his host. "Weakened by the blandishments of Naples" I quote the chronicler " like Hannibal's army with those of Capua," his commission languished, and he returned to Spain and to the Carmelites at one and the same moment. He elected to become a member of the Monastery of Granada, and Ana de Jesus (so the author of her life relates), as she rescued the serge cape from a poor woman to whom he had sold it for swaddling-clothes, is reported to have said that " he who had so basely dishonoured the Virgin's sackcloth would not long enjoy the serge, and that the end of his life was nigh." In vain Fray Pedro sought an interview with the indignant prioress, who resolutely refused to see him. One day as he passed the convent church, it happened to be 39 6io SANTA TERESA open, and he and his companion went in to pray. As he did so, the memory of what he had left swept over him, and he began to weep bitterly. " A notable circumstance ! " adds the chronicler, to whose garrulity I have owed so much. " Before he rose from the ground he lost the sight of both his eyes, so that it was with great difficulty they got him back to his convent, where in a few days God took him." When Mother Ana heard of it, she said to the nuns, although why she did not predict it more clearly before we are not told " I knew it already, my sisters, and for that reason did not care to speak with him ; on the contrary, I had counselled him not to come here. But it is good to pay for one's sins in this life, and thus save oneself eternal suffering." The lot now fell upon Fray Juan de Jesus (Roca), whose fearlessness of tongue and constancy of heart the past had so abundantly proved. He too, for he is one of the marked figures of the Order, merits a few words. A native of Cataluna, of respectable and virtuous parentage, his mother's name of Roca was given him at his baptism, " not without a divine intention," I quote the chronicler, " because he was a rock of bronze in his resistance to relaxation and to every adverse impulse." After taking his decree of Doctor of Theology in the University of Barcelona, he was appointed, on account of his conspicuous talents, to a professorial chair. His learning, however, obtaining for him a benefice, he was ordained a priest. " As he could not be contented with mediocrity," we next find him at Alcala de Henares, " a place rich in all kinds of learning," competing for one of the university chairs. " In the greatest fervour of his pretension he was distressed to find himself a slave of what his soul despised ; and not finding in visible things the wherewithal to fill his aspirations, he thirsted for the invisible." In this frame of mind he happened to hear Gracian preach that famous sermon on the antiquity and glory of the Order of Mount Carmel. Without a sign, without a word, the learned doctor set off straightway to Pastrana and enrolled himself a novice. Thence he wrote to the servant he had left behind him in Alcala, who, in his turn, had only to receive his master's letter to follow his footsteps and become a Discalced friar, perhaps fortunately for him, for scarcely had he left the house they lived in than it tumbled down, a circumstance which the devout master and no less devout servant accepted as a celestial warning thenceforth generously to employ their lives in the service of others. So aptly did the name of Roca typify the firm inflexibility, constancy, and fearlessness of his character, and his unalterable virtue, that amongst his brother friars he was never known by LA VERDAD PADECE PERO NO PERECE 6n any other. It was Roca who in the Observant Chapter of Morale] a had so stoutly opposed the measures for the destruction of the Descalzos that he forced the Carmelite fathers to desist from their intentions ; having on the way thither bolstered up his weaker-kneed companions, the Prior of Pastrana and the Rector of Alcala, to do the same. A man, too, who loved a joke, if a grim one. For does not the chronicler, as a proof of the " simplicity and kindliness " of those early days of struggle, relate how, when the three, on their journey back from the self- same Chapter, arrived at Mancera, of which Fray Juan was prior, with great dissimulation, he ordered his monks to throw them into prison, on the pretext that they had not defended the Reform as warmly as they should. The prior and the rector, although astonished (as well they might be), accepted the penance with great humility and simplicity, and were led meekly off to prison. A few hours after, Roca collects his monks, one of them clad in all the treasures of the sacristy, another two bear- ing garlands of flowers, and suddenly opening the dungeon doors, after crowning his captives with the garlands, led them triumphantly to the choir, chanting as they went : In exitu Israel de Aigypto. It is generally the fate of these inflexible characters, however, to find themselves in opposition, not only to their enemies, but to their friends. Nor was the Rock of Bronze an exception. We have seen, when made a prisoner in Madrid, how fearlessly he faced the Nuncio. As fearlessly did he face his own Order in the rebel Chapter of Almodovar, putting before them such unpalatable truths that they straightway threw him into prison for a month. In the spring of this self-same year of 1579 'in which he started for Rome, an unsuccessful attempt had been made on his liberty. As he was closeted in consultation with Teresa in San Jos^ of Avila, the prior of the Carmelites, leaving armed friars below to guard the doors, ascended to the locutory, and with great show of courtesy invited him to accept the hospitality of his monastery, since it was not right that a person of his standing should resort to the " meson." Roca sniffed the danger. The tornera * (a woman of action, although her name has not been preserved), seeing the armed friars at the gates, at once sends out to warn certain canons and pious gentlemen of the danger, and the prior, disappointed of his prey, had nothing better for it but to retire as he had come. Who then more fitted than the Rock of Bronze, bold and valiant and manly, to undertake this difficult and dangerous 1 Portress. 612 SANTA TERESA mission a mission on which hung the fate of Teresa and her Order? With the exception of Gracian, who himself seems to have hankered after the journey and to have already dreamt of founding a Discalced monastery even in the sacred city, the prior of Mancera's appointment was warmly approved of by the heads of the Order. Teresa's prioresses warmly responded to the appeals for help, some of them pathetic enough, which now went forth from San Jose* in Avila. " It is only once in a lifetime," she writes to Maria Bautista only once in a lifetime ! " For this reason we all wear one habit, so that we may all help one another, for what belongs to one belongs to all ; and he gives well who gives his all. ... I cannot earn it, for I have only the use of one hand ; and more painful is it for me to scrape it together and beg for it : it is certainly a torment to me, that would be unbearable except for God alone." But no ! they all give according to their capacity perhaps beyond it : even the somewhat grasping prioress of Valladolid is moved to generosity, and earns Teresa's warmest gratitude by her prompt response to her appeal for funds to speed on her emissaries at Rome. As for the prioress of Seville, she deposits 600 dollars, a legacy from the Indies ; the prioress of Veas contributes 400 escudos, the dowry of a novice ; the nuns of Toledo are equally generous ; which, together with what she herself is able to scrape together from various noble friends and prelates besides 8000 reals from Fray Nicolas (Doria) and 400 escudos the gift of their gallant partisan the Count of Tendilla comes to a goodly sum. To guard against any unforeseen change of mind on the part of the Nuncio, the utmost secrecy was preserved as to the journey and its object, it being considered advisable to keep even the Discalced Communities themselves in ignorance. It is decided too that Roca shall for once at least in his life doff the friar's cowl and sandals for the dress of a gallant of the century, and assuming the name of Jose Bullon (not quite a borrowed one, for it was his father's), and in such guise, ostensibly bent on a purely secular mission to obtain a dis- pensation for a gentleman of Avila to marry his cousin, set out for Rome, with his companion the Prior of Pastrana. Teresa, when she saw her ambassador, his beard grown, strong, valiant, " a proper man," as, cloaked and booted, his sword and spurs clanked over the faded red bricks of the convent floor, was overcome with joy. His grave and martial aspect was more that of some fire-eating captain than of a subdued and pallid monk, whose awkward air betrayed his assumption of a dress he LA VERDAD PADECE PERO NO PERECE 613 had forgotten the use of in the cloister. His mule waits at the door. From the frail hand of the great and remarkable woman whom he loved and venerated he receives the final blessing. As his mule's hoofs die away from the convent court, echoing through the narrow streets, she, still motionless and absorbed, breathes silent godspeeds : for on this mission depend the peace, prosperity, and renown of the Resuscitated Order of Our Lady of Carmel. And a hazardous journey it truly was that these two brave friars undertook : " God bring him back safely ; I beseech your grace to tell me on what day he left, and how he was " (this to Roque de Huerta). " I long for the hour for him to leave Spain, for fear any accident should occur to him, which would be a terrible juncture." Small wonder, indeed ! for they had to make their way across Spain, and who knows whether they will not be intercepted, perhaps treacherously poisoned, by those Argus-eyed enemies of theirs, just baffled of what but a few months ago had seemed an easy prey ? Just before they reached Alicante, the port whence the ship is to waft them to Italy, they had a terrible fright, for in spite of his disguise the Prior of Pastrana was recognised. Alternately becalmed and tossed about by fearful tempests ; terror-stricken by the Moorish galeots hovering about on the horizon like birds of prey, the Discalced friars, now transformed into Geronimo de la Vega and the grave and learned Doctor Diego Hurtado de Almazan, at last found themselves at Rome. It is not within the bounds of my history to relate how they sped with Pope and Cardinals. How whilst they were in Rome, the Chapter-General of the Order was held, by the new General and the Master Fray Geronimo Tostado ; how they went about in fear and trembling, their heads ever on their shoulder (according to the characteristic Spanish phrase), lest, the purport of their mission leaking out, they should be caught and cast into prison by the Observants. It is not within the bounds of my history to relate how the King of Spain, although in the thick of his war with Portugal, did not relax his interest in the fortunes of the Reform ; and how the Franciscan friar, Cardinal Montalto (afterwards Pope Sixtus V.), espoused their cause. How, with- out the timely influence of the Cardinal, Sforza, they were well-nigh outwitted by the wily intrigues of the newly-elected General of the Order, Cafardo, and the Pope's nephew, the Cardinal Buoncampagna ; how glimpses of success wer<- followed by moments of black despair ; how summer wore into winter and winter into summer before Pope Gregory XIII. in full conclave erected the Discalced Carmelites into a separate province by his brief of the 22nd of June 1580, in the ninth year of his 614 SANTA TERESA pontificate, which sealed and ratified the life-work begun by an obscure nun in a remote corner of Castille, for is it not all told with much display of superfluous rhetoric in the yellow pages of the Chronicle of Fray Francisco de Santa Maria, where he who runs may read ? CHAPTERj XXIII BIOS VOS AND so, leaving the Spanish pseudo-gentleman and his grave-browed companion to follow the fluctuating fortunes of the Reform in Rome, let us return to its foundress in Avila, who, looking into the future, foresees the Virgin's Order triumphant, encompassing within its starry girdle distant regions of the earth which were to her a vague dream, but scarcely a reality. She indeed may not live to witness these glorious destinies, but " may his Majesty preserve Paul many years to labour in and enjoy it ; for as for me, I shall see it from heaven, if I deserve to go there." She shall indeed see the Province, and the first Chapter of her Order held on Spanish soil for three more years of life still remain to her on this side of the grave ; three years which, with declining strength, show no diminution of activity and zeal; three more years of labour, weariness, and effort. For to those so heroic of spirit as she, fruition and success bring not repose, but greater responsibility, greater cares ; no sinking down in lethargic ease to rest on the laurels so hardly and gloriously earned : " For the night cometh when no man shall work ! Her life will go out like the setting sun of some wondrous day that lives in the memory for ever most gorgeous and most majestic as its blood-red disc dips behind the shadowy horizon and descends into the mysteries of space. For in June, when the parameras of Avila wave with flowers, transformed into verdant meadows, where, under the lush grass, trickle a thousand unseen rivulets, Teresa, at the instance of Fray Angel de Salazar, the new Vicar-General of the Descalzos, once more holds herself in readiness to traverse the hot and dusty bridle-tracks of Castille : her ultimate destination Malagon, whose affairs have been gradually going from bad to worse ; her more immediate object to visit Valladolid, at the request of Bishop Mendoza and his sister, sorely in need of her consolations a request which the courtly Provincial, who owes them much, does not dream of refusing : thence to Salamanca, where the 615 616 SANTA TERESA need of her daughters is greatest of all, the very silence with which they suffer, the most heartrending of appeals. " See you now, daughter " (she writes to Maria Bautista), " this poor wretched old woman " (she is 64), " and then to Malagon ! I assure you that it has made me laugh ; and I have spirit for more. Perhaps, though, before I finish with Salamanca we may have news which would enable me to be with you longer ; for as to Malagon, some one else could get it into order." For she saw through the ruse, never a crafty friar of them all could hoodwink her, and that the Carmelites are not sorry to get rid of her on any pretext, and out of the neighbourhood of the Encarnacion. 1 "There are indications (it may be suspicion) that these brethren of mine are more anxious to see me at a distance from them than to remedy the necessity of Malagon. This indeed has given me a little concern ; since as for the rest, I mean the journey to Malagon, I felt none whatever; although it distresses me to go as prioress, for I am unfit for it, and fear lest I should be wanting in our Lord's service. Let your paternity beseech him that in this I may never falter ; and as to the rest, come what may The greater the labour, the greater the reward." For no other reason (so rigid the sense of Duty) but that she has become too old and feeble to take more than an inter- mittent part in the duties of the community, in which she exacted that her prioresses should ever take the lead, she, once the most active of them all, who scrubbed and cooked (and cooked so well, too, that the nuns rejoiced exceedingly when Mother Teresa's turn came round), has become little more than a helpless invalid, with a useless arm, who cannot even clothe herself without assistance. " As for the rest ; for the sake of obedience I will go to the end of the world ; and farther than that, I believe that the greater the labour (trabajo), the more joyfully would I do anything, however small, for this great God, to whom I owe so much ; above all, I think one serves him most when one does it for obedience' sake alone ; for, as regards my Paul, it would be enough for me to do anything with pleasure, for the sake of pleasing him." Thus heroically she struggled still along the thorny path of which so little remained for her to tread, her great heart lyearn- ing for sympathy, longing, as only a great heart can, to lean on the frail reed of human love ; to whisper the secrets and sadnesses of her soul into some human ear. " Oh ! what solitude every day brings me, and more to my soul, to be so far away from your paternity," she writes to Gracian ; " although it seems to 1 Letter to Gracian, loth June 1579. DIGS VOS 617 it that it is always close to the Father Jose, and with this I bear this life, although bereft of earthly contents, and with very continuous trouble ! " Salazar yielded to her representations relieved her of the onerous office she dreaded her inability to fulfil, but still required that she should not fail to visit Malagon and give that convent, gone so wrong, the benefit of her presence. On the Day of Corpus Christi his mandate for her departure arrived in Avila, "with so many censures that the Bishop's pleasure and the petition he made to his paternity is thoroughly complied with. So I shall set forth one or two days after San Juan " (St John's Day). Her companion on this journey was Ana de San Bartolome. She broke her journey, and stayed to rest two or three days at Medina, midway between Avila and Valladolid. None of her convents more strange and curiously impressive than this of Medina Medina of the Plains, standing sentinel- like, tall, austere, mysterious, on the very edge of the town, at the entrance to the four cross-roads, along one of which, on one of those evenings late in June of 1579, a country cart, preceded by a white column of dust, crawled painfully up to the convent gates. A palace anciently ; its curiously-inlaid roofs still telling a story of ancient splendour and magnificence ; outwardly great breadths of walls, stained to many hues yellow, brown, and red ; caked with the universal dust which clings like an outer garment to Castilian man and beast, and veils his dwelling; enigmatic of aspect, for each generation in its passage has imprinted thereon somewhat of its personality here you may trace in the faded bricks the outlines of a Gothic archway, of a Renaissance window, long ago blocked up to suit the require- ments of later inhabitants. A building whose grim impersonality and expressionlessness fascinates and repels ; with nothing to connect the life without with that within ; no casement from which the eye may scan the boundless plains that girdle in Medina in spring and early summer a waving sea of green or golden grain, as immense, as vast as the great circle of heaven above it. For these narrow rectangular gratings which pierce its surface here and there, as few as may be, are not made for vision, but to admit the air. Outside, the world the world of Medina jogs on its way ; ragged labourers ride out past it in the gray of early dawn, on donkeys as ragged as themselves, on their way to the fields, and return at eventide in wearied cavalcades, along the brown, dusty road. For in Medina intensely Castilian as it is, unlike gray, Gothic, chivalrous Avila, it is the East that gives the dominating 6i8 SANTA TERESA note ; and the clusters of huts built of mud-bricks baked in the sun bear I know not what resemblance to an Eastern village. For the glory of Medina has long departed, was departing even in Teresa's time, when the Englishman, the Frank, the German, and the Fleming chaffered and bartered with the taci- turn Castilian under the arcades of the market-place ; its great warehouses are now empty; the shepherd drives his black merino sheep, or the goat-herd his goats, unmolested through the silent streets silent except for the tinkling of their bells or the winding of the swineherd's horn. Its stately convents, founded by kings and princes, stand decaying day by day in the stern pathos of past magnificence ; and the great old stone palaces, the coats of arms of their former owners still clinging, defaced and mouldering, to their angles, their carved staircases, once thronged by retainers and men-at-arms, have now become the dwellings of a rural population of labourers, herdsmen, and shepherds. On the 3rd of July she arrived in Valladolid. Although she had begged that she might be spared all tumultuous demon- strations of joy, which rather mortified than gave pleasure to her humble spirit, the more deeply convinced, as life wore on, of her own imperfections, deficiencies, and unworthiness, we may imagine the deep satisfaction of the nuns nay, after the past terrible year, it was almost a triumph to look once more, after an absence of four years, on the venerated face of their foundress. " I have been amazed," she says simply to Gracian, " how glad these nuns are to have me with them, and these great people also " (Don Alvaro and Dona Maria de Mendoza) " I know not why." The state of her convent under the capable rule of Maria de Bautista leaves nothing to be desired, for years have transformed the gay and giddy girl, who inaugurated in a jest the Reform of the Carmelites, into a grave and sententious prioress a little too fond of giving advice perhaps, but clever, shrewd, and " a great gatherer for her house." It is said that on the occasion of one of the obnoxious notices being served upon her during the disputes, now so happily drawing to an end, she dictated such a reply to a dull and worthy advocate of Valladolid as left him transfixed with astonishment at the force of a woman's wit. And had not Teresa, too, proud of one whose qualities had been developed under her own training, laughingly and gracefully acknowledged her superiority to herself, when turning towards Gracian, as the prioress was engaged in the occupation which of all others she liked best, that of giving advice, she said, in smiling amazement (not perhaps without its point of irony, DIGS 6 VOS 619 which escaped the slower brains around her), " Jesus ! how much she knows ! I am but a fool before her, confounded at my own ignorance and incapability of any good thing." Silks and brocades rustled all day long through that little tranquil convent parlour, filling it for a moment with the odour of things and emotions that were not entirely sacred ; Dona Maria de Mendoza's coach, a strange structure (Teresa once travelled in it to Madrid), waited for hours before the convent gates, whilst she and the Bishop were closeted with Teresa within. " I was too tired to write, what with seeing so many great ladies (tanta senora)," she adds at the end of an already sufficiently long letter to Gracian in Alcala Gracian, with whom the hot summer has disagreed, and made him break out in boils. I' Yesterday I was with the Countess of Osorno. The Bishop of Palencia, [the Don de Mendoza aforesaid, already Bishop-elect of that diocese] is here ; your paternity, and all of us owe him much." Indeed, almost on the eve of her departure, she grudges the time lost in such vain intercourse. " We who should live most apart from the world," she writes to her brother Lorenzo, " are obliged to have so much to do with it, that your grace need not be surprised that, although I have been here the time I have, I have not been able to speak to the sisters (I mean alone), although some of them desire it greatly, for there has been no opportunity." She is sending him, with the messenger who bears the letter, a chalice, " very good, a better one is not needed, which weighs 1 2 ducats, and perhaps a real over, and cost 40 reals to make ; which comes to 16 ducats, less 3 reals. It is entirely of silver ; believe your grace will be pleased with it." (Was it for the chapel at La Serna, I wonder ?) " They showed me one here of the metal you mention, and although it is not an old one, and has been gilded, it already shows what it is, and it has got so black inside the foot as to be disgusting. I decided at once not to buy one like it, and it seemed to me not to be thought of that your grace should eat in much silver and use another metal for God." Which little detail paints the somewhat ostentatious and showy character of her brother as also his thrift to a nicety ; as also Teresa's healthy hatred of shams, and her honest instincts. ^ " I did not think," she continues, " to get one of so large a size so cheap, but this ' hurguillas ' (huckstress) of a prioress has gone about bargaining for it with one of her friends. . . . The state in which she has this house, and the ability she possesses, are such as to praise God for." Sometimes she unexpectedly touches the great current of 620 SANTA TERESA history. Not uninteresting to hear how the course of events then convulsing the Peninsula as it had never been convulsed since the days of the Catholic kings and La Beltraneja are echoed back from the mind of this old nun. The old age and decrepitude of the Cardinal, Don Enrique, who succeeded to the throne of Portugal on the death of his nephew, Don Sebastian, had raised up a host of claimants ; chief amongst whom were Philip of Spain and the Duke of Braganza, who claimed through his wife Dona Catalina, Don Manuel's grand -daughter. It is to Don Teutonio de Braganza, Archbishop of Ebora, the Duke of Braganza's uncle, that Teresa writes as follows from Valladolid : Your lordship might order word to be sent to me, if in Portugal there is any news of peace, for what I hear here keeps me in great distress ; because, if for my sins this business comes to war, I fear that it will do the greatest harm to that country, and even to this it cannot fail to bring great misery. [The people being already groaning under new taxations.] They tell me it is the Duke of Braganza who is at the head of it, and it pains me to the heart, he being such a close connection of yours, letting alone many other reasons besides this. For love of our Lord, since your lordship will naturally be able to influence him greatly, try to effect a settlement (since from what I hear our King is doing all in his power to effect one, and this greatly justifies his cause), and bear in mind the great misfortunes that may come of it ; and may your lordship seek the honour of God, as I believe you will, without respect to anything else. May God please to bring it about, as we all here beseech of him ; for I assure your lordship that I take it so much to heart that I could wish for death, if God allows it to come to such a pass, so as not to see it. May he guard you with the sanctity that I beseech of him for the good of his Church many years, and bestow on you such a portion of his grace that you may be able to pacify a matter so much to his service. In this country every one says that our King has justice on his side, and that he has left nothing undone to prove it. May the Lord reveal Ithe truth, and we be spared the number of deaths that must take place if it is put in jeopardy ; and this at a time when there are so few Christians, that it would be a great calamity were they to shed one another's blood. A patriotic and single-minded letter. It is perhaps the only occasion on which she enters, however slightly, into the political complications of her country, but when she does, it is to breathe a wider and nobler spirit; to preach a brotherhood in Christ (let us doubt it not) that transcends the narrow limits of kinship and nationality. What effect the letter had upon the Cardinal Prince we know not ; but it is a fact that at the Cortes of Almerin, where he presided as head of the prelates of Portugal, he preserved, whether from indifference or conviction, a complete neutrality. The end of July found the intrepid traveller back again in Medina, on her way to Alba de Tormes and Salamanca. She DIGS 6 VOS 621 had cut short her visit to Valladolid to prevent any Bother purchaser snapping up the house, "splendid but dear," that she had fixed her heart on buying for her daughters in Sala- manca ; but her journey ended in failure, and the only earthly care that troubled her last moments was connected with her Convent of Salamanca. Oh my father [she writes to Gracian], how many labours this house costs me ; and although all was concluded, the devil has so contrived that we are left without it, and it was the house that suited us best in Salamanca, and a very good bargain for the owner of it. There is no trust to be put in these sons of Adam ; for, in spite of his offering it to us himself, and his bein<* a gentleman, and one of the most upright here, as every one says (for all declared with one voice that his word was as good as his bond) ; not only had he promised, but given his signature before witnesses, himself fetching the notary, and the bargain was concluded. Every one is amazed, except some other gentlemen who persuaded him to it for their own interest or that of their relatives, and had more influence with him than those who would have had him act fairly ; and his brother, who negotiated the matter with us with great charity, is deeply distressed. We have commended it to our Lord ; it must be that it is for our good. What adds to my distress is that I cannot find a house in Salamanca good for anything. . . . Certainly if these sisters had the house in Seville, they would think they were in heaven. The folly of that prioress [Maria de San Jose] distresses me deeply ; and she has lost greatly in my opinion. I fear me that the Devil has begun in that house, and means to destroy it utterly . ..for I see a slyness [literally, foxiness] in that house which I cannot abide, and that prioress is astuter than her position warrants. And so I fear that, as I told her there she was never frank with me. I assure you I suffered greatly with her when there. As she has several times written to me in terms of deep repentance, I thought, since she acknowledged it herself, that she had amended. To put into the heads of the poor nuns that the house is such a bad one, is enough of itself to make them all imagine they are ill. [ have written terrible letters to her, which have no more effect than if I struck on steel. ... I believe we shall have to send other sisters there of more weight, who will act in such grave matters as it behoves. A bitter philippic, perhaps the bitterest and sternest she had ever penned, this written by the old nun in Salamanca, as she compares the position of her sick daughters lodged m a damp and unhealthy house, and now all hope gone of a better, with that of the nuns in Seville where that mgrate, Maria de San Jose, despising the large and spacious house which had cost her so much suffering and anxiety, was bent, without her knowledge, on leaving it for another a house, too, with a fairy- like patio of alabaster, for all the world like a sweetmeat of white sugar (alcorza), and spacious and delightful views, a matter of great importance to women shut up in such rigorous seclusion ! Thus oppressed by anxiety for some of her daughters, and by the ingratitude of others, she was fain to leave matters as they were, and return to Avila. Here she had one of thos 622 SANTA TERESA anomalous attacks of " perlesia " (it may be paralysis it may mean something widely different). In spite of it she started the day after on a five days' journey to Toledo. For three days the rain fell in torrents, and as it was impossible for the nuns to dry their drenched clothes, it seemed little short of a miracle that Teresa in her delicate state should have received no harm from it. But there is a fund of resistance in the sober Castilian character ; regardless of her health (she arrived in Malagon on the 25th of November), she at once plunged with characteristic energy into getting ready for the reception of her nuns the new house, built for them by Da. Luisa de la Cerda on the site Teresa herself had chosen years before in an olive grove near the fortress. Barely three weeks later, the translation took place on the Feast of the Conception ; and for a brief moment the unaccustomed sisters, "looking for all the world like lizards crawling out in summer to take the sun," might imagine them- selves a part of the world of men. A moment which to all of them was an era in their lives, the glory of that triumphal procession long one of the most cherished traditions of the convent. But Teresa was confronted with graver cares than these. It was not merely to see the sisters move from one house to another that she had come to Malagon. The rule of a young and inexperienced prioress (for Prioress Brianda was still in Toledo) had played havoc with the discipline and loaded the convent with debt. She was also anxious to test the origin of the dreams and visions of Ana de San Agustin (for if Teresa believed her own visions, she had little faith in those of others), she who was afterwards prioress of Villanueva de la Jara, where her stern and beautifully-modelled face still frowns ascetically from the shadow that envelops it between the grating of the two choirs in the Carmelite Church. A bewitched nun, and a foolish, but well-meaning confessor, added other elements to confusion and anarchy. " The harm a prioress can do is terrible. Things have passed before me which I dare wager do not take place in the most relaxed convents of Spain." She had come prepared for no half measures, and Jeronima del Espiritu Santo, whom she had brought with her from Salamanca for that purpose, was at once elected prioress. No hint of these scandals was allowed to transpire beyond the convent walls; she dismissed the confessor, but in such a manner as to keep him still a friend. " I have endeavoured to act with all dissimulation ; and truly I find him a god-like soul, and that in nothing has there been any malice in him. As he lives at a distance, and has other work, it has been effected DIGS 6 VOS 623 without exciting remark ; and I got him to preach for us, and sometimes I see him. Everything is now smooth, glory to God ! " In less than a month she had reduced the convent to order, without losing a friend or making an enemy ! It is from Malagon she writes that pathetic little fragment of a letter : " Here I find leisure that I have longed for for years, and although I find myself alone, with none to console me, my soul is at rest. And it is because there is no more memory of Teresa de Jesus than if she had never lived. And for this reason I will endeavour to remain here; because sometimes I saw myself in great affliction at hearing so much folly, for there [in Avila?] they have only to say a person is a saint and he must be one without either rhyme or reason. They laugh at me [in Avila] when I tell them to make another, since it costs them nothing more than to say so." As she had travelled from Avila to Toledo her thoughts had flown back to the occasion when the fatigues of the road were lightened by the presence of Gracian. As Christmas draws near, when it would seem that the flight of time becomes a tangible fact bringing the present nearer to the past in an involuntary recapitulation of our life, she remembers that terrible Christmas night at Avila a year ago, when, bowed by distress, she mourned the captivity of her son and the ruin of her Order, " God be praised," she writes and it is to Gracian she sends this, her first Christmas greeting, " who thus betters the seasons. Surely that night was such that I shall never forget it, even though I live many years." And so another Christmas morning rises bright and clear over the bleak sierras, white with powdery snow, which girdle round the little fortress town of Malagon, and fades into night the night of Oblivion, the end of all men and all things. Be glad and rejoice, ye sisters, as the lights gleaming through the convent corridors reflect a red glow on the snow, and the labourers bar their doors against the wolves driven by hunger from their mountain fastnesses to prowl about the village streets (as was still the case on winter nights towards the middle of this century, perhaps is so still) ; sing with clear voices the simple ballads and homely villancicos of the season ; for it is one of Teresa's last Christmas-tides on earth, and it is with you she spends it. And as in this dim old convent of Malagon she kneels with her nuns at Matins and Vespers, and their voices now swell, now die away into the vague twilight of the little church, she, this forlorn old woman, so feeble of body and great of spirit, who pulls the strings of the Order, and provides her delegates, her " needy Romanes " (Romans), as she calls them, with money ; her brain still pictures a countless series of found a- 624 SANTA TERESA tions; immediately Villanueva de la Jara, Madrid, Arenas on the confines of Portugal ; and who knows whether, perhaps, she herself may not carry her Order and her nuns to France itself? Maria de San Jos6 has been forgiven ; for it is not in Teresa's generous nature to nurse resentment ; nay, in these January letters, she is sad to think that she should have added to her sick prioress's troubles. Your reverence must forgive me, for with those I dearly love I am insufferable, so anxious am I that they should err in nothing. I know not why your reverence should say fray Nicolas [Doria, then in Seville by Salazar's orders, to reinstate Maria de San Jose as prioress] has been at the bottom of this misunderstanding between us, for you have no greater champion on earth. He told me the truth, so that, as he foresaw the harm that would come to the convent, I might be undeceived. Oh ! my daughter, how little it matters as regards me that you should excuse yourself so much, for I tell you truly that to me it is indifferent whether you pay any heed to me or not, provided I know that you are acting up to your obligations. The mistake, as it seems to me, is that I look on all that concerns you with such anxiety and love, that I think you do not do what you ought if you do not heed me, and that I am only tiring myself out in vain. Again she refers to Beatriz de Jesus, the author of the troubles at Seville, who is still, it would seem, impenitent : The Lord often permits a fall, so as to leave the soul more humble. And when repentance is sincere and hearty, it redounds to the greater service of our Lord, as we see in the case of many saints. Therefore, my daughters (you are all daughters of the Virgin, and sisters), endeavour to love one another greatly, and think it never happened. I speak to all of you. New Year's Day was gladdened by the arrival of a messenger with a letter from the Duchess of Alba. If proof was necessary to show how profoundly a religious creed can distort conscience, and make men perverse and cruel, no two better examples can be found in this grim age than Philip of Spain and Ferdinand of Toledo, the stern Duke of Alba. There is no greater falsity in the world than History, when it goes beyond facts and statistics. When it comes to motives, and would paint the character of the actors in great broad touches, mistrust it as you would the plague. To label this bundle of contradictory impulses and emotions ever in fluidity, undulating, evasive, with one or two adjectives, and so send it down to posterity as the mental category of a man, is the most gigantic of impertinences and lies ; the most intolerable of injustices ! Who would re- cognise the terrible scourge of Flanders in the old gray-headed man, reading Teresa's Life, and meekly listening to the spiritual counsels and comfort of one of her bare-footed friars, professing that nothing could give him greater pleasure, although it cost him many leagues, than to see the Mother Teresa ? DIGS VOS 625 I was almost forgetting about the Duke and Duchess [she writes to Gracian, the bare-footed friar in question]. Know that on New Year's Eve [this with an almost imperceptible tinge of pardonable vanity] the Duchess sent me a messenger with this, and another letter on purpose to know how I was. As to what she says about your paternity having told her that I cared more for the Duke, I would not have it ; but I said that as your paternity told me so much of his goodness and spirituality, you must have thought so ; but that I loved God only for himself alone, and I saw no reason why I should not love her, and bear her more affection. It was much better expressed, however, than this. I think that book, which she says she made father Medina transcribe, is my great one [her Life]. Let me know all you can get to hear about it, and do not forget, for I should be exceeding rejoiced, now that there is no other [copy] but that in the possession of the angels [the Inquisitors], that it should not be lost. To my thinking, the one I have written since [the Moradas] is better ; at least I had more experience than when I wrote the other. I have already written to the Duke twice. Intolerance and Religion are twin-born ; doubt it not. If the Duke of Alba's name raises a shudder, blame not the man for the cruelty which has made him execrated: blame his age, perhaps blame his own austere virtue, the pursuit of the im- possible of extirpating heresy the Quixotic dream of him and the master he served, which to my mind casts about them both a certain glow of nobility and greatness. Quixotism and Fernando de Toledo was a religious Don Quixote, as fruitlessly trying to extirpate his heretics as his prototype tried to overthrow his windmills always excuses to some extent in a man the excesses to which it leads him. It may be as foolish to compare folly with folly as to contrast beauty with beauty ; still, bigotry for bigotry and suffering for suffering, is the intolerance and bigotry on Alba's part so much worse in its results than the modern folly which dooms so many thou- sands to a long death in life in the thralls of competition and commerce ? now and again shooting or hanging a few, in order that the system may not be disturbed ? In one case, a sincere desire to save their souls animated the butchers of the Nether- lands. In the other, the mainspring is a base greed for money, flimsily veiled over by specious references to Progress and Civilisation. In one case, the epitaph of the victim was the immoral aphorism of the Inquisitor as to the relative im- portance of soul and body. In the other, the no less wicked maxim of the political economist, that wealth must be pro- duced at all hazards. In the face of so much misery and such lamentable results, who shall award the palm of merit between Alba the Catholic and the countless modern Albas of commerce? Teresa remained in Malagon till February as may be seen 40 626 SANTA TERESA on the boards hanging in the gateway of the convent, which still perpetuate the memory of her visits. Her task has now been accomplished. "All are now full of contentment, and the prioress such that they have indeed reason to be so. ... The house is like a paradise. As to the wasted property, I have been busy planning how they may earn somewhat with spinning and needlework. . . . Nothing will be wasted in the prioress's hands, who is a great administrator." No sooner is one duty performed than another imperatively demands the presence of this wonderful old woman. The hope which now beams radiantly over the fortunes of the Reform once more makes it possible for her to resume those foundations which the events of the last few years have so cruelly interrupted. Three more convents shall yet testify to the unconquerable spirit of this, the last representative of the virtues and heroism of the old Spain of Ferdinand and Isabella, this old woman of sixty-five, who still goes forth to found, as Ferdinand of Toledo to fight at seventy, and shall cast their lustre over the last three years of her life. The origin of the foundation of Villanueva de la Jara is as follows : Three maidens, attracted by the fame of the austere Catalina de Cardona, had joined her in the Desert of La Roda ; but soon discouraged by the portentous strictness of a life and rule to which they could not school their weaker natures, they returned home to Villanueva, and, together with four or five others, constituted themselves into a pious community. Assum- ing the scapulary of Our Lady of Carmel, they took possession of the hermitage of Santa Ana and a small house adjoining. The pious priest, the founder of the hermitage (if we may believe the not very trustworthy accounts of the chronicler, too desirous of casting on his Order such fugitive glimpses of super- natural lustre as he can), had formerly been a Carmelite friar, and on his deathbed left his property for the purpose of raising a monastery close to it. " Either through carelessness or care," drily remarks the chronicler, " the property had disappeared, and the house and a little land was all that remained." But the dream, the unsatisfied aspiration of these worthy women's lives was to enrol themselves in one of the regular Orders ; and four years before, during Teresa's residence in Toledo after the conclusion of her Sevilian foundation, a priest arrived with letters from the corporation of Villanueva, together with one from the curate, the learned and virtuous Doctor Agustin Ervias, earnestly beseeching her to accede to their desires. Her first impulse was to refuse. DIGS fi VOS 627 On no account did it seem advisable to me to admit it, for these reasons : first, on account of their number, and the difficulty, as it seemed to me, of getting those accustomed to their own mode of life to reconcile themselves to ours ; secondly, because they had almost nothing to maintain themselves with, and if they were to live on alms, little enough aid could be expected from a town of little more than a thousand inhabitants, and, although the corporation volunteered to maintain them, it did not seem to me assured ; thirdly, they had no house ; fourthly, their distance from our monasteries ; and, although their virtues were described to me, as I had not seen the maidens, I had no means of knowing whether they were fit for our monasteries or not ; and so I decided to reject it entirely. The end of it, however, after consultation with her confessor Velazquez, who saw a deeper purpose than appeared on the surface in the union of so many hearts together in the same aspiration, was that, without definitely accepting it, neither did she wholly reject it. In any case the storms and tempests which then threatened the very existence of the Discalced Carmelites were scarcely a season for projecting further founda- tions. Now, however, it was different; and scarcely had she arrived in Malagon when the matter was again earnestly pressed upon her, this time by Fray Antonio de Jesus, who, after the disastrous conclusion of the Chapter of Almodovar, had been exiled to the Desert of La Roda, about three leagues from Villanueva, where he and the prior, Fray Gabriel de la Asuncion, " a discreet person and a servant of God," often went to preach. A warm friendship sprang up between the two friars and the Doctor Ervias, who made them acquainted with the pious sisterhood, "and being favourably impressed with their virtues, and persuaded by the town and the doctor, they took up the matter as if it had been their own," and at once set to work to besiege Teresa with urgent letters. Fray Gabriel de Asuncion, as he passed through Toledo on his way back from the Observant Chapter of Malagon, where, unheard-of triumph ! he, a Descalzo, had just been elected fourth Definitor, finding Teresa gone, followed her to Malagon, where he again pleaded the cause of the Beatas of Villanueva, with right good- will, and promised her, in the name of the good Dr. Ervias, directly the foundation should be an accomplished fact, 300 ducats out of the revenues of his benefice. " This," writes the shrewd saint, " filled me with uncertainty, it seeming to me that, once it was founded, he (Dr. Ervias) might not be so eager, for, with the little they had, they had enough to live upon ; and so I adduced many reasons, and to my thinking very sufficient ones, to the father prior to convince him of the inexpediency of making the foundation ; and I said that he and Father Fray Antonio had better look well to it, 628 SANTA TERESA for I left it on their conscience, what I said to them being in my opinion more than enough to settle the matter in the negative." Moreover, fearing lest her two obstinate friars might, behind her back, wheedle Salazar out of the license, she at once wrote to him not to grant it. A month and a half passed, perhaps more, and I already thought I had heard the last of it, when comes a messenger with letters from the corpora- tion and Dr. Ervias, in which they bound themselves to provide whatever was needful, accompanied with earnest letters from these two reverend fathers. My fear was, that if I admitted so many sisters together, they were sure, as often happens, to form a faction against the rest, and also the insecurity of the arrangements for their maintenance for what was offered did not decide me so that I find myself in sore perplexity. One day, after communicating, as I was commending it to God . . . his Majesty reproved me strongly : With what treasures had that been effected which had been done until now ! and that I should not hesitate to accept this house, which would be to his great service, and for the benefit of souls. Words which to this day are still preserved over the choir of the convent church of Villanueva de la Jara : words which have consecrated that spot as sacred ground for more than three centuries, and are remembered when perchance her heroic exhortations to the strong, tender virtues of her own character, which cast such a lustre over the lives of these first poor primitive sisters, have faded away, and left a languorous atmosphere of somnolent decay, hopelessness, and death. What matters it if the voice heard by Teresa de Jesus was Divine, or elaborated in the depths of her own consciousness whether it came from above or within, so long as it was to her the rigid, inflexible voice of Duty? It was in the way that she performed that duty nobly, fearlessly, uprightly I had almost said, chivalrously (so far as the term may be applied to a woman, it may be applied to her) that she teaches us her lesson. There is now neither indecision nor hesitation. She writes for and obtains Salazar's license ; orders a solemn procession, in which she leaves it to God to point out the nuns who are to accompany her ("for, oh! my father," she had written to Gracian a month before, " and what anxiety it gives me to find neither a prioress nor nuns to satisfy me "). The lot fell upon Ana de San Agustin and Elvira de San Angelo. On the 1 2th of February, the Prior of La Roda and Fray Antonio de Jesus, whose miserable jealousy of Gracian and disappointed itch for pre-eminence all melt away in his tender love for her whom they all regarded as their Mother, came to fetch them with a cart and a coach. "The worthy Fray Antonio cannot deny the love he bears me, since, old age and DIGS 6 VOS 629 all, he comes so far : he is well and fat it seems to me as if this year we grew fat on suffering." On the day following they started. At Toledo the company was increased by two nuns, one of whom she had fixed upon for prioress. She had left Malagon " very old and wearied," as she had written to her prioress of Seville ; but no sooner had she started than it seemed as if she took a new lease of life and strength ; she had never before, she said, felt so strong or well. .. , Her journey was one continued triumph. It was as il anticipated in life the glorious apotheosis which awaited her after death. If honour and fame are to be measured by the applause of men and by most men, such are the limitations of humanity, they are so measured, except by the noblest minds then did Teresa de Jesus achieve them during this journey. The Catholic religion has this in it of elevating above its cold and vapid Protestants rivals, that it has always idealised and personified Virtue, and has stirred the crowd to paeans of victory for other heroes than kings and warriors and states- menthe heroes of Virtue. I doubt, indeed, whether Philip of Spain himself, or his most famous generals, would have been accorded the reception that was now awarded to Teresa de Jesus. From every little town and village the people flocked to catch a glimpse of the aged saint; in Villarobledo it was necessary to post two alguaciles before the door of the house where she was eating ; and even then crowds swarmed up the walls in their eagerness to get a peep at the great foundress within ; nay, it was necessary to throw some of most adventurous into prison, to enable her to leave the town. One man, a rich labourer, hearing that she was approaching, in right patriarchal fashion decked his house, made ready a rustic feast, and sent out to gather in his flocks and herds from the neighbouring hamlets, so that they with him and his family might share in the saint's blessing. The saint blessed him indeed, but refused to alight or break her journey, where- upon he brought his whole household out into the road, so that they might all speak with her, and receive her benediction. It was in vain that they set out three hours before daybreak (and that in La Mancha, in winter) to avoid the enthusiastic multitude. Her fame travelled faster than the creaking carts, and moved the same simultaneous impulse of curiosity, venera- tion, and awe : the people still poured out to greet them 1 here was also the miracle ; at least the driver (a Spanish driver) declared that it was nothing less. For, in spite of her coach (in reality a very sorry cart the work "coach in Spanish 630 SANTA TERESA being applicable to anything slung on wheels) meeting with an accident in the dark, it still managed to accomplish another three leagues, which, when it came to be examined by daylight, seemed impossible. But her greatest triumph is still to come ; for her friars no matter on what pretext, we may be sure it had all been lovingly and carefully planned beforehand insist on her breaking her journey at their Desert of La Roda, about three leagues from Villanueva, and nearly half-way between it and the town of La Roda, and "it was but right I should obey these friars with whom we travelled, in everything." As they emerged from the path frayed by the bare feet of the monks she had herself conjured into existence, they sallied forth to receive her in procession, and after receiving her bless- ing on their bended knees, bore her to the church, intoning the Te Deum ever chanted on great national festivals and rejoic- ings ; on the visits and births of kings as she crossed the threshold. The scene and its surroundings affected her deeply. Her friars, with their bare feet and poor " sayal " capes, transport her to the " flowery time " of the solitaries of the desert. It seemed to her that they were but other blossoms, white and fragrant, mingling their perfume with that of the sweet strong- scented aromatic herbs and flowers which peopled this " savoury solitude." " Truly the inward joy I felt was such, that I would have accounted a longer journey well employed . . . although I grieved deeply that the saint through whom the Lord founded this house was now dead, for I did not deserve to see her, although I desired it much." Strangest of all those strange histories of beatas, or holy women, who flit across the religious chronicles of this age, is that of Catalina Cardona, who had cast round the flowery desert of La Roda the halo of her sufferings and her sanctity, investing it for Teresa with so potent and inscrutable an attraction, that Teresa has sketched her life history in the Foundations. In 1557, when monks and nuns swarmed, and fresh convents and monasteries were being founded every day, a Neapolitan lady had accompanied her relative, the Princess of Salerno, to Valladolid, then the court of Spain. The gay and sprightly Princess, surrounded by her train of Neapolitan courtiers, was virtually a political prisoner ; for although, on the discovery of his intrigues with France, the Prince had escaped just in time to save his neck, his vast Neapolitan estates were confiscated to the Crown. The continuance in Naples of a woman possessed of rare beauty and a sweet and persuasive tongue, and, what DIGS 6 VOS 631 was more dangerous, a quick and lively intellect, who, on the plea that she had not been privy to the plot, never ceased to reclaim her own dowry and personal possessions, was not likely to commend itself to the prudent mind of Philip, and he straightway despatched from Flanders a peremptory mandate, ordering her instantly to proceed to Spain. Concealing her tremors and dismay under an appearance of cheerful alacrity, the Princess determined to obey. At this critical moment of her life, turning aside from the splendid cortege she had gathered round her, she sought for consolation and support from an elderly relative of her own, the most of whose life had been spent in the retirement of a Capuchin convent. This was Catalina de Cardona, the descendant of an illustrious house, the royal blood of Aragon ran in her veins around whose early history the religious chroniclers have woven a tender and superstitious legend. They tell how, when but a child of eight, she is said to have martyred her tender limbs with untold penances, to rescue her father, the fierce swash- buckler captain who had so often led the Emperor's troops to victory, from the pains of Purgatory ; how for five years the good nuns laboured to teach her to read, but all in vain, until she was miraculously enlightened by the Holy Ghost ; how she made a vow of perpetual virginity, which Heaven itself aided her to keep, for, unable to resist the importunities of her relatives, she was betrothed to a grandee of Naples, who died suddenly on the very eve of his marriage. It was then that the bride of thirteen entered a Capuchin convent, where, without taking the vows, she gave herself up to the life that was most congenial to her. r>u-i- No better person for the demure and sombre court of Philip II than this elderly, plain-featured woman, who might to a certain extent sanctify the anything but demure household of the Princess of Salerno, the merry, beautiful, fascinating Italian, whose youth was to consume away in a bootless suit, and to wither under the frigid blight of Philip's influence. For a time all went on merrily as a marriage bell dark Castilian capital. The Princess's palace was a second court its grandeur and stateliness surpassed only by the King s, thronged with all the grandees in Casti lie princes and am- bassadors accounting it an honour to bow the knee before i brilliant mistress. Nevertheless, the Princess's demeanour was scrupulously reserved, and she never left its walls unless ac- companied by her grave and elderly cousin, Catahna. Amongst the visitors who thronged her palace was one destined to attain a sad and fearful celebrity, in whose society the Princess took 632 SANTA TERESA extraordinary pleasure ; and one can well believe the charm that the witty, acute Doctor Agustin Cazalla, with his latitudi- narian views and wide experience of men and manners, exercised on the exiled Italian, stifled by the sombre gravity of the Spanish court, and wearied of the dreary and stately ceremony and meaningless grandiloquence of the self-contained Castilians who composed it. But from the first the graver Catalina misdoubted her of the damnable heresy concealed under the Doctor's flowery phrases. Whenever he came, it is noted that, as if to guard her cousin from the fatal contamina- tion of his evil influence, she took her stand by her side, and boldly contradicted his doctrines. And yet perhaps it was only a question of temperament that separated these two people the future hermit and the heretic doctor. Catalina had a strain of Aragonese blood, and, strangely enough, nothing is more difficult to eradicate mix it, strain it, as you will than even the most distant tinge of Spanish nationality. Uncompromising and severe, accounting the world a delusion, and the body an instrument whereby Satan leads us to perdition, the strange pessimism of her race, which an Italian education had left unmodified, found in her a stern and eloquent exponent. The Kingdom of Heaven must be conquered by blood. Cazalla, of a happier, more buoyant disposition, undervalued the austerities which have as their final result the complete negation of life. After one of his sermons the last he was ever to deliver Catalina told him, it is said, that she had seen flames of fire issuing from his mouth, which smelt pestilently of brimstone. "Oh, lady," replied the Doctor in Italian, after in vain endeavouring to persuade her that what she had seen was the fevered vision of her own imagination, " speak not such words again ! " But the words had told home, and in spite of the sharp reproof the Princess gave her cousin for her discourtesy, the dis- comfited man rose from his chair and left the palace. Nevertheless Catalina was filled with the same stern and ardent rancour which slumbered in the stern bosoms of the Inquisitors, men whose moral character, let it not be forgotten, silenced by its rigid perfection the calumnies of their most prejudiced enemies. In her wrath against the heretic, she prophesied that he should preach no more. On the Saturday following, the church was crowded with courtiers and ladies to hear Cazalla's sermon. The Princess and her attendants were amongst the audience. Just before the Benediction, at the moment when he should have ascended the DIGS fi VOS 633 pulpit, arrived a messenger from the Inquisition, to announce that Cazalla was a prisoner. The Holy Office had done its work stealthily and well ! A year later, the square of Valladolid witnessed one of those fierce and gloomy scenes which exercised so horrible and unholy a fascination on the popular imagination, and ate so deeply into the national character, that in 1762, when it was proposed to do away with the Inquisition, the only reply that could' be forced from the King of Bourbon race who expulsed the Jesuits was : "The Spaniards want it, and it does me no harm" (Los Espanoles la quieren, y a mi no me estorba). Cazalla, his brother and his sister, after expiating the charge of heresy on the gibbet, were then consigned to the flames, together with the exhumed bones of their mother, who had been mercifully released by Death whilst she was still a prisoner in the Inquisition dungeons. Already the poor Princess of Salerno was doomed. Her splendour, her beauty, her popularity had drawn to her side warm and eloquent partisans. A perilous litigant this, whose court rivalled the King's. She was dangerous, and must be got rid of. Philip, utterly devoid of the chivalrous feeling or the magnanimity which had characterised his great father, decreed the ruin of the unfortunate woman who had thrown herself on his protection and generosity. She was bidden coldly to leave the court, and retire to Toledo. Mercifully the great Releaser was at hand, and Death stepped in before, like the Princess of Eboli, she found herself a close prisoner behind the gratings of some Castilian fortress. " The tongue of the King," moralises the chronicler, " is penetrating ; strong is the breath of his words for those who depend on them, and place their happiness in his discomfiture." The King, glad at heart, made a hollow pretence of the grief he did not feel. In the general disbanding of the Princess's household, a home was found for the austere Catalina (whose virtues had not failed to reach the monarch's ears) in the household of the Princes of Eboli, and she thus became an inmate of the royal palace, where she had charge of their jewels and wardrobes, and distributed the Prince's alms amongst the necessitous. It is noteworthy as throwing a side-light on the Princess's character, " more spendthrift than generous," notes the chronicler, that the Prince warned his almoner beforehand not to let his liberality come to the knowledge of his wife. As she grew in years, Catalina's life became still more rigorous. Her fare was vegetables seethed in water ; she fasted four days a week; she slept on a straw pallet, and wore 634 SANTA TERESA unbleached sackcloth next the skin ; she scourged herself with pointed hooks. Her body was lacerated with the sharp points of the cilicium, and marked by the weight of heavy chains. The young Princes, Don Carlos and Don Juan of Austria, all heedless of the gloomy future, conceived a strong attachment for the ill-favoured, homely, solitary woman, to whom they gave the name of Mother. During her absence one day after lunch, the royal scapegraces broke into a chest which contained the sweetmeats. She came upon the culprits amidst a rout of broken jars and syrups spilt upon the floor. " My princes," she said, " this seems to me an omen that some day you will upset the world in defence of the Faith. But I marvel that minds so generous should be employed in such trifles, and that, being able to command, you humiliate yourselves to mischief. A bad example you set the servants to be more daring. It is meet that no one else shall see what you have done, and that your highnesses, with a little more modesty, set to work to put this to rights." When it came to Philip's ears (as what did not?), the grim monarch was delighted with the rugged sincerity with which she had dared to rebuke the Infante of Spain. Don Juan never forgot the woman whom he addressed as Mother ; and to her the gallant young hero of Lepanto sent some of his precious spoils : nay, indeed, his leniency to, and chivalrous treatment of, his fallen foe was mainly due, it is said, to her influence and intercession. But her intercourse with palaces had served to increase, rather than to lessen, Catalina's abhorrence for the world. She was sick of the lies, and the feigning, and the hypocrisy. She fancied she saw the lips of Christ open, and bid her leave the palace, and hie her to a cave, so that she might more freely give herself to prayer and penance. Encouraged by a Franciscan friar, she accompanied her patrons to Estremera, where a neighbouring priest, to whom she confided her purpose, supplied her with a hermit's habit and hood. Before she started, she left a letter behind her for Ruy Gomez, and another addressed to Don Juan of Austria. It was not yet dawn when, her scanty arrangements concluded, she prepared to leave the house. The doors were barred, but the Christ she wore round her neck rose up, it is said, into the air, and pointing to a low window, bade her follow him. Where* upon, she found herself, she knew not how, standing in the street outside. The priests were waiting for her in the appointed spot, where, after cutting off her hair, she donned the hermit's habit. Well might her great contemporary, lost in amazement, exclaim, " How divinely intoxicated must this Holy soul have DIGS fi VOS 635 been, enraptured [by the thought] that none should hinder her in her enjoyment of her Spouse, and how determined to have nothing more to do with the world, since she thus fled from all its contents ! " So the hermit and her two companions trudged off towards Cuenca. A quarter of a league before they came to La Roda, in the district of Vala be Rey, the hermit said, as she stopped short at the bottom of a sandy hillside : " Here God wills me to take up my abode ; let us go no farther." Catalina, homely of feature but heroic of soul, was forty-three when, leaving behind her the cumbersome ceremonial of the court of Spain, she made her way on foot towards the lonely desert of La Roda, where she buried her life. In that flowery solitude on the banks of the river San Lucar, amidst the pines which murmur mysteriously against the sunset, and all the sweet, strong-scented, aromatic herbs and flowers, so peculiar to the sandy uplands of Spain, you may still see the cave where she hid her existence from the world. For three years, to the whispered awe and amazement of rustics and shepherds, a hermit, his face shrouded by his hood, who disappeared as mysteriously as he came, eluding all their efforts to track him to his dwelling, knelt at his devotions in the convent church of Fuen Santa. Who he was, or whence he came, none knew, until one day a wandering shepherd discovered him gathering roots and herbs, and followed his trail in the grass to a cave, or rather burrow, hidden amongst the cistus and brushwood of the hillside. We may not take for granted the chronicler's hyperbolical account of her privations and her sufferings : how she browsed on the herbs and grass which grew around the mouth of her cave, like some beast of the field ; how the cruel strokes of scourgings woke the midnight silence; how the flowers hung their heads, oppressed with the weight of the drops of blood which flowed from the hermit's heart ; how demons exhausted on her all their malignity, and the angels all their love ; how the devil in the shape of a black dog, with matted hair and eyes of fire, sent the kneeling figure rolling amongst the spikes of rosemary ; how, as she sank down fainting and exhausted with a fast of forty days, a passing muleteer, an angel, doubtless, says the chronicler (there is a strange practicality about a Spanish angel), succoured her distress, her hunger being oftentimes relieved by the like mysterious means. This strange old-world figure, who became at last a part of the universal life of Nature around her, who, ceasing indeed to move in the world of men, regained instead that supremacy over, and 636 SANTA TERESA mysterious sympathy with, that other world, which man for his crimes perhaps also the crime of civilisation (for Indians have it), has lost, needs no such embellishments to enhance its interest. The inhabitants of the sandy hillocks and shadowy pines, seeing a thing as harmless and gentle as themselves, pursued their gambols fearlessly at her feet. The rabbits and partridges, saluted her presence with marks of joy, running around her in glad and tumultuous pleasure. She even settled their innocent quarrels, and in the morning lovingly dismissed the vipers and poisonous insects which, attracted to her cell by the heat of a human body, never offered harm to one whom they regarded as their companion. Even the merry insect world, which peopled flower and herb, and filled the sunlight with a thousand strange and confused murmurs ; the turtle- dove and the fox, learned to distinguish her presence, and owned her sway. Who shall tell the mysteries of conscience that have been fathomed on this narrow spot of ground ; the strange battles fought by the Flesh and the Devil for a tortured soul, through the long winter nights when the wolves and wild boars howled and grunted around her dwelling? Or when winter had given place to summer, and Nature lay hushed in solemn silence under the glimmering stars, who shall tell the mystical harmonies which swept over her soul, as she watched alone, encircled by the solemn grandeur of the night ? At last it got to be whispered about that the cowled solitary was a woman. Some letters written by Don Juan of Austria to her he addressed as mother, found in her cave one day when she was absent, by certain priests, anxious to solve the mystery, betokened that she was a personage of birth and consequence. Her fame spread, not only as a saint, but as one of highest rank. Then the keen eyes of a friar belonging to the neighbouring Convent of Fuen Santa, who went to visit her in her cave, fell on a book of Hours, and as he turned over the leaves, he noted at the end of the book an inscription which the hermit had probably long ago forgotten, stating that it had been a gift from the Princess of Eboli. Now that her secret was discovered, so great the crowds that flocked to the " good woman " of La Roda, some to cure their infirmities by the magic touch of her hermit's habit, others from curiosity, or to beseech her blessing (amongst them grandees of Spain), that, to prevent them tearing her to pieces in their honest and frenzied devotion, it became necessary to surround her with a guard of armed men. But it had become the dream of her life to found a convent. Christ himself had held out to her as she prayed in her cave a DIGS VOS 637 Carmelite habit, and, on stretching out her hands to take it, she was bathed in a stream of glory ; and not he only, but the prophet Elijah, girt about with a hairy girdle. Where, however, shall she find these bare-footed friars, with the dark habit, short white cape, and shepherd's crook, of her visions ? To every one she addressed the same anxious question, until at length from a labourer on his way home from the fair at Pastrana she heard that there, in some caves on a hillside, lived men clothed even as she described. She at once despatched a letter to her old friend and patron, the powerful and amiable Ruy Gomez, who, pale and worn-out, sought in Pastrana a momentary surcease from the cares and turmoil of the court. Mariano was sent to fetch her. At the entrance to the town, the dusty friar and hermit were met by the Prince and Princess of Eboli, the Duke of Gandia, and a splendid retinue on horse- back. After solemnly receiving the Discalced habit in the Monastery Church of Pastrana, at the request of the Princess of Portugal, she set off for court. Philip sent for her to the Escorial. Although years of unbroken solitude in the desert had set their stamp upon the woman who had once been familiar with the customs of a court, and her appearance was strange and uncouth (she had forgotten, says the hyperbolical chronicler, all the forms of courtesy, and the names of the commonest things), it was noticed that her face, which had never been beautiful, was now transformed by an expression so divine and sweet as to attract all eyes. The Catholic monarch, whom ambassadors and grandees of Spain never addressed but on their bended knees, condescended to lay aside his rank, to dis- course familiarly with the simple old woman in the friar's habit, who styled him "my son," and spoke to him in the homely second person. When she attempted to excuse herself to the Princess tor her lack of courtly breeding, the latter embraced her tenderly, beseeching her to make it up in love, and to treat her like one of the countrywomen amongst whom she lived. Would that bigotry and superstition had never any worse results than these Don John of Austria, but recently appointed Captain of the Catholic League, promised to transform her hermit's cave into a shrine as precious and renowned as that of Guadalupe; a promise which was never fulfilled. The Pope's Legate, highly scandalised at a Discalced friar being seen driving through the streets of Madrid with ladies, and scattering blessings out of the coach, although informed by Mariano of her sex, sent for her to his presence. When she gave him her benediction, the Nuncio completely lost his temper. 638 SANTA TERESA " What ! you bring her to me with a hood ? " he said to Mariano, adding, as he turned to the hermit, " And by what spirit is it, good woman, that you go about showering blessings broadcast like a bishop ? " He ended, however, by beseeching her prayers for the success of the League ; and it is said that from her cell in La Roda she watched the progress, and was the first to declare the issue, of the combat which held the whole Christian world in suspense, and made Pope Pius V. groan as he awaited the dubious result Her return journey to La Roda was a triumphal progress. A cart was laden with the silver vessels, jewels, and chasubles that had been given her as presents. At Alcala she lodged in the palace of the Marquesa de Caiiete ; at Guadalajara in the Duke del Infantado's. From Pastrana to La Roda a court alguacil, sent by Ruy Gomez, restrained a crowd so great as to impede their progress. In April of 1572 a monastery of Discalced Carmelite friars rose upon the spot, the scene of her solitary combats and sufferings, and at her entreaty the church was built over her cave where she had spent eight years of her life. Five years later, in 1577, and a year before Teresa's visit, surrounded by the weeping friars, who besought the dying woman to give them a last blessing, "speaking things of God most moving and devout," Catalina Cardona " entered into her native land," and was buried in the self-same spot where she had lived. Great is the devotion borne to this monastery because of her, and it seems as if the whole neighbourhood was still full of her presence, especially when one looks upon that solitude and cave where she lived before she resolved to make the monastery. ... I was profoundly consoled whilst I was there, and still am so, although I was sorely humbled : since I saw that she who had there gone through so harsh a penance was a woman like myself, and more delicately reared, by reason of her station. . . . The desire of imitating her (if I might) was my only comfort, but not so much, for my whole life has slipped away in desires and works I have not done. . . . And the dead saint, of whose glorified body she had a vision, as she communicated in the church, spoke words of encourage- ment to the living saint, still struggling, " that I should not get wearied, but endeavour to go forward with these foundations. So by this you see," says the traveller, who was herself so rapidly drawing to her journey's close, and had seen the successful ending of many another toilsome one, " how, her labours being now ended, she enjoys endless glory. For love of our Lord, let us take courage and follow this our sister ; and abhorring ourselves, as she did, we shall end our journey ; since it is over in so short a time, and everything has an end." To-day, far away, just on the borders of La Mancha, is a DIGS fi VOS 639 little village, forgotten of men, and baked by the sun. It is La Roda. About three leagues farther on, another little town, buried amongst olive groves a little town where a population of labourers preserve intact the customs, manners, and dress of their forefathers, still bears the name of Villanueva de la Jara. Half-way between the two the road passes through a sandy, monotonous tract, sparsely covered with stunted pines. Brilliant and glaring at noonday, when the sun is high in the heavens, and the whole world basks under his fierce light; strangely bleak and impressive in the cold blue light of sunset. A landscape which stirs the imagination, with its tumbled red sand hillocks cut out against the sky in fantastic jags and cusps, such a landscape as I have seen reflected in the picture of some old Perugian painter, with St. Jerome kneeling in the foreground absorbed in prayer, his lion at his feet. If, turning aside from the road a track in Teresa's time you painfully make your way between the sandhills and pines, you come to a sort of tableland. On one side of it, down in the hollow beneath, gliding gently along past its poplar-lined banks, is the broad stream of the San Lucar. On the other a monotonous stretch of plain, broken by weird clumps of pines now black against the sunset sky melts into a far-away horizon. On the face of the broken slope above the river, almost hidden in the brambles and thyme, is the entrance to a cave roughly closed in. " What's this ? " I ask my guide, a rough shepherd^ who was born close by, and ought to know. "No se sabe" (no one knows), is his apathetic answer. " It is said thereabouts " with a sweep of the hand that embraces the limitless horizon "that a woman once lived here in men's clothes. But no one knows, and they say so many things. A few years ago some came to see it they came of the same family, so they said and closed up the cave. Up on the top there, by that heap of stones, you see it? is a well, where they say there was once a convent, but no one knows, and they say so many things." And so has the very memory of that strange history, thjs legend of this sixteenth-century Thebaid, completely faded away, and with it the ideas which animated that old, old world, with all its sin, its shame, its chivalrous nobleness, its wondrous virtues, its Inquisition, and its saints, have faded away also. Are the ideas of the new better ? Are we, who are still engaged in making history? And as the tall pines sway gently against the evening sky, although the breeze brings back no echo of a convent bell, and the cistus and the rosemary bloom as sweetly at my feet as they once did at those of Catalina Cardona's, and 640 SANTA TERESA the solitude is full of a vague and mysterious beauty, I worfder whether Nature herself may not keep imperishable records records hidden to man's feeble and limited perceptions of the atom of Dust which, calling itself Man, forms part of her for so brief a moment, and is again received by her into her generous bosom, to be nursed into fresh vitalities. On the morning of that first Sunday in Lent of 1580, an unwonted stir took the place of the apathetic calm and sleepy indifference which was the everyday atmosphere of Villanueva de la Jara as it is of all Spanish towns, great or small. From earliest dawn keen eyes in the bell-tower scan the white parched track between the olive trees. Presently a little cloud moves on the horizon ; the bells swing round in tumultuous volleys of merry and agitated sound which greet the travellers from afar. The whole population of the town streams out into the road priest, corporation, the " most principal " inhabitants await the coming of Teresa de Jesus, who is to arrive that day. Troops of children, swifter-footed than their elders, have already sped on to meet her, and, falling on their knees beside her cart, their hoods thrown back and young heads bared to the sunlight, fill the air with their acclamations: strangely like another scene, when other children strewed the city of a Syrian plain with palm branches before one Jesus, the son of David, riding on an ass ! The procession swells at every step. People kneel in the road before the mules; swarthy hands steal out from under ragged cloaks to touch the awning, and invoke Teresa's bless- ing. Muleteers and dusty friars can scarce force a passage through the eager, brown-faced throng which blocks the streets. As she steps over the threshold of the church, the strident notes of the great organ burst forth in triumphant and clamorous sound, and with one accord the people without and within intone the Te Deum Laudamus. A hush of expectation, a momentary lull, falls on the assembled multitude. Then out of the shadow of the open doorway the priests sweep forth, holding aloft the Host on silver "andas." Amidst shouts of joy and muttered benedictions, Our Lady, robed in pearl- spangled velvet, borne shoulder-high, smiles down in the radiant sunlight on the upturned faces of her worshippers. The great cross is raised, the heavy banners are unfurled (for all the riches stored in the dim recesses of the sacristy are displayed to-day), and with one accord the glad procession sweeps through the rush-strewn streets to the Hermitage of Santa Ana. Close behind the Host, under its very shadow, their habits, contrasting strangely with the silver and gold-embroidered chasubles and DIGS fi VOS 641 copes of the clergy, follows a little knot of nuns, the black veils which conceal their faces reaching to their feet. They cluster round the bent figure of an old woman, leaning on a staff, towards whom every eye turns in an indefinable commingling of curiosity, veneration, and love. Before the improvised altars on the way, they halt to chant the praises of the Order of Our Lady of Mount Carmel ; and so halting, so singing, the procession at last comes to a stop before the little hermitage. The "servants of God" who waited for their coming at an inner door received Teresa and her nuns with tears of joy. A day indeed long to be remembered in Villanueva, whose rural population depends for subsistence on the plenty of the seasons. For on that day rain long withheld fell abundantly on its parched and sultry fields surely a miracle, and as surely worked by the beneficent influence of Teresa de Jesus. And in proof of their gratitude, at the following harvest an abundant one the labourers gave a solid donation to the new convent of almost a hundred fanegas of wheat. Does the dust lie on Teresa's tomb too thick, is our fancy so clogged with it, that we cannot even for a moment, annulling the years and the centuries, stand invisible at the corner of one of those old-world streets of Villanueva de la Jara, flushed with the bright, cold February sun ; and watch that memorable pro- cession as it slowly files past us into space and oblivion, and be stirred with its joy and solemnity, its hushed pauses, the glad chant of many voices ? And so they pass : robust, brown-faced Manchegan peasants, in a costume, some relics of which their descendants still retain to-day; hidalgoes and people of con- sequence in velvet doublet, short cloak, plumed bonnet, and sword (growing a little rusty for want of use) ; phantoms they, and phantoms we, and the street is empty and silent, except for a dog hunting for garbage in the gutter. Short as was Teresa's sojourn in Sta. Ana, it left its special legend ; and the nuns still tell how, whilst the hermitage was being transformed into a convent, a workman let the wheel he was making for the well slip from his fingers and fall upon her with such force as to fell her to the ground ; and she must assuredly have been killed had not St Joseph (on whose eve it happened) miraculously saved her life. Five days after her arrival she gave the habits to her new daughters, and apportioned the various conventual offices. But time pressed ; her work of organisation concluded, her presence was no longer needed. The evening before she again set forth to retraverse the twenty-eight leagues between Villa- 41 642 SANTA TERESA nueva and Malagon, she called together the daughters she had brought with her, and whom she was now to leave behind, exiles and friendless in a strange place, whose life thenceforth would probably be a constant battle against starvation. She gravely and lovingly addressed them, painted the future that awaited them, and its manifold difficulties. Still the Lord had promised her that he would not fail them if they faithfully fulfilled their obligations. If any there were who faltered at the prospect, there was still time, and she begged them even at this last moment to speak out frankly, and she would bear them away with her on the morrow. But they were all brave and valiant souls, these poor, simple, conscientious women, and of the seven none accepted the offer dictated by her tender thoughtfulness. A last embrace, and before the sun rose over the olive groves of Villanueva, the aged saint had left the town behind her in the chill gray dawn. When she had crossed the thres- hold, and her voice still lingered in her daughters' ears, a great River rolled between them. For they had seen her face, and listened to her tender farewells for the last time on this side the grave ! ANTES QUEBRAR QUE DOBLAR " Ca non es la perfeccion Mucho fablar ; Mas obrando, denegar Luengo sermon." EL MARQUES DE SANTILLANA. THE day before Palm Sunday Teresa arrived in Toledo after a thirty leagues' journey from Villanueva de la Jara, which had taken several days to perform. Although she bore the fatigues of the journey so well that she writes to Maria de San Jose that " for years she had never enjoyed such health," her strength had been sorely tried, and a few days later, on Holy Thursday, she was struggling with one of the sharpest attacks of illness (" of perlesia and the heart ") she had ever had in her life. The brave old woman did not flinch. Accustomed to constant infirmity, she was "up and about whenever able." But she thought she had looked death very closely in the face ; and the fear of it that had once haunted her is, as she tells Gracian, now gone ; it had mattered as little to her to die as to live. Her weakness, and the secret hope she cherished of being able at last to obtain the desired license for the founda- tion at Madrid, detained her in Toledo until close on the second week of June. She sought and obtained an interview with the Archbishop himself, when, accompanied by Gracian, she proffered her request in person. He received her kindly, even seemed to favour the project ; but the license was not conceded. His general sympathy was doubtless with the Descalzos, but he bitterly resented his niece's intention of entering the Order at Medina, and attributed it to Teresa's counsels and persua- sion. At all events, she now heard for the first time of the fate of the book of her Life. Said the grave Archbishop: " Great is the pleasure I receive in knowing you. Thank God, from whom comes all good, and know that a book of yours was presented to the Inquisition, perhaps not altogether with 643 644 SANTA TERESA a good motive; but I, together with other very learned men, have read it through ; and not only has it not done you harm, but for its sake look on me from to-day henceforward as your chaplain ; and be sure that, in all I can do for the Order, right willingly do I offer to help you in everything that may be required." I know not how far these few insignificant words of admiration and empty Castilian offers of service, although spoken by the Grand Inquisitor of Spain himself (however much they might confirm its orthodoxy), consoled Teresa for the years of dreary delay and torture this book, which had been to her "a most great torment and cross," had cost her, or how far they compensated for the refusal of the only thing she desired. If the denouncer was, as has been asserted, the Princess of Eboli (although there is not a tittle of evidence to prove it), Teresa was amply avenged, for she who had once ruled supreme amidst the brilliancy of a court was now close prisoner in her fortress tower of Pastrana, and it was with the utmost difficulty that permission was accorded to Gracian to administer to her such spiritual consolation as he could. There was little pity in the old nun's heart for her fallen enemy: " Fray Hernando del Castillo is here. Report goes that the Princess of Eboli was in her house at Madrid ; now they say she is in Pastrana. I cannot say which is true : but either the one or the other is far too good for her." In spite, however, of the original of her Life (thus eulogised by Quiroga) being in the hands of the Inquisitors, who had not yet pronounced a verdict, it was not entirely withdrawn from circulation. A special license had been granted to the Duchess of Alba to retain the copy transcribed for her by that grumpy old Dominican catedratico of Salamanca, Fray Bartolome de Medina, whose sour dislike Teresa had so deftly transformed into warm attachment. In its perusal the Duke wiled away the weary hours of his imprisonment in Uceda, thus affording to the Monkish commentator of Teresa's letters an ingenious comparison with Julius Caesar engaged in the study of the Iliad. He is reported to have said this fierce bigot who decimated the Low Countries, this saint humble and pious if ever there was one (and, given the fierce grim creed of the epoch, the one view may be as correct as the other), "that there was nothing that could give him greater pleasure than to see the Mother Teresa, although to do so he had to travel many leagues." It is a somewhat curious circumstance that, although she was brought into such close connection with them, Teresa never saw either the stern Ferdinand of Toledo or his master, in the flesh. The Duchess, indeed, was one of ANTES QUEBRAR QUE DOBLAR 645 her warmest friends, and well did she repay her attachment, since it was as she travelled to Alba to be present at her daughter-in-law's confinement that she met her death. Amongst the letters written by her during her present sojourn in Toledo is one to Dona Maria Henriquez, Duchess of Alba, congratulating her on her husband's release, and beseeching her to use her influence with her brother-in-law, the Constable of Navarre, in favour of the Jesuits of Pamplona. It was on this occasion, when Philip was forced to place his prisoner at the head of the troops he was marching into Portugal to pacify the revolts consequent on the annexation of that country to Spain, that the aged Duke (he was then seventy -two) made his memorable answer, "that he obeyed, if only for the sake of its being said that his Majesty had vassals who won him kingdoms whilst they still dragged their chains behind them ! " Touched by Teresa's repeated entreaties for Fray Antonio de Jesus, who had himself been ill, and was still so weak that she feared to go alone with him, lest he should break down on the road, Gracian came from Madrid to conduct her to Segovia ; being present, as we have seen, at that famous interview with the Archbishop. It seems certain that she once again passed through Madrid (although by her own desire her visit was kept a profound secret), where she picked up the sister of one Juan Lopez de Velasco, Philip ll.'s chronicler, and afterwards Secretary of his Exchequer, who had assisted them greatly during the negotiations now so happily drawing to an end. Teresa was nothing if not grateful. If for many years she remembered in her prayers a man who had once given her a jug of water by the wayside, what was not her debt to the poverty-stricken gentleman 1 who had aided them so heartily in their struggles? She had therefore willingly consented to receive his sister into the Order. Perhaps it is characteristic of the age that, although the brother had been a brave and devoted soldier, and was, moreover, high in Philip's favour, he was too poor to give her a bed or the modest outfit required by Teresa's rules of the poorest novice. Not perhaps without some difficulty: "for these nuns make such a pother about anything, unless it happens to coincide with their own wishes, that they are a torment to me ! " Nevertheless the prioress of Segovia loved Teresa too well to thwart her ; " although I write to her in such a manner that they could do no less than receive her. Little, indeed, 1 Besides being a soldier and a statesman, he was also no contemptible scholar, and his erudition may still be seen in Covarrubias' Tesoro de la Lengua Castcllana. 646 SANTA TERESA was needed for the prioress, who desires to please both you. paternity and me ! " And thither the dowerless Juana de la Madre de Dios was now to accompany her. No subsequent prelate dared to take away the black veil which, on her departure from Segovia, Teresa placed over the head of the ignorant novice whom she herself had in vain endeavoured to teach to read, so as to enable her to take part in the choir duties, consigning to infamy him who should deprive her of it; and, although dedicated to the humbler offices of religion, Juana wore it until her death in 1620. In Madrid, too, Teresa probably saw for the last time the confessor whose rigours and harshness had only increased her love and veneration for him, Father Baltasar Alvarez, who died two months afterwards in the Jesuit college of Belmonte. At Segovia the news of her brother Lorenzo's death snapped another of the links which still bound her to life. Since the moment when, freshly disembarked from the galleons, he had come to her like a providence in her hour of utmost need at Seville, they had been united by the tenderest relation- ship. His admiration and love for her had known no bounds. She counselled, and he meekly besought her direction, not only in the graver matters of conscience, but in the minor arrange- ments of his household, the education of his children, the management of his fortune. Not only did she regulate his penances and send him hair shirts ; but she also decides as to whether or not he shall furnish his house with tapestries and silver, or buy a "good serviceable hack fit for work as well as riding," rather than a mule. " It was strange the confidence he had in all I said to him," she writes, " which proceeded from the great love he had conceived for me." Of a somewhat full-blooded habit of body, a little vain- glorious and ostentatious, a person of no little consequence in poverty-stricken Avila, full of old-world flourishes and compli- ments, such is the faint image of Lorenzo de Cepeda's personality as reflected through his sister's letters. Deeply tinged with that brooding melancholy which in one member of the family at least almost degenerated into madness (even in Seville, Teresa had had some little difficulty in restraining him from entering a religious order), his tastes were those of a sombre recluse, and became more sombre as years went on. No sooner had he taken root in his native town than he bought a property about three miles out of it, a country house with its cornfields, pasture- lands, and belt of scrub-oak, for 14,000 ducats, lying a little to one side of the sandy tract which connects the wind-swept ANTES QUEBRAR QUE DOBLAR 647 parameras with the cistus-covered prairies of Estremadura. " It is," says Teresa to her prioress, a " termino redondo" that is, exempt from all jurisdiction, so that Lorenzo was in fact lord of gallows and knife in his own domain. Surely the worthy Treasurer of Quito has had his heart's desire. Perhaps, who knows but he had by this purchase accomplished a dream, an ambition long nursed in the far-away heats of Peru ; that this distant prospect, now fulfilled, of ending his days in Avila in well-earned repose and dignity, ere he too laid down his bones beside those of his fathers and became like them a memory, had shone like a gleam of light through long and weary years of struggle. But alas ! he had there left his youth behind him behind him too the wife of his youth ; and if the streamlets rushed as merrily through brown paramera or jagged pine forest, alas! they could nevermore be the same to him as in his boyhood. No sooner had he bought it than he found the constant occupations, the supervision it entailed, both irksome and distasteful, and regretted not having laid out his capital in purchasing bonds or mortgages instead in those days an easy and lucrative source of income. His larger-minded sister 1 did her best to check this growing melancholy, and bring him to a healthier frame of mind. She prays God to help him sell hi: cattle ; his not being able to hear Mass except on Sundays fills her with great concern. She promptly vetoes as folly the vow made by the good hidalgo to refrain from venial sin, and smartly stigmatises his regrets as to La Serna as the devil's doing. Set your mind at rest that in many respects you have acted for the best, and that you have left more than riches to your children, which is 1 None who hears of it but accounts it a great good fortune. And t there is no trouble in getting payment of these quit-rents ? a never-endir going about with executions. Be sure it is a temptation : and do not agai give way to it, but praise God for it, and do not think that, although you had more time, you would have more prayer. Undeceive yourself this, for time so well employed as in looking after your chiloren s property does not hinder prayer Try to find time directly these fiestas are o [Christmas and New Year's tide] to see about your papers, and to get put into the order you intend to leave them in. And what you spend c Serna is well spent, and when summer comes it will be a pleasure to you t< go there occasionally. Jacob did not cease to be a saint because 1 after his flocks, neither did Abraham nor San Joaqum ; for, the momei wish to escape labour, everything becomes a burden to us. . . . .11 great a mercy of God that you are wearied by what to others would i Teresa in her convents conserved the ideas of an older age. To her ^it seemed a distinct dishonour to live on interest,-" a breed of barren metal as Sh has it. Agriculture, on the contrary, involved no such stigma. To L izo, wn had lived more in the world, and was better up to date, it involved none, quit-rents of which she implies her disapproval were fast becoming o of Spain. 648 SANTA TERESA But although it is so, you cannot leave it, for it is our duty to serve God as he sees fit, and not we. What it seems to me you can spare yourself is in this of increasing your fortune, and for this reason partly I have felt glad that you should leave it to God ; for even as regards the world one loses somewhat in its esteem. I think it is better to be more chary in giving, since God has given you enough to live on and to spare, although not so much [as you would desire]. I do not call what you are thinking of doing in La Serna gaining money, which is very well, but I speak of that other point of adding to your income. As time went on, in spite of his sister's counsels, Lorenzo became a confirmed ascetic, and again her wholesome restraint was needed to temper the ardour, which her own example, perhaps, had chiefly been instrumental in exciting, of the self- concentrated and morbid man. Guided by her, he gave himself up to the strange train of mystical emotions she knew as the Prayer of Union. A dangerous exercise these vague explorings into the abyss of conscience, with reason tottering on the brink. The eminently practical side of Teresa's nature had proved her salvation, but few indeed are those who can attempt to explore the hidden recesses of their inner consciousness with impunity. The following passage in one of her letters to him will perhaps explain my meaning, and may not be without interest either to the psychologist or to the physician : " Pay no attention to those afflictions you mention ; for although I have never suffered it, since God in his goodness has always preserved me from these passions, I think it must be that, as the delight experienced by the soul is so great, it reacts on the body. It will wear away gradually with God's favour, if you pay no attention to it. ... The tremors will also disappear. . . . As to the warmth you say you feel, it is of no consequence ; still, if it is excessive, it may be hurtful to the health." She sends him a hair shirt " extremely efficacious in awakening love," with minute directions when and how to wear it. When winter is over, she will send him some other " trifle " more. " I laugh that you should send me comfits, presents, money, and I hair shirts ! " But amidst all these vagaries of mysticism, Teresa's habitual good sense and discretion never deserted her. She sternly discouraged visions amongst her nuns, and, as to their writing down their experiences, she would have none of it. So too her brother's health is with her the supreme consideration, and she insists on his following advice which her letters show she too often neglected in her own case. He is to sleep not less than six hours, " since we elderly people must so treat our bodies, that they shall not play havoc with our spirit." He ANTES QUEBRAR QUE DOBLAR 649 is not to wear the hair shirt without a fold of linen underneath to protect his stomach, and if he feels pain in the kidneys, he is at once to leave it off, as also the scourgings, " since God cares more for your health, and that you should obey him, than for your penances." He is also to eat a sufficient supper, and not to deprive himself of sleep. At first Lorenzo, perhaps for the sake of the education of his sons, who pursued their studies under the Jesuits of San Gil, and not averse to dazzling his townsmen with the spectacle of his wealth and prosperity, had taken up his abode in Avila with no little show and pomposity, as is proved by the tapestries and silver, the master of ceremonies, to whom laughing allusion is made by his sister, and the page who accompanied his children to school. Latterly, however, surrounded by a crowd of hungry and out-at-elbows relatives, his circumstances would seem to have got somewhat embarrassed, and he retired to La Serna. " He spends much," she writes ; " and as he is accustomed to want for nothing, and has no stomach to beg from any one, he is very depressed." Nor was the constant presence of a brother, a melancholy soldier of fortune, who, lacking advance- ment in the Indies, had returned to his native country as poor as he had left it, to live on Lorenzo's charity, best calculated to dissipate the good hidalgo's spleen. Indeed, Pedro was a source of considerable disquiet to them both. Soured, atrabilious, exacting, and disputatious before she left for Segovia, he had turned up in Toledo much to Teresa's dismay, having quarrelled with Lorenzo and left La Serna in disgust, stating his intention of starting off for Seville on the morrow with a muleteer. " But I know not why, for the wretched man is in such a state that one day of sun might kill him, and he arrived with a pain in the head, and in Seville there is no help for it, but for him to spend his money, and beg in the name of God." I misdoubt me, indeed, whether the luckless adventurer thought much of Mass or sanctity, for the rigid old Castilian nun displays but small sympathy for the graceless brother, whose "terrible condition " she charitably ascribed to " melancholy, which grips him fiercely." Although Pedro's unexpected apparition in Toledo was anything but an unmixed pleasure, she at once induced him to wait, until she could patch up a reconciliation between him and the long-suffering Lorenzo in Avila. She feels little charity, indeed, for the wretched man whom God seems to have sent to tempt them both, in order to see how far their charity can reach. Even, as she writes to Lorenzo, if he were only a neighbour, much less a brother, she would have 650 SANTA TERESA little enough to waste on him. In any case Lorenzo must never have him in his house again, and Pedro also swears he would rather die than go back. Still, he is now penitent, and if Pedro is mad, which she believes he is on this point (that of returning to La Serna), " it is clear that your grace is only the more obliged, according to the law of perfection, to do what you can for him, and not to let him go away to die." Indeed it is clearly Lorenzo's duty to diminish his other charities for the sake of giving to his brother. Supposing he were to die on the road, she adds, such is Lorenzo's condition that he would never cease to bewail it. If Lorenzo would give him 200 reals a year to keep him in food over and above the 200 he has hitherto allowed him for his clothes, he can live with his sister (Da. Maria de Guzman), who, he says, has already asked him to do so, or with her son, Don Diego de Guzman. Even this modest stipend, however, must not be given to him all at once, but doled out to those who give him food and lodging, " for, as far as I can see, he will not stay long anywhere." Five days after, she wrote again, anxious to have the matter settled before she left Toledo. Pedro has got still leaner. " The poor man is here spending his money, and, judging by his thinness, he must be in great affliction." One thing she stoutly vetoed : Lorenzo's suggestion repeated to her by Pedro, that he might find a convenient asylum in one of her own monasteries. " How would one," she writes, " who refused to eat the meat provided for him at the inn, unless it was tender and well cooked, rather preferring to cheat his hunger with a pie (con un pastel se pasa), put up with the scant fare of a monastery ? besides which, it was strictly forbidden to receive laymen as inmates. When I can, I send him some little trifle, but very seldom. I do not know who is to endure him and give him everything done to a turn ; a terrible thing," she adds mournfully, " is this humour, which does harm to himself and every one else. God deliver you from taking him again into your house. I wish that every other means should be tried, so that, if he dies, your grace and I should have nothing to reproach ourselves with." It is to be supposed that a reconciliation was eventually patched up between the two brothers ; for Pedro, it seems, returned to Avila, where we shall presently find him fighting tooth and nail with the curator of his dead brother's property. Nor even in Segovia did the saint forget her brother's interests, for there we find her busying herself in negotiating a match for her nephew Francisco, for Lorenzo's sons were now young men, and Lorenzo, the second one, had already been ANTES QUEBRAR QUE DOBLAR 651 provided for in Quito. A strange occupation for a saint and her prioress: "looking about how to sound the intended bride indirectly, so as to see if it is possible for your grace to treat of it!" But neither marriage nor giving in marriage was to employ Lorenzo much longer. His last letter to her was so full of gloom and dark forebodings that she wrote towards the end of June: " I do not know whence you have it that you are to die soon, nor why you should think such nonsense, and be oppressed by what is not to be. Put your trust in God, who is a true friend, and will fail neither your children nor yourself. I wish, indeed, that you were disposed to come to me here, since I cannot go to you there. At least it is very ill of your grace to go so long without paying a visit to San Jose, for, since it is so close, the exercise and a little company will rather do you good." His daughter Teresa was a novice in San Jose", and Teresa fondly hoped that her sprightly sallies and the conversation of the good nuns might rouse him out of his depression. She had ended her letter by requesting him to despatch a messenger, "as a point has-been gained in that business, and it has not been taken ill.' A messenger that was never despatched ; for, seven days after his sister traced these, her last words to him, after a brief illness of six hours, Lorenzo died suddenly at La Serna, choked by a rush of blood to the mouth. 1 About three miles from Avila, at the foot of a tumbled, pine- clad hill, down whose face, sparkling in the sun, a streamlet rushes tumultuously, the long, low, rambling country grange still stands in which Lorenzo de Cepeda elected to end his days. Here, at least, is a veritable relic of his life, the mute witness of his goings-out and comings-in , a real thing, which greeted the eyes of one Lorenzo de Cepeda as familiarly as it does mine, and which, though he paid for it in good store of ducats, is now mine as much as it was ever his. Here, at all events, we touch the past. Here it has not quite faded away into night, like her father's house, where Teresa and these brothers of hers played and prayed away their childhood, and to which they bade farewell, she to found, and they to fight in those far lands beyond the seas some to win the guerdon of victory in broad pieces of eight, the most of them to find a nameless grave. Here, at all events, the hand of the barbarians that reared a tawdry church within the walls of what was once Alonso de Cepeda's dwelling, destroying all its most intimate charm and sentiment, has happily been stayed. And here before this gray country house of the Serna, facing brown paramera and blue sierra, with the same 1 It is worthy of note that Teresa also died in the same way. 652 SANTA TERESA dumb impassiveness as when the good Castilian hidalgo weaved part of his existence into its stones, it is the present that becomes unreal and strange, ourselves the unfamiliar figures in the land- scape. What, indeed, have modern life and modern ways to do with it ? Here along the front is the quaint solana, or open gallery, supported by slender granite pillars, where once a melancholy gentleman, in trunk-hose and doublet and short velvet cloak, gravely took the sun, as his eyes wandered over the tawny landscape of winter. The courtyards, spacious and even stately, surrounded by colonnades of granite pillars, are empty and lifeless. A donkey is tied to a ring in the outer court, where so many years ago Lorenzo, booted and spurred, bestrode his little well-knit Castilian hack (in whose purchase Teresa took so large a share), with its high-peaked saddle of embroidered cordoban. At nightfall, and how often, did not he and his master clatter in and out of the ponderous gateways of Avila its rider thinking thoughts and living a life all so dim and strange to us. The little chapel where he so often knelt at his devotions, and where Teresa took it so ill that Mass should only be said on festivals, hears Mass no longer. For times have changed, and men with them. Here is the kitchen, sombre, low-roofed, which Teresa would fain have shut off from the rest of the house on account of the noise made by the ploughmen who gathered round its roomy hearth. Thus a few scattered remarks in a nun's letters give us a faint reflex but still a reflex of the manner of life lived by this sixteenth-century gentleman in his dignified and rustic solitude. Yet, amidst much that has lost all shape and meaning, and has become even to fancy a mere floating image of mist, the sun setting in the west was once as much a fact to Lorenzo as to me. The stream caught and fixed his declining rays as merrily then as now ; the austere walls of the Gothic city in the distance flushed as redly against the evening sky : but the granite cross at the edge of the sandy road, time has long obliterated the devices on the sculptured shield at its base, remains to me what to him was none, an enigma as impenetrable as the Sphinx. A plain granite urn in the little church of San Jos^ of Avila contains the ashes of Lorenzo de Cepeda, lord of La Serna ; and in the chapel opposite, under their marble effigies, rest other and later lords of La Serna, Francisco Guillamas Velasquez l and his wife, ancestors of the Dukes de la Roca, and patrons of the church, to erect which they devoted no inconsiderable portion of their fortune. Teresa acquaints the prioress of Seville of her loss in a tone 1 Master of the Bedchamber to Philip n. ANTES QUEBRAR QUE DOBLAR 653 alike subdued and pathetic. Her grief was the calm, self- contained sorrow of one advanced in years, who must speedily rejoin the beloved traveller who has ended his journey first. " I repay him his love and confidence," she writes, " in being glad that he has departed from so miserable a life and is now in safety. And these are not mere words, but I truly rejoice whenever I think on it." As some return for the kindness and sympathy he had ever shown the nuns of Seville, she impresses on them that they must now commend him to God, "on condition that if his soul should not need it (as I believe it does not), and according to our faith I can believe it, that it may be directed to the benefit of souls whose necessity is greater. It seems to me, my daughter, that all passes away so quickly, that we should fix our thoughts rather on how to die than how to live. Please God, since I remain here, that it may be to serve him in somewhat, for I am four years older than he, and death never seems to end me." And then she turns off to occupy herself with the affairs of her dead brother's succession, for he has left her executrix of his will, and the day after to-morrow she must be on her way back to Avila. He has left the 400 ducats he lent to them to San Josd of Avila. These, she gives them warning, must now be paid up: adding that it might not be amiss to take a "good nun " if such an one should offer. On the 6th of August, a month later, she writes to the same correspondent from Medina del Campo. She and her nephew Francisco are on their way to Valladolid on legal business, to draw up the documents connected with her brother's succession, " until I see how he is to be left ; for I assure you that he does not want for trials, nor I either ; so that if it were not that I was assured I was serving God greatly in helping them, such is the reluctance with which I act in this business, I should already have entirely abandoned it : he is very virtuous." But to the duties imposed upon her by her dead brother she brought the same conscientious care and business acumen, the comic side of which in a nun she so thoroughly appreciated. Years ago Teresa laughed heartily at herself for being such a " baratona " in the affairs of her Order. Years had not blunted her capacity ; and although she did not succeed in carrying out all her schemes we shall see what they were presently and she failed of getting for San ]os6 as fat a slice of her brother's inheritance as she had anticipated, the business talent and shrewdness which she displays in such profane matters is truly wonderful. The Prioress of Seville is instructed to find out on the 654 SANTA TERESA arrival of the fleet if it brings any money for her dead brother " may he rest in glory " so that steps may be taken for its payment. Her reverence is also to discover whether Diego Lopez de Zuniga, a gentleman of Salamanca living in Lima, is alive or dead. If alive, she is to be told when the armada is starting, so as to send him messages ; " but as he is sixty-five years of age and more, and very infirm, it seems reasonable he will now be in heaven." If in heaven, however, a certificate of his death, signed by one or two witnesses, must be got and sent to her with the utmost secrecy and despatch, for " in case he should be dead, I have already settled with his heir to buy some houses of his for the nuns of Salamanca ; for their sufferings in the one they are now in are most pitiful, and I know not how it is that it has not killed them." Lorenzo has left the 400 ducats owing to him by the Convent of Seville for the purpose of building a chapel over his tomb in San Jose". Teresa reminds them that the debt must be paid. " As I am the executrix, I must now, reluctant as I am, take steps to secure its payment ; for which reason it would be well your reverence should see about it. Both as regards this and what you have given to the Order, it might not be ill to take a nun, if you can find a good one." In this letter she encloses one from the Bishop of Canaries to his friend the President of the Contratacion of Seville, so that, in case of money arriving from the Indies, he might take charge of it ; " and do everything well, my daughter, in return for what I am going to tell you." The piece of news so ushered in is the crowning triumph of Teresa's life. " Fray Geronimo de Gracian, who is now here in Medina, and has done these journeys with me, and been very useful to me in this business, received a letter five days ago from Rome from Fray Juan de Jesus, in which he says that the brief has been given to the King's ambassador." The triumph of Teresa's Reform was now complete, for, nine days after this was written, on the I5th of August, the King from Badajoz advised his agent at Rome, the Abbot Briceno, of the receipt of the duplicate of the brief, which had cost Teresa and her friars so many months of suspense and trembling uncertainty. Teresa remained in Valladolid until the end of the year. This year 1580 was long celebrated as that of the universal catarrh, an epidemic which, like the recent influenza, and strangely resembling it in character, swept the whole of Europe, and numbered countless victims. Teresa was amongst the sufferers, and escaped narrowly with life. " The illness has been such," she wrote to her prioress of Seville, " that no one thought I should live." She recovered, indeed, but never again regained ANTES QUEBRAR QUE DOBLAR 655 her former health and strength. Hitherto, in spite of the continual strain upon her energies and her frequent physical infirmities, she had been comparatively robust, and retained an appearance of youth ; but now for the first time it was borne in upon those who loved her that she was failing, and very changed and thin. The good Gracian's heart was filled with anxious forebodings which she, unable to write to him herself (for she now leant more and more on her secretary, and few of her letters after this date are written with her own hand), en- deavoured to dissipate through Ana de San Bartolome". " Little by little," she assured him, "I shall get well. Let not your paternity be distressed at my illness. My own distress is enough." In spite, however, of her enfeebled health, she never once relaxed in the supervision of the financial and spiritual concerns of her convents, still busy as she was with the admini- stration of her brother's estate. To the last, the first offspring of her labours was the most dearly loved ; and the material prosperity of San Jose* would now seem to have become the main object of her life. Francisco had returned to Avila not alone, for Gracian was there also, his mission evidently being to keep a sharp lookout on Francisco and his affairs. Francisco had inherited, together with his property, some share of his father's religious melancholy. He had delighted his aunt at Medina del Campo, where he took the Communion with his servants, by his devout demeanour, and she had written to his sister Teresa (who in the meantime has also learnt the termin- ology of mysticism what progress she made in it we know not and corresponds with her aunt as to her "drynesses," " delights," and the like) that " in goodness he was an angel." For the rest, he seems to have been an amiable, colourless, unstable youth, easily led by a stronger will. We have seen how Teresa and the good Prioress of Segovia had occupied themselves in finding him a bride a project which had been abruptly ended by Lorenzo's death. It had now been arranged that he was to enter the cloister. It being Teresa's sincere conviction that the monastic was the best and most desirable of all lives ; also, as she more than once indicates in her letters, the easiest; and that, indeed, the constitution of all society should be formed on monastic models, we cannot be surprised, or imagine her capable of sacrificing her own nephew for the sake of enriching San ]os6 of Avila ; that is, supposing any such inducements had been at the bottom of his resolution. Under these circumstances, then, she despatches her instruc- tions to Gracian in Avila. Perhaps none of her letters so thoroughly as this shows the acute attention to detail, the 656 SANTA TERESA shrewd, worldly wisdom which were so strangely perhaps never more strangely doubled in this extraordinary woman with enthusiasm and mysticism. A mere single-hearted enthusiast is apt either to despise reality or most singularly to distort it. This Teresa never did. If anything, she carried a certain practicality, a certain very keen perception of things as they were, into her vaguest visions. She was a true daughter of the " Tierra de Avila," and never has the Castilian character been represented in sharper outlines. Pedro de Ahumada has turned up once more in Avila, as quarrelsome and restless as ever ; likely to prove as great a thorn in Francisco's flesh as he had ever been in his father's. Of one person only did Pedro stand in wholesome awe, and that was of his sister. " Francisco will not protect himself from him unless he entrusts his business affairs to me, for I am the only one for whom he has any respect." For Pedro has again taken up his abode at La Serna and refuses to be dislodged, having got possession of the famous hack, the purchase of which Teresa had long ago advised, instead of a mule. " If Pedro de Ahumada should come in on the hack " [from La Serna], writes the wily old nun, " Don Francisco had better keep it and send him back on a hired mule ; but he is so cunning that I do not think he will. He has no use for it except to make expense ; and so Don Francisco had better tell him, as also that he is not to have houseroom at La Serna, so that he will have nowhere to go to or come from ; and he must manage him as best he can, without giving him anything, nor signing anything in his favour. He must be told, that he shall always have what my brother left him, with which he is well provided for." . . . Pedro has also come to words with Peralvarez, an old soldier who loved arms better than affairs, whom Lorenzo had ap- pointed his children's guardian ; and their disputes as to the management of the property led to nothing being done by either of them. As to which Teresa is fain that Francisco should pluck up courage, and speak his mind out sharply to Pedro de Ahumada. It may be doubted whether the poor week-kneed youth who had already been so completely en- trapped could speak out his mind sharply about anything. On one point, however, he is to be especially determined, to let Pedro de Ahumada see no signs of wavering, " rather all the mind .he has (and more, if more he can) as to the change he contemplates in his condition." For " that wretched little page," we hear, has let the cat out of the bag, and Francisco's intention is now no secret in Avila, " and since it is already decided on, ANTES QUEBRAR QUE DOBLAR 657 there is no further need to keep it quiet. So far as he is con- cerned, it does not seem to me that it will make any difference. He has written me a letter which has made me praise God." Almost immediately after this Gracian and the would-be novice started off for Pastrana, the former no doubt obedient to Teresa's directions to "sell the hack, and buy a good mule instead of that machuelo [small he-mule]." We may be sure that he was equally attentive to her caution " not to buy some- thing that will tumble my father off, for the other, as he is little, does not give me [you] so many falls," and that Francisco, as she also suggested, bestrode something, not of such value but that he could leave it with an easy conscience to the convent where he took the habit. Having thus disposed of her nephew, what were Teresa's intentions? A document addressed to the prioress and nuns of San Jose", and which was long guarded in the treble-locked chest of that convent, reveals them clearly enough. " The documents which concern the inheritance of that house are signed and sealed, and are very binding, God knows the care and trouble that it has been to me, until I saw it at this point. God be blessed, who has thus accomplished it : they are most binding. ... If God be pleased that Don Francisco should profess . . . the property will be at once divided between Don Lorenzo [the second son, then in Peru] and Teresa de Jesus [his sister]. She can dispose of it as she likes until she professes," but " it is clear that she will do what your reverence tells her ; and it is right that she should remember her aunt Dona Juana, since she is in so much want. When she professes, all will become the property of the convent." The same steward who administers her share will also administer Lorenzo's, " giving a separate account of the whole expenditure." The chapel over Lorenzo's tomb is to be commenced forthwith. " Whatever shall be wanting of the 400 ducats owing by the nuns of Seville is to be made up out of Don Lorencio's share. I think it is stated in the will (although I do not remember very well) that, in the distribution of Don Lorencio's portion of the estate, I should act in certain things as I thought best. Since, therefore, I understand that it was my brother's intention to build the arch of the chancel (as you all saw that he had already planned it), I hereby declare by these presents, signed with my name, that it is my will that, when my brother's chapel (may he be in glory) is made, the said arch of the chancel should be erected at the same time, together with an iron grating, not of the most costly, but well-seeming and sufficient for the purpose. If God should 42 658 SANTA TERESA be pleased to carry off Don Lorencio without children, then the chancel must be built as directed by the will. Take heed not to trust too much in the steward [the saint, in Spanish phrase, was wiser than seven notaries put together], but take care that your chaplains, whoever they may be, go frequently to look after this of the Serna, to see if it is well cultivated, for it is a property that will be valuable ; and without great care it will soon go to ruin, and you are obliged in conscience not to let it diminish." " Oh ! my daughters," says the shrewd saint (this most delightful of saints and women), as she lays down the pen which reveals a grasp of temporal matters that would scarcely discredit a pious family solicitor in full practice, " what weariness and disputes these temporal belongings bring with them ! I always thought it, and now I have seen it by experience ; for, to my mind, all the cares I have had in the foundations have not in many respects vexed or wearied me so much as these ; I do not know whether it has been caused by my great infirmity which has added to it. Praise God, your reverences, that he has been pleased to accept of it, for you are the chief reason why I have so taken it to heart, and commend me greatly to his Majesty, for I never knew how much I loved you. May he guide everything as shall be most for his honour and glory, and let not temporal riches deprive us of poverty of spirit." Sentences dictated indeed by a most intimate satisfaction in the conscientious, and, above all, successful, discharge of duty. Nevertheless, man proposes and God disposes. All these plans, which cost her so much weariness and contention, ended in nothing. Francisco at length, found a will of his own, and in less than a month the novice, as sick at heart as he was of stomach, resolutely turning his back on Pastrana, made his appearance, shamefaced and discomfited, in Valladolid, in such wholesome dread of Discalced friars and nuns that " I believe," says Teresa naively to Gracian, " he would fain set eyes on none of us, and least of all on me," adding, " it is reported that he says that he is afraid of the desire taking possession of him again. In this is seen the great temptation ! . . . He is now looking out for a bride, but not outside Avila. It will be a poor marriage enough, for he is full of troubles. Your paternity and Father Nicolao must have been at the bottom of it, for having left him alone so soon ; also that convent of Pastrana cannot be very greedy." Nevertheless in Avila Francisco exonerated Teresa from the charge of having forced his inclination, and contritely enough offered to take a wife of her choosing. " But I fear that he will have but little contentment ; and so, if it were not for the sake of my seeming vexed at the past, I would not meddle in it ANTES QUEBRAR QUE DOBLAR 659 at all. ... A brave temptation it must have been ; ... in my opinion with saints he would have been a saint." A month later, he married a young lady of Madrid, Da. Orofrisia de Mendoza y de Castilla, related to half the grandees of Spain a marriage which, in spite of the bride's dower of 400 ducats, was more productive of honour than profit. The bride was fifteen. " I see nothing against it," writes Teresa to his brother Lorenzo in the Indies, "except Francisco's poverty; for his property is so embarrassed, that unless he gets speedy pay- ment of what is owing to him there (in Quito), I know not how he is to live. On which account let your grace see to it for love of God ; so that, since God has given them so much honour, they may have the wherewithal to sustain it." In spite of his thrifty mother-in-law, however, and in spite of his showing him- self a shrewd financier of his slender fortune, Francisco was eventually forced to return alone to the Indies, and died in Quito a broken-hearted and poverty-stricken man. Not without bitterness does Teresa inform her prioress of Seville that " all her plans fall to pieces," and that she is not to send the money (the 400 ducats) to Francisco but to her, " for fear of his spending them on something else, especially now that he is married," adding as her reason, that she is " so wearied of her relatives since her brother died, that she wants no conten- tion with them." The 400 ducats, however, were never fated to find their way to Avila, and it may be doubted whether the nuns ever saw a farthing of Lorenzo's legacy. In spite of her repeated instruc- tions to Maria de San Jose to get " some nun to pay the money for my brother's chapel, which can no longer be deferred," almost a year passed before it was at last, regardless of Teresa's injunc- tions, paid into the hands of Fray Nicolao Doria, who at once appropriated it to paying off the debt owing by the community of Seville to his brother, Horacio Doria. We have seen how hitherto she has advocated, in eloquent and touching words, the utmost leniency to the two culprits who had been at the bottom of the disturbances in the convent of Seville. Under all her kindliness and lovableness, there was a stern inflexibility which it was not well to trifle with. She held her convents in such complete submission by other than the bond of love. It had been politic to dissemble dissimulation was then inseparable from the art of government, and Teresa was a born casuist whilst the Descalzos were still in mortal fear of their enemies ; now that their position was entirely altered, and the brief from Rome was hourly expected, there is an ominous change of tone. The rigid old disciplinarian had 660 SANTA TERESA neither forgotten nor forgiven the grievous scandal and shame that Beatriz de Jesus had brought on her sisters of Seville, nor was her attempt to lay the blame on Garci Alvarez, whom Teresa believed to be more misled than misleading, calculated to soften one who could not away with meanness or subterfuge. A frank confession would have touched the heroic chord in Teresa's nature and melted her heart at once. Not so now. " That which appears to you very well," she writes to the nuns of Seville, " that she should condemn Garci' Alvarez, appears to me very ill, and I should believe little of what she says of him, since I hold him to be of good conscience, and I have always thought she made a fool of him." Still, any confession was better than none. " Although it is not what we wish, I have been ex- ceeding glad. Here we have offered up great prayers for her : perhaps the Lord will have mercy. Since I saw the papers, I have been greatly distressed that she should have been allowed to communicate. I assure you, mother, it is not right that such things should be left without chastisement, and it were well that she should not be freed from the perpetual imprisonment, which you say was already decided upon here." Whether this merciless sentence was ever carried out we know not. Maria de San Jose* herself received a somewhat sharp rebuke for lending too indulgent an ear to the culprit's tardy excuses. " I cannot stand those excuses," writes Teresa, "for she cannot deceive God, and her soul must pay for it, since she made the accusations before you all, together with many others you have written to me. Either you speak truth or she " ; and yet, in the same breath, she regrets that they have not a larger orchard for the sake of giving her more occupation. I have dwelt on these details of Teresa's correspondence at this period, as they reveal a side of her character and not the least important which must not for a moment be lost sight of. I have left it to others to paint a false picture of an enraptured mystic. Had she wandered into the world to found convents led by mere enthusiasm for an imagined mission, she would most probably have been burned at the stake by the Inquisition, or incarcerated for life like Magdalen de la Cruz. Catalina de Cardona, impelled by religion to make the sacrifice of her life, and to live alone in the rude desert with the beasts (who learned to love her) and the flowers too harmless to be dangerous she at least was a one-idea'd enthusiast; but her very name has sunk into obscurity, and to-day her dim legend lingers a trail of light across the pages of one of the many religious chronicles of the age. Teresa was fervid with enthusiasm, but it was the ANTES QUEBRAR QUE DOBLAR 661 enthusiasm of a calm, self-reliant, courageous nature ; and it was certainly the least factor in her success. Men felt in her that indefinable thing which for want of a better term we will call authority. She was her "own star." Hers was neither a sanguine nor a poetic temperament : she never overstepped the limits of dull reality; she saw it under no false colours. A leader is rarely imaginative; if he is, it is not to success he marches, but to the scaffold and posthumous renown. Teresa worked with the instruments she had : she was a keen reader of character, and knew how to make its foibles, weaknesses, petty vanities subservient to her purpose. She never dreamed of the impossible, and for that reason she came nearer to achieving it than most Untiring constancy, indefatigable patience, ceaseless energy, a mind wonderfully even and serene, undated by success ; tranquil and steadfast in the face of the greatest reverses these are the qualities, dull and prosaic as they seem, which move the world, if, as in her case, they are associated with genius and purpose. Dry, didactic, thoroughly materialistic in her views of life, she possessed, too, a rare flexibility, perhaps more apparent than real, which served her in good instead. Stately and grave we may be sure she was, for such was the bearing of the time ; but there was something more, which drew bishops and nobles and the greatest grandees of the land to her feet and kept them there enthralled, through the course of a long life. It was not her sanctity for that as yet had not been conceded but wonderful charm of her personality : a sharp and ready wit courtly and fascinating manners ; a wonderfully persuasive and eloquent tongue, and merry too, "her very laughter was con- tagious "these were the outward and visible means whereby she intrenched herself so firmly in the affections of all, and overcame the enmity of the few. Truly a strange mixture, and one rarely seen, of great and little qualities ; of nobility and rectitude joined to wily adroitness, much casuistry, rapid insight ; a profound knowledge of all the keys of the human heart such was Teresa de Jesus. For my mind I love her as well when she haggles over ducats (for her convents be it remembered) and circumvents quarrelsome Pedro, and busies herself in all little minutiae of life, monastic and otherwise, as it was lived in Avila three centuries ago and perhaps better than when s is engaged on bigger matters. For her success in the one aros< from the same qualities (and perhaps defects) she displays eminently in the other. To her severe illness in September, from which she was still 662 SANTA TERESA not altogether recovered, and her consequent decay of strength, may be attributed her strange discouragement and reluctance in making the foundations of Palencia and Burgos. Her spirit, too, seemed to have greatly failed her, and for the first time she shrank feeble and wearied from the task she felt scarcely able to perform. In vain her niece, Maria de Bautista, entreated ; in vain the Jesuit Ripalda (her old confessor) told her that her cowardice came from old age ; " but indeed I saw it was not so, for I am older now and have none . . . although I heeded the latter greatly, it was not enough to decide me. . . . Now comes the true fervour, since neither men nor God's servants suffice, whereby many times it may be seen that it was not I who effected any- thing in these foundations, but he who is all-powerful. As, after taking the Communion one day, I was full of doubts, and irresolute whether to found at all, . . . our Lord said to me, like as in reproof: What dost thou fear? When have I failed thee ? The same that I have been, I am still : fail not to accomplish these two foundations." Before this still small voice which has ruled her life so far, and will rule it to the end, hesitation is no longer possible. Still ailing, the last days of December therefore found her braving the frost and intense cold of a Castilian winter, on her way to Palencia, accompanied by Ana de San Bartolome*, her devoted secretary and nurse, four other nuns, and two priests. A gentleman living in Valladolid had given her the use of his house in Palencia until June ; and well did the good Canon Reinoso, to whom, although personally unknown to her, she had written on the strength of a friend's assurance that he was " a servant of God ! " to get it ready for their coming, fulfil his mission. For when they arrived, hungry, weary, and perishing with cold, the heavy rains had made the cart-tracks almost impassable, and the fog had been so thick that they could scarce discern each others' faces, they found that his thoughtfulness had provided them with beds and many other sorely-needed comforts. Nevertheless, let her be as wearied as she might, there was little rest that night for the little old indefatigable nun. Her arrival, by her own desire, had been kept a profound secret, and before there has even been time for the whisper to get abroad that she and her nuns are there, the morning's light will find the fourteenth convent of her Order an accomplished fact ! At daybreak Mass was said by one of the priests who had brought them to Palencia ; and : a message sent to the Bishop, Don Alvaro de Mendoza, who, no less surprised than delighted, presently speeds to the extempore convent, full of kindness and ANTES QUEBRAR QUE DOBLAR 663 generous gifts, binding himself and his successors to provide it perpetually with bread. Two days after, at nightfall, Teresa hung up the cracked bell, the unfailing signal of possession. The Bishop's support must have gone for a great deal, but even a bishop is powerlesf ensure such an outburst of popular generosity and enthusiasm as her mere presence excited amongst the honest inhabitants of Palencia. Each one endeavoured to outrival his neighbour in showing honour to the guest whose sojourn in their town was felt to be a benediction and a privilege. Warm and ardent was her gratitude. As for the Bishop, " such is the debt this Order owes him, that he who reads these Foundations is in duty bound to commend him to our Lord, alive or dead, and so I beg of him for charity" ; and to this day the Palencians quote with pride, as a brevet rank of glory, the words in which she has handed down to all time their nobility and benevolence. I should not wish to leave unsaid many praises of the charity I found in Palencia, in particular and in general. It is true that it seemed to me a thing of the Primitive Church (at least not much in vogue at present in the world), when thersaw that we had no endowment, and that the> .had Itc .maintain us, that not only did they not forbid it, but said that God did them a most great mercy. . . . [Adding in a letter] It is a charitable and frank people, without deceit, which gives me great pleasure. For at last the unflinching tenacity of this old nun, so feeble of body and so resolute of will, has told home. The Dominating Idea of her Life, followed with a chivalrousness and doggf resolution worthy of her knightly ancestors, has won its way, and she has herself become one of the most distinct personal! this old world of Spain. Those who were inclined to doubt he sanctity, and there were few who did, were touched acquiescence by something perhaps better than sanctity- deep for words, but which imperiously demanded respec admiration. _ . . , K " Go, father," said the unwilling corregidor of Palencia, hali- angrily, to the supplicant Gracian, who had already whils Teresa waited in Valladolid, sued in vain for his license to found - go, and let it be even as you desire ; for the Mother Teres, de Jesus must bear in her bosom some mandate from the Council of God, so that in spite of ourselves we are all torced do even as she wishes." Her very presence is now enough t< ensure success. " Already I am fit for nothing, she writes, only for the noise made by Teresa de Jesus." Never once through the whole course of her career has Teresa felt a doubt as to her mission being the special care ot the Divinity. She would fain annihilate herself, so that all 664 SANTA TERESA honour and glory may be his. One of the most conclusive proofs, as it seems to me, of the nobleness and purity of her character, of the loftiness of her motives, is this serene and child- like conviction that she was guided by an exterior power. To superficial minds such a sentiment seems puerile : but it is indubitable that those who have most distinctly moved the world with a lever more powerful than that of Archimedes have felt a similar conviction. At all events it is a magnificent Illusion, whence, as from a fountain of perennial courage, our weak and faltering humanity has drunk such draughts of valiancy and strength. For Teresa de Jesus, it was the condition of her work the condition of her ability to perform it that she should feel brooding about and within her this mysterious Presence, counselling and shaping her decisions even in those temporal matters which we might justly consider to be most beneath the notice of the Deity. Even in her choice of a convent, she unhesitatingly accepts the inner voice of conscience for mysterious dictates from above. She had been offered, and had rejected, the Hermitage of Our Lady of the Street a popular and much frequented shrine in favour of another house found for her by the friendly canons Reinoso and Salinas, when : " I begin to feel a great anxiety and uneasiness which would scarcely let me sit still through Mass ; I drew near to receive the most holy sacrament, and, immediately I received it, I heard these words in such a way that I resolutely determined not to take the one I had intended, but that of Our Lady : ' This is the one for thee.' It began to seem to me difficult to draw back from a business so far advanced, and so much to the liking of those who had been so active in bringing it about : the Lord answered, ' They know not the great offence that is offered to me here, nor the remedy this will be.' It crossed my mind that it might be a snare, although I could not but believe it, for I saw well in the operation it worked on me that it was the spirit of God. He then said : ' It is I.' ... It seemed to me they would think me vain and flighty when they saw such a sudden change, a thing which I greatly abhor. . . . To avoid this, I confessed it to the Canon Reinoso. . . ." 1 The good canon, who was still but a young man, willingly 1 According to Isabel de Jesus, this injunction was repeated more than once, for when Sor Isabel, who was prioress, asked how she could hear the divine voice amidst the noise they were all making at recreation, Teresa answered: "That the voice of God so transfixed the soul's attention that all the turmoil in the world did not suffice to shut it out." ANTES QUEBRAR QUE DOBLAR 665 accepted (indeed he could do no less, for who could question it ?) a special intervention of Providence, in a matter which seemed to them of such supreme importance; and the return of the messenger sent to conclude the bargain with the absent owner, with an altogether unjustifiable demand for 300 ducats more, providing them, as it did, with a most convenient excuse, con- firmed and strengthened these tender and credulous souls in their superstitious awe and reverence. From the first, the two canons took up the business as warmly as if it had been their own, or even more so. They bargained for the house, provided money, became surety for the price. On the owner demanding further security, they at once went in search of the Bishop's Vicar-General one Prudencio. Meeting him on the way, and being questioned by him as to whither they were going, they replied that they were in search of him to sign the bond. Whereupon the good Prudencio laughed, and said : " So lightly do you talk of guaranteeing such a sum as this ! " and, more lightly still, at once signed it without dismounting from his mule ; " which," adds Teresa, " for these times is greatly to be pondered on." Yet verily they had their reward ! Reinoso's kneeling effigy still adorns the chapel which bears his name in Palencia Cathedral ; his only claim to the notice of posterity, his brief association with the great Teresa de Jesus. Towards the close of a hot June day, a marvellous procession swept through the white mediaeval streets of Palencia, bound for Our Lady of the Street. The Bishop came from Valladolid to take part in it, and Gracian journeyed all night to gladden the Mother's heart by his presence in the imposing ceremony. The famous Virgin Our Lady of the Street herself descended from her pedestal that day, and was carried forth to welcome and bring her daughters home. On they came through narrow, sun- baked streets strewn with flags and rushes, preceded by the blare of trumpets and triumphal music. First, amidst the loud reports of fireworks and low murmurs of admiration, leading the way as was most meet, Maria Santissima ; behind her, Bishop and Chapter, grave hidalgoes of municipality, fine gentleman, and hungry rascal. But who is this, this nun, somewhat bent and stooping, leaning on a staff, who walks in the place of honour between the Bishop and Canon Reinoso, whose face they cannot see because of her long black veil ? As she passed, a strange hush fell on the tumultuous happy throng a strange thrill shot through their hearts. For even as they look she has faded from their sight, and others take her place ; but all have felt that a solemn and memorable moment of their lives has come 666 SANTA TERESA and gone; and they who are then youths, grown old and garrulous, as they sit in the sun weaving long-winded stories of the past, will speak of it as marking an epoch in their lives, for they had even seen Teresa de Jesus for the first and last time ! On they sweep, this fantastic, incongruous medley of sixteenth- century folk. Friars white, black, and gray, with shaven crowns, and faces on which the cloister has set its indelible and mysterious seal ; on they sweep, these dark-browed priests and stately gentlemen, these fat-faced, broken-winded canons of the Cathedral Chapter ; monk and nun and priest and layman, con- jured thither by the indomitable will of an old woman with a broken arm, whose steps they follow. Quickly it passed away, that procession as strange and varied as the vanishing colours of a kaleidoscope, fading away, even as one looked, into dusty oblivion and indistinctness. Let me not forget, however, that a blast of wind blew out all the tapers except those carried by the nuns, which alone arrived burning at the church a notable instance, in favour of these holy women, of the vicarious suspension of the laws of aerostatics ! CHAPTER XXV EL ORO FIND SE ECHARA DE VER EN EL TOQUE BUT this triumph had been preceded by a still greater one, for the famous Chapter famous at least in these partial annals has been convoked and dissolved, and the existence of the Descalzos has been assured for all time by the decree which has erected them into a separate province. We have seen how warmly Philip had taken up their cause. It is said that one of those rare moments in which that monarch gave unmistakable signs of joy was as he read the Brief for the convocation of the Chapter, which was given into his hands at Badajoz on the 4th of August 1580, as he was preparing to enter Portugal. A month later the news of its arrival reached Teresa in Valladolid. The convocation of the Chapter was, however, delayed until March of the following year. The death of the Archbishop of Seville, who was to have presided at it, necessitated further recourse to Rome to confirm the appoint- ment of his successor, Teresa's Fray "Pero" Fernandez an appointment which proved equally unfortunate, for the good friar was lying on his deathbed in the peaceful cloisters of Salamanca, and his days for chapters were over. The news affecting an Order whose welfare he had ever had so nearly at heart, only served to cheer the last moments of the dying man. " Tell the King," he said to Gracian, who had rushed off in hot haste from Seville to Salamanca, " that I am setting forth for Heaven, whence I will assist by my intercessions, since I can no longer be of any use on earth." Gracian arrived at Gelves with the news of Fernandez's death on the very day that Mariana of Austria (according to the euphonious phrase of the chronicler) "passed to a better life." Perhaps to divert his thoughts from his great loss (I still quote the chronicler), the royal widower sat himself down forth- with and penned a letter to the Pope, proposing the famous Dominican Juan de las Cuevas, prior of. Talavera la Reina, as the dead friar's successor. 667 668 SANTA TERESA The third brief confirming this appointment reached the King, who was still at Gelves, on the 4th of January. In spite of the rains and impassable roads of winter, the good Gracian at once rushed off to Talavera to acquaint Cuevas with his commission, and from his wretched inn (for he refused to accept the hospitality of the stately monastery) he was busy day and night penning letters of convocation to the distant monasteries and convents of Castille for Cuevas's signature. Exactly two months afterwards, on the 4th of March, at Alcala de Henares, the Chapter was convoked which erected the Descalzos into a separate province of their own, and for ever severed their connection with the Carmelites. It was the crowning mercy of Teresa's life. Being in this foundation (of Palencia) [she writes, in simple and touching language], our Lord concluded a thing of such importance to the honour and glory of his glorious Mother, since it belongs to her Order, she being our Lady and Patron ; and to me gave one of the greatest joys and contentments that in this life I could receive ; for, for more than twenty-five years the trials and persecutions and afflictions I had passed through would be long to relate ; and only our Lord can understand it. And to see it now ended, none but he alone who knows the labours that have been suffered can understand the joy that came to my heart, and the desire I had that all the world should praise our Lord, and that we should offer up to him this our holy King Don Philip, through whom God had brought it to so good an end ; for such the malice of the devil, that all was'on the point of destruction had it not been for him. Now we are all in peace : Calced and Discalced ; none of us are prevented from serving our Lord. For this reason, brothers and sisters mine, since he has listened to your prayers so well, haste to serve his Majesty. Teresa in Palencia worked as hard as any of her friars ; to her were remitted the memorials of her prioresses and convents of nuns. With few of them was she satisfied ; that sent her by San Jose* of Avila with the petition for the whole community to eat meat filled her with horror. Already her Order has attained such growth that it is slipping from her control : the child she had reared and nurtured with her heart's blood has grown in stature, and now attempts to stand alone. "In this question of nuns" (for she does not attempt to interfere with the government of the friars) " I at least can vote," she writes to Gracian. Her great object was to unify her Constitutions, in which hitherto the caprices of a prioress or a visitor have introduced many variations, so that all her convents might be solidly knit together under the same rule. For this object a nun's coif, whether it shall be made of linen of first or second quality, becomes a question as important as any other. It is her last effort for her Carmelite daughters, the last EL ORO FINO SE ECHARA DE VER EN EL TOQUE 669 stone that still remains for her to add to the fabric she has reared. She would fain control the future by her wise and careful direction, and the experience of a lifetime ; fain protect her nuns from the incompetent bunglings of incompetent confessors; fain surround them with a potent barrier against which man and devil, human malice and all other, must be for ever powerless. Time has shown her many weak points in the armour which must be forthwith guarded against; her foresight endeavours to penetrate the dark cloud of Time, to obviate every danger, to meet every (as yet) invisible peril, to prevent any misconstruction in the meaning of her Constitutions, which must be so firmly written, so clearly unmistakable, that none can change or gloss them over. Strange and pathetic, are they not, these efforts of frail humanity to bend the inevitable to its will ; but it was the last legacy, the only one, that Teresa could leave to her daughters. Castles in the air, and ropes of sand! Even this short history will see all her sagacity frustrated, not by devils, but by her own friars. On one point she is explicit, nay, almost solemn that the nuns must be allowed a certain latitude in choosing their confessors and preachers : " We are not only to have in view, my father" (this to Gracian), "those who are now alive, but also that those may become prelates, who will interfere in this and more." On this point she is firm. If the Commissary gives an uncertain sound, the decision is to be got from Rome. Profoundly has she studied the temper of her nuns ; perhaps also the weaknesses of human nature. Coercion is dangerous ; " and when they have freedom they care little about it and do not want it." It would almost seem that Teresa succeeded with those sharp eyes of hers in piercing the future, and it is strange that she is the most earnest on those very points for defending which Gracian and Maria de San Jose" were afterwards dis- graced, and the former ignominiously expelled the Order. Most anxiously did she seek to close the door against any confessor interfering with the domestic affairs of her convents or the prerogatives of her prioresses. No confessor was to be perpetual, or to exercise authority. Neither must the nuns be subject to the priors of the Discalced monasteries. Well did she know the dangerous snare laid on the threshold of the confessional. " For none of them," she adds, " is like my father Gracian, and we must bear in mind the times to come, and learn from our experience of the past, to remove all opportunity, since the greatest benefit you can do these nuns is to see that they have no further intercourse with the confessor beyond confessing 670 SANTA TERESA their sins. ... It is always necessary to look to the worst that may happen, in order to take away this opportunity ; for by this road the devil enters without being noticed. This alone, and the taking of too many nuns, I always fear as being the means whereby much harm may come to us ; and so I beseech your paternity to be careful that on these points the constitutions are made most firm ; as you love me, do me this favour." Her words leave us no doubts of her intentions ; that she never for a moment dreamt of subordinating her nuns to her friars ; still less that she meant to limit the former to choosing their confessors from amongst the latter ; her object from the first was to secure to her convents a healthy autonomy in these matters as well as in all others, and to restrict the intercourse of any confessor, whether friar or outsider, with her nuns to the confessional pure and simple. It would be well to bear this in mind when we come to the further development of this history. Perhaps with a touch of the superstition that still in the minds of the vulgar attaches to anything in print, she is desirous that the constitutions be printed for when they are in writing prioresses there are who take from and add to them what they choose. " Let a great injunction be added that they may know that no one shall either take from or add to them." Cleanliness is not as a rule a monastic virtue ; godliness, it would seem, is more easily practised, for, as regards this at least, Teresa mourns that her nuns are too much for her. " For the love of God, let your paternity be careful that they have clean beds and table-cloths, even although it is more expensive, for it is a terrible thing not to be cleanly : indeed I wish it might be made a Constitution, although, such are they that even then I do not believe it would do much good." It was to Gracian, never doubting that she wrote to her future Provincial, that she addressed these long and minute directions as to the drawing up of the Constitutions. Long before the Chapter of Alcala, Teresa had warned Gracian of the existence of an adverse faction, headed by Fray Antonio de Jesus, sourly jealous of Gracian's pre-eminence not only in the Order but in Teresa's affections ; himself ambitious, and straining every nerve to secure the coveted distinction. Amongst his supporters was Mariano. How Teresa regarded him and his pretensions may be seen from the following : I spoke much with Mariano on the temptation he is under to elect Macario, who has written to me about it. I do not understand this man, nor do I wish to have any understanding with any one about this matter, except with your reverence. On this account, let what I have written about this be for yourself alone, as it is most important it should be ; EL ORO FINO SE ECHARA DE VER EN EL TOQUE 671 and do not fail to take counsel with Nicolao (Doria), and let them see you are not anxious for it yourself ; and indeed I know not how those there can conscientiously vote for any one else but either of you two. . . . Know [she again writes a few days after having penned the foregoing passage] that I have been warned that some amongst those who are to give their votes are anxious for the success of father Macario. If after so much prayer God should so will it, it will be for the best ; and it is his doing. I saw that some of those who now say this were well inclined to father Nicolas, and if they change, it will be for him. God guide it, and keep your paternity. If the worst comes to the worst, after all, the chief thing will have been accomplished. Already, then, in these long and confidential letters to Gracian the intimate outpourings of her heart letters which she asked him to destroy (although it was well for him that he did not obey her, since they form the completest and most decisive vindication of his reputation), it is too transparent that animosities and mutual jealousy had already parted the men whom hitherto difficulties and trial had united only the more firmly ; already the demon of faction and party strife had shown the cloven hoof, and the fuel was already smouldering which was to break out into so fierce a flame, the moment she was laid to rest in Alba, and her presence controlled them no more. Gracian was elected Provincial, and perhaps it would have been well for him if the lot had fallen on peevish, ambitious old Antonio de Jesus. From that moment dates the hostility of the harsh, dogmatic, austere Doria, as antithetic to his own gentle, easy-going, benevolent temperament as fire is to water. Now indeed are we in a position to assign its true value in a word of three letters to the calumny attributed by Doria to Teresa on this journey to Soria ; and to the bitter and heart-broken complaints of Gracian's conduct to which, according to Fray Antonio de Jesus, she gave vent on the last journey she ever took when she travelled to her deathbed in Alba. How deeply her heart was set on the election of this beloved son is shown most transparently in these letters. She used all her influence to secure it by writing to and petitioning Cuevas in his favour. It was the theme of her prayers and of those of her nuns : " Oh, how anxious they are for you to be elected Provincial. I believe that nothing else will please them." In her opinion he alone possessed the requisite experience ; he alone knew how to disarm opposition as well as to impose his will with gentleness and decision. We may be sure that, in this supreme moment, she sank all personal affection and preference in the greater claims of the general interests of the Order. If at times the wish sweeps over her to see him delivered from the 672 SANTA TERESA perplexities and difficulties of such a post, " I see," she writes, " that the love I bear you in the Lord, is more powerful than the good of the Order, and from this springs a natural weakness and so deep a feeling that any should fail to see how great a debt they owe your reverence, and how you have laboured, that for the sake of not hearing a word against you, I can scarcely bear it : but when it comes to the point the general good still weighs more heavily. Please God, my father, that so much harm does not come to these houses as to find themselves without your paternity, for they require most constant and minute supervision, and one who understands both." Such, then, is Teresa's opinion of the man whom she is said to have accused to Doria on her way to Soria of " poca religion." His enemies have heaped every calumny on his memory. In vain the faction who rose to power on his disgrace have mutilated Teresa's letters, and hidden others, in their attempt to rear this monumental lie against a good man's memory. Posterity, in face of irrefragable proof, has at last reversed the sentence of his contemporaries, and the fame of the poor, gentle, long-suffering friar shines brighter to-day than it ever did before. In her opinion there were two men, and two men only, capable of governing the Order. The first was Gracian, the second Doria, " that is, if your reverence goes with him as companion, on account of your experience and your knowledge of the dispositions of the friars and nuns." But lest it should seem that she unduly favoured these two to the exclusion of the rest, she included in the list she sent to the Commissary Cuevas the name of Fray Juan de Jesus (Roca), who, although he lacked the gift of governing, would, if accompanied by Gracian or Doria, naturally abide by their advice ; " and so I believe that if your paternity went with him, he would do all you told him, and so would do well. However, I am sure he will have no votes." As to Fray Antonio de Jesus, she absolutely vetoes him as unfit for the office. The Chapter met on the 3rd of March in the Discalced Carmelite College of Alcala. It was attended by Don Luis Hurtado de Mendoza the Count of Tendilla, and by various dignitaries of the university. All expenses connected with it were, by the King's express command, paid out of the Royal Treasury. Strangely enough, the first two friars of the Reform one of them the greatest of all Fray Antonio de Jesus and San Juan de la Cruz, were not present. In the first session, Cuevas, after formally pronouncing the separation of the Descalzos, gave vent to a learned and heavy harangue stuffed EL ORO FIND SE ECHARA DE VER EN EL TOQUE 673 with Scriptural quotations, intended to prove that division is not discord. The second session opened with an elegant Latin oration composed by Mariano, on the words jam hiems transiit, imber abiit et recessit ; . . . surge arnica mea et veni. [Cant. ii. 1 1, 13.] This concluded, the Chapter proceeded to the appointment of four definitors, Doria, Fray Antonio, San Juan de la Cruz, and Fray Gabriel de la Asuncion. They then came to the election of the Provincial. The voting was divided between Gracian and Fray Antonio de Jesus, the former gaining the day by one vote only. Amidst acclamations and rejoicing and the chanting of the Te Deum the new Provincial was borne in triumph to the College Church. The day after, a brilliant procession, graced by the authorities, the heads of the Universities, and the religious Orders, took their way to the magnificent church dedicated to the martyred children San Justo and San Pastor, where Fray Antonio de Jesus celebrated Mass, and Gracian preached. In the afternoon there was trying of conclusions between pupils and graduates, ex-professors and catedraticos, on various knotty points of theology. All this took place on the Sunday. On the Monday following, it was unanimously decreed by the Chapter to offer up perpetual prayer for the soul of the Catholic King ; some of the weekly scourgings in com- munity were to be devoted to the same purpose. On the ijth of March, the Constitutions were finally drawn up, and in the spring of the following year, in deference to Teresa's wishes, they were printed by Gracian in Salamanca, preceded by a few loving words of dedication to her who was alike his daughter and his mother. It was one of the notable joys of Teresa's life, although it seems, she writes to Gracian, " somewhat of a dream ; for however much we had wished it, we could never have succeeded in doing it so well as God has done it." A dream indeed ! but surely not a dream, Teresa, those long, laborious years of your life ; surely not a dream those wanderings over the length and breadth of Spain ! Nay, these too are but a dream, like all the evanescent forms which contain man's fretful and agitated life ; and perhaps in that region of changeless repose if there be any such she too has realised that the Reform of the Carmelites was a vanity like the rest. Nevertheless, woe for the world when the dreamers are extinct and cease to dream these dreams which fling some strange glow cast off from the Divinity over the sordid details of ordinary existence, and fill them with a perfume of Idealism. Greater than the Gods of 43 674 SANTA TERESA Greece which personified the forces of nature although their brows may not be so serene these other Gods personifying other forces, the moral forces of heroism, self-abnegation, disinterestedness. In spite of all, however, this dream of life seems a real enough thing whilst we are in it, and its current whirls us irresistibly along. The messengers are already in waiting to bear Teresa off to Soria, and, the instant she has walked in the procession with her daughters and seen them finally established, she hastens to be gone. Her original intention had been to found at Burgos after she had concluded the foundation of Palencia, but how could she, who had never yet been able to resist the claims of gratitude, refuse the pressing appeals of her old friend and confessor Velazquez, now Bishop of Osma, unfeignedly anxious to grace his diocese with one of the Discalced Foundations of Teresa de Jesus ? A wealthy widow of Soria, Da. Beatriz de Beamonte, daughter of a captain of Charles v.'s bodyguard, having resolved to devote half her fortune to the endowment of a convent, the Bishop's warm eulogies of Teresa and her daughters had decided her choice in favour of the Barefooted Carmelites. Every arrangement had been made for her comfort. The Bishop's letter was followed by the arrival of a coach sent by Dona Beatriz for the convenience of the traveller. With it came her household chaplain, and a chaplain sent by the Bishop, together with an alguacil to go before them, and to provide for her comfort and accommodation on the road. The Bishop of Palencia, not to be outdone, told off the Racionero Pedro de Ribera to travel in her train, and the little company was swelled by Fray Nicolas de Jesus Maria (Doria), and his companion, Fray Eliseo de la Madre de Dios, besides five nuns and a lay sister chosen from amongst the convents of Salamanca, Medina, and Segovia. So that in all it was a goodly bodyguard that mustered round her coach, in attend- ance on the aged traveller so near the end of a longer journey and sallied forth from Palencia at daybreak of one of those early days in June of 1581. But her heart was sore as she noted the absence of one who, she felt, alone understood her, and whom she loved so well that it was enough for any one to show him favour to be loved by her. In spite of his capacity and personal prestige Doria could ill fill the void he had been sent to replace. The absence of Gracian, whose company she had fondly hoped for, cast a deep shadow over the journey and even over the joy she felt in the final triumph of her Order. EL ORO FINO SE ECHARA DE VER EN EL TOQUE 675 Now do you not see [she had written to him a few days before] how little my content has lasted me ? for I was already looking fonvard to the journey, and I believe that I should have been sorry when it ended, as on those other occasions when I travelled in the company which I had looked for now. God be praised, for now, indeed, it seems to me that I begin to be weary. I assure you, my father, for, in short, the flesh is weak, and so it has saddened me more than I should wish, for, indeed, it has done so greatly. At least your reverence could have put off your departure until you had left us in our house, for a week more or less would not have mattered much. I have been very lonely here, and may it please God that he who was the cause of taking you away succeeds better than I think he will. God deliver me from such haste. . .". Truly, I am not able to say anything to the point, for I have no heart to say it. I have only one con- solation, and that is, I am relieved from the fear I might have had, and did have, that they would touch me in this Santo Santorum [her Sancto Sanctorum being Gracian], for I assure you that, on this point, I am strongly tempted ; and on condition that this is not done I will be con- tented that everything should rain on me, and it rains much. At this time I have felt it, and I shall have no heart for anything ; for, in short, the soul is sorrowful at being deprived of him who governs and comforts her. May God accept all ; and so long as this is so, we have no cause to complain, however great our grief. Never was reproach more tender, plaintive, and gentle ! And yet she is charged with having also in the same breath accused Gracian to his enemy Doria of his "poca religion." The reader will at least be now in a position to appreciate the value of the future charges, charges made by Doria and his party, brought against the devoted friar. Charges which, as often as not, rested on the distraught ravings of some visionary nun ; charges which made it necessary to mutilate, destroy, or hide Teresa's letters; and to forge letters and documents purporting to come from Ana de San Bartolome", Teresa's most constant companion in the last moments of her life, full of the saint's bitter complaints of the failings of this her so- dearly-loved son. To make up for his absence, however, Gracian had sent Doria in his stead, and Teresa is grateful for even so slight a proof of affection. "Too great a favour did your reverence do me in sending him (since you could do no more); a youth would have been no good, only one who can speak and has an air of authority (parecer mas)." But none can fill the void his absence causes, none can bring relief to the weary heart of this poor old woman, aching for this, her only earthly consolation. "Oh, my father! praise God, who made you so agreeable to all who know you, that it seems that none can fill this void. Oh ! how wearied is the poor Lorencia with everything. She says that there is neither peace nor rest for her soul except with God, and one who, like yourself, understands her. As for the rest, no words can express how 676 SANTA TERESA great a cross it is to her." Once more she gives a note of warning, which, seen by the light of after events, would have sounded ominously on any other ears more suspicious and less kindly than the sweet-tempered Gracian. I was delighted with fray Juan de Jesus. Each time I see the love he bears you it makes me love him well. Do not show him disfavour, for> as times go, a good friend is to be held in much. In spite of fatigue, Teresa took a more than usual delight in the changing aspect of the country through which she passed ; and one of the few remarks which show that she was not insensible to the beauties of natural scenery, she made in connection with this, one of her last journeys : " These journeys," she writes to Maria de San Jos6, "are very weari- some, although I cannot say the same of that from Palencia to Soria, which was rather indeed a delight to me, because it was level country, and often in sight of rivers, which was great company for me." At five o'clock on the evening of St. Anthony's Day, from amongst the heathy hillocks and moor- land which surround the city on that side, the travellers saw gleaming before them the picturesque towers of gray, old- world Soria. On the outskirts of the town the little cortege was swollen every moment by parties of grave ecclesiastics and magnificently-attired gentlemen on prancing horses, who had ridden out to welcome her. The roads and streets were lined with joyous crowds, and the air was rent with acclamations as the coach slowly jolted along the dusty track ; for all delight to honour her now. As they passed before his palace, where the Bishop was standing at a lower window in expectation of their coming, at a word from the saint the curtains of the coach were drawn back, and she and her daughters besought his benediction on their knees. They then moved on to the house of Dona Beatriz, who was waiting in the gateway to receive them. But no sooner did they escape from the eager throng of spectators outside than the wearied and travel-stained nuns found themselves the centre of another within, for they had now to run the gauntlet of the inquisitive gaze of all the great ladies of Soria, who were gathered together to do them honour. When at last they found themselves in the great and magnificently-decorated room which was to serve as their oratory whilst the church was being got ready, the Mother and her daughters, falling down upon their knees, kissed the ground, and remained a while absorbed in silent prayer. Their orisons finished, Teresa rose, and turning to EL ORO FIND SE ECHARA DE VER EN EL TOQUE 677 Dona Beatriz, embraced her with great kindness and affec- tion, thanking her for the favour she had shown them. Dofla Beatriz would fain have kissed her hand, but the courteous saint forestalled the movement, and kissed her hostess's instead. She then conversed with the other ladies, "with great discretion and pleasantness," not forgetting to address a few words of thanks to the knot of gay gentlemen around her for the honour they had done her habit. But if they were all astonished at the exquisite tact and judgment which per- mitted her, without infringing the dignity and reserve she owed her habit, to render with such polished urbanity the barren compliments of the century, they were not less so at the firmness concealed under those courtly and fascinating manners. For when the gentlemen were gone, and the ladies begged that the nuns might be allowed to raise their veils, Teresa refused to gratify their curiosity, although, indeed, she gave them leave to converse ; and not until they found themselves alone with two near relatives of their benefactress did she withdraw her prohibition. In the course of the evening a page arrived to warn her of the approach of the Bishop and Don Juan de Castilla. After a few words of welcome and inquiry, during which every veil was lowered, not, indeed, it may be supposed, on account of the prelate, who was blind, but of his secular companion, Teresa answering for her silent and motionless nuns, his lordship left them to their sorely-needed repose; not, however, before he had promised to return on the morrow to celebrate Mass, and to administer the Communion to them with his own hands, Fray Nicolas and his companion returning with him to his lodgings. On the morrow (it was the I4th of August, and the Feast of Saint Elisha), after the Mass, which was the solemn signal of possession, the deeds of endowment were drawn up by a notary who remained behind in the oratory for that purpose, in the presence of the Bishop, the saint, Da. Beatriz de Beamonte, Doria, Don Juan de Castilla, the Canon Diego Vallejo, the Racionero Ribera, and the Dr. Cebrian of Cuenca. In addition to the 500 ducats she had already promised, and the house they were then in, Da. Beatriz now offered to spend 3000 more on enlarging it. She imposed, however, certain conditions, which, being found incompatible with the peace and retirement of the community, were eventually withdrawn. The church alone was wanting, and this they owed to the generosity of the prelate, who gave them one close to the house, and which could be easily connected with it by means 678 SANTA TERESA of a corridor. The saint at once gave the patronage of the High Altar to the munificent foundress, to be bestowed on whom she pleased. The writings finished, Teresa paid a visit of inspection to the church, and her busy brain at once set to work to plan the details of her corridor. Almost two months, however, slipped away before the preparations were finally com- pleted ; and on the day following that which brought her labours to an end, it being the 6th of August, and the Feast of the Transfiguration, the Host was solemnly placed on the Altar of the Church of the Discalced Carmelites of Soria, the sermon being preached in the Bishop's absence by the Jesuit, Francisco de la Carrera. One there was, however, who did not share the universal content. Dona Beatriz had a nephew, Don Francisco Carlos de Beamonte and Navarra, who considered himself unjustly defrauded of the greater portion of an inheritance he had already looked upon as his own, for the sake of a pestilent community of nuns. Teresa and her nuns were alike ab- horrent to the graceless youth, who abused them roundly in no measured terms, although, for the sake of not losing the remainder, he took care his words did not reach the ears of his aunt. For fifteen years, long after Teresa was dead, he still nursed a bitter anger against the woman who had robbed him of his fortune, until one day I quote his own duly signed and attested testimony, to be found in the evidence for her canonisation as he was lying on a sickbed, from which there was little hope of his recovery, he saw her once more, standing close beside him. " Greatly hast thou doubted of my sanctity," he thought she whispered ; " yet consider what the Gospel says, that the tree is known by its fruits ; think on those that I have given." Then it flashed across his memory how, when he was still but a gay and thoughtless youth in Soria, she had told him certain things which had since come to pass. " Unstrung nerves " was a term not yet invented ; no one then dreamt that those attacks of brooding melancholy and unnatural elation the ordinary symp- toms of " conversion " might have their origin in physical causes alone. Never doubting that they listened to something outside and beyond themselves, the people of this century acted with a grand simplicity. An incident like this decided the course of an entire life ; and rarely was there any looking back from the plough to which they had once set their hand in some such moment of intense and inexplicable sensation. So with Don Carlos. He rose from his sickbed a changed man, entered the third order of the Order he had onee so virulently abused. EL ORO FINO SE ECHARA DE VER EN EL TOQUE 679 and retired to Arevalo, where his life thenceforth was one con- tinued example of edification to his neighbours. Before Teresa left Soria she received a visit from the Jesuit Ribera, her biographer, who happened to pass that way on his return from Rome. On his way thither he had paid her a visit in Valladodid, where she still lingered irresolute before the foundation of Palencia. But this last visit has a peculiar and mournful interest, for it was the last time on this side the grave that the good Jesuit looked on the woman whose history he afterwards related in a work which for its simplicity, its candour, and its evident sincerity deserves a place amongst the best biographies of the age. He too was amongst the number present at the inauguration ceremonies of her convent on that day of the Transfiguration. "But on this visit of Soria," he writes, " I remember more on account of its being the last, for I never saw her again, and also for the sorrow I felt after- wards that I should have been four days in the town without knowing she was there until the last, during which I might have been benefited and greatly consoled by her holy con- versation." He has left us a famous portrait of Teresa, the only one that has been painted worthy of her. For the hard-featured woman immortalised by poor Fray Juan de la Miseria, from whose gloomy countenance we turn away with impatience, ^can have had but little resemblance to the mobile and lively lineaments of life. A modern Spanish engraver, by modifying the original, by suppressing certain features and accentuating others, has indeed managed to give us a more sympathetic presentment. It may be that her beauty, as in the case of many intellectual people (for I think it may be accepted as an axiom that except in the case of a privileged few, beauty and genius do not often inhabit together this frail tenement of mortality), was of that peculiar kind which depends on the strange and potent irradia- tion of moods or expressions. Thought must have stamped her brow with its majestic touch; her deeply-sunken eyes, which looked away so far and yet so near, 1 must have flashed every movement of irony, kindly satire, unaffected mirth. At times she assumed an almost unearthly aspect of beauty : her face was suffused with a radiance which astonished those who looked upon it. Ribera's account at least would serve to show 1 This thought was suggested to me by a Spanish peasant, to whom I once showed a picture of the saint. His remark was (and in it he summed up what on my part it has taken a whole book to set forth), " Cara de pensadora. Tiene la vist para aqui y para otra parte." (A thoughtful face. Her eyes are fixed far beyond it. 68o SANTA TERESA that Teresa shone in physical as well as moral beauty ; and if the alabaster effigy of her sister Juana, whose exquisitely fair and chiselled face still lies cushioned on her sepulchre in Alba de Tormes, affords any criterion, then must Teresa have been singularly beautiful. In men it is often seen that to those whom the Lord chooses for his sublimest grace and greatest supernatural gifts, he also gives a more perfect and excellent disposition, as is well seen in that he gave to the Mother Teresa de Jesus. She was of very good stature, and in her youth beauti- ful, and even after she was an old woman of very good seeming, her body large and very white, her face round and full, very well-sized and shaped, her colour white and red, and when she was in prayer, it lit up and became most beauteous, absolutely clear and placid ; her hair black and curly, her brow broad, even, and beautiful, her eyebrows of a red colour, somewhat approaching to black, large and somewhat thick, not very much arched but somewhat level. Her eyes black and round and somewhat heavy lidded (papujado), for so they call them, and I know not how better to explain it, not large, but very well placed, and lively, and so merry, that when she laughed, every one laughed with her, and at other times very grave when she was serious. Her nose small, the bridge not very prominent, and the point round, and slightly curved downwards, the nostrils arched and small, her mouth neither large nor small, the upper lip straight and narrow, the lower one thick and slightly pendulous, its shape and colour excellent ; her teeth very good, her chin well-shaped, her ears neither small nor large ; her hands small and very beautiful. She had three small moles on her left cheek which became her much, one below the bridge of the nose, another between her nose and mouth, and the third below her mouth. These details [adds the scrupulous biographer] I have received from those who had more opportunity than I to look at them often. Altogether she was very comely, and walked gracefully, and was so amiable and " apacible" that she generally pleased every one who looked at her. Skilfully brushed in ; but not yet so skilfully and delicately as the slight sketch he has painted of her character : A most healthy keen and clear judgment, a great discretion and singular prudence, a very cheerful and gentle disposition, an excellent temper and absolutely void of melancholy ... as is well known by those who knew and conversed with her. . . . And what shall I say of the humility which shone in her so resplendently that it made itself felt even from a long way off. We have now followed Teresa through the various phases of youth to old age ; we have endeavoured to show the various and contradictory impulses and emotions of a strong and vigor- ous intellect and character which was led away, but never wholly vanquished, by the tremors of mysticism. A dreamer and a schemer in one, she was never entirely the one or the other ; but through all, and in all, whether she thought she was accompanied by the subtle presence of the Son of God, or anxiously planned how to bring good store of ducats to her poverty-stricken convents, she shows such an honest rectitude, EL ORO FINO SE ECHARA DE VER EN EL TOQUE 681 such an inherent love of truth, such a just perception of the realities of men and things, as must alike excite the admiration of him who condemns the first as fanaticism, and the second as a blemish unworthy of a character otherwise so disinterested. Up to a certain point her judgment prevented her becoming the victim of delusion, and she was never sure herself of the reality or origin of her visions, and never ascribed to them any other than a very minor importance. It has been to the interest of her idolaters, however, to gloss over those passages in which she distinctly refers to them as the effects of ill-health, and to pretend to veil their faces as they enter with her into the tabernacle of the transcendental and supernatural. Towards the close of her life, however, a notable change takes place, and one which now demands our attention. On the eve of her journey to Soria she wrote a paper to the Bishop of Osma, which may be considered as a species of general confes- sion or review of her spiritual life. In such a document it is almost impossible to be perfectly ingenuous. The votaries of a religion which presupposes the suppression of all reason to faith, which itself rests on a long chain of impossibilities and crudities, are never quite free from deception and involuntary exaggera- tion. Teresa with all her sanctity was perhaps freer than most. At all events, whatever the unconscious exaggeration into which she was betrayed by the almost total absorption of her own personality into her mission, it is a precious revelation. Her doubts and fears have long been laid at rest ; and the imaginary visions which inspired them have now ceased, and their place has been filled by the sublimest of intellectual visions a constant sense of the abiding presence of the three Persons of the Godhead, and of the Humanity of Christ. Perhaps the keenest mental sensations and emotions are, as in the case of physical ones, gradually blunted and deadened by use or abuse : she may, with the decay and weariness of old age, be no longer capable of those old impetuses, whose sharp and delicious pain had so often pierced her heart; of those melting moods of tenderness in which the spouse struggled in the amorous embrace of her lover. For all this is gone, leaving behind it a profound and uninterrupted peace, a complete lord- ship over the castle of her soul, and perfect security as to the future. Indeed it would seem that the soul has lost all con- sciousness of self, so complete is its absorption in the Divinity. She can no longer feel the same pangs as of yore at the trans- gressions of heretics and the sight of souls going to their perdition. Those poignant desires to mortify the flesh and suffer for the Lord, which made her long, rather than fear, that 682 SANTA TERESA she might be taken and chastised by the Inquisition, have long ago passed away. Nay, rather at this point of her career, according to Yepes, did she take a naif, and perhaps touching pleasure in the esteem accorded to her writings, and the veneration rendered to her Order and convents throughout Spain. She listened delighted to Yepes's praises of the Camino de la Perfection, and said to him with great satisfaction, " There are grave men who tell me that it seems like the sacred Scriptures." It was no mere personal (and pardonable) vanity that animated her her, of all women the most humble and least vainglorious but because she feared lest any smirch falling on her faith or reputation should fall also on her convents ; in short, the esteem and honour she enjoyed were grateful to her, for, so it seemed to her, it was more to God's glory and the profit of her children. If she loved to be honoured and esteemed, it was for their sake and their sake alone. Once she had prayed God to take away the opinion entertained by people of her sanctity, but now that she had been so favoured as to have been the instrument of resuscitating the great Order of the Carmelites, her only care was that she should be free of any, even the most trivial, imperfection. She had once asked the Lord, " How dying it was possible to live ? " and he had answered, " Daughter, by remembering that, this life ended, thou canst serve and suffer for me no longer." She had had her share indeed of service and of suffering, but verily, and it is with profound satisfaction I say it, in these last years of her troubled existence she tasted of the serenity and absolute tranquillity of a conscience at peace with itself and the world : her work had been so well and thoroughly done ; the sacrifice of herself and life had been so complete, that there was no room for aught but joy. Full of celestial peace and calm, bathed in all the glories of sunset, she surveys with unclouded brow the long and weary ascent behind her, in the full assurance that God alone was the author of the visions which He had sent her as being the only means of leading and guiding a weak and troubled soul into security and rest. It is full of such tranquil confidence that her life draws unto its close, and some reflection of it lingers in the couplets (" Letrillas ") to my thinking the best she ever wrote which she left behind her as an imperishable legacy to her daughters of Soria. It is impossible in a foreign idiom to render the quaint lilt and peculiar rhythm which give them such a simple charm. The spirit, indeed, may be rendered ; so tender, valiant, stead- fast, and true. She composed them for the Festival of the Exaltation of the Cross, on the eve of her departure for Avila ; and on that day of every succeeding year until now they are EL ORO FIND SE ECHARA DE VER EN EL TOQUE 683 still sung during the midday hour of recreation, the traditional and simple ceremonies she inaugurated being still adhered to. After adoring the Cross, the community, each nun bearing an olive branch, proceeds in solemn procession to the burial-place, filling the cloisters as they go with the strange old-world sound of their foundress's hymn. When the last strains have died away in the stillness, they murmur a response for the souls of the dead, leaving the boughs to wither on the tombs until another year shall renew the same simple rite. 1 En la Cruz estd la vida Y ella sola es el camino Y el consuelo ; Para el cielo. Y ella sola es el camino De la Cruz dice la Esposa Para el cielo. A su querido, En la Cruz est el Senor Que es una palma preciosa De cielo y tierra, Adonde ha subido : Y el gozar de mucha paz Y su fruto le ha sabido Aunque haya guerra : A Dios del cielo, Todos los males destierra Y ella sola es el camino En este suelo, Para el cielo. On the same page which bears her verses, her nuns have set down her last charge to them and their successors. "My daughters, inasmuch as I love you, I leave you to bear in mind three things : the first, regular observance ; the second, obedi- ence to your superiors (prelados) ; and the third, to be charitable to one another ; and if you fulfil them, I assure you that God will renew your spirit, even as he did our Father Saint Elisha, for the sake of this house having been founded on his day." It is curious that at Osma, through which town she passed on her return home to Avila, she should have met her other biographer Yepes then prior of La Rioja, and afterwards Bishop of Tarazona. He too had heard of her being in Soria, and being informed by the Bishop of the day before that she was expected at Osma on the following night, he waited to see her. It was eight at night when she arrived, and the prior went to the door to meet and salute her as she alighted. She asked him who he was, and on being told, she was silent, and he feared that she had forgotten him, or that his presence was 1 In the Cross all life is centred And it alone to Heaven the road is And consolation ; For us below. And it alone to Heaven the road is Says the spouse to her beloved, For us below. A palm the Cross indeed i: In the Cross is he, the Lord of Which I have climbed, Boundless realms of earth and heaven, And its fruit to me has tasted And midst the strife which rages Of glorious sweets ; round us, And it alone to Heaven the road i In its shadow there is peace. For us below. From earth it banishes all evil, 684 SANTA TERESA unwelcome to her. When they were alone, and he asked her the reason of her silence, she answered, " I was a little startled," and then correcting herself as if she had used too strong a phrase, " and indeed the surprise was not great, for it only lasted a moment, because two things occurred to me, that you were leaving your Order to do penance ; and whether our Lord had not wished to reward me for the labour of this foundation by finding you here. This favour consoled me." She also pro- phesied the duration of his penance, and told him that he would be ashamed, when it was ended, for having been discomfited by such a trifle. During her sojourn at Osma she twice made confession to him, and received the communion from his hands ; of this he has left us some personal details, far more valuable than his biography, in which the figure of Teresa, the woman, glimmers here and there but faintly. As she drew nigh to take the consecrated wafer, he saw and as it would seem for the first time her face uncovered. He noted that it was " the colour of earth," which she ascribes to her age (she was then sixty- seven), continuous infirmities, trials, fasts, and vomitings, from which last she suffered for more than thirty years ; but in the moment that she received the Lord into her mouth, it became most beautiful, and of a transparent colour, and impressed with so solemn a majesty and gravity " as showed how worthily the Guest was lodged." He observed, too, that, although her teeth were worn, black, and decayed, her mouth smelt like musk ; a circumstance which greatly astonished and scandalised the good friar, who thereupon thought to himself that she could not be so saintly and mortified as she said, since she used odours and comforting things ; but when he afterwards asked the nuns if she used perfumes, they told him that she shunned them like the plague, as they gave her intolerable headache, and that when there were spiced biscuits for supper, she went without, as they deprived her of sleep. It is an old legend in Osma that she was lodged in the Bishop's palace ; the old gray pile which still rises grim and menacing on one side of the long, narrow arcaded street. It is more likely, however, that she took refuge in the little dark " meson " close by ; a meson now, as it was then for the centuries have brought little difference to the popular life and patriarchal customs of this old town, stranded far away from railroads in the very heart of Castille, still consecrated to, and redolent of her memory. On the ipth she continued her journey to Segovia, a journey of six days by San Esteban, Ayllon, EL ORO FINO SE ECHARA DE VER EN EL TOQUE 685 and Sepulveda. Her travelling companions were the Racionero Ribera of Palencia, that "sanbenito" who had earned her gratitude by helping her in the construction of the corridor between the Convent and Church at Soria, and of whose modest virtues she speaks in enthusiastic praise; and Ana de San Bartolome, her nurse and secretary. Others had not been wanting who would have accounted it an honour and a privilege to escort the aged saint, but the little meagre Racionero (I think he must have been a young man) seemed to her quite enough ; " for the less the noise the better do I fare on these journeys." In spite, however, of all Ribera's care, it was a rough and fatiguing journey enough for this brave old woman of sixty- seven. The roads were bad too bad even for the rough country cart in which they travelled and the heat intense. On this journey [writes Teresa] I paid for the comfort I had had in going ; for although he who went with us knew the road to Segovia, he was ignorant of the cart track, and so this lad took us into places where we had often to alight, and go on foot, whilst the body of the cart hung suspended over the edge of deep precipices ; if we got guides, they guided us to where they knew the road was good, and a little before we got to the bad places, they left us, saying they were busy and could go no farther. Before we got to a posada, as we were uncertain of the road, we had suffered much from the sun, and the danger of being often upset in the cart. I was sorry for him who accompanied us [Ribera ; characteristic this of the old woman, so valiantly trudging along under a blazing sun, that she should still think first of the distress of others], for just when he had told us we were on the right road, we had to turn back again, and retrace our steps : but his virtue was so well rooted that I think I never saw him vexed, which filled me with great amazement, and made me praise the Lord ; for where virtue is so well rooted as this, provocations matter little. I praise Him for the way in which He was pleased to deliver us from that road. Characteristic too, the merry, pleased exclamation for as firmly rooted as her own virtue was the almost childish pre- possession which never left her, that a foundation accomplished without suffering augured but ill for the future with which she welcomed one of her falls from the cart on this occasion : " At least I have had a fall and hurt myself." On St. Bartholomew's Eve, they arrived at Segovia, where they found the nuns greatly concerned at their non-arrival; " as the road was such, the delay was much." After a week or more of rest, in which her daughters vied with each other in ministering to her comfort, she set out for Avila. From some little obscure wayside posada in Villacastin, six leagues from Segovia and five from Avila, where she passed the night, whilst the cart was waiting at the door in the first glow of a September morning, she wrote to her prioress of Seville (" For the Mother 686 SANTA TERESA prioress of the Discalced Carmelites at the back of San Francisco of Seville " such is the address) : " I arrived last night, weary enough of travelling, for I am returning from the foundation of Soria, which is distant from Avila whither I am now bound, forty leagues." (It was in reality forty-three ; but when did ever a Spaniard not miscalculate distances?) At length, on the 6th of September, she once more found herself, after a year's absence, amongst her nuns of San Jose*. Even during her lifetime she was saddened and mortified at the spectacle of the dissolution and relaxation of the convent, which she may have been said to have founded with her heart's blood. For long it had been going from bad to worse, and she had declared in grave anxiety at Soria, that, if no other means could be found, she would go to Avila on foot. And, indeed, she alone could unravel the tangled skein of temporal difficulty and spiritual disorganisation. The convent was on the brink of starvation, for with Salcedo's slender legacy (which was not enough to provide them with a daily dinner, let alone the supper, that is supposing it to be punctually paid, for as yet, the nuns were still waiting for the first instalment), the alms on which they had hitherto subsisted, ceased. " They have made me prioress," Teresa wrote to Maria de San Jose, "from sheer hunger." The stern and rigorous discipline had been greatly relaxed through the foolish weakness and leniency of the chaplain we are sorry to learn he was no other than our old friend, Master Julian of Avila. It was sorely against her will that she was elected to the office which she already felt too much for her failing strength, and doubted her ability to fulfil. It was the most amusing scene in the world, writes Gracian, she scolding us all for not letting her rest ; and as she was about to reason us into electing another prioress, I bade her place her mouth to the earth, and when she was prostrate I began to sing the " Te Deum Laudamus" and on the loth of December, in obedience to Gracian's command, she was elected prioress by the unanimous voice of the community. Avila was no longer the Avila of her youth. The absence of the old familiar faces which had passed out of her life for ever had left a melancholy void in her heart never more to be filled up. The brother to whom she had been knit by the tenderest ties of affection was sleeping tranquilly, Avila, Peru, La Serna, to him now as if they had never been. Good old Salcedo, too, was gone, leaving a last legacy to San Jos^ ; and Baltasar Alvarez, at the age of forty-seven, had tranquilly passed away a year before, whilst making his provincial visit to the Jesuit College of Belmonte ; and " the worst is " (she refers EL ORO FIND SE ECHARA DE VER EN EL TOQUE 687 to Pedro and Francisco), "that those are left who are ! " It is the sad penalty of a long life to be gradually deserted by those who have accompanied it for so long: to watch them one by one fall out of the race and disappear, and to be left alone, stranded as it were, the last of a generation, amid things which have grown strange and pathetic memories of past affections. "The more I go," writes Teresa, "the less do I find in life wherein I can take consolation." A little while, O brave and valiant soul ! and you too shall lay down the burden which oppresses you, leaving an immortal memory it may be less imperishable than your sanctity of courage, devotion, and constancy of purpose, rarely, if ever, equalled amongst women. Well may she complain to Maria de San Jos< that the loss of so good a brother was as nothing in comparison to the trials caused her by those he had left behind. Her family only added to her anxieties, and was even worse to manage than her convents. Scandal, justly or unjustly, had made itself busy with the fair fame of her niece Beatriz, the daughter of Juan de Ovalle and her sister Juana. The honour of her family was very dear to this rigid old Castilian saint. Her nephew Francisco, she sums up his character in the phrase, which was surely not meant to be contemptuous, although it strikes the ear with a certain ironical echo, " that he was only fit for God,' had deluded his wife and his clever mother-in-law as to his income ; he had told them he had 2000 ducats, and spenf accordingly ; the real state of the case being that the provisions for his younger children, and pious legacies, had absorbed Lorenzo's fortune, and left his heir little or nothing to live on. He now sought to annul his father's will, and made some fruitless efforts to withdraw his sister from her aunt's control. There were also symptoms they were but momentary, however that Teresa, now a woman herself, the girl whom she had brought up from childhood, and probably dreamt of as her future successor in the Order, was on the point of wavering, a gloomy foreboding justified by the former conduct of her brother. Casilda de Padilla, "whom some devil must have deranged," had listened to the persuasions of her relatives, and was bent on deserting the Order she had entered in a fit of childish and perhaps temporary enthusiasm. The moral to Teresa's mind is obvious " that it cannot be his Majesty's will that we should be honoured with the great people of the earth, but with poor folk like the apostles, and so there is no need for this to trouble us. ... The answer I make here to the remarks of the world is, that, as regards God, it is perhaps for the best, so that we should look to him alone. May she go with God. 688 SANTA TERESA May he deliver me from these gentlefolk who are all-powerful and have strange turns of temper." In spite, too, of her express and often-repeated injunctions to Marie de San Jose to send them to no one but herself; in spite of her direct negative in Palencia to Doria's request that they might be paid to him, the latter, with flagrant bad faith, had induced the prioress of Seville to deliver into his keeping the 200 ducats, the payment of which had been the subject of such anxious correspondence on Teresa's part. The wily friar (perhaps his conduct might merit a stronger term) had at once handed the money to his brother in payment of the sum advanced by the latter to defray the expenses of the delegates to Rome, and the chance of accomplishing her brother's last and sacred behests before her own death seemed to melt farther and farther away. Teresa was justly indignant at such double- dealing, and told her prioress bluntly that they must have schemed it together (not the first time that she alludes to the " raposeria" the foxy slyness of her favourite prioress, so fit to treat with Andaluces). " I feared it would happen, and it has seemed to me in no way well; for I like frankness." She observes that, if Marie de San Josd gave them to Doria to transmit to her, the fact of his having handed them to his brother cannot justify the latter in keeping them in payment of his debt without her prioress's leave, who well deserves, since it was not for want of being warned, to have to pay them twice over ; " and so you will, if they do not give them to me," adds the decided old saint. The chapel is not even begun, and if it is not done whilst I am here (at least commenced), I know not how or when it will be, for I hope, if it be .God's will, to go from here to the foundation of Madrid. . . . You may well believe that if the money were mine, or if it was in my power, I should be better pleased not to have anything to do with it [her brother's will]. If you could only see how his fortune [Francisco's] is being wasted ; it is a pity, because this boy was only fit for God. Although I wish to withdraw myself entirely, they tell me it is my duty ; ... for I know not how it can end. Again she recurs to the faithless Father Nicolas What has displeased me most is his having set his will against mine ; and, in short, that your reverence and he should have acted against my desire . . . his brother was better able to wait than the chapel entrusted to me by my brother ; and if I die it will be left, such are his son's necessities, and the money perhaps spent : and this, from what I can see, we may be sure of. Such were the cares and thoughts which haunted the brain of the old foundress in sixteenth-century Avila; and pursued EL ORO FIND SE ECHARA DE VER EN EL TOQUE 689 her as, far away to the west, she watched from her narrow casement the last sunlight fading away over the brown uplands towards Sonsoles, or hobbled through the convent corridors in the gathering gloom, through which the piercing cold of that upland winter had now begun to creep, until she sighed, like many another, before and since the Idumean of Chaldea made a similar plaint, that " God rained everything upon her at once." With these mingled dreams of other foundations, that of Madrid haunted her to the last. It was indeed to be accomplished, but, as she had all too truly foreseen in Soria, not by her. She had waited on in Soria in the hope of induc- ing the Cardinal of Toledo to give his consent. But the proud prelate had been deeply stung by the resolution of his niece (that rich widow of Medina, Dona Elena de Quiroga, to whom Teresa had years ago owed so much in the foundation of Medina) to leave the world for the obscure retirement of the convent she had helped to found. In spite of the prudent assurances of the saint (who would really seem from other motives to have opposed that lady's entrance into the Order), that she would not be received without his consent, the Cardinal still withheld the desired license, and she was obliged to return to Avila. She now began to fear (and feared rightly) that her cherished scheme would never be realised. Neither her sub- mission nor her promises seem to have had any effect, although a private and confidential letter to Gracian (which, like so many others she wrote to him with the same request, was not torn up as she desired, but piously preserved) remains to prove her entire sincerity : I have sent you these letters from Toledo, so that you may see how grievously the Archbishop takes it, and I see that on no account will it do for us to make him an enemy. And, apart from this, whenever this entrance has been mentioned, I have always been greatly averse to it ; for wherever mother and daughter are together with so many of their family, I fear from what I have seen of this lady, that there is sure to be great inquietude, and little peace for her ; and so, before I spoke to the Archbishop, I had begged father Baltasar Alvarez to prevent it, and he promised me to do so, for his opinion was the same as mine, and he knew her well. From this you can see how likely it is that I should have persuaded her ! I have written to the Cardinal that I will warn your reverence, and that he may be easy that she will not be received, and it would pain me greatly if it were otherwise. Your reverence already knows what secrecy this letter demands : in any case tear it up, so that no one may think he is the cause of its n~>t being done, but that it is solely for her benefit and that of her children, as is true ; we have more than enough experience of these widows ! . . . The hour cannot have arrived for this foundation [Burgos]. That of Madrid is what is wanting now, and I believe that when the Archbishop sees that we are acting according to his wishes, he will give it at once ; and the Bishop here, who is bound thither in October, tells me that he will procure it. 44 690 SANTA TERESA But the resolution of Dofla Elena herself defeated Teresa's decision. Her threat that, if she was not admitted into the Carmelites she would join the Franciscans, extorted the Arch- bishop's tardy and perhaps reluctant consent, which for over twelve years he had so obstinately refused. Gracian himself went from Salamanca to Medina to celebrate the taking of the habit by so illustrious a novice ; and Teresa's last letter to Don Caspar de Quiroga was one of heartfelt thanks and humble gratitude for so great a consola- tion and favour. But as to the foundation of Madrid, the last anxiety of these closing years of her life, he remained inflexible, and she still waited for that license which never came, and never was to come, although so long and eagerly expected. And so the year wears on to its close to the morning and evening clang of the cathedral bells, and the gray streets look grayer against the film of powdery snow, and, " quite a prioress," as she writes laughingly to Gracian in Salamanca, she fights the wolf from the doors of San Jose, as she had done years ago from those of the Encarnacion. Little, perhaps, to record ; little to attract the attention in the actual events that took place in that obscure convent, and yet the nunnery too is thrilled or shaken as profoundly as the world outside by its humble joys and sorrows. A sermon preached by the Doctor Castro, the worthy canon, whom Teresa, true to the instincts of her life, has transformed by her magic influence, and perhaps a dose of that deference and delicate flattery which none ever wielded so dexterously, from an impartial disbeliever in visions into a partial believer in her own ; his visits to the little dark locutory, for the mere fact of his having been a fellow-student of Gracian's when they were lads together in the University of Alcala had been enough to win him her heart, were the most stirring events which diversified the sordid cares (for no life is heroic in its details) of her laborious everyday existence. There we may fancy them sitting, she lost in the darkness behind the grating, he in the twilight gloom of the locutory. Occasionally a messenger from the Duchess of Alba or the Marquesa of Villena alights at the convent gates, and blows a worldlier whiff through the quiet precincts. And yet this austere rigid existence differed very little, except in the regular recurrence of choir duties and a stricter seclusion, from that which went on in the gray old palaces of Avila, stuck over with armorial bearings, or in the houses of the greatest grandees themselves. If to-day we would form some vague conception of the life our forefathers lived ; of its sombre, dignified, changeless repose, EL ORO FIND SE ECHARA DE VER EN EL TOQUE 691 we shall find it alone in these Castilian convents where the passage of the centuries only touches the walls without, tinging them with a deeper hue, but the atmosphere within in its smallest details is that which lapped about Teresa. What they then were, they still are; and as one talks through the grating with the prioress and her nuns, and the quiet murmur of voices fills the silence, the world outside fades away, perhaps also the worldliness from one's heart, and one longs for the peace of the cloister, the peace of a quiet conscience and the humble discharge of Duty, of practising, folded close to the bosom of the Divinity, those great Ideals, Poverty, Self- sacrifice, Serene Humility. Sombre and dignified even in their poverty, they carry us back, they make us touch the very essence of a century which is fast fading away even in Spain : in them alone lingers a faint transcript of the medium, the thoughts, the internal history of the age. When they have gone, the past will be swept away for ever before the growing vulgarity, the flashy tinsel, a uniformity that is odious without being stately, the shams and falsities of modern life. Nay ; we have even forgotten how to be merry ! And oh, what mirth and gladness filled the convent when a novice took the veil or made her profession ! What feasting outside and in ! outside, the family of the would-be nun making merry on capons and partridges in her honour; inside, a warmth of welcome, of lighted tapers, of triumphant joy at the entrance of another spouse of Christ, and perhaps also a good share of the partridges and capons found its way to the "torno." At least such is the scene that Teresa shows us in the letter she writes to Gracian at two in the morning, as taking place in San Jose on that 28th of November at the profession of Ana de los Angeles. The Mother's heart had also been cheered by the presence at the ceremony of Fray Juan de la Cruz, sent from Baeza by the Provincial of Andalucia to fetch her to the foundation of Granada, with the comfort and care befitting her age and person. But either because she had not lost all hope of the license for Madrid, or because she was dismayed at the length of the journey (for we cannot imagine her refusal to proceed from the rooted prejudices she as a Castilian entertained against the cheating, mischievous, dangerous Andaluz, nay; so far was it from being so, that she had even held out a faint prospect to Maria de San Jose that she might even yet before she died see her face again in Seville), she resigned the honours of this foundation to Ana de Jesus, prioress of Veas. And on the morrow following, after she had bidden* farewell to the nuns whom she had herself carefully selected, and who were to join 692 SANTA TERESA the foundress at Veas, and thence go with her to Granada, she felt sad and lonely enough. Other little details in her letters paint her thrifty, struggling life. Her poverty made it impossible for her to assist Gracian with his foundation in Salamanca, "so advantageous to the Order, that truly all should contribute." To this end even Fray Juan de la Cruz had turned out his wallet and counted and re-counted his scanty store of ducats, to see if any could be spared, but his desires proved greater than his ability. " But she had got," she writes to Gracian, with all her old merry vivacity and shrewd humour, "four crowns out of Antonio Ruiz," who had paid her a visit two or three days before ; " and I do well in not keeping them, for, as things go, it would not be wonderful if the temptation came upon me to steal." Once more the powdery snow covers the neighbouring sierras with a veil of white, and lies in masses in the narrow tortuous streets ; once more the wind howls with a strange and dreary sounding, bearing on its wings the secrets of vast and desolate solitudes, of mountain tops untrodden by foot of man, of savage recesses inhabited by the wolf and the wild boar, of that great white world which lay beyond the grim mediseval town. In the country hamlets no one stirs ; and flocks and herds are all under shelter, and packs of wolves scour the streets at midnight. The very shepherds cower over the blaze and listen in awestruck wonder to some strange, fantastic legend of that wild, stirring past, which was even yet to them a real thing, whilst the door, barred and bolted, creaks and shakes in the fierce blast. And once more in midwinter Teresa prepares to travel to Burgos. Once more ! For she is nearing her journey's end. Once more she shall hear the dull clang of the great cathedral bells as they usher in the most solemn and joyous night of the year, stirring in her all the recollections of her childhood ; far- away reminiscences of those with whom she had listened to their strident voice long years ago ; some of them now slowly mouldering to dust in the great Franciscan monastery below the walls ; some of them on the battlefields of the Indies, that country vague to her with all the vagueness of immensity ; and one in the little monastery church of the convent which owed its existence to her own hands and constant will. As they clang and clash through the stillness of the upland town, above the moaning of the wind, does their tongue convey any note of warning to the little old woman who has listened to their language from childhood to youth, from youth to age? But no ! Oblivious of the near as of the distant future, when she EL ORO FINO SE ECHARA DE VER EN EL TOQUE 693 shall have so set the seal of her identity on her native town that it shall no longer be Avila of the Knights, but Avila of Teresa de Jesus, she spends her last Christmas-tide on earth ; arranges with loving care the little chamber where Gracian, who is on his way from Salamanca, to accompany her to Burgos, is to sleep: "although I do not believe that Doctor Castro, also anxious to have him for a guest, will consent to it." All has been arranged ; family difficulties patched up for the present as well as may be. As for her niece Beatriz, much sound advice has been despatched to Juan de Ovalle in Alba, to get his daughter out of harm's way as soon as may be by spending the winter, as was his usual custom, in the little hamlet of Galinduste : I shall not be easy so long as I know you remain in Alba . . . since the occasion is by no means dead. For love of our Lord, take heed ; for winter is now so far advanced, that it will do you no harm to go where you can have good fires, as is your custom ; for, according to the warnings that have been given me, be sure that the devil is not asleep. . . . And surely, senor, putting aside such important matters, which it is impossible to lay too much stress upon, the course which has been suggested is necessary for your daughter's remedy ; for she cannot remain with her parents for ever. In another letter written five days after, she indicates the " remedy " more clearly, a " remedy," indeed, which does not seem to have commended itself to, or to have been much relished by, the patient. She is about to found at Burgos, and thinks it would be a good plan to give Beatriz the habit in Avila and take her with her ("it will amuse her to visit these convents"), and she might afterwards accompany her to Madrid. But what seemed to Teresa the most powerful of inducements, namely that of being a foundress before she professed, did not rouse any corresponding enthusiasm on the part of those to whom it was proposed, and although she did, after her aunt's death, become a nun, she seems for the present to have preferred the hamlet and the good fires. " God be with them," sighs Teresa ; " what a life they give me ! " One of her last letters of the old year was addressed to her nephew Lorenzo in Lima (or, as she styles it, "the City of Kings ") he whose picture stills hangs in the ruined old manor- house of Hortigosa. He at least is rich and flourishing, and has made a wealthy marriage. His Indians poor Indians ! bring him in a revenue of 7000 ducats ; and Teresa, wno has already had experience of one needy brother, sends a word of warning to Agustin de Ahumada, who was on the point of sailing for Spain in the fleet, to seek a pension for his services from the King. " I assure you that, if he does not bring enough 694 SANTA TERESA to live on, he will have hard work enough, for no one will give him anything to eat, and for me it will be a sore trial not to be able to assist him. . . . It is an arduous thing for a man of his age to expose himself to so perilous a journey for the sake of fortune, when our attention ought rather to be set on getting ready for Heaven." A CHAPTER XXVI THE CROWN OF THORNS AND ROSES ND now we come to the foundation of Burgos, which the - i. chronicler has styled not inaptly for he too sees dimly into the tragedy of the last act of the drama of a human life-- bar crown of thorns and roses. Up and gird thy loins, C Teresa ! for one last glorious effort ; for the Night is coming when Work and Time shall for thee be swallowed up together in darkness, and when no man shall work, whatever may have been his mission. Lay aside the instinctive reluctance the weariness of body and spirit which tempts thee if omy for a moment to leave this foundation to stronger arms, but surely not stouter hearts than thine. Away, away there, wrapped m the sunset glow, lies the city, the Home, which thou hast seen glittering before thee from afar even from childhood, of thine this weary laborious life, which seemed unending in the acting, has been but a dream ; its griefs, and struggles and spirituaf darknesses but a mist, obscuring for a moment brightness. Thou art fast approaching the Reality, thou who lovedst the Real in life; thou who even caughtest some du crlimpses of the Eternal Reason on earth, however falsified by the petty dogma of a creed. Bound in thy creed, its darknesses and its miserable prejudices, thou hast arisen far above it and hast embraced and felt the Infinite striving within thee. Turn and look for the last time, before the city fades away for evei from vision-on the old gray city, storm-tossed and turbi of look and outline, which has shut in with its changing imagery of day-dawn and sunset so much of thy existence There 1 ?he Encarnacion, sleeping in the hollow below the frowning battlements ; away to the sunset stretches the bare, stone-strewn, rosem y-grown moorland, hiding a thousand crystal streamlets in its bosom. There, too, on the edge of the town r 1 1 dis- tinguishable from the dusty Medina track amongst he re roofs and high walls of other convents.-the Gordil as and Sta Ana of the Bernardines.-is that other convent which owes its existence to thy hands, which have fashioned it within 696 SANTA TERESA and without to thy own spiritual seeming. O brave old woman ! one last lingering look ; and Avila for thee has faded away ; nay, as completely faded out of thy life as if it had never been ; although thou shalt shed over it a posthumous renown and the deeds of the caballeros who sleep in armour in the cathedral shall be forgotten ; its heroic past and history be no longer remembered except inasmuch as their traditions nurtured the childhood, and inspired the womanhood, of the great Teresa de Jesus. Her daughters of San Jose" long remembered this her last residence amongst them. The magic touch of Death alone is wanting to such tender credulity as theirs (there is an element of greatness, let it not be forgotten, even in credulity) to see a miracle in many trivial actions then unheeded, after- wards invested with a strange significance. It is not until the great curtain shall have rolled between them for ever, and Teresa shall have disappeared into the impenetrable shadow, that, vaguely realising how great had been the figure that had passed from amongst them, the imagination pursuing an inevitable ^process, lends her that vague supernatural atmo- sphere, which still shrouds her to-day as with a veil, and obscures the real aspect of the woman. One might have thought that the last foundation, this crowning act of her career, would have been a continued triumph, that she had silenced opposition, that she would have found her path cleared of all difficulties, and that she had only to appear in Burgos to make a project an accom- plished fact. Such would indeed have been the dramatic ending to her sufferings and struggles ; but, alas ! human life in the acting rarely preserves the unities, and such was not Teresa's fate. Foiled in her darling project the foundation at Madrid she had at sixty-seven, during the last months of her life, to fight as keenly as she had ever done twenty years ago at Avila and Medina, before she added the last to the list of convents which hailed her as their foundress. For more than six years the idea, first suggested to her by some of the Company of Jesus, had lain dormant in her brain. It had been stirred into development by the newly-elected Archbishop of Burgos happening to pass through Valladolid during her stay there previous to the foundation of Palencia. She knew him well, for, like herself, he was an Aviles by birth, and sprung from one of its noblest and most ancient families. As long as Avila had been Avila, no skirmish, no sally after the Moors in the mountains, but some stout Blasco or Nunez or Vela had had a share in it. What more natural than that he should help THE CROWN OF THORNS AND ROSES 697 a countrywoman, whose struggles in her first foundation, when the whole town had risen against it, had been actually witnessed by him, and were still fresh in his memory ? Whilst the two Bishops feasted and ate together in the old Jeronimite Convent of Valladolid, he of Palencia, proffering the request in Teresa's name, had little difficulty in extracting a verbal promise to admit and favour the proposed foundation. Nevertheless, on account of the distance, and of the climate of Burgos being so cold and rigorous, as well as to do pleasure to the good Bishop of Palencia, the former was deferred until the latter should be concluded, and when Soria interposed a still further delay, he sent a canon expressly to Burgos to sound the Archbishop as to his intentions. The Archbishop now, however, imposed conditions ; the convent must either be endowed or sanctioned by the city. Teresa received this answer in Soria. The Bishop of Palencia, on the contrary, irritated at his episcopal brother's ambiguous answer, was for her setting forth at once. Teresa, however, was not to be deceived by fair words and reluctant promises. Loath to stir up strife between these two holy men, her ill-health and the approach of winter furnished her with an ostensible excuse (for with exquisite prudence, so as not to set the two friends by the ears, she refrained from assigning the real reason the conduct of the Archbishop himself), and she quietly returned to Avila. Nevertheless, a rich and influential widow of Burgos, who, getting acquainted with Teresa in Palencia, whither she had brought her two daughters to take the veil (two of them had already done so four years before in Valladolid), had set her heart upon this convent ; and it was owing to her devotion, and not to any Archbishop of them all, that this of Burgos at last became an accomplished fact. She it was who, by generously volunteering to provide the house and sustenance, if needed, overcame the objections of the Corporation. When she had begun to treat of it, she wrote to me that she had set about the negotiations. I took it as a jest, for I know how hard it is to get them to admit poor convents, and as I did not know, nor did it cross my mind, the obligation she had taken upon herself, it seemed to me that much more was needed. Withal, as I was commending it to the Lord one day in the octave of San Martin [the middle of November], I thought on how it might be done if the license were given : for that I with my many infirmities should go to so cold a place as Burgos (the cold being very hurtful to them) seemed to me impossible, and that it was a temerity to take so long a journey when I had just concluded so severe a one as I have spoken of in my coming from Soria ; nor would the father provincial Gracian allow me. I considered that the prioress of Palencia would do as well, since, everything being smooth, there would be nothing to do. Whilst I was thinking this, and being very determined not to go, the Lord says to me 698 SANTA TERESA these words, and by them I saw that the license had already been granted : Fear not the cold, for I am the true heat. The devil puts forth all his strength to prevent this foundation : put forth all thine for me to accomplish it, and fail not to go in person, for it will be of great benefit. . . . Once more for the last time does the monitor of her life inspire her feeble frame with strength and courage. The natural reluctance of old age and infirmity to brave the snows and rains of a winter journey through Castille vanishes like a cloud before the sun ; and when, a few days later, her prevision was justified by the arrival of the license, if she had had her will, she would have set out at once. Gracian asked indeed whether she had the Archbishop's license in writing, but she quickly inspired him with the same generous confidence that she possessed herself. The things of God [she answered] need not so much prudence, nor can weighty matters importing his service be undertaken if we wait for every- thing to be as smooth as we would wish. That foundation [Burgos] will be greatly to the service of God, and if it is put off any longer, it will not be made. Let us risk it [the license of the Archbishop], and keep silence, for the more we suffer the better it will be. And know that the devil is doing his utmost to prevent it ; but, nevertheless, let your reverence consider your decision, for that will be the safest. On the 2nd day of January 1582, Teresa set out for Burgos. Gracian, to whom she had written with her usual loving solici- tude, that, if he preached the last day of the Festival (Advent), he was not to set out without taking a day's rest, for fear the journey should hurt him, came from Salamanca to Avila to accompany her, partly, she says, because he had to go to visit Soria, partly to look after her health on the road, as the weather was so severe, and she herself so old and infirm, " it seeming to them that my life is worth somewhat And it was certainly a providence of God ; for the roads were such, on account of the heavy rains, that he and his companions were indeed wanted to pick out the road, and help to drag the carts out of the quag- mires, especially from Palencia to Burgos." And so the little caravan took their way over that wild wintry world of Castille to Burgos. A covered cart, followed by a few straggling figures on donkeys, or it may be mules, appeared on one horizon, mingled for a moment with its white immensity, and faded into black dots on the sky-line. As in the Pampas of La Plata, or the sandy deserts of Arabia, on these upland plains, such objects as there are take an altogether disproportionate magnitude and importance, and for miles the ragged shepherd, standing motionless against the sky, noted their approach and watched them disappear. The melancholy and 699 desolate charm of these upland plains is an indefinable impres- sion rather than a positive perception. The earth as limitless as the sky, the sky itself the dominant note in the landscape. At midday, under its glittering brilliancy, the earth sinks into insignificance ; until it too, as the sun grows low in the heavens, flushes with strange lights and symphonies of colour, and the stony stubble is turned into a glorious palette, beyond all tell- ing weird and mysterious at nightfall when the long low lines of the horizon darken against the pure green light, and a bunch of thistles looms tragical and ominous against the vast immensity of earth and sky. Now and again the bell-tower of a church, some flat-roofed, smokeless village breaking for a moment the uninterrupted plain, rather increases than lessens the oppressive sense of solitude. It is little more than a day's journey, as the crow flies, from Avila to Medina, and on the 4th of January, the day before the Eve of Twelfth Night, the grim Castillo de la Mota, flushed with the evening light, keeping watch and ward over the still invisible city at its base, rose before them above the level of the plain. To us it recalls nothing but historic facts diligently dug out of books : sic transit gloria mundi : but to these travellers it recalled personages and events which were still living images in their memory, events which had been enacted by, and in which their own fathers had taken part. Isabella and Ferdinand still cast a gigantic shadow over this their fortress palace ; hidden in the plain a few miles distant was Madrigal, the birthplace of the Catholic Queen. Old men still living had seen them both ; could remember the slightest detail of some faded pageant ; had listened to the sound of their voices. As the mules' hoofs rang over the frost-bound earth, and night fell slowly over city and plain, these and a hundred other memories evoked by that stern old building in the distance must have been uppermost in their thoughts and on their tongues. We can fancy their entry into Medina, for the stage is unaltered, the actors alone are gone. There are the four cross-roads by which they arrived that January night of 1582 ; here at the angle where town and country meet and blend so strangely is the tall square building of the Discalced Carmelite nuns of Medina. The last lingering strokes of the Ave Marias vibrated just as sadly through the keen wintry air ; the pungent smoke of burning straw betokened then as now that the labourer had returned from the fields, and that for him one more day of his life's long labour was done. A cart stopped for a moment 7 oo SANTA TERESA before the convent gates ; a few figures scarcely more palpable than shadows moved confusedly hither and thither ; the clang of a bell woke the echoes of the silent street ; some footsteps shuffled through empty passages within ; the gates swung open, and then closed ; and cart and figures are engulfed in the shadow behind them, and the street is silent and tranquil as before. Nothing to attract more than a momentary movement of curiosity on the part of a passer-by, except that it took place on one January night of 1582, and no record remains of it, no record of how these dead people moved and felt, or how they thought and lived, beyond a passing reference to it in a nun's letters. It is because of these gaps that no human ingenuity can fill up that never can be filled up that so trivial an occurrence rouses an intense, nay, almost a solemn, interest. They found the prioress Alberta Bautista ill in bed with high fever. " Jesus ! daughter," said the saint, passing her hands gently over the sick woman's face, "and are you ill just when I am here. Come, get up, and have supper with me." And so she did, for as she rose in obedience to Teresa's bidding, she felt herself suddenly relieved, and at once set about ministering to the necessities of the beloved guest. Oh, the joy of loving hearts, which seasoned the frugal meal that night, and had the virtue of transforming crusts of bread and draughts of water into some high festival ! She stayed with them a few days, and on the eve of her departure addressed a letter to the Archbishop of Toledo's chaplain, the licentiate Pefia, informing him of the health of Da. Elena Quiroga, the Archbishop's niece, " whose joy is so great, that it has made her praise God, and who has thriven so well on convent fare that she has even grown fat. Indeed she might have been a nun for many years, so versed is she in the ' cosas de religion.' I did not think to leave Avila," she adds, "until I started for the Foundation of Madrid." (I wonder if a pang of remorse smote the Archbishop's heart when the light of death had given to these words an echo of reproach the more touching as it was unspoken.) " Our Lord has been pleased that some persons of Burgos were so desirous that one of these monasteries should be founded there, that they procured the Archbishop's license, and that of the corporation, and so I am going with some sisters to effect it, for so obedience demands, and our Lord wills that it should cost me more labour ; for being so close as is Palencia, it was not his pleasure that it should be done then, but after- wards when I was in Avila, for it is no slight labour now to take so long a journey." At Valladolid they were detained four days on account of THE CROWN OF THORNS AND ROSES 701 Teresa's health, who, besides having caught a bad cold and sore throat with the severe weather, had had a slight stroke of paralysis. Withal [she writes to Catalina de Tolosa], I set out as soon as I was a little better ; because I am afraid of your grace, and these my ladies, whose hands I kiss many times. I beseech their graces not to blame me for the delay, nor your grace either, for if you knew in what a state the roads are, perhaps you might blame me more for having come. . . . They say that the road between this and Burgos is very irksome, and so I do not know if the father provincial will be willing to set out until I am better, although he desires it greatly. Her arrival at Palencia was a veritable triumph her last. So great the crowds assembled to see her alight and to hear the sound of her voice so soon now to be stilled and seek her benediction, that they had much ado to get the travellers out of the carts. As the cloister doors opened to receive her, she was met by her nuns chanting the Te Deum, as was the invariable custom of all her convents, when she arrived. In token of their joy and delight the good souls had swept and garnished the con- vent patio, and decked it with altars and images, " which inspired great devotion." During the few days he spent with them, however, she was very ill, and they tried in vain to induce her to remain until the severe weather had moderated, and the heavy rains subsided. To set forth in such weather they all said was impossible, for they ran the risk of perishing on the way ; but, brave to the end, nothing they could say was of any avail, and she insisted on proceeding. A man sent to report on the state of the roads, returned with the news that all the rivers were up, and the bridges washed away. For a moment the saint was dismayed, but not for long: "Fear not," whispered the mysterious voice, " for I will be with you " ; whereupon " although it seemed a foolhardiness," she at once started. " Although I did not tell this to the father provincial then, nevertheless it consoled me in the great labours and perils in which we saw ourselves, especially in a crossing near Burgos, called the pontones, and the water was so high that the bridges were completely covered, and very deep. In short, it is a great temerity to cross it, above all for carts, which, should they swerve ever so little, would certainly go to the bottom, and in this way one of the carts saw itself in great peril. ... As we could not do a day s journey on account of the bad roads, for very often the carts stuck fast in the mud, and the animals had to be taken out of the others and yoked to each one by turns so as to drag them out, the fathers who accompanied us had their hands full, for our muleteers chanced to be mere lads, and careless. The 704 SANTA TERESA fashioned it, jagged of outline, a little grayer than the sky, it looked as if it had lain there for ever a small oasis of life cut out of the vastness of the plain. Ragged sky torn by the tempest ; lace-work spire shooting up against it ; smokeless, stately, and grim, the city lay dripping in the rain, moss-grown, gray, and faded on the low-lying banks of the Arlanzon. Away to the left, overlooking the water-meadows where the stork mused gravely on the landscape, Las Huelgas, the proudest convent in all Spain, its aisles lined with tombs of kings and queens, above them the silken banner of Miramamolin rotting proudly to dust. Facing them an old tower on an eminence, mouldering even then, overshadowing the city as was but meet, as its owner had overshadowed it in life, even the Cid, the great Cid Campeador. And Teresa, as she watched it growing on her vision across the flooded water-meadows, little recked that as Burgos the capital of Spain long before Valladolid, the chiefest jewel in the Castilian crown then lived on his memory as if he, the stern old Gothic knight, had been its only raison d'etre, so too that wild old fortress town amongst the moorlands, which she had beheld for the last time, was to live on hers for all eternity. For these two, so far apart in years, were to be alike in this, that they are the two types in which the Castilian character and its tendency have most distinctly embodied themselves, and been made visible to the world. It was still light when they reached the outskirts of the town too light to enter Burgos. For it was no small matter in those days for a band of strangers to run the gauntlet of the hostile gaze and excited curiosity of an unknown and, being unknown, inimical town. They had now got to what is to-day a lonely and deserted suburb, cut in two by railway lines and telegraph posts, crossed by a sandy lane. This sandy lane was then, when honest muleteers and booted and spurred cavaliers rode in and out, as muleteers and gentlemen should, the highroad to Madrid, and the principal entrance on that side to the city. It wound before the high walls of stately hospitals and monasteries, which had spread from the town and invaded this strip of low-lying ground on the right bank of the Arlanzon, and was connected with the city by St. Mary's Bridge. Before the gates of one of these monasteries the travellers alighted. It was the famous monastery of the Augustinians, renowned throughout all Spain as the shrine of one of its most famous images the celebrated Christ of Burgos. They thus achieved a double object : they put off the last moments of daylight until they could enter THE CROWN OF THORNS AND ROSES 705 Burgos under cover of night ; and Teresa and her nuns would also be privileged to make their orisons before the marvellous Christ of which they had heard since childhood. It is true : there is no more wonderful image one in which the elements of sublimity, terror, and profound pathos are so eloquently combined as in this Christ of Burgos. The Spaniard is not imaginative. His rigid matter-of-factness penetrates even into his religion. To him every object of his faith is a living concretion ; not a nebulous phantasm floating in a remote limbo. He blocks out his Virgins and Images to represent the colour and aspect of life. The Christ it still hangs terrible and pathetic above the aisles of Burgos Cathedral is one of the most striking examples of this. It imposes on and thrills the imagination with its grim realism, and startles the gazer into the momentary belief of his forefathers that the rigid form may at any moment rouse itself into movement and volition. It was generally ascribed to Nicodemus, and supposed to have floated all the way from Palestine to Spain, and to have been picked up on the high sea by a pious merchant of Burgos. Others, not satisfied with so prosaic an explanation, will have it that it came down from heaven itself: they are perhaps not altogether wide of the mark, for the obscure carver has indeed, like Prometheus, filched the creative fire. However it may be and I shall leave it to the pious reader to choose whichever hypothesis commends itself to him most, for all is possible (to faith) it was and still is the supreme glory and boast of Burgos. Around it, as around other images which deeply affected the national imagination, clusters a circle of legend terrible, pathetic, always picturesque, strongly tinctured with the character and peculiar characteristics of the Spaniard him- self. Had not the holy head shaken off the golden crown, placed by piety round its pallid brow, and, faithful to the crown of thorns, spurned it to his feet, where ever afterwards it found a resting-place? When stolen by the jealous monks of a neighbouring convent, had not the image straightway returned to its accustomed shrine, and when again wrested from its guardians by main force, appeared in its place next morning as if nothing had happened ? The light of day has ever been unpropitious to religious mysteries. Proving on the one side the reality of the devotion which resolves itself into a cult so splendid and so grand ; on the other, the universal acknowledgment that the bulk of men are governed rather by appearances than reason. The perpetual and mysterious twilight was lit by the glimmer of a hundred 45 706 SANTA TERESA gold and silver lamps, 1 and sixty silver candlesticks. As the last of the three curtains, embroidered with pearls and precious stones, was drawn apart, and the Man of God stood revealed, the bells clashed loud in the tower above, and all present fell on their knees. " Certainly," says Madame d'Aulnoy, who visited the shrine a century after Teresa, "that sacred spot and divine image inspire religious awe"; and if the brilliant and vivacious Frenchwoman confessed to such a feeling, we may judge of the emotion felt by these simple Castilian nuns and friars of a former generation with their na'if belief in a positive faith. Let us follow them across St. Mary's Bridge. The city is lost in the night. A feeble oil light flickers here and there, a red gleam from an open casement, blurred by the drenching rain. The river lies dark and silent below. All sound has faded from the street, except the pelt, pelt of the rain, the heavy pour of water from the leads on the causeway below ; for in a moment the gates will be shut for the night, and no one may go out or in until the morning. In the middle of the bridge an oil lamp gleams before the image of the Virgin, who, wrapped in the rigid folds of her stone raiment, extends a silent benediction to the outgoing or incoming traveller. So they enter the soaking streets of Burgos, and, frozen to the bones and drenched to the skin, at length find themselves under the hospitable roof of Catalina de Tolosa, where they dry their wringing habits before a blazing fire. During the night, Teresa was seized with giddiness of the head and vomitings, and spat up blood, which she attributed to her having remained longer before the fire than was her wont. Nevertheless, next day, stretched on a pallet placed close to a grated window which gave on to a corridor, and concealed by a curtain, she received the visitors who thronged to salute her. The corporation sent to assure her of their goodwill, and to place themselves at her service. This pleased her greatly, since, if she had entertained any misgiving at all, it had been on account of them. One of these visitors, Don Pedro Manso, Magistral of Burgos Cathedral, and afterwards Bishop of Calahorra, testified nearly thirty years afterwards that, such was the fear and respect that thrilled through him, and made his hair stand on end with awe and reverence, as he drew nigh to speak with her, he indeed knew he was in the presence of a great saint, destined to be a notable pillar in the Church of God. He it is also, 1 These lamps were of so extraordinary a size as to cover the entire cupola of the chapel in the cloister devoted to the image. The sixty candlesticks were taller than a good-sized man, and it took three workmen to lift them. , THE CROWN OF THORNS AND ROSES 707 who, after a business interview with her, is recorded to have exclaimed, " God help me ! I would rather argue with all the theologians in the world put together than with this woman." During the course of the morning, Gracian returned from his first interview with the Archbishop. His news were any- thing but reassuring. The capricious prelate he had found " so changed and angry at my having come without his license, as if he himself had neither ordered it nor had anything to do in the matter, and so spoke most furiously against me to the father provincial." When pushed into a corner by Gracian's ingenious arguments, and forced to concede that she had come at his bidding, he took shelter in the quibble that he had meant herself alone ; " but to come with so many nuns, God deliver us from the trouble it gave him ! " In vain the good friar urged that they had complied with the only condition he, the Bishop, had insisted on, viz. that they should obtain the license of the corporation, and that there was nothing more to do but to found forthwith ; and that if they had not given him notice beforehand of their coming, it had been by the advice of the Bishop of Palencia, who, confiding in his metropolitan's word, had seen no need for it. " It was," adds Teresa, in an undertone, so keen to gauge hidden motives, " the will of God that the house should be founded, for had we frankly told him our intentions, he would have ordered us not to come." The long and short of it was, that on no account would he grant a license unless they could endow a house of their own, and they might return as soon as they liked. " A pretty state indeed the roads were in, and the weather also ! " But the old saint was nothing daunted. She had conquered archbishops before nay, even had them on their knees before her "Teresa the omnipotent." She was not going to be beaten now. All was for the best. Let the devil lay as many snares as he liked to circumvent it, God was bound to bring his work to a triumphant ending. Gracian too was cheerful, until his patience oozed away with the sickness of hope deferred and the equivocal paltering of the Archbishop. Nor did that prelate confine himself to paltering. He refused the request it seemed modest enough, but was indeed equivalent to taking possession made to him by two friendly canons, that the sick woman consumed with fever might hear Mass in a room of Catalina's house a room which had already been used as a chapel for more than ten years by the Jesuits on their first establishment in Burgos. She might found there, he answered, if she liked, provided always that the endowment was forth- coming, and she could give security for the purchase of a house. 706 SANTA TERESA gold and silver lamps, 1 and sixty silver candlesticks. As the last of the three curtains, embroidered with pearls and precious stones, was drawn apart, and the Man of God stood revealed, the bells clashed loud in the tower above, and all present fell on their knees. " Certainly," says Madame d'Aulnoy, who visited the shrine a century after Teresa, " that sacred spot and divine image inspire religious awe"; and if the brilliant and vivacious Frenchwoman confessed to such a feeling, we may judge of the emotion felt by these simple Castilian nuns and friars of a former generation with their naif belief in a positive faith. Let us follow them across St. Mary's Bridge. The city is lost in the night. A feeble oil light flickers here and there, a red gleam from an open casement, blurred by the drenching rain. The river lies dark and silent below. All sound has faded from the street, except the pelt, pelt of the rain, the heavy pour of water from the leads on the causeway below ; for in a moment the gates will be shut for the night, and no one may go out or in until the morning. In the middle of the bridge an oil lamp gleams before the image of the Virgin, who, wrapped in the rigid folds of her stone raiment, extends a silent benediction to the outgoing or incoming traveller. So they enter the soaking streets of Burgos, and, frozen to the bones and drenched to the skin, at length find themselves under the hospitable roof of Catalina de Tolosa, where they dry their wringing habits before a blazing fire. During the night, Teresa was seized with giddiness of the head and vomitings, and spat up blood, which she attributed to her having remained longer before the fire than was her wont. Nevertheless, next day, stretched on a pallet placed close to a grated window which gave on to a corridor, and concealed by a curtain, she received the visitors who thronged to salute her. The corporation sent to assure her of their goodwill, and to place themselves at her service. This pleased her greatly, since, if she had entertained any misgiving at all, it had been on account of them. One of these visitors, Don Pedro Manso, Magistral of Burgos Cathedral, and afterwards Bishop of Calahorra, testified nearly thirty years afterwards that, such was the fear and respect that thrilled through him, and made his hair stand on end with awe and reverence, as he drew nigh to speak with her, he indeed knew he was in the presence of a great saint, destined to be a notable pillar in the Church of God. He it is also, 1 These lamps were of so extraordinary a size as to cover the entire cupola of the chapel in the cloister devoted to the image. The sixty candlesticks were taller than a good-sized man, and it took three workmen to lift them, , THE CROWN OF THORNS AND ROSES 707 who, after a business interview with her, is recorded to have exclaimed, " God help me ! I would rather argue with all the theologians in the world put together than with this woman." During the course of the morning, Gracian returned from his first interview with the Archbishop. His news were any- thing but reassuring. The capricious prelate he had found " so changed and angry at my having come without his license, as if he himself had neither ordered it nor had anything to do in the matter, and so spoke most furiously against me to the father provincial." When pushed into a corner by Gracian's ingenious arguments, and forced to concede that she had come at his bidding, he took shelter in the quibble that he had meant herself alone ; " but to come with so many nuns, God deliver us from the trouble it gave him ! " In vain the good friar urged that they had complied with the only condition he, the Bishop, had insisted on, viz. that they should obtain the license of the corporation, and that there was nothing more to do but to found forthwith ; and that if they had not given him notice beforehand of their coming, it had been by the advice of the Bishop of Palencia, who, confiding in his metropolitan's word, had seen no need for it. " It was," adds Teresa, in an undertone, so keen to gauge hidden motives, " the will of God that the house should be founded, for had we frankly told him our intentions, he would have ordered us not to come." The long and short of it was, that on no account would he grant a license unless they could endow a house of their own, and they might return as soon as they liked. " A pretty state indeed the roads were in, and the weather also ! " But the old saint was nothing daunted. She had conquered archbishops before nay, even had them on their knees before her "Teresa the omnipotent." She was not going to be beaten now. All was for the best. Let the devil lay as many snares as he liked to circumvent it, God was bound to bring his work to a triumphant ending. Gracian too was cheerful, until his patience oozed away with the sickness of hope deferred and the equivocal paltering of the Archbishop. Nor did that prelate confine himself to paltering. He refused the request it seemed modest enough, but was indeed equivalent to taking possession made to him by two friendly canons, that the sick woman consumed with fever might hear Mass in a room of Catalina's house a room which had already been used as a chapel for more than ten years by the Jesuits on their first establishment in Burgos. She might found there, he answered, if she liked, provided always that the endowment was forth- coming, and she could give security for the purchase of a house. 7 o8 SANTA TERESA When, after a month's delay, this was finally arranged, and security had been found and given, and the Archbishop pro- fessed himself satisfied, his Vicar-General stepped in, interposing other difficulties. He pretended that Catalina's house was damp, and in a noisy street; they must even look out for a house of their own, more to the Archbishop's liking ; and " as for the security for the money," adds the perplexed Teresa, " I know not what twistings and turnings." Still she hung on ; until at length she determined to seek the Archbishop in person, and to plead with him face to face. The first, and perhaps the only, time in her life that the magic of her presence and simple eloquence signally failed. She obtained nothing, and her nuns scourged themselves in vain, although I know not by what mysterious chain of reasoning their bleeding shoulders were to turn the fate of the interview. Nevertheless, her com- panions noted that she returned to them as gay and cheerful as if all she wished had been accomplished. And indeed she has need of all her cheerfulness, for despondency has begun to invade that little band. Gracian and his companions lodged in the house of Canon Manso, an old fellow-student of his at Alcala, Gracian, baffled by futilities, begins to despair; the nuns also; and they would all willingly have abandoned the foundation and returned as they had come. Yea, their spirits shrink away under the touch of adversity ; hers only waxes greater. If the good Gracian's distress troubles her, and she wishes he had not come, it is for his sake, not her own. " Now, Teresa, hold firm ! " These words, which she attributed to God, are but the faint echo of her own indomitable spirit and unflinching resolution. She persuades Gracian that they can do without him. Lent was approaching, and he had to preach his Lenten sermons in Valladolid. He was easily persuaded, but before he went he and his friend Canon Manso did what they could to make the position of the nuns more tolerable. Until now they had been the guests of Catalina de Tolosa, but owing to the Archbishop's refusal to let them hear Mass in a room of her house on Sundays and festivals for the rest of the week they went without they were forced to go trudging ankle-deep in mud to a neighbouring church. A small matter, say you ? But not so small to women whose life of seclusion had made them peculiarly sensitive ; to whom it was positive torture to mix even for a moment with an outside world so strange to them. One nun there was who trembled from head to foot when she found herself in the street. Nor must we imagine that the streets of Burgos were at all like THE CROWN OF THORNS AND ROSES 79 what they are now. You may still see a mediaeval Spanish street in some forgotten hamlet of the Vera of Plasencia A narrow causeway of rough pebbles, barely wide enough to allow a passage for a mule and rider, shut in on either side by the frowning fronts of palaces or hovels, but all alike solid im- penetrable, gray, and moss-grown ; the timbered eaves of the roofs shutting out the daylight; and underneath running the centre of it, sometimes to a considerable depth, either an open sewer or stream of water. A jostle in such circumstances as often as not led to the flash of swords. Through this shadowy, mysterious street, often ankle-deep in mud, did Teresa and her nuns flit at earliest dawn to hear a mass and she also met with her encounters. As she was crossing one of these places one day, a woman whom she asked to make room for her replied with scorn, "Let the old relic-monger pass," and pushed her violently into the gutter. Silence my daughters," she said, as she picked herself out of the mud, to her indignant companions" silence, for the woman did exce mg Nor was the church itself free from some rough insult We have seen how at Toledo a woman had stoutly belaboured her with her chapins. In Burgos some men administered a few such hearty kicks to the kneeling saint, for not having got out of their way as quickly as she might, as sent her sprawling on the floor. When Ana de San Bartolome* flew to raise her up, she found the old saint full of laughter, and highly delighte Wl At lirThirgood Gracian had been greatly distressed, and although not without great difficulty (for local prejudice was strong in those dim far-away days, and those from a neighbour- ing ctty were mistrusted not merely as aliens and strangers in the gates, but exposed to suspicion and active hostility a sentiment which in a less degree is ^^. A] ^^^J^ Spain of to-day), he found them a lodging in the Hospital the Concepcion, a few paces from the monastery of the Augu tinians, where they had made their orisons to the famous of Burgos on the night of their arrival. It still exists, this Hospital of the Concepcion, a great walled building in the low- lying sandy suburb outside the town, on the opposite banl the Arlanzon-it still exists, although modern life has ceased to have any use for anything so spacious and so stately- exists, its beneficent purpose being put to the uses of a wo< shed. A great, old, rambling place; echoing and empty, with granite staircases of enormous size and massiver white washed refectory hung with famous Flemish tapestries 7io SANTA TERESA (they too have gone within the last three years). Here, then, he hired for them some rambling lofts under the roof. " This gave him some satisfaction," says Teresa, " but he went through not a little before he got it for us ; for a good room there was there had been hired by a widow of Burgos, and (although she did not require it for half a year) not only did she refuse to lend it to us, but was vexed that we had the rooms under the roof, one of which communicated with hers. And not satisfied with lock- ing it on the outside, she nailed it up inside as well. Moreover, the confraternity thought we were going to take possession of the hospital which was ludicrous only that it was God's will we should deserve more. They make us promise the father provincial and me before a notary, that the moment they tell us to go, we do so at once." You may still see if you will the lofts under the roof where Teresa and her daughters dwelt ; and the gallery surrounding the humid patio, whence (for in those days it looked down upon the chapel altar) they once heard Mass. There you may fancy them huddled together under the tiles in the winter cold, they and the rats ; startled by all the ghostly echoes that haunt the silence of empty and desolate space. Ana de San Bartolome firmly believed it was haunted by evil spirits at night things were violently thrown down overhead and she affirmed to her dying day that she had seen Satanic imps appear through a hole and push one another about. Her nuns suffered from the cold, filth, and evil odour left behind them by generations of poverty- stricken sufferers ; Teresa alone was unfeignedly happy, and accepted everything as better than she deserved. " Oh, my Lord, what a luxurious bed is this, in comparison with thine on the cross," she said, as the nuns made up her miserable straw pallet. " Do not pity me," she told the nuns, their compassion aroused by the sight of the sufferings of the brave old woman, who could scarcely swallow without drawing up blood from a wound in her throat " do not pity me, for the Lord suffered more for me when he drank the gall and vinegar." One day she longed for an orange, and a lady (Catalina de Tolosa ?) sent her some very good ones. What does she do ? Shall she eat oranges when others perhaps need them more? So, telling the nuns she was going down for a moment to see a poor man who was complaining greatly oh, innocent deception ! she puts them in her sleeve ; hobbles down to the hospital and divides them amongst the sufferers. " I want them more for them than for me," she answered to the reproaches of her companions when she returned ; " and I am very glad, for I left them greatly consoled." THE CROWN OF THORNS AND ROSES 7" Another time, at the sight of a present of some limes she exclaimed, " Blessed be God for giving me something to take ^ They are little incidents, but paint the nobility of the woman. Who shall tell the ray of light she left behind her as in her patched old habit (for, ragged as it was, we may be sure was clean and most neatly patched) she moved amongst thos wretched beds. , . " Son " she said to a wretched man whose groans and cries disturbed the repose of the other sufferers-" son why do you complain so, and not bear this with patience for the love of God ? And presently his pain left him, and with it his complaints. And thenceforth, however intolerable the operations he underwent, he bore them in silence. The very sight of her consoled those poo sick folk, and they besought of the infirmanan to bring hem that Holy Woman often. And when she left the hospital she left behind her mourning hearts and streaming eyes. Daily were they cheered by the visits and presents of the generous Catalina de Tolosa. Indeed, without her they could not have lived. She too displayed much courage and valou facing the criticisms and the sharp tongues of her townsme: Not but that they wounded her so sorely that, however much she sought to hide the wound, it could not be concealed from the sharp and sympathetic vision of Teresa And yet verily according to the verdict of that day, she had her reward- two sons became Discalced friars in Teresas Order, she and all her daughters nuns in the convent which she was ma inly instrumental in founding. And her children rose up and call wasnow the Eve of San Jose. The confraternity had warned them that they must out of the hospital by Easter. What was to be done? All Teresa's ^ 5 d f ihos * ( * friends had been fruitless ; and they were still as far off as ever from getting a house of their own. She now bethought hers -was it not the Eve of San Jose, her loyal patron -of one which having been successively rejected by three Orders on The same mission in Burgos as herself, had till that moment almost faded from her memory. Being one-day with the licenciado Aguilar [can you "jj^^tb good medical man of Avila, with his gloves and hi y as f ^ d ca f* pompous strut?], who, as I have said, was a friend of ou r fa hert a bethought me that even though it be so bad as they say, it might SANTA TERESA our necessity, and that afterwards we could sell it : and I asked the licenciado to do me the favour to go and see it. It did not seem to him a bad idea ; he had not seen the house, and, in spite of its being a stormy and tempestu- ous day, he started off at once. It was inhabited by a tenant who had little wish it should be sold, and would not show it ; but he was greatly pleased with the site and all he could see, and so we resolved to buy it. The gentleman it belonged to was not in Burgos, but had entrusted the sale to a priest, a servant of God, whom his Majesty inspired with the desire to sell it to us, and to treat us with great frankness. It was arranged that I should go and see it : I was so pleased with it that it would have seemed to me cheap, even had they asked twice as much more as what I understood they were willing to give it to us for ; nor was it much for me to do, for its owner had been offered that price two years before, and would not take it. Presently next day came the priest and the licentiate who, when he saw the price he asked, was for settling it there and then. [One may be sure, being Spaniards, that there was much bargaining.] I had mentioned it to some friends, who told me that if I gave it, I gave 500 ducats too much. So I told him, but he thought it cheap even if I gave the price he asked, and so did I, and I would not have hesitated, for it seemed to me given away : but as the money belonged to the Order, it made me scrupulous. This meeting was on the Eve of the glorious San Jose, before Mass : I told them we would talk the matter over again when Mass was over, and then decide. The licentiate is of a very good understanding, and saw clearly, that if it got wind, either it would cost us much more, or we should lose it altogether. He was therefore very earnest about the matter, and made the priest promise to come back after Mass. We went to commend it to God, who said to me : And dost thou hesitate because of money ? showing clearly what we ought to do. They all pressed me to conclude the bargain. The sisters had besought San Jose greatly that we might have a house on his day, and although we did not dream we should have it so soon, he brought it about. They all pressed me to conclude it, as was done, for the licentiate found a notary at the very door which seemed a dispensation of Providence and came with him and told me that it was best to settle it, and brought a witness ; and the door of the room being shut, so that nothing could transpire (for this was his fear), the sale was concluded with all firmness on the Eve of the glorious San Jose\ by the kindly diligence and understanding of this good friend. No one thought we should get it so cheaply, and so when it began to get wind, forthwith came forward other purchasers, who said that the priest who sold it had let it go for nothing ; and that the sale should be undone, because the fraud had been great : the good priest went through much. The occupants of the house, who were a principal gentleman and his wife, were at once notified ; and so delighted were they that their house should become a convent, that they sanctioned it, if only for that reason, although, indeed, they could do nothing else. Im- mediately the next day the deeds were drawn up, and the third of the price of the house paid down, all as the priest had bargained for. After some little difficulty in getting rid of a troublesome occupant loath to go, Teresa and her nuns moved into their new house. With the help of the good licentiate, and at no great cost, in little more than a month it assumed the appearance of a monastery. " Truly it seemed as if our Lord had kept it for himself, for almost everything seemed to have been done beforehand. It is true that immediately I saw it, and everything as if it had been THE CROWN OF THORNS AND ROSES 713 done on purpose for us, it seemed to me somewhat of a dream to see it so quickly ready. Well did our Lord repay us for what we had gone through, by bringing us to a delightful spot ; for with its gardens, views, and water, it seems nothing else." But their difficulties were by no means ended, cavilling Archbishop was still to be placated. At first he expressed himself highly delighted with their good success; even took the credit of it to himself, but wrathful was he when he heard that they were actually in the house ; still more so that they had put up gratings and a torno. " I appeased him as much as I could," adds Teresa ; " for, although he is quickly angered, he is a good man, and it is soon over ! " Nevertheless, although he came to see the house, and pro- fessed himself pleased with it, for more than a month he obstin- ately withheld the license. Nay more, he would allow no Mass in the Chapel, although the owners of the house had never used it for any other purpose ; and on feast days and Sundays they were still forced, as at Catalina de Tolosa's, to resort to a neighbouring church. Then there were questions as to the deeds. " Now they were satisfied with cautioners ; the next moment they wanted the money with many other importunities. In this the Archbishop was not so much to blame as a vicar- general of his, who battled with us so terribly that if God had not taken him away on a journey, when his charge devolved on another, I think it never would have ended." Canon Manso put in a word whenever he was able ; but at length Teresa as a last resort appealed to the Bishop of Palencia. Already deeply offended at his archiepiscopal brother's paltering, and at the treatment she had received, he at once sent her an open letter for him " in such wise that to have delivered it, would have been to ruin everything." Indeed the unpalatable home-truths it contained were unequivocally and frankly expressed that Canon Manso advised her not to deliver it, and from what I know of Teresa I doubt whether it was ever seen by the touchy and irascible Palate to whom it was addressed. Again she wrote to his Mosl Illustrious of Palencia, and this time D. Alvaro de Mendoza, making a heroic effort to swallow his wounded pride and indignation -"all he had done for the Order," he averred, "was as nothing to that letter" took a more conciliatory tone, good Hernando de Matanza let his name be remembered, at least if we know no more of him than that he was in his time "a good servant of God" sped with the missive to the Arch bishop's palace. The night before, for the first time during all these weary months of waiting and delay, Teresa herself 714 SANTA TERESA given way to the general despondency. Oh ! now, Teresa, on the eve of victory hold firm, hold firm ! How blessed are the feet of him who brings good tidings ! Hernando returns in triumph ; and, with a joy too deep perhaps for words, announces it to those within by quietly setting to work to ring the convent bell. Ring on, oh bell ! fill the convent corridors with thy feeble tinkling. Thou commemoratest a victory bloodless, indeed, but one in which human strength and endurance have been strained to their utmost limits ! Let thy echoes ring on for ever ; let them vibrate for all time in the memory of Burgos ; in the memory of all who love her, for it is the last thou or any other shalt celebrate, won by Teresa de Jesus. Nay, not the last ! There is still one other, the greatest of all to be fought and won one that is very near now. Next day it was the ipth of April 1582 the Host was solemnly placed on the altar. The first Mass was celebrated by Canon Manso ; High Mass by the Dominican prior of San Pablo. It was a solemn and gorgeous scene. The musicians and minstrels of Burgos spontaneously offered their services, and their bursts of minstrelsy swelled through the humble little chapel. Great joy was there that day in the ancient capital of Castille ; for the Archbishop's petty tyranny had in a lesser degree the same passive virtues (the only ones) as persecution, and rallied all hearts to the brave, undaunted old woman. And the good Catalina de Tolosa, the worthy matron who had stripped her own house of its beds and furniture (for " she was very much a daughter of some one ") to administer to their necessities, she too is full of gladness. " Of those who have founded our monasteries," says Teresa in her history of this foundation, written during this last year of her life, " others have given very much greater wealth ; but to none has it cost one-tenth part of the trouble." Let her too be remembered And verily, according to the judgment of her epoch it may have shifted since; but what matter? she had her reward. Before Teresa left Burgos her daughters received the habit from the saint's own hands a ceremony actually graced by the Archbishop himself, who, tardily repentant, now publicly from the pulpit sang the praises of the Discalced Order of Carmelites, and expressed his sorrow for the delays there had been in the Foundation. Two of Catalina's sons became Discalced friars, and worthy ones. Her daughters all entered the same Order; she herself took the habit in Palencia, "thereby fulfilling" it is Ribera who speaks "the words of David, that the generation of the THE CROWN OF THORNS AND ROSES 715 just shall be blessed." Even for those days presenting an unparalleled example of a family of nine persons moved by the same impulse, entering and dying in the same Order ! Yet let us not forget that the salient events of life what in the conception of the vulgar alone constitute the history are in reality very few. Teresa's triumphs lasted but a moment : were but the pearls, stringing together long intervals of obscure labours, in which there is little to attract the shallow mind. Detail and more detail ; humble duties ; cares often wearisome, and sometimes sordid. Such is the obscure undertone of all lives ; tragic enough, too, if we could but see it with a larger vision. One day witnessed the triumph which all men could see and wonder at, which forms the exterior and tangible part of her history ; but labour, cares, sordid or otherwise, humble duties, formed her life. And to me he is greatest and lives his life most worthily, although no triumphs smile upon his efforts, to whom no trifle is too small, no detail too sordid, if it enshrines and consecrates a daily sacrifice to Duty. In the meantime, however, the good Catalina is sorely per- plexed and troubled of conscience. She had bequeathed her fortune after her death (that part of it at least which such of her daughters as had already entered the cloister had renounced) to the Jesuit College of Burgos. This she had now legally transferred to Teresa's convent. The fathers of the College, who were moreover her confessors, naturally regarded these fresh dispositions sourly, and gave her no peace. They accused Teresa of being at the bottom of it all ; and the quarrel between her and her old friends promised to be a bitter and fierce one. Anxious to avoid a rupture with her old friends and supporters in many an emergency, as well as to release the generous widow from a false position, she and Gracian formally resigned the gift in presence of a notary, and returned the deeds to Catalina de Tolosa. This was done with great secrecy lest it should reach the Archbishop's ears ; since he had granted the license on the express condition that the convent was endowed, and might have conceived himself aggrieved, although as Teresa says, the loss was not his but the convent's, which was now left in a most precarious state, and in danger of perishing from hunger. For since every one supposed (and it was not wise to undeceive them) that the nuns had enough to live on, they were shut off from the ordinary resources of those founded in poverty, viz. the alms of the faithful. Yet Teresa knew neither doubt nor fear. They will not want [she writes] ; for the Lord, who provides alms for other monasteries dependent on them, will arouse up some to assist 716 SANTA TERESA here, or will show them some way by which they may maintain themselves. Although as not one of them has been founded in like sort, I sometimes besought him, since he had willed it to be made, that he would devise some means for their assistance, so that they should not want for the necessaries of life, and I felt reluctant to leave them, until I saw whether or not some nun would enter. And once as I was thinking on this after I had com- municated, the Lord said to me : Of what dost thou doubt ? For this is now concluded ; thou mayest indeed go ! thereby assuring me that they would not want for anything needful. Because it was in such a manner that I never again felt the least anxiety any more than if I had left them with an excellent income : and immediately I set about the arrangements for my departure, since it seemed to me that I was no longer of any use, except to take my ease . . . and that elsewhere, although with more labour, I could do more good. Yea, Teresa, now thou canst go, for thy mission in Burgos, nay, thy mission on earth also, is well-nigh done. Not, however, before a grateful town acclaims her as its deliverer, so keenly has her personality entered into the hearts and touched the imagination of its inhabitants, in whom the old chivalric spirit of the Cid still found a distant echo. For on Ascension Day the river rose and flooded the city. Houses were swept away ; the monasteries were abandoned by their inmates, but not the little monastery on the low-lying ground down by the river, the most exposed of all. For Teresa refused to fly; carrying the Host before them, she and her nuns took refuge in a room at the top of the house, and there repeated their litanies until the danger was over. And the Archbishop declared, and with him many of the city, that God had spared it because of the presence of Teresa de Jesus. Towards the end of July, the 26th according to Ines de Jesus, Teresa set out on her last journey, leaving behind her an imperishable memory. Yes ! There in the distance, before it fades from her sight, she looks back on the stork-haunted towers of Las Huelgas, founded by kings, the scene of strange pageants, which even to her are more an old-world pageant than a reality. The monarchs who have for a moment filled the throne of Spain, and then departed like shadows, have one and all visited Las Huelgas. Once in the life of a king is that bricked door in the cloister opened to welcome him in his pride of triumph. Once more it may be opened to receive his bones. The visit of one Teresa de Jesus shall, like that of kings, be long remembered in the annals of Las Huelgas ; nay, she has left behind her a more abiding impression than any king. For of that venerable community, ruled by their mitred abbess, where the daughters only of the proudest nobility of Spain are allowed to dedicate themselves to God, four of its titled nuns amongst them the daughters of the Count of Aguilar presently abandon T.HE CROWN OF THORNS AND ROSES 717 its delights and privileges, to assume the sackcloth, and share the privations of the Barefooted Carmelites. And not on that stately monastery alone, but on the Hospital de la Concepcion, has she set her indelible seal. There, enshrined in the hearts of those humble, bedridden folk, whose sufferings she had consoled, casting over poverty and rags the tender radiance of sympathy (although she too, Teresa the Omnipotent, is as poor and ragged as they), will she, the very sight of whom had soothed them, and whose absence, when she left Hospital, they had wept so bitterly, be long remembered and long mourned. CHAPTER XXVII NOT TO A STRANGE COUNTRY, BUT TO HER NATIVE LAND " It will be a great thing at the hour of death, to see that we are going to be judged by one whom we have loved above all things. Securely may we set forth to answer for our sins : for it will not be to set forth to a strange country, but our own native land, since it is that of him we love, and who loves us." CAMINO DE PERFECCION. T)ERHAPS it was well the end was near; that her death ]L came when it did ; that she should have been spared the last and bitterest of all disillusions that of watching what she had built up by the efforts of a lifetime crumble away under her eyes. Already the fervour of her convents has begun to decay ; her prioresses are openly rebellious and impatient of her authority; her friars are divided by jealousy and ambition. Warned, perhaps, by some obscure presentiment, she had in vain begged of Gracian, her favourite son, to postpone his journey into Andalucia, and to stay by her side a little longer. The last pathetic appeal she was to make to him (alas ! he knew not it was the last) remained unheeded. Doria was in Genoa, sent thither by Gracian so said his detractors that he might be rid of an inconvenient censor, but in reality because his birth, ability, and intimate connection with Genoa and Rome alike pointed him out as the most fitting person to entrust with the important mission of laying the submission of the Descalzos at the General's feet, and procuring his confirmation of the late Chapter of Alcala. She has been disappointed in her hopes of founding at Madrid, which still haunts her, will haunt her to the last. Let her only accomplish this one foundation, no more, let her establish her Order in the Court of Spain, and her days for journeyings are done; for now as she writes, before she left Burgos, to Pefla (the Archbishop's chaplain), who she still hopes may touch his master into acquiescence, "she is very old and wearied. Confident that his Majesty will enlighten his Most Illustrious as to what is best, and that he desires to show her favour, she therefore would not be importunate ; except that 718 TO HER NATIVE LAND 719 as his Most Illustrious has so much to think of, and that she knows that this is for our Lord's service, she would not wish it to be lost sight of, for any want of diligence of hers ; and so she reminds his lordship of it, being very certain that God will give him light, and all will be done for the best and at the most fitting season." Her pathetic entreaties were of no avail. The Archbishop deferred giving the license until the King returned from Portugal ; and when the King returned it was too late, for she was dead. What, however, she failed to achieve in life, she accomplished in death; for four years afterwards, as Yepes described to him the scene when her body was exposed in Avila, smitten perhaps by remorse as he remembered how often the great and heroic spirit had sued in vain,- he exclaimed : " Let it be done forthwith ! " She had been wounded too how should she not by the conduct of Ana de Jesus in Grenada, who, in her newly- acquired importance of foundress, had shown a disposition to shake off all control, and to act without consulting either herself or Gracian, showing how correctly Teresa had gauged her character when she had written to Gracian from Avila, a few months before, that her fault was an itch for command. But Teresa was not to be trifled with, and, old and feeble as she was, she at once asserted her authority in as stern and austere a reprimand as she had ever penned. You have set about your disobedience so cleverly, that this last [specimen of it] has given me no little pain, for it cannot but appear very ill to the entire Order, and furthermore on account of the evil example which it may have left behind for other prioresses to act in the same way, who will have no lack of excuses either. And now that you give those gentle people such a character, it has been a great indiscretion your having been so many ... for in the same way as you sent those poor women back so many leagues, when they had barely arrived (for I know not how you had the heart to do it), you might also have sent back those who came from Veas, and even others along with them, for your having been so many has been a terrible discourtesy, especially when you felt you were giving trouble. For let it not be forgotten that Teresa was a lady of delicate instincts and perceptions, and had never, though often sorely pressed, infringed the unwritten laws of good breeding. I have laughed at the fright you give us that the Archbishop will do away with the monastery. ... But if it is to go on as it is doing now, intro- ducing the beginnings of disobedience into the Order, it would indeed be well it should not exist, for nothing is to be gained by founding many monasteries, unless those who live in them lead saintly lives. Without saying anything to Gracian, or consulting him as to their choice, the wily prioress had taken with her from Veas 720 SANTA TERESA those nuns most partial to herself. On this point Teresa's commands are peremptory. With the exception of Ana de Jesus herself, they are all to return thither without delay : Since any kind of attachment, even though it be to their prioress, is utterly against the spirit of the Descalzas, and checks all improvement in the spiritual life. ... It is the beginning of faction and rivalry, and of many other calamities, if it is not checked at the commencement ; and for this once at least, for mercy's sake, be guided by me ; and afterwards, when you are more settled, and they more detached, you may have them back again if you think fit. Truly I know not who they were you took, for with great secrecy have you kept it from me and our father [Gracian] ; nor did I think your reverence would take so many thence ; but I imagine that they are those most affected to your reverence. ... I beseech your reverence to consider that you are bringing up souls for spouses of the Crucified ; and that you crucify them in rooting out their will, and putting an end to these childishnesses. Consider that you are carrying the Order into a new kingdom [Grenada], and that your reverence and the rest are obliged to act like valorous men and not like weak women. What matters it, my mother [Ana de Jesus has been hurt in her dignity by having been addressed by Gracian as president instead of prioress], whether the father provincial calls you president or prioress, or Ana de Jesus. ... Of a truth, I have been greatly put to the blush, that after so long the Descalzas should pay attention to these mean and paltry things. . . . Either your sufferings have deprived you of your wits, or the Devil has begun to work his infernal machinations in this Order. Here until we made our election, when our father came, such was the name we gave her, and not prioress, and it is all the same. . . . Whenever I think on the straits you are putting those gentle- folk to, I cannot but feel it. I already wrote to you the other day to get a house, even though it should not be very good and reasonable ; for however ill you may be in it, you will be more at your ease. And if you were not, it is better that you should suffer rather than those who show you such charity. Besides the disobedience and offended dignity of Ana de Jesus, which so j'ustly roused the ire of the high-minded old woman, the disquietude and disorder which filled the Convent of Alba had transpired to the outer world. The nuns were on bad terms with Teresa de Laiz, who, infringing unduly on her character of foundress and benefactress, interfered in the affairs of the community. But however despotic, or whatever her faults, it was impossible for Teresa to speak out her mind so frankly to Teresa de Laiz as to a misguided prioress. Ostensibly she laid the blame on the nuns, but, with great adroitness, she let that lady clearly perceive that she was not blind to the real cause of these dissensions. Tomasina Bautista, prioress of Burgos, trembles from head to foot at the very idea of going back to take that post in Alba, and " the reasons she gives are such, and so important for the TO HER NATIVE LAND 721 peace of her soul, that no superior will order it. She has now a good house and is very happy." If your grace loves her well you ought to be glad of it, and not wish for one who does not care to be with you. God forgive her, for so greatly do I desire to please you, that I would fain it were possible to do so in every- thing. . . . If your grace is distressed at the thought that the Mother Juana del Espiritu Santo is to remain as prioress, it is needless ; because she has written to me that for nothing in life will she again accept this office. I know not what to say of those nuns : I fear that none of them will be prioress long, for all flee from it. I beseech your grace to consider that it is your house, and that with such inquietude they cannot serve God ; and so it is exceedingly necessary that you show them favour in nothing, for if they are what they ought to be, what matters it who is prioress ? but it is all childish- ness and partiality . . . and I guess pretty nearly who they are that make the others restless, and if God give me health, I shall try to go there as soon as I am able, to get at the bottom of the mischief ; for I am deeply pained to know for a fact that things have been told to friars of another Order, which ought to have been kept strictly private, and it has got wind amongst secular people beyond the town. . . . They must not think that it is a trifle thus to disturb a monastery, and to communicate to people outside, things so prejudicial to those on whose virtues the eyes of the world are fixed. In Salamanca things were even worse. The prioress, Ana de la Encarnacion, Teresa's cousin, had, all unknown to her, craftily set about the purchase of a house. This manoeuvre Teresa quickly intercepted. As good fortune would have it, Pedro de la Vanda y Manrique, the owner of the one they occupied, happened to be in Valladolid, and she hired it from him for another year. I assure your reverence [she writes to Gracian] that she holds me bewitched. Such a brave woman is it that she transacts business neither more nor less than as if she had already your reverence's license. To the rector she says, although he knows nothing of her purchase, and disapproves of it, as you know, that she does everything by my orders ; to me that the rector is doing it by yours. It is some devil's mischief, and I know not what she goes upon (for she would not tell a lie) ; only that her great anxiety to get this wretched house has deprived her of her wits. Brother fray Diego de Salamanca came yesterday (he who was here with your reverence during the visit) and told me that the rector of San Lazaro had been forced into this business for my sake, until he told her that every time he had anything to do with it he got absolution, it being altogether so against God ; nevertheless, on account of the importunities of the prioress he could do no more, and that all Salamanca was talking about the purchase . . . and from what I can gather they have set about it with artifice so as to prevent it getting to my knowledge. ... I wrote to Cristobal Juarez [the owner of the house which the prioress was bargaining for], to beseech him not to do anything further about it until I wem, which would be towards the end of October I told Cristdbal Juarez that I should first like to see where the money is to come from (for I was told he was the surety), and that I should be loath any harm should come to him, giving him to understand that the money to pay him was not forthcoming. 46 722 SANTA TERESA . . . God has willed [she adds piously] that they [the nuns] had lent the money to your reverences ; for, if not, it would have been paid down together with Antonio de la Fuente's ; but now I have just received another letter from the prioress, who tells me that Cristdbal Juarez has got some one to advance him the 1000 ducats until he can get them from Antonio de la Fuente, and I am afraid they have already been deposited. . . . And another evil is that, so that they may move into Cristobal Juarez's house, the students must go to the new house of San Lazaro, which is enough to kill them. I am writing to the rector not to consent to it, and I will keep a sharp lookout about it. As to the 80 ducats you owe the nuns, do not let it trouble you, for Don Francisco [lord of Coca and Alaejos, to whose generosity the friars were already greatly indebted for the foundation of the College of Salamanca] will pay them to the nuns in a year's time from now ; and the best of all is that he has not got them now to give. No fear that I shall assist them. It is of more importance that the students should be accommodated than that they should have a large house. Where are they to get the money from to pay the " censo " ? As for me, this business has driven me distracted. For if your reverence has given them license, how is it that you refer them to me after it is done ? If you have not, how is it that the money has been paid for they have given 500 ducats to the daughter of Monroy's brother-in-law ? And how is it that they look upon it as so finally concluded, that the prioress writes to me that it cannot be undone ? God remedy it, for so he will. . . . For the love of God, let your reverence see well to your doings there [in Andalucia]. Put no faith in nuns, for I assure you that, if they want a thing, they will not stick at trifles. ... If your departure could have given me any joy, it is to see you quit of these vexations, for much rather would I suffer them alone. And lonely she is, in very truth, and full of many troubles. " You would be amazed," she writes from Valladolid to her prioress of Toledo, " if you knew how overwhelmed I am with trials and business." Has not Gracian gone to Andalucia, where the plague, which still stalks terrific and menacing over Seville, has already carried away one of her friars ? Might he not have stayed by her side a little longer ? Could not those monasteries have spared him to her at least two months more, whilst he helped her to put some order into those of Castille? I know not the cause [she writes feebly and sadly and we have never before seen her so discouraged and despondent], but so keenly have I felt your absence at such a moment, that it took away all my desire to write to you ; and thus I have not done so until now, when I cannot help it ; and as to-day is full moon, I have passed a wretched night, and so my head is very bad. Until now I have been better, and to-morrow I hope (when the moon wanes) my indisposition will have passed away. My throat is better, but not well. Already Doria and Gracian represent two adverse factions in the Order ; already the duel has commenced which can only end in the downfall of one of them. " I do not understand," she had written to Gracian from Avila in December of 1581 TO HER NATIVE LAND 723 only a few short months ago, and if the words refer to Doria, as has been supposed, they deserve attention, " some sancti- ties : I say this for him who does not write to you, and the other who wishes everything to be done, as he thinks fit, has tempted me. Oh, Jesus ! how little there is perfect in this life." The mutual antipathy of these two men, the only two of ability in the Order, could not long be concealed from those sharp old eyes. The buzzings of Gracian's enemies filled her ears. Gracian, it was said, had sent Doria to Rome to get rid of him, and was not averse, it was said, to keep him there on the pretext of founding a monastery. There is still time enough to found a house in Rome [she writes] ; for your reverence is in great want of subjects, even for those in Spain ; and Nicolao you need greatly, for in my opinion it is impossible for you to attend to so many things unaided. So fray Juan de la Cuevas told me, with whom I often spoke about it. His earnest desire is that you may do well ; and he has a great affection for you, for which I am indeed grateful to him. And he told me, moreover, that your reverence acted against the rules, which were, that should you be left without a companion (I forget whether he said the priors had anything to do with the choice) you should elect another; and that he held it impossible to do without one; that Moses had chosen I know not how many to assist him. I told him how there was no one, that we were even scarce of priors : he replied that the latter was the most important. Since I came here, I have been told that i has been remarked of your reverence that you do not take about with you a person of any weight. Indeed I see that it is because you cannot help yourself ; but as the time for the Chapter is drawing near, I would fain they had nothing to allege against you. For the love of God look well to it ; and how you preach in Andalucia. I never like to see your reverence remain there long ; for as you wrote to me to-day of those who have been in trouble there, I pray God not to do me so much evil as to see you si and, as you say, the devil does not sleep. Believe, at least, that I shall be wretched as long as you are there. ... Do not now think of making yourself an Andaluz, for you are not of the temperament to deal with them. As to the preaching, I beseech your reverence again earnestly, although you preach little, to be exceeding careful what you say. ... In Alba it has done them much good my writing to them to say how angry I am. All will be well, with God's help, and we shall be in Avila at the end of this month. Be sure that it was not fitting to drag this child [her niece Teresa] about from one place to another any longer. Oh, my father, how distressed I have been these last few days ; it went away when I knew you were well. My respects to the Mother Prioress and all the sisters. I do not write to them, for they will hear of me from you. I was glad to know they were well, and I beseech them earnestly not to break your heart, but to make much of you. . . . Our Lord protect you, as I implore him, and deliver you from dangers. Amen. To-day is the first of September. For three centuries his enemies have triumphantly pointed to this letter, the last she ever wrote to him, as a proof of Teresa's estrangement from, and censure of, this her so-dearly- beloved son. So little does it take for a pious order to con- 724 SANTA TERESA demn a man to all eternity, if only sufficiently backed up by a distracted woman's "visions" and flagrant ill-faith. It is fair to state that his own party had their visionary nuns who under- took his vindication. But in such cases might is right, and exile and banishment triumphantly decided the question as to which set of visions was more worthy of credence. Such is the letter in which only malice and a foregone con- clusion could see anything but the tenderest solicitude and concern for Gracian's welfare and reputation. No comment of mine is needed ; but it may be well to turn to it when we come to the causes which drove him from the Order. It would seem that during these her last weeks of life, not only her prioresses, but her own family, had conspired to fill her heart with bitterness and sorrow. " Indeed indeed she is full of trials of a thousand shapes ! " and in truth she is very lonely. If she had not long ago learnt the lesson which it would seem the only object of life to teach, she learns it now ; that man's hopes and efforts and work, and all he does and is, are but a floating quicksand, and that no faith can be placed in the son of man. She would fain have inspired all the world with something of the gigantic spirit that burned within her : it remains a dead letter, even to the prioresses she had trained. In Valladolid her own family threatened her with litigation. Lorenzo's will had been found open, and they sought to annul it on that account. Although she is not in the right [she refers to Francisco's sharp, decided mother-in-law], she has great valour, and some tell her she is ; and to save Francisco from utter ruin and ourselves great expense, I have been advised to come to an agreement. San Jose will lose thereby ; but I trust in God, if only our claim is properly secured, that it will eventually inherit all. I have been, and am still, broken-hearted about it, although [it is always to Gracian she writes] Teresa is all right. Oh, how she has suffered from your not coming ! Partly I am glad that she may begin to see how little we can trust in any one but God ; and even to me, it has done no harm. It was on this occasion that a notary forced his way into Teresa's presence and covered her with abuse. No trace of anger or vexation crossed her face. When he had finished she answered calmly, with a characteristic touch of quaint irony, " God reward your grace for the favour you have done me." The ingratitude of her prioress, however, was harder to bear. Maria de Bautista sided with her enemies. Deeply wounded at her niece's coldness and evident desire to get rid of her, she at once prepared for her departure. Before she took her leave she called the nuns together those daughters who shall never look on her face again or hear her voice except in celestial dreams, a TO HER NATIVE LAND 725 fading and radiant vision and bade them a tender farewell. " My daughters," she said, in the touching words which have been handed on from one generation of nuns to another to this " My daughters, I leave this house greatly consoled by the perfection I see in it, and the poverty, and the charity you bear one another; and if it continues as it does now, our Lord will help you greatly. Let each one do her utmost that through her not a single imperfection enters into the perfection of the Order ; and alas for her through whom this shall happen ! Do not let your prayers become a mere habit, but day by day make heroic acts of still greater perfection. Accustom yourselves to have great desires, for out of them great ^benefits may be denved, even if they cannot be put into action." But the bitterness of this last journey, which was fated to be her via cruets, was not yet over. As they were going the prioress caught hold of Ana de San Bar tolom e s habit and bade them return thither no more. Nor did she meet with a warmer welcome at Medina, where, if Ana de Bartolom6 is to be believed, she suffered keenly from the insubordination of the prioress. " How true it is," Teresa had once written to Maria de San Jose, "that our nature loves to be requited. Amongst the many fine qualities of her nature, a keen and ardent sense of gratitude, and a tender sensitiveness to affection were the most conspicuous. She reproved her prioress for some small matter which had gone amiss and was met with insubordination and insult. Had it come to this, then, that after all these years her daughters openly defied her? She ate nothing that even- ing, and lay awake all night. On the morrow she set forth for Alba Her intention was to have gone straight through to Avila, whence she hoped, after giving the veil to her niece Teresa, to go and put things to rights in Salamanca, and thence to Madrid. In this her last desire she was also doomed tc disappointment. She found Fray Antonio de Jesus waiting for her in Medina with the Duchess of Albas coach The young Duchess was on the eve of her confinement and the old saint's intercessions were sorely needed. Broken in spirit too old and feeble to resist although sorely against her ^ will so she, whose whole life had been one long obedience like him who was obedient unto death, and that the death of the cross, obeyed once more. It is to Ana de San Bartolome that we owe the account of this last journey; and "is strange to see what accents of amazing accuracy, delicacy and heartfelt pathos this didactic and somewhat prosaic Castihan finds in which to relate these closing scenes. None of them knew she was dying. 726 SANTA TERESA Teresa least of all. Sor Ana must have penned these notes in the first moments of her bereavement, when every little cir- cumstance relating to the Dead is invested with a heart-moving and solemn interest. " On the morrow we set forth," writes the venerable Ana, for a shred of Teresa's mantle fell also upon her, and she has been beatified if not canonised " without bearing anything with us for the road, and the saint stricken down with her last sickness, and I could find nothing on the way to give her ; and one night we were in a poor village Penaranda de Bracamonte where we could get nothing to eat, and finding herself exceeding weak she said : ' Daughter, give me something for I am faint- ing/ and I had nothing but some dried figs, and she was suffering from fever. I gave them four reals to get me some eggs for her, cost what they might. When I saw that nothing could be got for money, which was returned to me, I could not look at the saint without weeping, for her face seemed half-dead. I can never describe the affliction I was in then, for it seemed to me as if my heart was broken, and I did nothing but weep when I saw myself in such a plight, for I watched her dying, and was powerless to help her." "Do not be afflicted for me, daughter," said the old saint, as she noted her companion's deep distress, " for these figs are very good ; there are many poor people who do not get such a treat." The next day they fared even worse, for the only thing they could get for her in the hamlet (Macotera ?) where they stayed to eat, was some greens boiled with onions, which she partook of thankfully, although they were bad for her complaint. ' At six o'clock on the 2oth of September she arrived at the end of her last earthly journey, to the fatigues and sufferings of which, ingratitude and unkindness had not been wanting to add their sting. Did she, as she came in sight of the gray mediaeval pastoral town, dominated by the ducal castle of Alba glittering on its eminence, lift up the curtains of her litter, and gaze once more with faded eyes on the tall trees which line the sweep of the gleaming Tormes, the view of which in other days, from the narrow grating of her cell, had so often delighted and consoled her? or did she, already insensible to exterior impressions, descry the first faint outlines of some other Country, some other River, some other City gleaming afar off, but very close to her now, to which she believed that Death was most assuredly the portal ? Just before she reached Alba she was met by a messenger with the news of the Duchess's safe delivery, and she rallied for a moment to say with a gleam of her old, quaint humour, which TO HER NATIVE LAND 727 old age, fatigue, hunger, and sorrow could not quench, " Thank God that this saint will be no longer needed." It was noticed that, contrary to her wont, she permitted her daughters to kiss her hand, and gave them her benediction with many fond and endearing expressions. As *&2?%&Si dressed her and put her into bed, she said, Oh ! God help me, daughters, and how tired 1 feel; it is more than twenty years since I went to bed so early; blessed be God that I have fallen ill amongst you." On the morrow, resuming her accustomed mode of lite, and for ei^ht days afterwards with increasing difficulty and pain, she rose, visited the house, inspecting everything, attended the Divine Offices, and communicated with great devotion. After communicating on St. Michael's Day she sickened, never to recover; the heroic spirit could no longer battle against rapidly declining strength. , She begged them to carry her up to the infirmary, the mating of which looked on to the High Altar, and whence she could hear Mass. There she lay an entire day and night, absorbed in prayer. Eight years ago she had noted down in her Breviary the year of her death, and when she bade farewell to her daughters of Segovia she had told them that they had seen her for the last time in this life, and that the hour of her departure was at hand. Not until now was it borne in upon her that the time for Rest was come. Gently did she prepare her faithful nurse, Ana de San Bartolome, for the inevitable separation-which, in spite of the auguries of the doctors, she saw approaching. The nuns began to remember and to repeat to each other, in awestricken whispers, how between eight and nine of the morning, a sister had seen a ray of Ijght, clear as crystal, above all conception lovely, pass close by the window of the cell where she afterwards died ; how that very summer they had heard close by them as they were at prayer a soft and tender moan, and how the Mother Catalina Bautista, the infirmanan, Poking up at the heavens as she prayed before the crucifix in he convent patio, had seen a star larger and brighter thar .the rest alight and stop stationary above the roof of the central nave of the church, bathing it in bright effulgence Patiently and obediently she suffered all the remedies applied by her afflicted daughters. The cruel blistering of tl doctors drew from her lips no murmur of complaint days before her death she sent for Fray Antonio de Jesus, her first Discalced friar, to hear her confession. Bound to her by the ties of a lifetime of affection and common anxiety, 'ntensifiec by the memories of the struggles and hardships of other days, 728 SANTA TERESA he exclaimed broken-hearted, as he knelt before her bed, and realised the prospect of the so fast approaching separation, " Mother ! pray God not to take you now ; leave us not so soon." " Hush, Father," answered the dying woman, and who knows but the very sound of her voice had power to soothe the old man's sorrow, " and is it you that speak thus ? I am no longer necessary in this world." Almost as she was speaking she grew suddenly worse, and the doctors, who were sent for with great haste, ordered her to be carried down to the cell in which she was before, on account of the coldness of the infirmary, and applied cupping glasses to the scarified flesh. Although she smiled, aware of the inefficacy of the cruel remedy, she suffered it to be applied obediently and cheerfully. Her daughters remembered every detail of those last painful moments, which they watched with such solicitude ; how that a medicine of evil-smelling oils, ordered by the doctors from the drug shop, was spilled by accident on the saint's bed, at the moment of the visit of the old Duchess of Alba, who came constantly to tend and feed with her own hand one whom she already looked upon as a saint. "The saint was pained that she had come at such an unpropitious moment, on account of the evil smell, and I said to her [it is the mother Maria de San Francisco who writes] : Do not grieve, Mother, for you smell as if you had been sprinkled with water of angels [an old-world perfume]. And so it was that it had a most fragrant scent, and the saint answered me : Praised be God, daughter ; cover it up, cover it up, so that it does not smell ill, and annoy the Duchess, for I should be only too glad that she had not come here at this time. "When the Duchess entered she at once sat down and began to embrace our Holy Mother, and to draw the clothes over her, and she said : ' Do not do that, your Excellency, for they smell very ill with the remedies that have been given me ' ; to which the Duchess replied : ' On the contrary, they smell delightful ; and I am vexed that they should throw scent on them, for if anything, it seems as if water of angels had been sprinkled here, and it may do you harm.' And hearing what her Excellency said, I observed carefully, and it seemed to me a miracle ; since in spite of the pestiferous oils that had been spilt upon them, there was no evil smell, but on the contrary, sweet savours, as has been said." But the end was drawing rapidly near. At five o'clock on St. Francis' Eve she asked for the sacraments. As she waited for them to be brought, her bed surrounded by the nuns in deep affliction and sorrow, she, clasping her hands, addressed them TO HER NATIVE LAND 729 in tender words of humble supplication rather than the authorita- tive ones of a last bequest. "Daughters and my mistresses, I beseech you to pardon the bad example I have set you, and not to follow my example, who have been the greatest sinner in the world, and she who has kept her Rule and Constitutions the worst. I beseech you for the love of God, my daughters, to keep them with great perfection and obey your superiors." When the Host entered her cell, in spite of her extreme weakness, she rose and knelt, and would have prostrated herself on the ground before it, had they not controlled her. Those watching her saw her face change, and light up with a majestic and resplendent beauty. All signs of age had faded away, leaving behind them the serenity of youth. Clasping her hands together, her soul inflamed with Divinest Love, she murmured gladly sweet and joyous words of welcome. " Oh, my Lord and my spouse, at last the longed-for hour has come ; it is now time for us to see one another. My Lord, it is now time to set forth; let us go with God-speed and thy will be done. The hour has at last come for me to leave this exile, and for my soul to rejoice, one with thee in what I have so long desired." In this supreme trance, from her memory slip away all merits of her own; she sees only a weak and erring human nature darkened by many failings, and clings to Divine Mercy alone Over and again she repeated, "After all, Lord, I am a daughter of the Church," and asked pardon for her sins, saying that she hoped to be saved through the Blood of Jesus Christ, and beseeching her daughters to pray for her. The pathetic, broken utterances of the Psalmist never left her lips. Sacrificium Deo spiritus contribulatus ; cor contntum et humih- atum, Deus, non despicies. Ne projicias me a facie tua. Sptntum sanctum tuum ne auferas a me. Cor mundum crea in me, Deus. But the passage she dwelt on most was that half verse Cor contritum et humiliatum, Deus, non despicies. At nine of the same night she received Extreme Unction, and herself joined in reciting the Psalms and Responses. Again she expressed her thanks for having been made a daughter of the Church. Once only did Fray Antonio interrupt her celestial repose, and bring back her thoughts to the Earth which was becoming so dim and shadowy, by asking her whether she wished them to take her body to Avila. "Jesus ! Must you ask tnat, my father? is there anything I can call my own? Wil they r give me a little earth here ? " And in answer to one of the nuns who reminded her that 730 SANTA TERESA our Lord had no house he could call his own, she said, " How well you speak, Mother ! You have consoled me greatly." When the morning light penetrated the narrow cell, she moved to one side, holding the crucifix, which never left her until she was buried. So she remained for fourteen hours, in deep peace and quiet, her lips moving at intervals, as if she was speaking with some one they could not see. Towards nine on the night of the 4th of October 1582, her face suddenly became illumined with a great light and splendour, beautiful and radiant as the sun, and in a last aspiration of supreme love, so peacefully and imperceptibly, that it seemed to those around her that she was still in prayer, her soul took flight. Fain would I believe that before it sped on its last strange journey, she turned for the last time in a mute appeal for human sympathy and love, and died with her head resting in the loving arms of her faithful companion and nurse, Ana de San Bartolome. Largire clarum vespere Quo vita nusquam decidat ; Sed premium mortis sacra? Perennis instat Gloria. That self-same night, as the nuns watched round her bed, the infirmarian, Catalina de la Concepcion, sitting close to the low window of the cell which looked out upon the cloister, heard a rustle as of many footsteps, and looking out she saw a great and brilliant throng, clothed in white, which seemed to enter the cell and fill it with their presence. At the moment when the celestial visitors reached Teresa's bed, she expired. That same night Ana de Jesus, lying sick unto death in her far-away convent of Granada, saw standing beside her bed a Carmelite nun, whose face she could not discern because of its surpassing glory and splendour. And as she looked, saying to herself, " Surely I know this nun ! " the face smiled and drew nearer and nearer, until, dazzled by the excessive splendour which encircled the glorious figure, she could see no more. And not to one only, but to many of her children did she appear that night at that mysterious moment when, with three sighs so gentle and so feeble as to be scarcely perceptible, her soul left the bondage of the flesh. " We here in Heaven," whispered the radiant vision to a Carmelite monk, whose name is not given, " and you there on Earth must be one in love and purity : we above seeing the Divine Essence ; and you on earth TO HER NATIVE LAND 73* adoring the Most Holy Sacrament. So that you below shall do with it, what we here with the Essence : We enjoying and you suffering, for herein lies the difference between us ; and the more your suffering the greater your joy. Say thus to my daughters." And when the light of another day broke over the world of Alba, and gilded the pallid features of her for whom the Eternal Morrow had dawned in some other world, Lo, and behold ! as the watchers blinded with tears looked through the grating of her cell into the convent orchard, yesterday so familiar to-day and for all days henceforward so strange and unlike to their amazement, for it was old and cankered, and the season for flowering long past an almond tree that grew in a little plot of ground before the window was covered with beauteous and fragrant blossom ! From nine in the evening she lay until next morning, surrounded by her afflicted nuns. Some rays of the glory, which had been revealed to her dying eyes, still lingered around the lifeless clay, touching it with an unearthly beauty. The benignant touch of Death had smoothed out all wrinkles, and her face, set in the majesty of its passionless repose, regained the serene beauty of its youth; her hands and feet, "transparent like mother-of-pearl," and her limbs flexible and supple, retained the beauty of the innocence and sanctity they had guarded during life. A strange and undefinable fragrance, unlike any earthly perfume a fragrance which even in life had been perceptible, and clung to the articles she used most issued from the body as they performed the last duties and prepared it for the grave, filling the entire convent with its odour At times it seemed to come in waves of renewed sweetness and fragrance, which at last became so overpowering that it was necessary to open the casement. Nor was this all. Those who were then present testified . . . years after, in the evidence for her canonisation, to the miracles worked by the dead body of Teresa de Jesus. One sister recovered her sense of sme another suffering from violent pains in the head and eye< felt them swiftly removed as she embraced the transparent feet As Isabel de la Cruz passed the Mothers lifeless hands over her brow, she regained her failing sight. And who shall say that, by some strange psychological process dimly to t ddfined some loosening of the flood-gates of the heart and conscience some extreme tension of spirit when her sic! daughters kissed her feet in a last solemn embrace, and passe her dead hands over the aching brow and failing sight who 732 SANTA TERESA shall say that their simple faith and supreme emotion did not effect what they ascribed to the miraculous virtues of that sacred and beloved body? It is a strange coincidence that she died on the same day of the year as San Francisco de Assisi. On the morrow following she was buried. The Bishop of Salamanca, the Duke of Huescar, 1 and many gentlemen and monks belonging to other religious orders, having heard the news of her death in Salamanca, arrived in all haste to take part in the hurried and simple funeral. And so, stretched out on a bier covered with cloth of gold, as so many years before she had foretold it would be, did the Form of the great woman upon whom they now looked for the last time as they had seen and known her in Life, receive the last marks of veneration and love from these great lords and simple neighbours of Alba. Amidst sighs and awestricken whispers they kissed the feet which had wandered so far, and were now for ever stilled, and the patched and faded habit of the Mother Teresa de Jesus. He who succeeded in touching the sacred body felt that he bore with him a talisman through life, and to that never-to-be-forgotten moment will his thoughts cling as the clouds thicken in death, be he Duke or Bishop or Peasant. Her body, clothed in its habit, was then lifted off the bier, placed in a coffin, and buried in a hole in the wall beneath the arch and grating which separated the Coro Bajo from the church, so that both those within and without might rejoice in it alike. In order the better to preserve their sacred treasure, and to secure it from being robbed and carried off to Avila, at the instance of Teresa de Laiz, the foundress, a mass of bricks, stones, and lime was hurridly piled on the coffin lid. The workmen and the nuns, who all lent a hand, spent two days blocking up the grave before it was accounted sufficiently safeguarded and secure. But the memory of the dead woman, so near and yet so far, still haunted them. Strange knockings were heard inside the grave itself. An indescribable fragrance issued from it, a fragrance varying not only in degree, but in nature ; sometimes like lilies, at others like jessamine and violets : sometimes impossible to define. They began to reproach themselves for not having given a more reverent and honourable burial to the foundress, whose virtues and character, seen through the perspective of death, grew daily more beauteous 1 The Duke of Huescar is the second, as that of Count of Lerin is the third title of the Dukes of Alba. This Duke of Huescar was that D. Fadrique de Toledo who accompanied his father, the great Duke, to Flanders. His wife's delivery had been the cause of Teresa's coming to Alba. TO HER NATIVE LAND 733 and wondrous. They longed, the poor women! to probe the mysteries of that blocked-up tomb in the choir wall ; to look once more on what was left of the mortal remains of Teresa de Jesus. At length, nine months after her death (she who might bitterly have opposed it, Teresa de Laiz, could oppose it no longer, for she too was come to her long home in the walls of the convent church), Gracian, who in his capacity of Provincial was visiting the convent, acceded to their prayers that the body might be exhumed. With the utmost secrecy, lest any inkling of it should reach the Duke of Alba, he and his companion, aided by the community, set to work to remove the stones and rubbish. This took them four days, the coffin being opened on the 4th of July 1583. The lid had been broken in with the mass of building material. It was half rotten, and full of mould and damp. The habit too was rotten and smelt of damp and decay. But the body, although it was covered with the earth which had fallen through the lid, was as sound and entire as on the day it was buried. They removed the mouldering clothes (for according to Spanish custom she was buried fully dressed in the habit she had worn in life), washed the body and scraped the earth off with knives, and after putting fresh clothes on her, wrapped her up in a sheet and placed her in a chest, which was again deposited in the same place as before, and which may still be seen by the devout or curious visitor to Alba. t was noticed, however, that the scrapings of earth (which were Pjously preserved as relics) were impregnated with the same indefinable odour as pervaded the tomb itself. They did not remark (however strange it may appear), what it was reserved for a future occasion to demonstrate, that both earth and cere-clothes were saturated in a fragrant oil which exuded from the body, and communicated itself to everything it touched, "so that . i the Lord (I quote Yepes) had not declared it afterwards by a thousand ways, they were so blinded with joy that they would not have seen it." . Those to whom her wonderful life may have said but little knelt in silent and reverent veneration before the miracle of the incorruptibility of her body. This indeed proved her to have been a saint in very truth. This was the immediate cause of the first steps being taken by the miracle-loving and super stitious Philip II. to secure her beatification and canonisation. Human nature, eternally unchanged and unchangeable the same in the nineteenth century as in the sixteenthas throughout the ages, crying like Thomas incredulously for the sign, blind to the greatness and mystery of the life whi has passed before their eyes, and they have touched and Bffi 734 SANTA TERESA to apprehend. For the opinion of the old Archbishop of Florence, San Antonino, was held by few : "As for us whose path is surrounded by shadows, to whom it is permitted to judge of the saints by what we know and presume of their works, I think that none can doubt but that many of the blessed men and women, who have not been canonised by the Church, nor even mentioned by her, have not been less worthy nor less glorious than many who are canonised. For the canonising of them does not make them more worthy, nor give them more essential glory, neither does it determine the degree of sanctity, but only that temporal honour and glory that may arise to them from the solemn celebration of their office and festival, which without this cannot be done." Before, however, the body was replaced, Gracian cut off the left hand, and bore it with him to Avila in a locked casket. All of which took place on the 4th of July 1583. Two years later, in the second general Chapter of the Order held at Pastrana, Gracian, no longer Provincial of the Order, pleaded the prior claims of the convent of Avila to the posses- sion of the body of its foundress. Avila, which had been not only her own birthplace but that of the Reform, had undoubtedly the best right to the mortal remains of its illustrious townswoman. It was by the merest accident that she had gone to die in Alba, instead of in the Convent of San Jose, where she was still prioress. There was another and a more urgent reason. Before Teresa's death Gracian had given a signed and written promise to the Bishop of Palencia (Don Alvaro de Mendoza), that her body should find its last resting-place on the right side of the altar opposite to the sumptuous tomb he had built for himself to the left of the High Altar of San Jose. Through his secretary, Carrillo, who was present at the Chapter, the Bishop now demanded the fulfilment of this promise. On the 24th of November 1585, Fray Gregorio de Nacianceno and his two companions, the Bishop's secretary, and Master Julian de Avila, arrived in Alba on their secret mission. Gracian arrived at the convent on the same day. To the prioress alone, and to two or three of the oldest and most venerable of the nuns, did they confide the object of their coming. The Convent Church of Alba has witnessed strange sights, but never one more strange and weird than that which took place at nine o'clock of that November night of 1585. So as not to excite suspicion, the nuns were sent to sing Matins in the Coro Alto ; and then, whilst the dreary monotone of their voices rose and fell through the vaulted roof, the two friars, together with the prioress and such of the nuns alone TO HER NATIVE LAND 735 as had been taken into the secret, set to work to open the tomb once more. The clothes which enveloped the corpse were rotten; the sheet saturated with the oil l that distilled from the body ; but the body itself, in spite of its being somewhat shrivelled, they found as intact and fragrant as before. It was noticed that a small serge cloak which had been used to stanch the blood which oozed from her mouth (her death, like that of her brother Lorenzo, was due to a broken blood-vessel, or according to the expression of her biographers, " a flux of blood ") was saturated with blood, which still after the lapse of three years and two months, retained its natural colour. When in fulfilment of his orders, Fray Gregorio, overcome by emotion (he afterwards told Ribera that it was the greatest sacrifice of himself God had ever called upon him to make), drew the knife which hung at his belt and severed the left arm from the body, that they might leave it with the nuns of Alba so the Chapter had decreed in order to mitigate their grief the bone was as sound, and the flesh as soft, and its colour as natural, as if she had but just died. Then wrapping up their precious burden as best they could, they bore it from the convent. In the meantime the strange odour peculiar to the relics, which invaded the choir and kept increasing in intensity, roused the suspicions of the nuns in the choir above. Stricken with a sudden and woful foreboding, heedless of Matins (to remain for ever unsaid, but I am confident that the saint forgave them that one breach of discipline), and guided by the celestial fragrance, they rushed to the porteria, to find their treasure gone and the gates shut. Then they remembered, as, stricken with grief, they looked on the severed arm and a bit of the blood-stained cloth all that remained to them of the sacred body of their foundress how one day during recreation, whilst they talked of what was going on in the Chapter of Pastrana, they had heard three knocks twice repeated inside the grave, on the same day and hour when, according to Fray Gregorio Nacianceno, the warrant for the translation had been signed at Pastrana. At earliest dawn the friars and their mysterious burden were already traversing the wild track over the uplands to Avila the road Teresa had so often travelled in life, and was fated still i It is strange that Ribera, whose Life was written in 1590, should not mention the fact of the oil. Yepes, on the contrary, who insists upon it, wrote in 1614, Ui year of her beatification The judicious reader may draw from these facts whatever conclusion he chooses. 736 SANTA TERESA to travel again before her bones and mutilated body were allowed once more to rest in peace at Alba. Although the arrival of the body in Avila was kept a profound secret (it was feared that the Dukes of Alba might get wind of it, and insist on its instant restitution), it was impossible to prevent some notice of it transpiring to the outer world. A secret rumour reached Yepes in Madrid the good Yepes, now Confessor to the King, and in the way of obtaining a fat bishopric. Provided with the Provincial Doria's license, who easily granted it to one whose express object it was to lay before his Majesty an account of its marvellous incorruptibility, the Jeronimite friar sped to Avila as fast as his mule's hoofs could bear him. With him went the Bishop of Cordoba and Don Francisco de Contreras, Oidor of the Royal Council, " with the devout intent of visiting the holy body, and seeing that new marvel." They arrived in Avila on the last day of the old year, and were lodged in the palace of the Bishop, to whom they confided their purpose. On New Year's Day some twenty people, including the most famous doctors and notaries of the city, to testify to all that passed, and a few " principal " gentry, assembled in the porteria of San Jos^ of Avila. All fell on their knees in silent adoration as the body was brought out into the gateway. Then rising, they stood bare-headed, some amongst them moved to tears at the sight of the rigid mummy before them. The body was entire no sign of corruption could be discovered and gave forth a fragrant smell ; the bones and nerves so firmly knit together that, when they lifted it out of the chest, it conserved its rigidity, and stood upright with very little support. The flesh was soft and flexible ; they could lift the head by the hair ; the bones and flesh of the shoulder whence the arm had been severed by Nacianceno retained their natural colour ; and withal it did not weigh more than a child of two years old ; " so that," concludes good Bishop Yepes, " herein appear three miracles incorruption, fragrance, and agility." It was impossible that an event so transcendental should not get wind. The Bishop of Avila threatened excommunication on all who should divulge what they had seen, but was forced to raise it, so intense was the excitement. So went events in Avila ; but in Alba they were far otherwise. It is said that a lay sister, on the supposition that she was not included in the censures of the Chapter, asked the prioress's leave to present a pie she had made to the Duchess. Inside the pie she placed a paper giving a full account of what had happened. The old Duchess, deeply moved, rushed out into the streets screaming like a madwoman " They have taken Santa Teresa from me ! TO HER NATIVE LAND 737 They have taken the saint from me ! " The old Duke of Alba was dead ; also his son the Duke of Huescar, who had been present at Teresa's funeral, and the then representative of the House of Alba was that Don Antonio Alvarez de Toledo immortalised in Lope de Vega's sonnet : Belardo que & mi tierra hayas venido A ser uno tambien de mis pastores. He was absent at the time in Navarre, of which he was hereditary Constable ; but his uncle, the Prior of San Juan, who managed his estates, one of the saint's most ardent devotees, at once used all the powerful influence of the House of Alba to secure its return to their ancestral town, of which it had now become the chiefest treasure. A brief was despatched by Sixtus v. to his Nuncio in Spain, ordering its immediate restitution. Without a moment's delay, Fray Nicolas de Jesus Maria (Doria), the Provincial, set out for Avila to arrange for the translation. At dead of night two friars, bearing between them their strange burden, issued from the gates of Avila, crossed the bridge, and took the hilly path to Mancera. And so for the last time did Teresa bid a long farewell to her native town. In a small town half-way between Duruelo and Mancera, La Boveda, some labourers, who were threshing at night, attracted by the unusual and peculiar odour which issued from the remains, left their threshing-floors and followed them, in order to discover what it was that caused it. At Mancera, where they stayed in the monastery for the night, a sick monk, suffering from tertian ague, was, " to console him," bidden by the prior " to make haste and rise to keep watch over the holy body." He too smelt the strange and peculiar fragrance. He remained by her side until midnight, and for that night at least he was free from the ague,' the attack of which should have come on at nightfall. On the morrow, when they bore her away, his tears fell fast as he bade her farewell, and prayed, not that he might be rid of his infirmities but that she would help him to suffer them ; " and that same day the ague left him and never again returned." They arrived at Alba early in the morning of the 2jrd of August of 1586, but so cunningly concealed the nature of their burden that none might know what they carried ; and at eight o'clock in the morning, a little before or after, they deposited the body in the convent. Great was the rejoicing that day in Alba ! Arrangements had been made to meet and bring her 47 738 SANTA TERESA into the town in solemn and triumphant procession, to the sound of music. But the downcast friars, bent on fulfilling their ungracious and distasteful mission, sternly discouraged any attempt at festivity. The Provincial's orders were decisive, and obeyed to the letter. He had not placed the body there to remain, but merely as a loan, in obedience to the Pope. There was to be no rejoicing. The friars were to deliver it up, and receive an acknowledgment that it had been done. In the presence of the Duke of Alba and the Countess of Lerin, and the crowd which filled the church, it was uncovered, so that all could see it. The Prior of Pastrana briefly asked the nuns whether they recognised the body as being that of the Mother Teresa de Jesus, and if they accepted its delivery. Their answer was swelled by the unanimous response of the crowd, and it was duly attested by a notary. Guards were placed at the gates of the church to secure the safety of the relics, which, after so many vicissitudes, and nearly a year's absence, had been at last restored to their safe keeping ; for no one believed in the friars' faith, or that they would not get them away if they could. An injunction was also served on the nuns not to give them up. It was well that the body was in safety behind the grating, for the excited crowd, in their eagerness for relics, would have torn it to pieces. Ribera, on his way from Salamanca to Avila on purpose to visit the body, " which I greatly desired to do," arrived at the monastery very little after the friars, so that, had he (he notes regretfully) got there a moment before, he would have found it in the porteria, and had his desire gratified. It is to his pen that we owe the description of the strange scene which took place that August day within the convent walls of Alba. The body lay all exposed to view behind the grating of the low choir from early in the morning until nightfall. " The whole afternoon the church was so full of people come to see the marvel, that neither could they be put out nor could those who were farther inside get out, until very late, for none could gaze at her enough. ... Of all this I was a witness, and saw her at my leisure through the grating and afterwards, though hurriedly ; for, although it was night, and the doors of the church were being shut, those behind us would not let us do so. That same night, before the friars who had brought her started on their journey, they came to sup at the posada, and brought away with them the habit in which the body had been wrapped, to take it back to Avila, for in Alba they clothed it in another. It was wrapped and tied up in a blanket, so that the folds came out at the sides, and I drew near to smell it, and it had an TO HER NATIVE LAND 739 excellent odour; it remained there about three-quarters of an hour, and when the friars were gone I went to the room where they had been, and even from the short time the habit had lain there, it had left a perfume in the chamber, which at once I smelt and recognised. In a little while my companion returned, and I asked him if he smelt anything ; and he said he did, and that it was very perceptible." Ribera has left us a minute description of the body as it was in 1588: " I saw the sainted body, greatly to my satisfaction, on the 25th of March of this year of 1588, as I examined it thoroughly, it being my intention to give the testimony I give here. I can describe it well. It is erect, although bent somewhat forward, as is usual with old people ; and by it, it can well be seen that she was of very good stature. By placing a hand behind it to lean against, it stands up, and can be dressed and undressed as if she were alive. The whole body is of the colour of dates, although in some parts a little whiter. The face is of a darker colour than the rest, since, the veil having fallen over it, and gathered together a great quantity of dust, it was much worse treated than other parts of the body ; but it is absolutely entire, so that not even the tip of the nose has received any injury. The head is as thickly covered with hair as when they buried her. The eyes are dried up, the moisture they possessed having evaporated, but as for the rest entire. Even the hairs on the moles on her face are there. The mouth is tightly shut, so that it cannot be opened. The shoulders, especially, are very fleshy. The place whence the arm was cut is moist, and the moisture clings to the hand, and leaves the same odour as the body. The hand exceeding shapely, and raised as if in the action of bene- diction, although the fingers are not entire. They did ill in taking them, since tJie hand that did such great things, and that God had left entire, ought for ever to have remained so. The feet are very beautiful and shapely, and, in short, the whole body is well covered with flesh. The fragrance of the body is the same as that of the arm, but stronger. So great a consolation was it to me to see this hidden treasure, that to my thinking it was the best day I ever had in my life, and I could not gaze at her enough. One anxiety I have, lest some day they should separate it, either at the request of great personages or at the importunity of the monasteries ; for by no means should this be done, but it should remain as God left it, as a testimony of his greatness, and the most pure virginity and admirable sanctity of the Mother Teresa de Jesus. To my thinking, neither he who asks it nor he who grants it, will act like true sons of hers." . . . CHAPTER XXVIII THE PATRON SAINT OF SPAIN Her life was marvellous, you say, Lorenzo, and so her Death, And what o'ertook it passing marvellous. Where'er she trod they say the roses blossomed, And lilies breathed strange fragrance. Nay more, I've heard it said that o'er her sepulchre they catch the gleam of angels' wings, And hear faint strain of voices chanting throughout the silent Night. OLD PLAY. IN 1 594, twelve years after Teresa's death, Ana de Jesus, on her way from Salamanca to Avila, procured leave from her superiors to visit the remains of the Mother she had so venerated, and by her disobedience so pained, in life. In 1 598 the body was removed to a worthier burial-place to the left of the High Altar, above the choir, where a sort of little chapel or niche, as in the case of all famous Spanish shrines that of Our Lady of Guadalupe, for instance had been built for its reception. On the side next the convent a little door gave admittance to the nuns who decked and tended it ; towards the church it was protected by a gilded grating. Here, then, they placed the chest the gift of Teresa's friend, the old Duchess of Alba which contained her remains. The walls were hung with cloth of silver, the gift of a later Duchess of Alba, Dona Mencia de Mendoza; and the silver lamp which burnt before it day and night was the offering of the Duke, her husband. The rich baldaquin of cloth of gold which canopied the coffin was sent by an Infanta of Spain, Dona Isabel Clara Eugenia, afterwards Archduchess of Flanders. For the three short years that had come and gone since Teresa's death had worked a mighty change. It was no longer a mere tribute of sorrowing veneration for the virtues of the woman whose like they should never look on again, but of adoration to the saint. By a process easily understood in ardent and self- concentrated minds, amidst the silence and mystic repose of the cloister, the real Teresa who had lived and moved amongst them 740 THE PATRON SAINT OF SPAIN 74' became dimmer and dimmer ; as the successive layers of atmo- sphere between her and them grew thicker and thicker, so she too gradually faded away. In like proportion as she impressed them in life, so did she beset their imaginations in death ; and the counterfeit image they were fabricating in her stead Time and they between them loomed day by day larger and more glorious, more fixed in outline, more ethereal and unearthly. The miracles attributed to her relics grew in magnitude and wonder. But I would note one fact : that the miracles said to have been worked at this period are widely different in character from' the crude inventions of the following century which canonised her. They do not outrageously offend either our sense of probability or the canons of good taste. They are all directed to beneficent ends, and not to the mere wanton laudation of the saint herself. They are the spontaneous out- come of genuine simplicity and faith ; and however naif, however much they show that humanity loves to deceive itself, only a fool or a person entirely devoid of the finer instincts could find it in his heart to laugh at them. Nay, some of these cures, marvellous as they are, are steeped in so strange a pathos, and old-world and stately dignity, that we almost find ourselves deploring as a loss to humanity the disappearance of the good faith, the tenderness and passionate Belief, that made such things possible. Even the relation of them as told by Ribera, with that strange blending of matter-of-factness and simplicity and gravity which is the peculiar characteristic of the Spanish character, and peculiarly his, rouses no mental protest, but rather holds the mind in a sort of tender fascination. There were doubtless other motives motives of which those who acted upon them may have been dimly conscious, or even altogether unconscious (for it must be remembered we are not dealing with a century of charlatanry, but of one which esteemed Truth, or what it conceived to be Truth, as the most precious of its possessions). The miracles worked by the sacred relics so jealously guarded in the Convent of Alba undoubtedly shed a reflected lustre on that community a lustre which it was to their glory (not interest) to enhance; but no less certain is it that the body of legend which clustered around them was most firmly believed in by those who unconsciously helped to weave it. .. In 1603, in order to put an end to the ravages oft hunters, the General of the Order commanded the chest to be nailed down, so as to make it impossible to open without breaking. On this occasion the body was again uncovered in the presence of the Duke and Duchess of Alba, and the entire 742 SANTA TERESA community. Before, however, Fray Tomas de Jesus accomplished his behest, he still further mutilated the body he had been sent to preserve more barbarously than any of his predecessors. He distributed bits of flesh amongst the bystanders, and besides the fair portion he reserved for himself, tore away a rib " with more devotion than piety." On the 1 3th of July 1616, two years after her beatification, on the occasion of some alterations being made in the disposition of the tomb, the body was again discovered, and from that date, for more than a hundred and thirty-four years, it remained " in safe custody and concealed from human vision." In 1750 the tomb was again opened in honour of Ferdinand VI. and his wife, Maria Barbara of Portugal ; and, although the royal visit never took place, owing to the Queen's illness, the General of the Order, Fray Nicolas de Jesus Maria, and the Duke of Huescar, as representing the House of Alba, proceeded to Alba, to make the necessary arrangements. The stone sepulchral urn in which the chest was laid was then once more brought to light. The chest itself was found to be of wood, and secured with nine bars of gilded iron. The lock was also gilt, but as the key was lost, it had to be forced. The chest was lined inside with crimson velvet, as fresh and lovely as if it had been but newly cut from the piece. The body what little of it was left showed no signs of corruption, although sadly muti- lated by a mistaken and irreverent piety. The right -foot, the left hand and arm, and the heart ; a portion of the upper jaw, the left eye ; several of the ribs, and various pieces of flesh and bones, had been carried away by the relic-hunters. The flesh, skin, and bones of the rest of the body were intact and unin- jured ; the head was severed from the bust, and a great part of the neck missing. The pupil and lashes of the right eye were distinctly discernible ; the right arm as flexible as if still imbued with life. In the place where the hand had been forcibly wrenched off, the bone was still white and beauteous. The toes and nails of the right foot could be clearly distinguished. The body itself was covered with a fine linen sheet ; over this was laid a second covering of thin crimson silk. A leaden casket which lay in the coffin beside it contained a parchment deed testifying to the condition of the body when last it was exhumed in 1616. As the Duke of Huescar was unable to assist at its formal restitution to the urn having been recalled by the King to the Escorial he solemnly made oath before he left Alba that the body was the same he had seen taken out of it little more than a fortnight before. This was on the i8th of October, and on THE PATRON SAINT OF SPAIN 743 the 2 9 th it was again replaced in the chest, which was nailed round with nine bars of gilded iron as before, locked with three keys, and once more deposited in the urn. In 1760 the tomb where she had rested so long was pulled down to make way for a sumptuous chapel reared in her honoi by those Catholic monarchs, Ferdinand VI and Maria Barbara of Portugal. The whole disposition of the church was then entirely altered. A new choir was built at the end opposite the High Altar; the altar-pieces were torn down or renewed. little, dark, rustic church as Teresa had known it disappeared ; one by one the old landmarks sacred to her memory were done away with; the grave and dignified century of which she had fiTrmed a part was for ever effaced under the mole of jaspers and marbles laid on it by the cold, ga unt i ^^ rtlstlc ^ of the eighteenth century, which produced nothing-could Produce nothing, and, utterly barren and impotent itself was only the more eager to destroy what it no longer understood On the afternoon of the i 3 th of October of that year (Ferdinand VI. was king no more, and Charles III. reigned This stead), the body? which whilst W^ffi destruction was going on, had been guarded in the cell wh( she died, was solemnly conducted to the Camarin Bajo. There for the fifth and last time-font has never been opened since, and most probably never will be ^f^^ was opened and the identity and incorruption of the body one more sokmnly verified. On the morrow (how far away are we from dear good, old, simple Ribera-Teresa herself is becoming very shadowy !) he worthy inhabitants of Alba and the surround- S^district were once more admitted to look then -last o .the ooor mummy which had once enshrined the great Teres Jesus FTm earliest morning to three o'clock in the afternoon, tapers, it was taken to the Camarin Alto the little chapel above he High Altar, which had been prepared for its reception The rfgid Hmbs were clothed in a rich habit ; a coll ar in he form of the Golden Fleece, from which depended silvei hearts e< in number to the donors,-the Carmelite nuns of S a. Ana of Madrid,-was hung round her neck Thus Decked out she was laid on a cushion of crimson satin bordered *"* pillow on which her head-it was severed from the 744 SANTA TERESA was of the same material embroidered in silver. A martyr's palm was laid across her breast. The silver chest the gift of the Kings of Spain was then locked, and the four keys given into the keeping of the General of the Order, the prioress, the representative of the Dukes of Alba, Don Alonso de Oviedo, and she was left to repose a repose which I hope will never again be broken in the spot where she now rests above the High Altar of Alba. The old chest, the gift of the Duchess of Alba, in which she had first been placed, was offered by the Duke of Alba to the King in the name of the General and Definitory of the Discalced Carmelites, and accepted with pious satisfaction by his Majesty, who ordered it to be placed in his oratory. Where it may be now I do not know. For me Teresa's life is now finished. I have still to follow the successive steps of her beatification and canonisation, but they are events in which she had no part either dead or living. I would fain bring my history of her to an end in the words of the simple old Jesuit, whose loyalty and affection for her shines so transparently through every line of his biography a work which for purity and simplicity of style, and downright, old-fashioned directness, deserves to take its place as a classic in the literature of the period. " With these, O Lord my God, who makest saints and crownest them, will I bring to an end the history that I took upon me to write of thy faithful servant, so that the world might know the treasures thou didst place in her, and all may praise thee without end. And since thou art the beginning and end of all sanctity, Saviour of the world and our Lord, and these fragrant and beauteous flowers which have been born and are born in thy Holy Church would not have been roses, but thorns and briers, had they not been watered with thy most precious Blood, may thou be praised eternally in thy saints, the most perfect work of thy fingers. May it please thy eternal bounty that this slight gift I offer thee may ascend before thee with a sweet perfume, and that because I, unworthy and miserable sinner, have spoken of so much sanctity, it may not cause thee to remember my sins anew, on account of my deeds being so different from those I have related, but on the contrary that through her intercession they may be forgiven me, and mayest thou place within me a new heart and a new spirit, so that I may indeed appear like her thou lovest, and I love. And if it were not an overboldness, I will speak to my Lord, although I am but dust and ashes, and beseech him that all those who out of devotion to his servant shall read this true and faithful history, THE PATRON SAINT OF SPAIN 745 although ill written, may draw from it, by thy mercy, lively desires to praise thee always for the grandeurs thou workest, and to imitate these so sovereign virtues, and serve thee with all their heart. The works at which they marvel, Lord, are thy gifts; the truth, no matter whence it comes, is thine. These powerful deeds cannot in very truth but move, and great indeed is the force thou givest them ; deliver me, Lord, from this fear, the only one I can have, that its efficacy may not be lost because of my having been the instrument of this writing. And thou, holy mother mine, for whose glory and memory I have laboured, although I was not worthy to relate thy praises, well dost thou know how willingly I have done it, and what thou hast done in order that it might be effected. I said ill that I have laboured, for I have not felt it labour, rather has it been to me a consola- tion and a joy to write this, although my time was very much occupied. I have desired that the memory of thy glorious deeds should not be lost, and to this end have I done all I could, so that thou mayest be for ever known and imitated, and in thee and for thee that this great Lord who made thee so marvellous may be praised. Pardon the slowness of my genius and the poverty of my words, since thou knowest that my will to serve thee has been neither slow nor poor. And since the Lord favoured me so greatly as to let me know thee in this life, and thou didst love me well, and wast careful to commend me to his Majesty, obtain from him what I have besought of him, and never neglect this thy miserable son who loves thee so dearly, until by thy merits I reach the blessed sight of our Lord and Creator, where with thee and all the saints I may rejoice in him and praise him for ever and ever. Amen." In 1595, thirteen years after her death, Philip II., moved thereto by the miracles reported to be worked by her relics and the prodigy of the blood which still oozed from the body, and dyed everything it came in contact with, set on foot, through the Nuncio Camilo Gayetano, the preliminary inquiries necessary to her beatification. Her manuscripts were collected and taken to the Escorial, where they lie beside those of St. Augustine and St. John Chrysostom, religiously preserved as the chiefest jewels of that great and magnificent foundation. The Spanish Am- bassador at Rome, the Duke of Sesa, was urged to push forward the process of canonisation with all the speed and warmth possible ; but in spite of the feverish desire of the Catholic King, it was reserved to his grandson to see this crowning glory cast a lustre on his reign. Things went slowly in those days, and it was not until 1614 that her beatification, so ardently prayed 746 SANTA TERESA for, not only by the monarch and kingdom of Spain, but by the rulers of Europe, was decreed by Paul V. ; two Popes having filled the pontifical chair and passed away whilst the negotiations dragged on their weary course of official delay. On the 7th of May 1614, the first news of her beatification was brought to Spain by no less a person than Don Carlos Doria, General of the Genoese fleet, and Duke of Thursis, who arrived in Barcelona with a squadron of seventeen galleys. The news spread like wildfire ; although the rejoicings were postponed until it was solemnly confirmed by the General of the Order. The couriers with his letters and a copy of the Brief reached Barcelona at seven o'clock on the evening of the 3Oth, as the friars had just concluded Matins. The bells were at once set in motion, informing the city of the great event with glad and joyous peals. The monks, headed by their prior in cope of cloth of gold, descended to the body of the church, and in voices broken and tremulous with emotion chanted the Te Deum. On the morrow, after placing Teresa's picture covered with a rich canopy of brocade in the midst of the High Altar, the Prior sallied forth on a visit of ceremony to Prince Philibert, to the Marquis of Almazan, the Viceroy of Cataluna, and the great dignitaries of the city, to all of whom he imparted the triumphal tidings. Two monks sped on the same mission to the Tribunals of the Chancelleria, the Inquisition, etc. ; whilst two others were sent to the different monasteries and convents of the city. On that same day the friars celebrated Vespers with unusual pomp and splendour. The church was hung with damask ; the floor strewn with broom and lovely flowers ; the altar buried beneath roses, lilies, and orange-blossom, and, sparkling with tapers, " seemed like a picture of the paradise of God." Incense and perfumes floated into the streets ; the merry bursts of minstrelsy summoned the worshippers from afar. In they streamed from three in the afternoon until eleven at night : Prince Philibert it was noticed that his devotions to the saint took him half an hour the Viceroy, his wife, and all the nobility and authorities of Barcelona. I should like to have been there to have wandered unperceived amidst that obscure, unchronicled multitude of craftsmen and minor folk ; to have heard the squibs and crackers hiss and crackle in the air over the sombre walled old town, lighting up all manner of strange angles and projections, gleaming out seawards, revealing in a flash turreted walls and cathedral towers ; to have listened to those old-world minstrels posted on the church roofs, tripping up one another's heels, in all manner of quaint, forgotten THE PATRON SAINT OF SPAIN 747 snatches, trills, and sonorous madrigals, until it was (affirms the narrator) "a glory to hear them"; to have watched the torches on the Rambla blaze redly into the hot summer night; and have shaken at the volleys from those flint- lock muskets, as they rolled through the narrow echoing streets. si i OIL s The general feasting was, however, appointed for the 4th of October. Nothing like it had ever been seen before in Barcelona since the entry of Columbus : no prince's entry had ever been celebrated with such magnificence and splendour. t was pre- ceded by an eight days' fast, from the 26th of September, on which day the saint's flag was unfurled high above the bell tower of the Discalced Carmelite Monastery, where it remained to the vigil of her festival. At three o'clock on the 2nd of October, Don Geran c Guardiola, in gala suit of silvered white, and cape and cap of black velvet lined with the same, and glistening with diamonds and precious stones (the dried old counsellor dwells on the details with the unction of an artist), his horse was also white, and as magnificent as himself, in silver trappings and velvet housings which swept the ground Don Geran Guardiola, I say, escorted by all the young nobles of Barcelona, no less splendidly accoutred, arrived at the monastery gates. A mounted troop of trumpeters and minstrels stationed in the plaza are awaiting their approach ; amidst the blare of trumpets, and the roll of kettle-drums, they dismount and enter the church. Flanked on either side by Don Juan de Boscardos and Don Miguel de Moncada, who hold the pendent tassels, Don Geran hoists aloft Teresa's white silk banner, and marches proudly into the sunshine. Again they remount the minstrels, the trumpets, and the kettle-drums more strident and triumphant than before and then, in the silence which suddenly invades the tt plaza, a herald proclaims Teresa's festival before the gates c her monastery church. . At twelve o'clock at noon on that 4 th of October, as the clock struck the hour, the thunder of artillery and the clashing of the cathedral bells announced the commencement oi festival. From every church and convent tower in the city clamoured the peals of merry and deafening sounds All Barcelona," says a contemporary witness, " was in revolution. Never before had such seething multitudes of people been gathered together within its walls. From her lofty perch o the tower of the monastery church her image, clothed in silk and covered with pearls and precious stones of inestimable value Teresa beamed a mute and benignant welcome 748 SANTA TERESA votaries. At six o'clock, as the last stroke of the Ave Marias pealed through the air the religious ceremonies being now concluded in the friars' church the bonfires were lit and the whole city became a blaze of light. Lanterns, some green like emeralds, others like rubies or topazes, sparkled from every battlement, from every turret and gate. Great cressets full of pitch burnt in every street and plaza, converting night into day. The Carmelite Convent was like " a starry heaven " with fire- works and illuminations. From church tower and battlement floated a continuous stream of minstrelsy. How those minstrels played that night! drawing the soul out of those archaic instruments of theirs, the very names of which in their Arcadian simplicity have become unfamiliar to us. But the great spectacle of the night was the return of the saint's image to the convent, after being borne in solemn procession round the city. It was not until nearly ten that the expectant multitudes in the plaza opposite the monastery caught sight of the saint's ship. On it sweeps, the grand and imposing spectacle; first the heralds, trumpeters, and drummers on horseback ; then the minstrels in a triumphal car drawn by powerful Flanders horses ; and last of all, surrounded by a guard of nobles, a splendid vision of silver cloth and orange-tawny, and plumed hats their horses in silver trappings adorned with knots of orange-tawny the image of Teresa, raised far above the crowd from the stern of a mimic ship, receives the homage of her worshippers. Four little children at her feet represent the four cardinal virtues, and twelve boy-friars, clad in the diminutive habits of her Order, are scattered about her on the deck. Presently the people surge backwards like a receding wave, as the master of ceremonies rides forward to clear the way. The ship is brought to a standstill in front of the gate of the Boqueria, whilst the cavaliers enter by the opposite gate (the Puerta Forri^a); "putting their horses through their paces in most lovely seeming and knightly and gallant fashion," they made their obeisance to the saint, and broke each five lances in her honour. The saint's ship then advanced and engaged in a mimic combat with a ship supposed to represent apostasy, already stationed in the plaza for the purpose. She then opened fire on a castle which, with its elaborate outworks and tower of homage, represented the " obduracy of the heretics against the Catholic Church in those times when, by the providence of God, our saint was sent to illumine it." A dead crocodile, blazing with fireworks symbolical of the devil, flew through the air to defend them. Apostasy and heresy fared ill that night ; being utterly routed and consumed with fire, and when the smoke THE PATRON SAINT OF SPAIN 749 cleared off, the saint, " exceeding triumphant and glorious," was left mistress of the field. When this was over the monks in solemn procession came forth to welcome her, and bear her shoulder-high in triumph to the church. As the deep strains of the Te Deum grew fainter and fainter and the last taper disappeared within the shadow of the gates, the populace, profoundly moved, broke into tears and sobs. Placed on a silver pedestal in the centre of the High Altar of the monastery church, she then received the last farewells of her votaries until close on midnight. Nor was the rest of Spain behindhand, as the accounts which lie buried in the dust of public libraries still remain to prove. In Valladolid the festival was celebrated by a great bull-fight in the plaza the bulls being from the famous Xarama, in which the Marquis of Aguilar and other noble hidalgoes displayed their courage and the swiftness of their horses. The greatest poet of his day, Lope de Vega, penned sonnets and villancicos in her honour. Perhaps more touching than in the great cities of Salamanca, Madrid, and Cordoba, the demonstra- tions of joy she received in Alba, where her body lay enshrined. There, by the unanimous voice of the people, she was elected patron saint of the province, an example which was followed by Salamanca. The whole history of Spain records no more simultaneous and splendid fervour of national rejoicing. It may be doubted whether the conquest of Granada evoked such a thrill of triumph as the beatification of this Castilian gentlewoman. It is im- possible to read the faded accounts of these old thanksgivings without being stirred by a strange emotion. For the old forms of the world in which Teresa had lived, and of which she formed a part, were even then passing away ; the glory of Spain was on the eve of its extinction. Medievalism was emerging into more modern forms of life and thought. The spirit that informed it was gone, but never had its outer manifestations been more brilliant : the life so fast ebbing away clung jealously and with a sort of desperation to the minutest forms and ceremonies and splendours which had clothed it. The feasts and rejoicings which welcomed Teresa's beatification are especially note- worthy, inasmuch as they were the last lingering remnants of a former age, whose vitality had been consumed in the general decadence of the nation. It was the ghost, decked out 'n rags and finery, of the great impulse of mediaeval chivalry, which special causes had rendered inseparable from Religion, and whose last throbs were still distinctly to be felt in Spain, when 750 SANTA TERESA the brilliant light of the Renaissance had illumined and revivified the rest of Europe with new and fresh forms of thought. Let Don Geran de Guardiola, with gala suit of silvered white cloth, and cape and bonnet of black velvet, studded with diamonds and precious stones, prance once more on his white charger, with its velvet gualdaropa and silver trappings, through those dim old-world streets of Barcelona, to the honour of the Castilian saint. Let bands of gorgeously attired youths break lances for the favour of their lady ; let the feathers wave once more from jewelled caps as they passage their steeds in stately joust along the Rambla of Barcelona for it is a most fitting ending to all that was so grave, so stately, and so chivalrous in the past. Let the bells ring and clash from the great cathedral and the countless towers of monasteries and churches ; for they, although they know it not, are ringing out old Spain, the period of great thoughts and greater deeds, and Teresa was the last of it! On the 1 2th of May 1622, eight years after she was publicly canonised in Rome together with other three Spanish saints, San Isidore, Ignacio de Loyola, and San Francisco de Xavier; when the Roman senate in their official robes and insignia, the Pope's brother the Duke of Trano, and more than fifty bishops, all carrying white torches, accompanied her banner to the Discalced Carmelite Church of La Escala. The previous scene in St. Peter's is not without a certain smack of Paganism. The Pope seated on his throne in St. Peter's was appealed to by his nephew, Cardinal Ludovisio, to canonise the saints. When the request had been thrice repeated, the Pope's secretary rose, and, in a brief oration, defined and declared them saints. Then began the Mass of St. Gregory, in which special mention was made of each one of them according to the order of their canon- isation, their names being drowned in the roar of cannon and volleys of artillery which, at a given signal, poured from the Castle of San Angelo. At the offertory the Generals of the different Orders to which the saints belonged made offering to the Pope in the name of each one of them, of two small pipes of wine, two silvered loaves, and three baskets covered with a network of gold and silver. In the first were two white doves ; in the second two turtle doves ; and in the third a number of little birds, which, on being released, happy to regain their liberty, flew chirping into the roof, whence they sang through nearly the whole Mass. In 1732, Benedict xm. instituted the Feast of the Trans- verberation of her Heart. It is strange that until this year we hear nothing of this mysterious and miraculous wound. And THE PATRON SAINT OF SPAIN 751 yet, according to the Discalced Carmelites, the heart had been cut' from her body between 1582 and 1586. Ribera knew nothing of such a wound, for if he had, he would certainly have mentioned it; Yepes still less, although the former wrote his Li/em 1590, and the latter died in 1613. Fray Francisco de Santa Maria preserves the same significant silence. The wound according to the evidence of various doctors and surgeons present at the judicial examination of it in 1726 was burnt at the edges, and presented all the symptoms of having been effected by a red-hot instrument " evidently with great artifice"; and we are fain to agree with the good surgeon Miguel Sanchez, in his conclusion, in spite of the different interpretation we attach to it. The mysterious thorns which seem to grow upwards from the dust at the base of the heart were first observed in 1836. In 1872 they were visited and examined by a commission of professional men appointed for that purpose by the Bishop of Salamanca. Although they came to various opinions and conclusions, they all confessed their ignorance of the nature and causes of so remarkable a phenomenon. It would be interesting to know how and in what way their observations were conducted ; and how closely they were allowed to inspect and examine them. _ . , .. ,-, .. Teresa was solemnly voted patroness of Spam by ment in High Court" assembled, on the 3Oth of November 1617 a decision, however, which was not confirmed on account of the violent opposition of the Archbishop of Seville and others, who would admit no rival to contest the ascendency of Santiago over the national fortunes. The King (the weak and pious Philip ill ) bent to the storm, and the execution of the decree was suspended. Philip IV. again attempted to carry through what his father had so signally failed in accomplishing, succeeded indeed in obtaining a brief from Rome, declaring t saint Patron of Spain, but did not find it so easy to bend the stubborn wills of his subjects. The brief and stormy controversy it provoked is chiefly remarkable for the conspicuous part played in it by Quevedo the last of the great Spanish writers, who could still wield the Spanish tongue with the force and sincerity of a Sta. Teresa, and the grace and richness of diction of a Fray Luis de Leon. The paper he addressed to the King on th. occasion rather in the capacity of a Knight of Santiago to the Grand Master of his Order, than of a vassal to his ruler- model of learning, brilliant antithesis, and nervous eloquence: the reasoning (limited as is its scope) being precise, clear, penetrating, and logical. The canons of Santiago appealed to 752 SANTA TERESA Rome. The Discalced Carmelites, instead of boldly seconding the King, remained inactive, and refused to appear. The Spanish Ambassador, without the royal instructions, the King's letters were, it is said, intercepted on the road, was powerless to act. The Pope withdrew the brief; the King was beaten, and Santiago triumphed. In a codicil to his will, the last King of the House of Austria (the weak and drivelling Charles II.) left it as a solemn charge to his successors to do their utmost to ensure the " compatronato " of Teresa. At least, so late as 1812, under Ferdinand VII., her claims to the patronship were again urged by the Carmelites, and confirmed by the Cortes of Cadiz, but again the decree was never carried out owing to the opposition of the Rigid Catholics, and it remains to this day a dead letter in the 1 " Diario de las Sesiones." Nor were these the only honours decreed to her by her enthusiastic and admiring countrymen ; and it must not be forgotten that to the dignity of a doctor of Salamanca she adds that of a colonel of artillery. CONCLUSION INVENI PORTAM IT would seem to me that I had ill fulfilled my task if I did not carry the extraordinary history of the Reform a little farther, and follow to the end the fortunes of those whose lives had been so long bound up with Teresa's ; the men into whom she had breathed somewhat of her own marvellous spirit, and who had followed the banner she had held aloft so fearlessly through the dark and stormy years which preceded the triumph of the Reform. I am inspired too by a wish to do tardy justice to the man who, of all others, most contributed to it ; on whose memory calumny still rests black and thick, her favourite, the most tenderly cherished of all her sons ; he of whom she wrote, that there would never be such another as her " greatest Prelate." After Teresa's death, the same fate overtook her immediate followers, those she had most thoroughly saturated with her spirit, as befell those of San Francisco of Assisi. Their very loyalty to the traditions of their foundress; their determined resistance to any innovation in the institutions and government she had left them, inevitably doomed them to destruction. Gracian he who had filled the highest offices in the Order, and Teresa's own letters prove how worthily and well he did so wa s expelled from it with disgrace; the last days of San Juan de la Cruz were embittered by persecution ; and Maria de San Jose of Seville died of a broken heart eight days after her arrival at La Cuerva, whither she was banished. The jealousy against Gracian began from the moment he entered the Order, and had slowly gathered volume. Teresa herself had watched its progress (for nothing escaped those keen eyes of hers) from the very first ; and during those black and miserable years, when the fate of the Reform hung trembling in the balance, it had added to her anxieties. The discontented and ambitious friars never forgave the brilliant young monk, fresh from the university, for having, when scarcely more than a novice, risen to the head of the Order. They never forgave him the undisguised partiality and preference ever shown to 48 754 SANTA TERESA him by Teresa from her first interview with him at Veas to the hour of her death. The gray-headed Fray Antonio de Jesus nursed, with all the concentrated venom of a brooding and sus- picious mind, a bitter resentment against the man who, he conceived, had not only supplanted him in the Order, but in the affections of their foundress. He took refuge in a sulky and obstinate silence refused even to answer her letters. She had even suggested to Gracian, from Malagon, in January of 1580, more than a year before the Chapter of Alcala, that Fray Antonio should be elected Provincial: "If only to let him die in peace, now that his melancholy has taken this form . . . and to be rid of these rancours . . . since so long as he has a superior over him he cannot do any harm." And so the storm brewed. Gracian's opponents were not slow to perceive the advantages to be reaped from espousing the cause, and seconding the pretensions, of the peevish, dis- contented old man, who, the first and oldest of her friars, had seen himself relegated to a secondary place in favour of an upstart, young enough to be his son. And at the Chapter of Alcala the crowning glory of Teresa's hard and laborious life, when the Papal decree was confirmed, and the Discalced Carmelites for ever separated from the main body of the Observants, he willingly became the cat's-paw of Doria and his party. There the muttering of the distant storm made itself more distinctly heard. It needed all Teresa's influence, it needed all the determined efforts of the Dominican Cuevas who presided, to secure Gracian's election, and one vote alone stood between him and defeat. Even then his rivals asserted that he, a raw novice, had been chosen over their heads, before he had had time to prove his vocation, to become, barely a few months after he had made his professsion, Apostolic Commissary, and the central figure of the Order. He had shown, said the jealous friars, a disposition to command rather than obey. He had ever paid more attention to the exterior and secular part of his calling than to silence and prayer. He had deviated from the Rule and Constitutions rather than risk the loss of his popularity. But what they laid particular stress on was the allegation that from the first he had entirely overlooked the spirit of the Rule, which was contemplative and eremitical, to devote his energies to the confessional and the pulpit. In spite, however, of their determined opposition, to Teresa's fervent joy, her Eliseo was elected. During her life she stood an im- pregnable wall of defence between him and their miserable jealousies and disappointed ambitions. Her letters to him are full of the warning notes of danger. She protected him INVENI PORTAM 755 from the open and occult attack of his enemies. The moment she was dead he was left defenceless against the storm. The tone of the Chapter was not long of asserting itself. The whispers began to grow ominously in volume. They disturbed the last moments of the dying saint; but there is not a shadow of proof, as has been asserted by Doria's fierce partisans, on the partial and unreliable evidence of Fray Antonio de Jesus himself, and of Ana de San Bartolome" (afterwards Gracian's most prominent accusers), that her con- fidence in and love for him suffered any change. His every action was submitted to the fierce scrutiny of a thousand peering eyes. The leniency of his government, the breadth with which he interpreted the spirit rather than the letter of the Rule (for in intellect and grasp he was far above his fellows, and his aims were wider and more universal), were interpreted against him by the narrow zealots who rose to power on his ruin. Doria was a very different antagonist from the weak, sour old man whom Teresa had treated with the same tender indulgence one accords to a spoilt and wayward child. The very antithesis of Gracian, from the first there was little sympathy between them. A man of undoubted power and ability, of iron capacity, this Doria: rigid, unrelenting, narrow, despotic ready to sacrifice everything to his gigantic personal ambition. A foe indeed to be feared, this austere, ungracious Genoese, who would neither conciliate nor be conciliated the descendant of those stern old sea-wolves who for more than a century had led the galleys of Spain to victory. Teresa summed up his character shrewdly enough when he first entered the Order : " He has certainly seemed to me sensible, and of good counsel, and a servant of God, although he does not possess that grace and gentleness which God gave to Paul, for to few does He give so much together ; but he is certainly a man to be esteemed, and very humble and penitent, and knows how to conquer wills ; and he will thoroughly recognise Paul's worth, and is very determined to be guided by him in all things; for in many things (if Paul agrees well with him, as I believe he will, if it is only to please me) it will be of great advantage for the two of you to be always of the same opinion, and to me a great con- solation." It would seem as if already she had a distinct prevision of the incompatibility of these two men, whom she would fain have linked together in the government. They were as unlike physically as morally. Their portraits still hang side by side in the peaceful cloisters of Pastrana ; the one handsome, beaming good temper and benignity, his blue eyes as ingenuous and frank in expression as those of a child already 756 SANTA TERESA partially bald, with a tendency to obesity. The other vulture- faced, beak-nosed, eagle-eyed, thin-lipped, all muscle and sinew, not an ounce of spare flesh ; full of the grim intensity arid sup- pressed ferocity of a bird of prey about to spring on its quarry. A countenance which inspires one with repulsion and even dread. The very year after Teresa's death, at the Chapter of Almodovar, Doria, breaking through all restraint, gave vent to the undisguised animosity against Gracian which had long been slumbering in his breast. In view of this approaching Chapter, as if she already foresaw what was about to happen, Teresa, in her anxiety to shield him, had written little more than a month before her death, to warn him as to certain complaints which had come to her ears, and which she feared might give rise to imputations in the Chapter. It fell out even as she had feared ; and Doria, throwing off the mask, declared that his rival's complacency and want of rectitude had brought destruction on the Order. It was seriously debated whether or not Gracian should be deposed from the provincialate. But the time was not yet ripe for action, and in an invidious and artful apology, even more dangerous and inflammatory than the attack, Doria contended that Gracian should be allowed to conclude his term of office. Thus commenced that mortal duel (if the term duel can be applied to a combat so unequal, where the aggression was all on one side) which ended in Gracian's final expulsion from the Order. And yet, two years later, in the Chapter of Lisbon (1585), by a strange irony of fate, Gracian himself nominated as his successor the man who was to work his ruin. Already Doria's mingled hatred and ambition, which had grated so unpleasantly on his brethren's ears at the Chapter of Almodovar, were sufficiently palpable ; so palpable indeed as to alarm the high- minded, pure-souled, angelic San Juan de la Cruz, who ex- claimed with a flash of prophetic insight : " Your reverence has elected one who will some day deprive you of the habit." In that same Chapter, Gracian defended himself from the attacks that had been made on his character, affirming them to be false and calumnious. The Chapter was then suspended until the arrival of the new Provincial, when the sittings were renewed at Pastrana in October. On this occasion Doria introduced various changes into the government of the Order, and proposed the division of the Province into four districts, each governed by its separate vicar. This step was, as Gracian too clearly foresaw, the prelude to the elaborate scheme, the details of which had already been care- fully matured. He made a marked allusion to Gracian. " Let INVENI PORTAM 757 us," said he, " pluck up the barren fig tree and cut off the rotten limb, and the body will recover its health." Doria showed his hand still more clearly in the Chapter held in Valladolid in 1587, where his proposal to associate Definitors with the Provincial in the government, and them a decisive vote, met with universal disapprobation. H would still seem to have wavered between removing his rival from Spain, and thus destroying the undeniable influence wielded in the Order, or his total extinction-for Gracian was appointed Provincial of Mexico. But the friars were no match for the austere, eagle-faced Genoese. Without consulting them, which would have been to risk a certain defeat, he acted boldly, promptly, and alone, if we except his two coadjutors Mariano and Fray Juan de Jesus Roca. A memorial was laid before the King, of whose support they had previously assured themselves Philip warmly seconded them with the Pope, through his ambassador Olivares. It was not without difficulty the Bri was granted, Doria having inserted a clause, unheard of as yet m thlnisto y of the Mendicant Orders-with what object will presently be seen,-to give the Order authority to expel any Sous subject from its bosom. The first portion of his scheme was now achieved, and henceforth the Descalzos were virtually at the mercy of the Provincial and his Defimtors On the 25th of November of the same year, Dona and his Definitors met in council in Madrid **^^ffi was to revolutionise the government of the Order. It : i ; worthy nf remark that in this Council none of those men sat or had a voiceTho had struggled hand in hand with Teresa through the bkcke't hours of tfe Reform. Only one figured amongs^the names of the unknown friars, the creatures of Dona - whose Httle jealousies and peevish character she had long ago een through Fray Antonio de Jesus. It was decided to co voke a General Chapter, to read the brief before it, and either to force it on the whole assembly, or on a 758 SANTA TERESA disturbing orders"? A man like this a man who promised to disturb all Doria's carefully-elaborated schemes must be got rid of before anything further could be done. But how? It is easy for malignity to find a motive. An indiscreet observation or one which seemed so to a jealous and vindictive mind in a book on Missions to the Heathen, which he, in unison with the Franciscans, had written and printed without first obtaining his superior's sanction, afforded a plausible pretext. In spite of all, several of the conclave espoused his cause. But Doria carried the day. That old rivalry ; that jealousy of the power and preference so long enjoyed by Gracian the love and confidence shown him by Teresa above all others still stank in the nostrils of the harsh, imperious monk, and were now to be revenged a thousandfold. Gracian was deprived of all voice active or passive in the forthcoming chapters of the Order, and was forbidden even to be present. The notice of this decree reached him in Irun, where he was busy founding a monastery. He hurried to Madrid. In this, of all moments the one in which he should have acted with decision and indignantly repelled the accusa- tions of his enemies one of these being an undue freedom of intercourse with the nuns, he humbly avowed himself in the wrong, and made a complete and abject submission. " I have erred," he wrote, " through oversights caused by the frankness of my nature, and not from malice ; nor does my conscience accuse me of any guilt." He proffered complete obedience, offered to resign the post of Provincial of Mexico, and being, as he said, already wearied of the cares of office, only craved for liberty to retire to some monastery, where he could devote himself to a life of contemplation and prayer. So did the incautious man play into the hands of his wily adversary. Had Gracian stood firm on this occasion, and forced his opponents, instead of obscure calumnies (for the book, Doria cunningly allowed it to be supposed, was only a pretext to conceal more serious and graver breaches of discipline), to formulate specific charges against him, he might still have been triumphant, demolished Doria's plans, and completely routed their under- hand tactics. He numbered many followers in the Order, who already began to murmur angrily at the determined persecution he was subjected to. They openly declared that the sentence had been dictated by the ambitious Doria to free himself from his rival's presence in the Chapter, and to prevent what he had reason to dread, the election of Gracian himself as Vicar- General ; that he had taken advantage of Gracian's ingrained INVENI PORTAM 759 simplicity and ingenuousness to remove a << d *l for the Vicar-Generalship. And it is certain that appearance in the Chapter would have been the signal for open revolt and more than certain that Doria and his faction would have been completely routed, and Gracian once more have taken his place at the head of the Order, to which he had con- SCCr A ^months ago Doria had still hesitated between remov- ing his en^my from Spain in an honourable capacity-making fof hm a bddge of silver-or his total extinction. He now esitaSd no longer. Perhaps with the contempt of a bold, resolute nature for a weaker, he despised any such precautions Shone who, being the only man in the Order capable of making front ^gainsf him or calling in question the autocratic Tnd despotic rule he was on the point of instituting, allowed his w"nYs to be clipped so tamely. The resignation was accepted The previous sentence confirmed, which, since he could neither elect nor be elected to any of its posts, stripped Gracian of all voTce and influence in the Order. He was taken at his word nd loosed from the Vicariate of Mexico. He might mdee, still go ?o Mexico if he would, but only as the head of a band f fS the first it would seem to have been a deeply-laid and ****^ in tes' the Chapter commenced its 760 SANTA TERESA The attendance of priors of monasteries, who had hitherto had a voice in the government, was dispensed with at the General Chapters, henceforth exclusively composed of the Vicar-General, and his Council of six, the provincials and their associates, the definitors. The priors were limited to the local chapter of each province, presided over by its provincial. The authority of the Council embraced the whole civil and criminal jurisdiction of the Order nuns as well as friars and the appointment of priors, sub-priors, readers, confessors, preachers, was vested in it alone. No monk or nun could change from one community to another without its express permission. It took cognisance of the minutest affairs in the scattered Order. The Vicar- General was elected for a term of six years ; he and his Council (six in number) to form a permanent body, residing in Madrid, in a house set apart for that purpose. It will be noted that in this scheme the power of the General of the Order shrank into a mere shadow, and that the real substance of it was vested in the autocrat who, at the head of his Council, pulled the strings from Madrid. Also that the provincials were left little more than the name, they being debarred from all action independent of the central body. Doria, in short, was to be a kind of Deus ex machind, wielding an irresponsible and incontrovertible authority, similar in a less marked degree to that of the General of the Jesuits, on whose constitutions he had evidently modelled his scheme. It was an innovation that Teresa never would have sanctioned ; utterly foreign in its aim and purpose to the spirit of her rule, which was, to grant as large an autonomy as possible to each and every one of her convents. The priors and prioresses were shorn of the authority they had hitherto wielded, and which, in the case of her nuns, she had fought so zealously to obtain and keep intact. Had she been alive it would either never have been effected, or, if effected, it is probable that she would have shared the fate of those who, wedded to the traditions of their foundress, were the most determined in their resistance to any innovation in the institutions and government she had bequeathed to their keeping. Had she been alive Doria might never have dared to bring it forward, or, if he had, with her standing behind him making up for what he lacked by her own strength of will and energetic resolution, Gracian would have strenuously opposed it ; and had they not carried the day, the world might have witnessed the strange spectacle of a woman far up in years banished to, and a close prisoner in some distant convent of the very Order she herself had founded. It must not be imagined that Doria carried out his projects INVENI PORTAM 761 without opposition. The storm it excited in the Order and throughout Spain was tremendous. It was a coup de main cleverly contrived and executed, and he had astutely provided against any resistance on the part of the priors and the provincials by depriving them of all voice in the government, and limiting it to a council of seven. But he had not reckoned with the prioresses, who bitterly resented this unwarrantable invasion of their liberties so contrary to all that Teresa had ever thought, or said, or written ; and resolved to shake off the tyrannical rule to which it was proposed to subject them. Ana de Jesus, foundress of Granada, and Prioress of Madrid ; Maria de San ]os6 of Seville, instigated thereto (it is said) by Gracian, with the spirit and energy of their great foundress herself, prepared to make a stout attempt to preserve the ancient discipline of the Order. That all the trifling details of a woman's convent, its weaknesses, its peccadilloes, should be laid before a conclave of seven austere monks, far from the scene of action, and incapable of judging that they should become a theme for comment throughout the Order seemed to these brave and independent spirits a monstrous violation of Teresa's Rule. Ana de Jesus resolved to get Teresa's Constitutions which expressly gave to the prioresses the right of choosing their own confessors confirmed ; to appeal to the Pope to appoint a Commissary-General, who although subject to the Vicar-General, should alone take cognisance in all matters relating to the nuns ; and who more fitted for the purpose than those well-proved servants and heads of the Order, so dear to their foundress, Fray Juan de la Cruz or Geronimo de Gracian ? All this she planned in her valorous soul (she mig been disobedient once, but I am sure Teresa would have applauded her now, and blessed the imperious character ot prioress), and behind her stood a serried little group of warm partisans, the best fitted in all Spain to judge of Teresas intentions, and to guard her Constitutions as she had left Don Teutonio de Braganza, Archbishop of Evora; tray Luis de Leon, the eminent catedrdtico of Salamanca, who, although he had neither known nor seen the Mother Teresa on earth, knew and saw her in the image of her daughters ; and tn oreat and scholarly Dominican Banes, one of the most chenshe amongst Tesesa's confessors, all unanimously signified th approval of this decisive step. Maria de San Joseof -isbon and Gracian joined heart and soul with her -of Granada. Counting on the support and protection of the King s the Empress Maria and of the Archduke Cardinal of Portugal, 762 SANTA TERESA whom Gracian had enlisted in their favour, they resolved to have recourse to the sovereign Pontiff himself. Marmol, a priest and near relative of Gracian (whose life and misadventures he afterwards wrote), undertook the mission. He conducted it with such secrecy that it was not until the Brief had been actually despatched " sub annulo Piscatoris " of Sixtus V. that Doria conceived any suspicions as to what was going on. Furious at being defied, and his authority set at nought by a few refractory prioresses, he immediately convoked an extraordinary Chapter-General, which sat in the Monastery of San Hermenegildo of Madrid. It was decided that the brief appointing the Central Council, and giving it absolute control over the nuns, should be at once enforced, and the provincials entirely deprived of the authority they still conserved over them. And in case the nuns achieved their object, and Doria and his party were worsted, it was resolved to abandon them to their own devices to treat them in fact as if they no longer belonged to the Order. Since they had appealed to the Pope, let the Pope manage them in future even as he thought fit. Gracian, too, must be withdrawn from Portugal, where, protected by powerful friends, he was intriguing with Maria de San Jose (loth June 1590). His friends and firmest supporters were no less anxious for his presence than his enemies, and used every effort to induce him to obey. In February, four months before the Chapter met, Fray Luis de Leon had written from Salamanca to Marmol in Madrid : It is necessary not only for him but for his supporters, and the Order, that his cause should be tried, and in Spain : and if it should be impossible to get the King and the Pope to appoint judges for him here, he can do this ; appear before the Cardinal and institute an action against these fathers for defamation of character (accion de jactancia), as it is called, by saying that it has come to his notice that they have deprived him of all voice, both active and passive, on account of the crimes and excesses he has committed, and that they likewise say and publish that they have other and graver charges against him, and that they give him out as being relaxed, and a bad monk, and a criminal. Whereon the Cardinal will order them to appear before him to answer it. If they appear and answer, the truth must come out ; if not, he will proceed against them by default, and they must declare him not guilty, and revoke the sentence they have given of privation of active and passive voice, and will restore his rights. If they consent to this, they will virtually confess the malice which has actuated them in the past : if they appeal, then it will be time enough to go on with the matter, and to consult afresh as to what more is to be done. But Gracian gave no heed to these prudent counsels. It seemed as if he was obstinately bent on precipitating his own ruin. Bolstered up by the favour and protection of the Cardinal Archduke of Portugal, to whom he had rendered important INVENI PORTAM 763 services during the siege of Lisbon, when it was besieged by the Pretender Don Antonio and the English under Drake, confident in the protection of his powerful patron, he weakly closed his eyes to the approaching danger. The commonest in- stinct of self-preservation might have warned even his ingenuous simplicity how small is the trust to be placed in princes. A month later Fray Luis again wrote : I have received yours and seen the copy of the father Gracian's, which I should have known was his wherever I had seen it, without any one to tell me so. The reasons he alleges for his absence have some colour ot religion ; but from what I see, and it may be I am mistaken, they ans< rather from the natural disposition of the father Gracian, who is by nature indolent in these things, and it is easy to give the colours of religion to what in truth is not so ; and the more so in this case, where indolence of soul looks so like modesty, and pusillanimity like humility. Let us begin with the welfare of the Order, which he puts last, and thence come to the first. And, as to this : first, I am exceedingly amazed that the father Gracian persuades himself that his withdrawal from it will do anything to remedy the present inconveniences which day by day a erowing greater, and that those who are now silent owing to his being present will then sally forth in its defence. Because, if we consider i rightly, it is all the other way ; for if some have now courage to resist it is on account of his presence, and if he is not there, the whole thing will be hushed up by force, and all reduced to submission according to all soun. reasoning. It may be that it is not so, but this is to be conjectured ; and thus to pursue a most uncertain hope, and on account of it to do immediate and certain harm to the Order. Two or three things occur to me at present as being of the greatest importance for his Order, the well-being of which depends on their being placed on a proper footing. One is, that which calls ' questtoj i his innocence and that of the nuns he has had to do with ; for li they are eft under such a stigma, many persons, generally and particularly wiU be iggrieved and suffer in their reputations. Another is the government oi ?he g Wars, which is being introduced, and which as the father Gracian knows and has written, is so prejudicial ; and which, ,f it is thus established, must destroy the principal virtues, which are chanty simplicity, and single- mmdedness; which will be to the detriment not of one person .but of the whole Order, and not for a day, but for many years and an evl that if once introduced, will bring about the decay of the Order, so that it wiU be necessary for another Teresa to rise from the grave to restore it. | ch, Then was the opinion of this acute and profound observer of Donas ambiti- ous schemes] The third is as regards that which re ates to the nuns on whose deTtruction they are also bent, by changing their rules, from which Aey have Srved such benefits. . . . This, then, being the truth, it is no ess so that he is in conscience bound, to the utmost of his power, to do whatever he can towards this end, and if he fails in this duty, he will be to bHme and offends God very gravely, and all the good he chooses to fancy h "win do ir ?he Indies will no\ palliate it. ... His Order ,s m flames and the Indians. ... God has entrusted him with this office, a Staost with audible words to resist the evil that is coming upon his Order. 764 SANTA TERESA Is it well that the father Gracian should say to him now : You, Lord, will do it, for I wish to go to the Indies to baptize two or three infidels ? God will answer him : Unprofitable servant, this I order thee, and this I will that thou shouldst do, and since thou failest me in this, it is certain that thou wilt fail me in the rest. I will confide no more in thee, since I have no lack of persons for these ministries. He says that to take action in his defence disquietens his conscience, and gives him scruples. A little disquietude is a less evil than the guilt of not fulfilling what the benefit of his Order imperatively demands of him. What duty of active life would ever be done if we considered this ? Let him reassure himself that he is doing his duty, and what God wills him to do. If he defended himself alone, and discovered the faults of his assailants on his own account only, it would be an imperfection ; but since it is for the general good, as in fact it is, it is a sin not to do it. He says that it is to tarnish the reputation of the Order. . . . Which is worse, that ten or twenty persons should not have a good opinion of six or seven friars [the number of the Council], or that all the nuns of the Order should get the fame of loose and abandoned women ? . . . He says that if he goes away others will come forward in their defence. This is laughable : since now, when they are armed and have the captain present, they dare not sally forth, to think that they will sally forth after- wards, when they want the head and his power, and these others will be left absolute masters of the field. . . . He says he will be accounted vain if he takes up the cudgels in his own defence ? Who but a fool can imagine such a thing ? Moreover, he is not defending himself but many others ; and, what is more, the well-being of his Order. . . . And if some are scandalised, it is clear that it is the scandal of Pharisees. They will not account him vain if he indeed opposes the evil that menaces his Order ; but they will account him chicken-hearted and pusillanimous if at such a moment he turns his back. And then he says a thing, which is that he has no patience with you for not seeing that it is probable they will face him with two or three companions as witnesses. . . . And without doubt, and if I did not know the father Gracian, and, from many things that have come under my notice, was assured of his virtue, I should conceive an ill suspicion of him, and believe he is afraid because " non est bene sibi conscius." But March came and went ; and in April the old friar wrote again : The sight of his letter has filled me with a great fear that he will give us the slip either one way or the other . . . and it seems to me I see it is the Devil that gives him such a longing for the Indies. Once more he wrote on the i8th of July, in answer to Marmol's letter acquainting him with the doings of the Chapter in the previous June : I received both of yours together, on my way from Madrigal ; together with the decree and additions of those fathers, which resemble the quiver whence they come, for their excellent sense can be seen even in the style. . . . God alone knows the end he [Doria] has in view. I am pleased with the constitution to reduce the votes to fifteen, and that those fifteen can exchange their offices amongst one another as they see fit : and I repeat INVENI PORTAM 765 that I am delighted ; for, although I had strong suspicions of that fathers FDoria'sl ambition, still I saw that he concealed it by giving definitive votes to the members of the Council, and I was waiting until he revealed it in some way ; and with this he has now done so, so openly that even a blind man must see it ; and if this does not open Loaisa's eyes, he will indeed be more than blind. The punishment decreed for the carnally-inclined is admirable ; it would have been better if it had been established against the ambitious. . . . Judges are wanted, I repeat judges, and judges a thousand times, and the reason why this is growing every day is because this has not been strenuously enough insisted on. Please God, senor, that these mothers would cut themselves aloof from them and be ruled as was their fi monastery, for thus would they preserve themselves in their purity, ^an; live in peace. Here they have been told [the nuns of Salamanca] that then Constitutions have been confirmed in Rome, and that the Pope has given them to the General, and the General sent them to the Vicar ; I cannot believe it nor that the senor Doctor has allowed them to come by any other hand I his own. Let me know what truth there is in it ; let me know what goes on n Lisbon ; and stir up that fat-brained dolt of a relation of yours [Gracian J to defend himself, and the public cause of the Order ; for this they send i the letters is an infernal libel. I know not whether those fathers, by whose advice such things are done and written, have lost their brains 01 : their conscience, for either one or other is lacking, if not both,-so as to mark better. But neither for this did Gracian awake out of his culpable supineness ; and Fray Luis de Leon was left to defend the nun alone Nor is it one of the least noteworthy deeds in career that the noble old man, defying both King and Dona, stood up single-handed in the cause of these defenceless women Never was right or reason more stoutly maintained ; never ( weakness meet with a greater-souled or more chivalrous champion. On the 7 th of August, Sixtus V was dead. A fortnight later, before the news of his death had time to reach the shores of Spain, the brief confirming Teresa's Constitutions, and committing the government of the nuns to a Commissary- General, appointed for that purpose, arrived at Madrid. It execution was committed to the Archbishop of Ebora and Fray Luis de Leon. The former dexterously withdrew and left coUeague to cope with it as best he might The latter at once insisted on the convocation of the Council and ^ vincial ^j proceed to the election of the Commissary, and boldly propose Gracian or Fray Juan de la Cruz. But the learned D m ' n ' ca " was no match for the crafty Genoese, who betook himself to the Pardo, where the King was hunting. At the very moment the Chapter was about to assemble (Philip had given no sign), arrived an order from the 1 dismiss the conclave until a new faculty could be obtained from Rome. But the brave Augustinian was not to be bea spite of the King and Doria, he again convoked a Chapter, a 766 SANTA TERESA Doria again appealed to the King. As the monks were filing into the Chapter, appeared a gentleman of the King's bed- chamber : " His Majesty orders your paternities to suspend the execution of the Brief for the meantime, and to change nothing until his Holiness, to whom all has been made known, shall decide otherwise." Fray Luis de Leon, a second time outwitted by the Genoese, muttered as he left the council-chamber, " It is impossible to execute any of his Holiness's orders in Spain." The bird of the air, or the curious ear of some sanctimonious friar, caught the bold utterance of the brave old Augustinian and carried it to the King. In the moment which was to crown the labours and the sufferings of a long and laborious life as he was about to be elected a Provincial of the Order of which he had been the most splendid light, and on which to this day his memory sheds an unfading lustre the King interfered, and another was elected in his stead. Philip had well learned, in that cold, inscrutable, dogged mind of his, to bide his time, so as to crush the more certainly and swiftly. They say the dis- appointment broke the friar's heart, but I do not believe that the hand even of a king could break the heart of one who had for five years defied all the horrors of the Inquisition dungeons ; and who on the morrow of his release, oblivious of the years that had rolled between, took up the thread of his discourse in the Lecture Halls of Salamanca with the memorable words : " As I was saying." When the dust has cleared off and the shadows dispersed, how small a figure the mean-souled, narrow- minded, vindictive Philip, the Lord of Spain and the Indies beside the grand Augustinian monk, whose magnanimous and gentle soul conceived and penned the Ode to Solitude ! The nuns had been deprived of their mainstay. But there was still a man, the most famous scholar of his age famous in the disputes of the schools (now ancient history) as the opponent of Molina who dared to lift up his voice with no uncertain sound in defence of Teresa's daughters, as once before he had defied the large and unruly meeting at Avila, when he pleaded for the fate of her first foundation. Banes unburdened his mind to Doria in no measured terms ; told him plainly that his action in abandoning the nuns, thus virtually expelling them from the Order, was infamous, and without a parallel in the annals of the Church. The iron friar remained rigid in his implacability and hate. "Well, then," said the Dominican, " I will induce my Order to receive the nuns you cast off." To which Doria made answer : " I shall keep you to your word, for it will be to our interest and theirs that they should pass to the Rule of so venerable a religion." The King's comment on Baiies's inter- IN YEN I PORT AM 767 vention was mordant and concise: "Who brings Banes into matters that concern him not?" On the ist of June 1591, this being the fixed and regular time assigned for its assembly, another General Chapter was held in Madrid. After various regulations as to the govern- ment, it turned its attention to the nuns. Although Dona treated them as already separated from the Order, the Km had veered round in their favour, and no decisive step could be taken without a further decree from Rome. It then turned its attention to Gracian, who, still firmly intrenched in Lisbon, had hitherto stubbornly refused to leave Portugal. But the discussion was cut short by a letter presented by the Arch- bishop of Ebora, indicative of his submission There was indeed nothing else left for him to do, for the Ar <*duke Cardinal, at the King's desire, had delivered him bound hand and foot, as it were, into the hands of his enemies. A few weeks later he arrived in Madrid. All present at that Chapter knew that over his head the sword already hung suspended. And yet only one man lifted up his voice in his defence. Where was Mariano, his old companion, who had fought with him through those troublous times in Andalucia? Could he ,t say a word to avert the doom from one he had known so long and so intimately; with whom he had shared so many truggles,-so many triumphs? For the sake of the great woman who had loved him so well, could he not swallow his personal rivalry for a moment, and say if one word only in his favour? Yes, Mariano was there, but he held his tongue! And Fray Antonio de Jesus-what of him? Was it possible that a man of eighty had not long ago buried and cast behind him the memories of those old, unworthy rancours and resent- lents? What, after all, did it matter that they should speak keep silence? For one spoke in his favour; the greatest amongst them-before whom they and their jealousies melt mTo rmsshapen shadows-a pure and lofty soul who once more reSctantly plunged into those grim and sordid dissensions, arose for ^he last time at the voice of Duty to speak grave words of warning. They were not to be forgiven him. t ray Juan de la Cruz saw the abyss into which Dona blinded by his gigantic personal ambition, was bent on plunging not only himself, but the Order. He disapproved the constant and contradictory changes introduced into its constitution, sub- ve?sive of all discipline, and the origin of confusion pleaded.-and we may judge (in spite of the carefully-guarded and biassed words of the chronicler) that he pleaded ably and well,-in favour of Gracian. Forecasting the future, he 768 SANTA TERESA warned them against taking any cruel and hasty resolution which they must afterwards repent. He pleaded for the nuns, and deprecated the Vicar-General's harshness in chastising all for the fault of one or two if fault there was. His noble and dispassionate words produced no effect on the passionate and prejudiced audience around him ; for since the priors had been deprived of a seat in the Chapters, Doria had no difficulty in filling it with his own creatures, who owed all to him. Sus- picious of Fray Juan's complicity in the action taken by Ana de Jesus, knowing that, if the Bull granted by Sixtus V. was confirmed, the office of Commissary-General of the nuns would naturally fall on one of the heads of the Order (and who more likely than San Juan de la Cruz?), Doria hastened to annul his appointment to the Provincialate of the Indies, bestowed on him by that very Chapter an election which had already afforded a theme for murmuring tongues, so obviously was it an attempt to secure his absence from Spain. Dragged from his cell, thrust into the fierce faction fights of the Order, he who had ever dwelt so far above the affairs of men, in regions of calm and ineffable peace and contempla- tion, and had desired nothing better than to leave his country, if only to escape from the tumults and clash of tongues which rent his heart, he now remembered that he had prayed to die free from the cares of office ; and in Doria's paltry vengeance he only saw a sign that his prayer had been answered, and that the end was not far off. But not yet, O valiant soul not yet ! For somewhat has the Church placed thee on her altars as a beacon and a consolation to suffering and weak humanity ! The price of sanctity is hardly won ! " Would you wish me," he said to his sons, " not to drink of the cup my Father sends me?" And the cup of which he was to drink was verily very bitter ! He had scarcely returned to his beloved solitude of La Penuela monies alti et coelo propinqui sunt contemplativi than he was subjected to a base attempt to besmirch the dignity and purity of his character. His accusers were Fray Diego de Evangelista (who under Doria's administration had risen to be General Definitor, and whose laxities San Juan de la Cruz as visitor had been called on to reprove) and Fray Francisco Crisostomo (whom the saint had also admonished for the same reasons). Their names deserve to be mentioned, if only that they may be held up to universal execration. Fray Diego, charged with the investigations into Gracian's conduct in the convents of Seville and Granada, in his desire to please his master (Doria), outstripped his commission, and INVENI PORTAM 769 spared no pains to blacken the character of him for whom all felt a singular veneration. With perverse malignity, they threatened and menaced the terrified nuns into vague admis- sions and utterances, which were falsified or embellished by the secretary who took them down ; and the Commissary loudly proclaimed that it was his purpose to cast out from the Order him who had founded it, Teresa's first and greatest recruit. The universal burst of resentment and anger which hailed these base calumnies against a man whose life had been so absolutely spotless and free from reproach convinced Doria that there were limits beyond which even he could not go with impunity. It is said that as he read the indictment the paper fell from his hands. Why did he not burn it? The malice of a devil could scarcely go farther than to perpetuate a posthumous libel. A little while, and Fray Juan de la Cruz will have gone beyond the power of his enemies to defame. A pale diaphan- ous figure, passionless, serene, he has floated across the pages of this history, leaving little mark and little impress. "The good such men do lives after them ! " As the monks watched beside his deathbed, the convent bells rang out on the mid- night silence. "What are they ringing for?" he asked; and when they told him " for matins," his eyes encircled the by- standers in one long sweet gaze of mute farewell. " I am going to sing them in heaven," he said, and, kissing the crucifix, he murmured, "Into thy hands, O Lord, I commend my spirit," and died. So died Fray Juan de la Cruz, in the fifty-eighth year of his age, on the I4th of December 1591. If he, whose character for sanctity was venerated by 'all about him, did not escape the penalty of his opposition, but fell a victim to calumny, we can scarcely feel surprise at the fate in store for Gracian, not a vaporous, nebulous essence, but a man of flesh and blood, although a weak one. He arrived in Madrid, says the chronicler, like one desperate, without humility or resignation. There are surprising depths of defiance even in the gentlest natures, when pushed beyond all limits of human bearing. He obstinately refused to clear himself before his enemies. What, indeed, had he to clear himself of? He had, in his letters and memorials to the King, dared to characterise the new form of government instituted by Doria as tyrannical, and more fitted for Court Alcaldes than a religious Order. Certain sick friars had asked him for a license to eat meat one day on account of their infirmities, and he had answered, " Love God, and eat meat or not as you will." A nun, who saw him for the first time 49 770 SANTA TERESA after a long interval, knelt down and embraced him, and, kissing the feet of the Christ which hung on his breast, fell into an ecstasy. During the heat of summer, whilst he was superintending the building operations going on in the nuns' convent at Lisbon they had taken out a mattress for him into the gateway, where he took some repose during the heat of the day. He went inside the convent to give extreme unction to a dying nun ; the effort of sitting up was too much for her, and she fainted away, and Gracian threw his arms around her to sustain her head. One night, when the friars were gathered together in community, they heard a man battering at the door with his fists and demanding confession. He wished to go out and shrive the tormented soul, and on hearing that it was against the rules of obedience to open the door at night, he said angrily : " Fathers, what obedience ? There is no obedience here. Let us go forth and hear his confession." These and such as these were the charges against him, which had so roused the honest wrath of good old Fray Luis de Leon. That he was able to bear the fierce scrutiny directed against him by the suspicious malignity of his enemies so well is in itself significant. The worst accusations they could bring against him in the crisis of his fall were his intimacy with secular people ; his efforts to fill the chairs of the Spanish universities with Carmelite friars ; his predilection for preaching and the duties of the Confessional, and the leniency of his Rule and punishments. For his dream had been to bring the Carmelite Order to a pitch of splendour ; to give it a world- wide influence had he not himself, whilst Provincial of Portugal, been instrumental in its extension to Mexico, Congo, and Abyssinia to fill the great universities with its friars, to cover it with an aureole of learning and enlightenment, and to make it a worthy rival of the great Dominican and Augustinian Orders ? Surely not an inglorious ambition ! He failed, not because he was not at the height of his role, but from a certain slackness of fibre, a lack of certain work-a- day qualities, which, if a man hath not, there shall be taken from him even that he hath ! He was too gentle and yielding to be a fighter, too unsuspicious to be a good diplomatist. His very virtues became defects in the circumstances in which he was placed. Had he been the one, he might have cowed his enemies by the fierceness of his attack ; if the other, have adroitly parried their strokes and turned the points of their weapons against their own breasts. As ill-luck would have it, he was neither. His whole conduct, from beginning to end, was one long series of mistakes. He temporised when he INVENI PORTAM 771 should have stood firm ; he was firm when he should have temporised. His fatal freedom from suspicion made him an easy prey, and it is surprising how easily he fell into the trap laid for him by Doria. Even his firm friend and supporter, Fray Luis de Leon, was doubtful whether his inexplicable vacillation and supineness arose from cowardice or humility. At all events, in the moment of his fall he plucked up courage and behaved like a man. He knew himself to be innocent. He was aware that his real crime was that he had stood in the way of Doria's ambition. Expecting no mercy, and desiring none, he took refuge in a proud defiance. Neither Doria's hypocritical grief at his victim's obduracy and im- penitence, nor all the efforts of his chosen colleagues to make him plead guilty, made any impression on him. In this supreme moment of his life he found that decision and firm- ness, the want of which had proved so fatal to him. Once only did he relax to throw himself on Philip's mercy (an unknown quantity in that monarch's character) and to implore that he might be tried by judges, more impartial and dispassionate than those whose personal enmity against him was so notorious ; otherwise he pleaded that he was entirely at their mercy. But Gracian had once more hindered the plans on which Philip had set his heart (for from the first he had heartily espoused Doria's scheme), and it was but a faint show of justice that he received at the hands of the Jeronimite and Dominican appointed to take cognisance of his cause. They were more intent on watching how the breeze blew at Court than in engaging themselves in a lengthy controversy with the King and Doria. For might was now right; and they themselves feared lest at any moment they might become the victims of the royal displeasure. The result of their investigations was already a foregone conclusion. The alternative was offered to him, which he refused with disdain to accept correction at the hands of the Order or to be expelled from it. He was then sentenced by a private vote to be disfrocked ; forbidden under severe penalties to preach, to write to any nun, or to enter any convent belonging to the Order. After listening to the hypo- critical expressions in which the sentence was wrapped up, without a word he took off his hood and flung it from him. Forestalling the officious friars who then stepped forward to deprive him of his habit, he undressed himself with his own hands, and it also he flung from him. He then clothed uimself in the priest's robes which had been got ready for the purpose (they were new, and very honourable, remarks Fray Gregorio de San Angelo, who played a prominent part on this occasion) ; he 772 SANTA TERESA was then deprived of the tonsure, and went forth into the world a disgraced and homeless man. It is said and this time at least the miracle does not seem to me so stupendous that at the moment of his expulsion blood issued from Teresa's girdle, which is still venerated in Zaragoza. Such was the fall of Doria's hated rival, whose resistance to his ambition, and an ardent desire to conserve the Order under the governance instituted by its foundress, were the whole head and front of his offending. The most spiritual of her sons, San Juan de la Cruz, that strange and tender personality, had been mercifully released by death from witnessing Gracian's disgrace. As for Ana de Jesus and Maria de San Jose, women of great talent and discernment, and undoubtedly Teresa's most capable and trusted prioresses, the one was a close prisoner in Salamanca, the other banished to La Cuerva, where she died of a broken heart. Fray Luis was dead, unable to survive (but I do not believe it, in spite of the affirmations of the chronicler) the loss of Philip's favour for having championed their cause. The Order of Discalced Carmelites is no longer the Order Teresa founded, and those who have fought so tenaciously to preserve her Constitutions in all their purity are accused of fomenting conspiracy and rebellion against its head. It is perhaps some satisfaction to know that Doria himself was overtaken by death before he could leave his plans established, and that one of his most ardent coadjutors was drowned whilst crossing a stream a judgment of Heaven, it was said at the time, and I see no reason to contradict it. Gracian's further adventures his sickening and hopeless suit for redress in Rome ; his imprisonment by Turkish corsairs, steeped in all the romance and movement of that strange century he has himself related in the form of a dialogue between two friars, who, under the tall chestnuts of a peaceful Neapolitan monastery, discuss the fate of their storm-tossed comrade. Bidding farewell to his mother, and donning a hermit's habit, he made his way to Alicante, thinking thence to take ship for Italy. Whilst he waited he lodged in a meson, and, " since a Simon of Cyrene is never wanting to assist in bearing the cross," it so happened that the mistress of the hostelry, who was well- to-do, had an only son, a lad about to set forth to Milan to see service as a soldier. The mother and son were kindly, simple folk. They thought that, if he went with the friar to Rome, with the assistance of the latter, added to his own meagre stock of Latin, it would be easy for him to get ordained and enter the priesthood. In him the lonely, gentle man found a companion, counsellor, friend, secretary, and servant, according to his heart's INVENI PORTAM 773 desire. Whilst Gracian remained shut up in his room (he notes that it opened out on a balcony looking towards the sea), as his eyes wandered over the strip of blue dancing against the yellow sand, its surface broken by the tall wand of a flowering aloe, enshrined in a distance of radiant sky, Joaquin charged himself with all the arrangements for their journey. Hearing of a ship in Tortosa about to sail for Genoa with a freight of wool, the strangely-assorted pair made their way thither, spending Holy Week in Valencia to see the sights and attend the services, celebrated throughout Spain for their stateliness and grandeur. The night before they were to sail, Gracian received a letter from a friend, offering him a passage on board the royal galleys, about to start from Vinaroz with subsidies for the French war. The simple friar was for holding to his bargain ; the provisions for the voyage had been purchased, and they had met wit crreat kindness both from captain and passengers. No such sentimental scruples disturbed the practical Joaquin, who having been to Rome before as secretary to a bishop, knew what a sea-voyage was. " Father " he said, " go to sleep and don't trouble yourself, for in these matters I am not going to do what you order, but what is best." And at break of day on the morrow, having s. the provisions, he resolutely mounted the friar on a horse, am bore him off to Vinaroz. He might, indeed, go to Rome But Philip's shadow stalked after him. " If Father Gracian should arrive there," Philip wrote to the Spanish Ambassador, the Duke of Sesa, "request the Pope not to give him a. hearing, nor allow the matter to be reopened" Certainly it was not worth while to quarrel with his Catholic Majesty for the sake of a poor outcast friar; and when the Cardinal Santa Severma interceded in his behalf, the Pope made answer that he showed him favour enough in not clapping him into prison and bade the Cardinal meddle no more in that fathers matters, but admonish him to enter some religious order, as his superio had enjoined, within eight days' time. But, alas ! no religion would give an asylum to the disgrace and banished man. The Carthusians, Discalced Franciscans Capuchins, shut their doors in his face; the ^ocurator of the Dominicans asked the Pope what crime his Order had bee guilty of that it should be forced to receive a man wh< to Naples to solicit the projection of the Viceroy, who refused to see or hear him : it was not to his interest, he said, to befriend a man who had forfeited the King's favour. 774 SANTA TERESA Thence, like " some wandering knight-errant, who looses his horse's reins to go whither chance may lead," he proceeded to Sicily. But here, too; Olivares, the Viceroy, refused to give him a hearing, although his wife, with the noble and disinterested charity of a generous woman (may she rest in peace, if for that deed alone !), found him an asylum in the Hospital of Santiago, whilst she wrote to Rome on his behalf. Here for a few peace- ful months from February to August he forgot his woes in the composition of various treatises and books, which prove his curious and heterogeneous erudition. Aided by the wounded soldiers, he transcribed the Mystic Harmony its title indicative of its subject; wrote a History of the Carmelite Order; and beguiled his leisure (no doubt to the admiration of his military coadjutors) by lighter treatises on the Art of Warfare, Anatomy, and Arithmetic. He was rudely awakened from this brief inter- lude of tranquillity by a Papal Brief from Rome, ordering him without delay to join the Order of Augustinians. When, on the morning of the nth of October 1593, laden with papers, and 250 copies of his works which he had caused to be printed in Naples, he embarked at Gaeta in one of the Inquisition frigates for Rome, it seemed at last that a gleam of hope smiled on his chequered fortunes. Scarcely three hours after, however, between Gaeta and Monte Sarcoli, as they were standing well out to sea, they were pursued and captured by a Turkish galliot. Stripped to the skin and laden with chains, he and the rest of the crew were flung into the hold ; a little while after he beheld his precious MS. of the Armenia Mystica, which had cost him so many labours, and was of no little value, being put to the base use of cleaning his captors' muskets. In a small island, Ventoten, not laid down in any chart known to modern navigators, where the corsairs put in for refreshment, they were joined by three other galliots and some brigantines from Biserta. From Ventoten they made a night attack on Gaeta, but were driven back, owing to a woman who heard them and gave the alarm. Casting anchor between Gaeta and Naples, where they took in provisions and sacked two hermitages, they sailed up the Bay of Naples, swooping down upon more than a hundred barques coming from Castellamare and Torre del Greco. Three galleys from the harbour gave chase to and fired a few shots at the foremost galliot (Gracian's), but not being particularly anxious to come to closer quarters, presently made their way back again into the harbour, and the arraez swore, as he plucked his beard with rage, that had it not been INVENI PORTAM 775 for the two which had hung behind, for the sake of plundering some frigates, he would most certainly have captured Allof which took place under the very casements of the of Naples on that October morning of 1 593- They then attempted to surprise Torre del Greco, and t< capture the Cardinal Ascanio Colonna; and after plundering one hundred and ninety souls, "with the swiftness of demons the bold marauders bore out to sea. In spite of its t dead calm, which forced them to take to their oars dayligh found them in the Straits of Bonifacio, and the next day they anchored at the Island of San Pedro, off the coast of .Barbaiy. Here the captives were set on shore to refresh themselves (literally, " unflea," despulgar) and take the sun. The po were already boiling on the fire when four galleys belonging to the Duke of Florence hove in sight. Without losing an instant, the captives were hastily em barked, and the anchor weighed, more than thirty Turks left behind. The galleys gave hot chase, and escape seeme hopeless, when the wind, freshening up, broke the lateen yard of the Admiral's sail, checking the pursuit, a"d forcing 1 to take shelter under the same island which the Turks ha, just abandoned. It seemed to the wretched captives that they iaw the gates of heaven opened, when at last they found them- selves in the port of Biserta, and they looked forward baths as a sort of paradise. A paradise which soon turned into a purgatory. The captain of the frigate, Antonio Leyva, Ri a few da'ys of landing The baths them- selves were like long, narrow, underground sta ^ r jare houses, with a corn-mill in the centre worked by an a 311 t? ! ?n d SS2^t at all, they had nothing for it but to erect 'frames or hurdles similar to those used for rearing silkworms, to which they climbed up on sticks. The filth and darkness such that a Spanish prison (in that century !J ^Ate "sSti" apart one captive in every ten for the BaxV Elisbly and Durali'the joint-owners of the skiff > ; which g hey had been taken, cast lots for the remainder Gracian fcU to the share of Elisbey, and would have had but little ty effecting his ransom, -for the captain was in want of ne - had it not been for an unfortunate rumour whic - one - Cached the ears of the Baxa of Tunis, that he -as an ardiblhop with an income of from 10,000 to 20,000 ducats, > The names are in the phonetic Arabic of Gracian, not mine. He pabh Arabic Grammar, of which I have never been able to find t 776 SANTA TERESA and was going to Rome to be made a cardinal ; moreover, that he was a great marabout amongst the Christians, and a relative of the King of Spain. Now, when any person of consequence was taken, the Baxa could by law either select the prize for himself or the Great Turk. But Elisbey, when summoned to give up his prisoner, pretended that Gracian did not belong to him, but to Durali, who, from being an Algerian, and an old man of exceedingly savage temper, would be better able to defend him than himself. But the Baxa had no idea of letting so valuable a prize slip through his fingers, and presently despatched his Chauz, or ambassador to the Great Turk, with an escort of mounted soldiers armed with lance and musket, to bring old Durali to reason. Durali threatened to pitch the Chauz head foremost down- stairs, if he repeated his request a second time. " Look here, Durali," answered the Chauz, by name Caymbali; "this time I forgive thee, for I see that thou art drunk ; but by the head of the great Pataxa (Padishah), if to-morrow morning, when thou hast digested thy wine, thou dost not give me up the Papaz, I will drag thee at my horse's tail to Tunis." Whereupon irascible old Durali was convinced. So in the chill dawn of a cold November morning, mounted on the top of water-baskets, and surrounded by janissaries, huddled in an old striped haik given him by the Christians, Gracian, with his breviary and some of his papers, took the road to Tunis. The wretched man was like to starve, had it not been for a bit of bread given him for the journey when he set out, by a compassionate Christian. At sunrise next day they came to a swollen river, which they could only swim across on horseback. Preceded by a Moor, who bore his clothes and held the reins, those on the brink encouraged him by their shouts. " Grip the mane stoutly, fix your eyes upon the sky, Papaz, and do not heed the water," cried the guide : and all his life long Gracian remembered that the best sermon he had ever listened to came from the lips of an infidel. For two years his feet riveted in chains he lingered a captive in the Baths of Tunis. Apart from the fetters, however, his position seems to have been by no means intolerable. Perhaps what most surprises us in this strange recital is the comparative leniency with which the Christians were treated, and the cordial relations which existed between them and the Turks. Their faith and rituals were not merely tolerated but even encouraged by the Baxa. " Dog," he INVENI PORTAM 777 answered to one of the gaolers who complained of the evil language used by the Papaz to his holy nabi Mahomet- dog! what business is it of thine to hear what the Papaz preaches. Dost thou want perchance to become a Christian ? Leave them alone; are they not within the walls of their dwelling-place, and is it likely they should speak well of Mahomet?" And in the Baths, ill lighted, miserable, and damp as they were, a sort of dark, obscure cave was set apart for the Christians' Mass said by a priest, bought for that purpose by the Baxa, who was free to go and come, and was treated with consideration and respect. Put it down tc the meanest of motives viz. to prevent the Christians turning renegades, and thus becoming unavailable for service as oarsmen in the galleys the Baxa proved himself a deeper politician than Ferdinand, Isabella, and Philip II., their great-grandson, then by the grace of God burning heretics by the score, in Christian Spain. The gentle benevolence and transparent simplicity i good friar quickly won him the hearts of Turk and Chris alike The Christian captives provided him with food, clol es, and money. The Sultanas, the Baxa's mother and mother-in- law the latter a Greek from Chio sent him presents of linen and food from their own table; the Baxa's baker a loaf daily from the batch of bread baked especially for the seraglio. Priest, confessor, umpire, mediator, all in one, writing letters for renegades, in which, as he naively confesses, he contrived to inform the Viceroy of matters affecting the interests of Christendom, so wore away the long monotonous hours of captivity The Turks who frequented the little eating-booths kept by the Christians, attracted thither by the Requm or Christian brandy, invited him to eat and drink with them 1 they ought a n at the hands of the Christian barber, they prudently made him the depositary of their fees "Keep these ?en ducats, Father," they said, "and if Maese Pedro cures us within such and such a time, let him have them, and if not, return them to us, for we are not such fools as the people of your country, and give the doctor money not to attend us but to heal us" Oh, wise Moors! An old man, inspired by I know not what admiration for his harmless Character brought his sick grandchild to receive the miraculous touch of the gent e Papaz^ Christians grown old and useless in ^vity related to him a thousand curious facts about the country, and these 1 WSU Witha ovable n and ^/vanity characteristic of the man, he records the notable results of his teaching; and although we, 778 SANTA TERESA refuse to believe that a Moor wept when he heard Christ's name reviled, or that Christmas was kept in more esteem than Mahomet's birthday, he unconsciously shows us that he was himself both loved and venerated. And we see no reason to doubt the somewhat unseasonable devotion of a drunken Turk, who on being shown a crucifix, and told that it was Cidnaica (the Lord Jesus), and the woman at his feet La Miria, his mother, sallied forth into the Jewish quarter, and, shouting " Chifutiguidi que matastes a Cidnaiga," " Cuckold Jews, who murdered Christ ! " broke as many Jewish heads as came in contact with his cudgel. So the days wore away in the dark, narrow underground cellar. At daylight the heavy bolts clashed, and the gates were opened for the captives to go to their work. For a brief interval at midday, whilst the camels were being watered, the friar was allowed to drag his chains into the sunlit courtyard, hemmed in on one side by the Baths, on the other by the massive walls of the Alcagava or fortress. Here for a moment, as he listened to the hoarse guttural shout of the camel-drivers, and the challenge of the white - robed sentinels sitting motionless with their muskets ; above, great breadths of glistering walls, whose flame-shaped battlements were cut out in a frame of vivid azure, the Castilian monk became a part of that strange Eastern phantasmagoria around him. And at sunset, when the chains had grated in the locks for the night, for even these poor wretches not being in an English gaol or workhouse knew a gleam of joy and brightness, Gracian enjoyed for a fugitive moment his old oratorical triumphs, as perched on a tub at the church door he roused them with words as eloquent, perhaps more so, than those which had made him famous in the universities of Spain. Then, too, you might have heard the tinkle of guitars, and six hundred voices raised in vespers. No matter that they kept but little time or measure. I even think that they reached heaven as nearly, as if they had rolled through the resounding roof of the most magnificent cathedral. On greater occasions, when they celebrated the festivals of their church with lute and zither, the Turks lent them silks and brocades to adorn the church and patio. Teresa had judged well. There was in the composition of the unfortunate friar a heroic strain which, developed under happier circumstances, might have girt his brow also with the aureole of the saints. In the humble, faithful performance of his mission devoting the gifts that poured in on him to the relief of the sick and the hungry, who were even poorer and INVENI PORTAM 779 more miserable than he himself, he found such tranquillity and happiness that he describes these two years in the Bath Tunis as the most peaceful of his life. Twice it would seem that he was in danger of being burnl alive, for the rumour got about that he was an Inquisitor and the fact of his having been captured on board an Inquisitic frigate, freighted with instruments of torture, lent it a sims seeming of truth. The janissaries demanded him of the Bax, To put him to death ; but the Baxa had no idea of burning even an Inquisitor whom he had decided to be worth thirty thousand crowns at least-and so the matter dropped. Eliseo with such contempt for the Turks, and such daring against them, that in all his sermons he never failed to speak il of Mahomet, and publicly taunt him as a dog." "is conversion of a Christian renegade from Salamanca, who had Arabic, drove the one to the oars, and loaded the other with a hundredweight of iron. Not that the Baxa cared for it was to his gain, Is he frankly confessed.-but Cerberus o^oiially demands his sop. "Well! what do I care," he said, that El MTmi has turned Christian? Would that there were more of them and so for this crime we shall take him from his master put him in irons, and have another 'galley-slave the more ; and as for the Papaz, put him into the Magyar chains thes hav in- been brought especially from Constantinople for the use of a notorious sla-capLn. In June of ,59 4 - thj .poor Q fnar - * discerned a chance of freedom. -Six ransom were already deposited in Tabarca The Baxa himselt " on th point of leaing Tunis on a ^-g" intending to return, was in terrible need of money 3S5S^wfe5S? : ^s^ twg^ Towers of the Black Sea. But the Baxa, who had already a 780 SANTA TERESA Mass. But now he could scarce crawl out to see the sky and breathe the air. He was closely watched by a sentinel, Man^ur, who inspected his irons every night. So through the long summer months he lay stretched on his crib " and what we suffered from fleas, filth, stench, rats, and fear of phantasms that went about those caves, was of itself a certain kind of martyr- dom ; so that the worst dungeon of a Christian prison is a delightful garden in comparison to what one goes through there." In August a dispute about his ransom again dashed the cup from his lips, the very day before that on which he was to have regained his freedom. The 400 crowns lent him by the generous silversmith, and which he wore round his legs con- cealed beneath his fetters, he now devoted to releasing others, " leaving," as he says, " his own rescue to God ; and if he had had in his possession the 600 of Tabarca, he would have spent them in the same way." It was to the Baxa's need for money to pay his janissaries that Gracian at length owed his freedom. It was impossible to delay their payment even for a day, nor would want of funds be accepted as any excuse. About this time also the Lomelines (?) of Tabarca sent the Baxa a present, and entreated him to accept of the 600 crowns. He rejected the offer with scorn. A day before the janissaries were to be paid, the Baxa in great per- turbation sent for one Simon Escanisi, a wealthy Tunisian Jew. Now this Jew had just arrived from a journey to Gaeta, Naples, and Sarcoli, where he had been repeatedly urged by Gracian's friends to leave no means untried to bring about his release. " I know not how to look for money for thee," said cunning Simon, " since thou wilt not sell this Papaz, whom I know to be a poor friar, and never in his life wilt thou get more out of him than the 600 crowns in Tabarca. Do not lose the money nor the opportunity, for one of these days he will die on your hands, and you will get nothing." At length, after a long dispute, the Jew beat the Baxa down to 3000 crowns. " If we let this occasion slip," said the good Jew to the poor Papaz, " I see no hope of your ever getting free, and one by one we will deliver you from your imprisonment, for after all, God is great." Nor had Gracian any hope either ; but he held his tongue that he might not be thought to belittle the God that the Jew called great. At the critical moment, when the Baxa knew not where to turn to fill his empty coffers, Simon appeared with 600 ducats, and the bargain was closed at 1000. Off speeds good and cunning Simon to the Baths. After two years' imprisonment INVENI PORTAM 7 Sl Gracian's fetters are at last knocked off, and he himself safely lodged in the house of the French Consul. It was enough to make one praise God, the pleasure shown by many Turks an Moors, who met him in the street after having seen him in chains. Some said, Zalam alicum />*/** '-God be with thee; others Sfcuwfc-Praise be to God, and like salutations. Others took and entertained him in their houses, or showed him their wardens, and all that there was to see in Tunis. To the relief of Simon, however (who saw his 1000 crowns in jeopardy so long as Gracian remained in Tunis; for, unable to forget the dialectics of the schools, or the learning whose brilliancy had dazzled his contemporaries the honest friar could scarce refrain from accepting the challenge of the Mofiti and Cadi to enter with them the lists of theological discussion), the beginning of May found him on his way to Biserta. After a stormy passage and a narrow escape from recapture, he arrived in Genoa and begged his way to Rome, where : he took out a brief to beg in order to refund his ransom. T Congregation de Regularibus revoked his sentence and expulsion and ordered the Descalzos once more to receive him into their bosom But it was not to be. Doria and Mariano indeed were dead and gone to their account, but the Order was still governed bv their creatures. He finally took the habit of the Caked Carmelites who treated him with every honour and consideration the Genemrs cell being set apart for him in the Monastery of San Martin in Montibus. For five years he remained m Rom visited the in e emomen o Deza. Once again he visited the salute his family, and had the supreme consolation of beir h ' S A man whose teaming was rather diverse and curious ^than i Again I must note that the Arabic is Gracian's, not mine. 782 SANTA TERESA enough he analysed and knew (a knowledge that many of us never attain to) the secret of his material failure. Indecision and want of confidence in himself were the remote causes of his ruin. "One may say," writes his friend, Marmol, "that the very candour of his disposition was the cause of his lacking the malice or caution which is often so necessary amongst the sons of Adam, and from this perhaps came the greater part of his woes." From the very outset he became the victim of the strangest caprices of fortune, and if one believed in predestination, in him we might find a startling example of it. Let us say with the unknown annotator perhaps a member of his own family who has written it on the yellow- stained margin of my copy of Marmol's pages, published four years after his death, in Valladolid : O juicios de Dios ! O juicios de los hombres ! EPILOGUE Thus fittingly from Avila of the Saints, and no less fittingly from a country where the Church for a thousand years was indeed militant, came the last great saint of mediaevalism, in many respects the greatest of them all. There will be no more saints. The world will go on producing great people, or rather great people will be born into it, with sympathies as large, as bold to dare, as brave to do, and as little understood as she was. But the world itself has changed ; the scene is no longer the same. To idealise greatness to such a superlative degree as it has been idealised in Teresa, presupposes a force and vigour of conviction, a power of enthusiasm, a capability of those very qualities it idealises, which it has ceased to possess. It is the especial grace of these privileged beings to force mankind to shake off its inertia, and for a moment to inspire into it that bright glow, that eager intensity of purpose the reflection of their own. She died at the right moment. It is the sad privilege of great minds to feel the full bitterness of disillusion, to discover the depth of the chasm between the ideal and reality. The bright and luminous vision so fair in the distance which had beckoned her on to each successive effort, was inexorably destined to lose its beauty and mystery when chained down and shut in within palpable stone walls. To materialise the intangible is a sacrilege punished on EPILOGUE 783 the daring and exalted mind that conceives it, as inexorably as the theft of Prometheus. Teresa's last moments were saddened by some sue conviction. As those who continue and bring to its completi some admirable cathedral-that of Avila, for instance- incapable of understanding or carrying out the grand of the unknown architect who first conceived it ; so too her prioresses, incapable of comprehending, responded intentions of their foundress. Division had broken out amongst her friars. Had she lived longer she too would probably have incurred the same disgrace that blighted the name and fame Gracian, and embittered the last moments of San Juan "Great is the power and majesty of Death. Never greater than in this, that in its cold clear light we read all that escaped us in the life that has gone. A thousand little circum- stances that seemed so insignificant in the acting, become invested with I know not what sudden majesty and grande Imagination endeavours to pierce the thin haze between us and the voice that is silent, the heart that is for ever still, degrees the loved image, now shrouded in all the mystery of the unknown and the irreparable, becomes a distant ai beautiful picture, and every detail, regarded with such slight attention at the time, then reveals to us its hidden meaning. Then it was, but not till then, that those poor coarse alpargatas in which she trod over so many leagues of Castihan tracks ; ; the staff on which she leant in old age, became, and justly, the most nu buried her with little honour. The mausoleum of religious literature which weighs down her memory bears to me a strange ^^*^ ta ** # Jj stones and brick and mortar that broke in her coffin 1 Alba From these I have endeavoured to disinter her with tovSg and reverent hands, and to paint her, however feebly, as in very truth and seeming she walked in the world of mi. And so Teresa and her friars pass before me into the nig With them goes ou? old Spain, its gloomy stateliness, its austere repose its grave interiors, its democratic impulses. She has 3^>^^5 in the gray escutcheoned houses of Avila; i 784 SANTA TERESA villages lost in the wilds of La Mancha and Castille, far from the turmoil of men, she and the spirit of her age linger flickeringly. A nun's figure small, indeed, in the immensity of past and future once knelt for a moment in those great cathedrals, as the roll of Tenebrae or the glad Te Deum of triumph thundered above the aisles ere she too went her way into space. In remote country districts, a meson, a venta, where she once passed the night in those ceaseless pilgrimages, is still pointed out by the inhabitants, and, without ceasing to welcome the wayfarer now as then, is for ever consecrated to her memory. Perhaps to me, however, she has lived most vividly, I have seen her most distinctly, as the donkey's feet sink noiselessly into the sand of the narrow paths which traverse hither and thither the immense plateaux of Castille. There in the silence of some hot noonday, broken only by the chirp of a bird, or murmurs of myriads of crickets lost in the fine lush grass around me the paramera strewn thickly with grim fantastic boulders, lit up here and there by bright patches of grain ; flecked with masses of scarlet poppies or corn-flowers, whose stars of vivid blue are profiled sharply against the searching sky there, as the sun lingers high above and the afternoon wears on apace, like confused strains of music which seem to float from space and time, not so perfectly co-ordinated as to form a definite melody, have I caught those odds and ends of memories, forgotten instincts, a persistent re-assertion of the past, lurking in the brain, and handed on unconsciously from father to son, which first led me to write the Life of Teresa de Jesus. In upland villages, amongst simple country people have I found the clearest glimpses (if still obscure) of the conditions of her life. Duruelo, still intact, thanks to the laudable incuria of the Spanish peasant, is after three centuries redolent of her memory. Her hand planted the poplars beside the gateway. A skull half buried in the sand of the little graveyard close by is that of some forgotten friar, whose life blossomed for a moment in the desert, and faded tranquilly into night. Yes ! Let me look well on the landscape photograph it well on the chambers of the brain ; the blue mountains of Piedrahita in the distance still faintly streaked with snow, the brown plain around me; the streamlet (Rio al mar) winding through its grassy bottom ; the oak glades I rode through in the morning light ; in the background the brilliant sky, framing all as in a picture. For on the same spot where I now stand, she also stood three centuries ago, and blotted out for a moment sky, and stream, and sandy track. Here then; in Malagon EPILOGUE 785 where the rude boards in the gateway commemorate her visits; in Villanueva de la Jara, buried amongst the olive yards, I find her still, if not in visible presence, in invisible potentiality. The gray, time-stained walls, the humble rustic interior, the rough woodwork, the darkness, the obscurity, the austere repose, the unbroken tranquillity of these old buildings show us what these primitive convents were what she herself was too, whose life lies imprisoned in them for ever. Sometimes so little has all changed one almost fancies the little procession of peasants one passes journeying to worshipi-at her shrine across the treeless wastes or through the sunlit oak glades, will meet not the saint, but the simple Castilian gentlewoman, who three centuries ago journeyed seated on an ass even as they do now. ! Saint that trodst this earth 4 6 7, 577, 608. Salazar, Maria de, 219. Salcedo, Francisco de, 126, 169, 551 Salerno, Princess of, 630. Saludador (health giver), 101. San Bartolome, Ana de, 727. Sandoval, Catalina de, 445. Sandoval, Don Cristobal de, 488. San Francisco, Maria de, 176. San Geronimo, Maria de, 265. San Gil (the Jesuit College), 134- San Jose, Convent of, 202; foundation of, 223 ; rules of life in, 252. San Jose, Maria de, 503, 520, 527, 660. San Juan de los Reyes, church in Toledo, 371. San Juan del Puerto, 467. San Millan, hermit of, 140, note. San Segundo, legend of, 78. Santa Barbada, story of, 79. Santo Domingo, Isabel de, 361, 424. Santo Matia, Fray German de, 574. Santo Tomas, monastery of, n. Sega, Philip, Bishop of Ripa, 571, 582, 603. Segovia, Teresa at, 421. Seraphic doctor (Teresa), 155. Seraphic vow, 165. " Serranos," 6. Seville, nuns of, 524, 606, 660 ; Teresa at, 490; Gracian at, 519. Silva, Ruy Gomez de, 337, 350. Sonsoles, shrine of, 1 6. Soria, 676 ; Teresa travels to, 674. Spain, art in, 26 ; in sixteenth century, 1 8, 30, 136; church music of, 26; literature in, 26. Suarez, Fray Augustin, 519. TERESA, her brothers, 14 ; mysticism of, 41, 63, I2 5 ; visions and ecstasies oi, 45' 141-150, 409; as a religious re- former, 47 ; and the Inquisition, 56 ; autobiography of, 57 ; style of, 57, 172 ; contemporary biographers of, 59 ; woman, 61 ; birth and childhood, 6t her father's house, 71 ; her reading, 81 personal appearance, 83, 679; enters cloister, 96 ; at Castellanos de 1 Canada, 98 5 her return to th< Encarnacion, 112; MS. of her lite, 124 356 ; puts herself under the Jesuits guidance, 130 ; her divine "locutions, 135 ; her detractors and opponents, 156; transverberation of her heart, K4. 7 <;o; conflict with demons, 158; her vision of hell, 161 ; her " Rela- tions," 165, 390 5 her treatise of prayer, 170 : charm of, 172 ; her Mondas, 176, 768 ; on prayer, 178-191 ; her miracles, 210 388, 451 ; predictions of, 212, 449 ? letters to her brother Lorenzo, 215 ; founds San Jose", 223 ; her doubts, 230 ; 792 SAXTA TERESA her Camitio de Perfection, 267 ; founds Malagon, 307; her life, 313, 643; her letters, 313-321, 512 ; founds Duruelo, 319; founds Toledo, 322; founds Pastrana, 354 ; her house in Toledo, 367 ; founds Salamanca, 373 ; founds Alba de Tormes, 380 ; prioress of Encarnacion, 400, 401 ; opposition to, 402 ; her rule as abbess, 404 ; travels to Salamanca, 413 ; at Segovia, 421 ; her worldly shrewdness, 432 ; travels to Veas, 449, 451 ; at Seville, 490; her first interview with Gracian, 475 ; her arrival at Cordoba, 483 ; residence at Toledo, 515 ; her Fundaciones, 544~ 548 ; her bearing in trial, 599 ; triumph- ant journeys, 629, 640 ; her character, 660 ; at Palencia, 662 ; care for her nuns, 668 ; travels to Soria, 674 ; portrait of, frontispiece, 679 ; couplets by, 683 ; her last hours, 726 ; her death, 730 ; burial of, 732 ; her body removed to Avila, 735 ; her body taken back to Alba, 737 ; description of her corpse, 739 ; miracles by her relics, 741 ; beatification of, 745 ; canonisation of, 750 ; chosen patroness of Spain, 751- Teresian vow, 165. Tendilla, Count of, 602. Tiemblo, 329. Toledo, 216, 333 ; Church of San Juan de los Reyes, 371 ; Teresa's house in, 368, 515. Toledo, Don Luis de, 458. Toledo, Fr. Garcia de, 221. Tolosa, Catalina de, 706, 711, 713. Torno, 266, note. Torquemada, .13. Tostado, Fray Geronimo, 509, 573, 583. Traggia, Padre, 68. Treatise of prayer, 171. Tunis, Baxa (pasha) of, 775. Turkish corsairs, 774. UtLOA, Da. Guiomar de, 134, 163, 196. VALLADOLID, 317 ; scene in, 589. Vanda, Pedro de la, 419. Vargas, Fray Francisco de, 463, 470 ; prior of Cordoba, 459. Vasquez, 353. Veas, 444 ; Teresa's arrival at, 451 ; monastery of, 540. Vejamen, Cartel de, 407. "Vejamen Espiritual," 551. Villanueva de la Jara, 639 ; foundation of, 626. Visions of Teresa, 45, 141-150, 409. Vow, Teresian, 165. YEPES, 59, 683. Printed by MORRISON & GIBB LIMITED, Edinburgh UC SOUTXRN REGONtt. LOMRY FOUTY A 000714138 5