It is inevitable sacrilege for anyone in this generation, which has traveled so far from the days of faith, to touch on Teresa"s raptures and locutions, for in sheer ignorance we profane what is holy. The saint herself foresaw our difficulty. "I know that whoever shall have arrived at these raptures will understand me well; but he who has had no experience therein, will consider what I say to be foolish.... However much I desire to speak clearly concerning what relates to prayer, it will be obscure for him who has no experience therein.... Some may say these things seem impossible, and that it is good not to scandalize the weak.... I consider it certain that whoever shall receive any harm by believing it possible for G.o.d in this land of exile to bestow such favors, stands in great need of humility; such a person keeps the gate shut against receiving any favors himself." So unparalleled was her life of ecstasy that at first the saint doubted if it were heaven sent or not; she submitted herself humbly to the tests of that inquisition age till at length her own good judgment told her that this "joy surpa.s.sing all the joys of the world, all its delights, all its pleasures," was from G.o.d, because of its after-effects, an added peace, a deeper humility, a more ardent and practical love of souls. But her clear brain and transcendent honesty made her see the risk for weaker minds: "The highest perfection," she warns, "does not consist in raptures nor in visions, nor in the gift of prophecy, but in making our will so conformable with the will of G.o.d that we shall receive what is bitter as joyfully as what is sweet and pleasant."
Mysticism skirts indeed perilous precipices, but St. Teresa walked the narrow path securely, her eyes uplifted, oblivious of the dangers below.
I dare not touch on her marvelous life of the spirit.[19] All I can say is, go to her own works, read them in their pure, native Castilian, do not be content with the few extreme quotations given perhaps by those who would discredit her; read her in various moods, as you do the "Imitation," and I doubt if she fails to convince you that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our negative philosophy, that a few rare souls have risen to supreme heights because they were really humble and really holy, that religion has preserved from total loss the subtlest faculty of man, and faith stood up bravely through centuries of intellectual contempt to battle for it. Recently I came across a review of some works on psychology by that able young English novelist, Robert Hugh Benson; it ended with these suggestive words:
"In Psychology, science and religion are very near to one another, for its subject is nothing else than the soul of man. Science in her winding explorations has been for centuries drawing nearer to this center of the maze: she has traversed physical nature, the direct work of G.o.d, and philosophy, the direct product of man....
Is it too much to hope that when science has advanced yet a few steps more she may have come to Faith with the human soul newly discovered in her hands: "Here is a precious and holy thing that I have found in man, a thing which for years I have denied or questioned. Now I hand it over to the proper authority. It has powers of which I know little or nothing, strange intuitions into the unseen, faculties for communication which do not find their adequate object in this world ... a force of habit which is meaningless if it ends with time; an affinity with some element that cannot rise from matter as its origin. Take it from my hands for you alone understand its needs and capacities. Enliven it with the atmosphere it must have for its proper development, feed it, cleanse it, heal its hurts, train it to use and control its own powers, and prepare it for Eternity.""
Let the reader before he opens the "Way of Perfection" know the saint"s "Life"[20] which she wrote, by the advice of her superior, when forty-six years of age; it is an autobiography worthy to rank with Augustine"s "Confessions." Read also the few hundred racy letters written after the press of the day while the convent slept. Chief of all, let the reader, if he is practical, know that inimitable book of her fifty-eighth year, the "Foundations," with its Cervantes-like pictures of the people and customs of the time. Perhaps only those who have traveled on Spanish country-roads, those tracts of mud or rocks, can appreciate the hardships endured by this aged woman as she went from city to city to found her houses; in heavy snows to Salamanca; to Seville in a covered cart turned to purgatory by the direct rays of the Andalusian sun, with fever and only hot water to drink; rivers overflowed by heavy rains; boats upset in the rivers. The last foundation was at Burgos, barely four months before her death, the jolting cart in which she rode from Palencia having to be pulled out of the ruts and she entered the coldest city in the Peninsula on a raw January day in a heavy rain, there to find further troubles.
Familiar with Teresa"s physical endurance, her cool-headed business ability, her candid hatred of shams and pretence, then approach her loftier self and read the "Camino de Perfeccion." The treatise on prayer in the "Life," (Chap. XI to XXII) prepares one for this second book, which she wrote for her sisters and daughters of "St. Joseph"s" in Avila, "those pure and holy souls whose only care was to serve and praise Our Lord, so disengaged from the things of the world, solitude is their delight." Through the "Way of Perfection" runs her beautiful exposition of the Pater Noster, with digressions to right and left as her thoughts arose. She tells of the intangible land of worship in magic-laden words that draw the cold heart to the far realm of contemplation wherein lay the source of her strength. The "Camino" leads one to her last book, the "Interior Castle," a glorious paean to G.o.d, a courageous exploring of the untrodden realms of the soul that is truly one of the triumphs of the spirit, and when we consider it was written by a woman of sixty-two, worn out with labors and penance, living in a poor little convent, it is an incredible feat of genius. In all literature is found nothing loftier nor more ethereal: "Oh, "tis not Spanish but "tis Heaven she speaks!"
Teresa belonged to the race of the true mystics because she was a great saint. It has been said that sainthood, the divine hunger of the soul to do or to suffer _pro causa Dei_ is as difficult to define to the imagination as genius. The materialist may scoff at it, but it remains a primitive part of human nature against which argument beats itself in vain. Its form may change with the times, the Eastern anchorite and the mediaeval ascetic may give way to the administrative bishop needed in his age; to a knightly paladin such as that "Raleigh among the Saints" who led his Free Lances to the fight for the salvation of souls; to a large-hearted philanthropist like Vincent de Paul, with his unresting Sisters of Charity; to a scholar of the schools, a Newman; to the reformer in our ugly modern cities; under varying vestures the spirit is the same. In the compelling power of her saints lies the force of the Church; to the saints of the Catholic Reformation, to Philip Neri, Charles Borromeo, Francis Borgia, Francis de Sales, Francis Xavier, Ignatius Loyola, the Church owes her rehabilitation. These great souls rose in every land to purify abuses, to drive the money changers from the temple: they were the leaven in the hundred measures of meal.
Macaulay noted the fact that since the middle of the sixteenth century Protestantism has not gained one inch of ground, and this is due to these saints of the Catholic Reformation; for deep in man"s heart lies a reverence for simple goodness that overrides all disputes, and when such saints arose in the church that was called a sink of iniquity, men paused; those who had pa.s.sed from her ranks did not return, but none after followed them. Had Luther been gifted with more of this personal sainthood, the fatal division that bequeathed centuries of hate and warfare might have been avoided, and the simpler method of example, of holiness of life, have sufficed for reforming Renaissance Rome intoxicated with the revival of pagan culture. Such regrets are futile, a mere weighing the weight of the fire, a measuring the blast of the wind; and they are ungrateful, too, since the spirit of that troubled time roused among other great souls, a Teresa de Cepeda y Ahumada.
The writings of this remarkable woman have the same allurements for us to-day as when they flowed almost unconsciously from her pen, for besides her mysticism and her sainthood, she was a poet, of the race of those whose thoughts make rich the blood of the world. Her little nuns tell that when she wrote her hand moved so rapidly, it seemed hardly possible it could form human words, while in her face was an expression of exaltation. "She ranks as a miracle of genius, as perhaps the greatest woman who ever handled pen, the single one of all her s.e.x who stands beside the world"s most perfect masters," is the testimony of the ablest English critic of Spanish literature. She wrote with her eye direct on her soul"s experience, with the glorious courage to give the naked truth regardless of consequences, and she will be read as long as sincerity of soul-expression is the poet"s best gift and while the conflict of faith and unbelief remains the highest of human themes.
Mystic, saint, and poet, she can claim yet another t.i.tle, that of philosopher. By the road of self-study, she reached that sublime height of metaphysics, the intellectual vision of the Absolute. The further Psychology advances, the more wonderful is found her knowledge of the soul and its moods and powers. "The highest, most generous philosophy that ever man imagined," wrote the scholar, Luis de Leon. "Sainte Terese a explore plus a fond que tout autre les regions inconnues de l"ame, ...
elle explique savamment, clairement, le mecanisme de l"ame evoluant des que Dieu la touche ... une sainte qui a verifie sur elle-meme les phases sur-naturelles qu"elle a decrites, une femme dont la lucidite fut plus qu"humaine" is the appreciation of Huysmans. Not only orthodox believers yield her this preeminence: Leibnitz read and deeply admired her; a recent French critic of the skeptic school compares her to Descartes.
Hyperbole is inevitable in speaking of this "sweet incendiary," and all who know her books feel the same enthusiasm. "A woman for angelical height of speculation, for masculine courage of performance, more than a woman," wrote the old English poet, Richard Crashaw, whose "Flaming Heart" is touched with her own potency:
"Oh thou undaunted daughter of desires!
By all thy dower of lights and fires; By all the eagle in thee, all the dove; And by thy lives and deaths of love, By thy large draughts of intellectual day; And by thy thirsts of love more large than they;...
By all the Heav"n thou hast in Him, (Fair sister of the seraphim!) By all of Him we have in thee; Leave nothing of myself in me, Let me so read thy life that I Unto all life of mine may die."
Spain may claim the glory of having appreciated this her greatest daughter. She is a colonel of artillery; she is a doctor in Salamanca; the ma.n.u.script of her "Life" was placed in the Escorial and the King carried the key; at country inns they tell of the night she rested there, as if it had been yesterday; her devotees to-day sign their letters "_su amigo teresiano_." It was reserved for later generations of different race to explain what they could not understand by calling it hysteria and epilepsy. Richard Ford"s account of the saint is so wide of the original that Froude, no lover of Catholic Spain, says it is not even a caricature; the article on her in the Encyclopedia Brittanica is a disgrace to intellectual thought.
Spain stands indifferent to such criticism. She knows herself secure in her mystics who seem to have left the race an intuitive understanding of the life of the soul. This inherited intuition has, of course, its dangers, for all intelligences are not those of a Teresa de Jesus. It needs indeed "large draughts of intellectual day" to be a mystic.
Valdes" novel, "Marta y Maria" shows this mistaken insisting in the nineteenth century on conditions of life suitable to the sixteenth. But because smaller minds have imitated her disastrously, their neo-mysticism need not be considered a serious menace in modern Spain, since following a saint, even haltingly, is not by any means an easy life to choose.
St. Teresa and Avila: her name evokes that of her native city as instantly as St. Francis" that of a.s.sisi; every stone in Avila breathes of the heroic woman. Our first visit was to the small plaza under the city walls, where the _casa solar_ of the Cepeda family stood. Teresa came of the unt.i.tled gentry of Castile, _de sangre muy limpia_, and a Spaniard"s pride in his blood, untouched by Moorish taint, by crime, or illegitimacy, is as strong to-day as then: perhaps it is this pride, in peasant as well as n.o.ble, that makes the democratic relation of the cla.s.ses in the Peninsula.
At right angles to the mediocre church built in commemoration, on the site of the Cepeda house, stands the mansion of the Duque de la Roca, which gives a good idea of the solid escutcheoned homes of the hidalgo.
Many such dignified houses are scattered over Avila, making a stroll in her streets full of the charm of surprise; their chief adornments are the doorways, truly splendid old portals with coping stones sometimes nine feet deep radiating round the entrance. In one of these solid Romanesque houses Teresa was born in 1515. Through a city gate before her house, I looked out on just the same scene she had known during the first eighteen years of her life; the rocky plain, through which the river wound, stretched to a spur of the Guadarrama mountains, capped already with the winter"s snow. Leaving the venerable little plaza, I descended the steep street that led to the river bridge, in the spirit of pilgrimage still, for the child Teresa and a small brother wandered here alone one day on their way to seek martyrdom among the infidels.
Met by an uncle beyond the bridge, the runaways were brought home. Truly in the saint"s life, the child was father to the man, her days bound each to each in natural piety, despite that short period which her too tender conscience ever regretted when, as a pretty girl, love of fine clothes and flattery allured her. It is told of these remarkable children, that, hearing the word "Forever," they clasped their little hands and gazed wide-eyed in each other"s faces, overcome by its stupendous meaning.
[Ill.u.s.tration: HOUSE OF THE DUQUE DE LA ROCA, AVILA]
When Teresa was eighteen she went to visit a married sister who lived at a distance, and on her return stopped to see an uncle who had just taken the resolution of entering a monastery. The religious feeling in her partly awoke, and she too desired the life of the cloister, but her parents not finding strength to part with her, one morning she and a brother slipped away from home, and after he had conducted her to the Carmelite Convent of the Incarnation outside the walls, he went on himself to beg admittance at the Dominican Convent of St. Thomas. For over twenty-five years Teresa lived in the _Encarnacion_: during the first twenty years she was miserable in bodily health and as miserable in spirit, for the saint had not yet found her vocation, and the laxity of the rule allowed the nuns to see much of the world, to receive visitors and hear the gossip of the town. "I was tossed about in a wretched condition, for if I had small content in the world, in G.o.d I had no pleasure. At prayer time I watched for the clock to strike the end of the hour." Strange words for this future great genius of prayer!
Her conversion, the change of heart that sooner or later, disregarded or welcomed, comes to all who live with any depth, came to Teresa as she was approaching her fortieth year. She had been roused to more serious thoughts by her father"s death, and one day in the oratory she suddenly seemed to realize in a figure of her crucified Saviour the unspeakable wonder of his sacrifice:
"Thy hands to give Thou can"st not lift.
Yet will Thy hand still giving be, It gives, but O, itself"s the gift, It gives tho" bound, tho" bound "tis free."
"Love touch"t her heart, and lo! it beats High, and burns with such brave heats Such thirst to die, as dares drink up A thousand cold deaths in one cup."
With the inflowing of true religion, Teresa longed for a stricter life, for the original rule of Mount Carmel as conferred by Innocent IV in 1248. She was misunderstood by those around her, her locutions and visions doubted; as a natural result of the false _beata_ of that day, she was considered a woman who for the sake of notoriety pretended to sainthood. Only after years of semi-persecution did the ring of truth and the ethical fervor of Teresa"s words convince the learned men who examined her, and she was allowed to leave the _Encarnacion_ to found the convent of St. Joseph, her first house of the barefoot or _descalzos_ Carmelites.
a.s.sociated so closely as is the _Encarnacion_ with the saint, it is with emotion one looks down from the city on the pleasant oasis it makes in the rocky plain. Teresa had there the memorable interviews with St.
Francis Borgia, just returned from a visit to his friend and former lord, Charles V at Yuste; with the mystic poet, St. John of the Cross (whom Coventry Patmore has followed in his "Unknown Eros"); with St.
Peter of Alcantara, who too held that "the cornerstone and chief foundation of all is humility." These devout men confirmed Teresa in her belief in the divine origin of her prayer: "There is no pleasure or comfort which can be equal to meeting with another person to whom G.o.d has given some beginnings of the same dispositions," she wrote, harra.s.sed by the petty suspicions around her.
A tenderer a.s.sociation than the _Encarnacion_ is that of _San Jose_, her first foundation. The convent lies outside the Puerta del Alcazar, Gate of the Castle, past the plaza where the townspeople stroll under the arcades, and peasant women sell fragrant celery from the big saddle-baskets they lift from their donkeys" backs to the pavement. The visitor is shown treasured relics by the nuns, the quaint musical instrument their mother played on, her drinking jug, and wooden pillow, a letter in her strong, clear hand-writing. During the later strenuous years of her life the saint ever looked back lovingly here. "I lived for five years in the monastery of St. Joseph at Avila, and those now seem to me to be the most peaceful part of my life, the want of which repose my soul often feels." From the age of fifty-two to her death at sixty-six (1582) this wonderful woman traveled over Spain, founding her reformed order, sixteen convents for women and fourteen monasteries for men. While on a visit of inspection at Alba de Tormes the end came; with her favorite words of the Psalmist, "A contrite and humbled heart, O G.o.d, Thou wilt not despise," she pa.s.sed, as she had written in her "Way of Perfection," "not to a strange country, but to her native land."
Avila is worthy of her saint, Avila of the Knights, Avila the Loyal, the King"s Avila. It is one of the most perfect examples existing of the fortified towns of chivalry. Built on an eminence, it is completely encircled by grand old walls, forty feet high, whose sameness is broken by some eighty-six towers; two of these here and there are placed close together and arched, so as to make a gateway. Below the town on every side stretches a plain, so strewn with shattered rocks that it is easy to picture it the scene of some battle of giants. The Cathedral may be called part of the city ramparts, since its apse forms one of the eighty encircling towers; the walls are so thick that the radiating chapels round the chancel are not seen in the exterior view, being quite lost in the depth of stone and mortar. Our inn, the _Fonda Ingles_, looked out on the square before the Cathedral, a windy spot, where the gusts from the mountains seized and tossed the men"s long capes. Like Burgos and Salamanca, Avila is on the truncated mountain of central Spain, and one is reminded of its 3,500 feet of alt.i.tude by the bitter cold. Nothing can pierce so sharply as the wind of the Castile plains. Each day we crossed the gusty plaza to the church and so grew to know it with the heart-affection Spanish cathedrals win. The large windows have been walled up to darken the interior, for Spain, the hardy, the all-enduring, ignores the frosts of eight months of the year to provide against the summer heats. The details of Avila Cathedral are truly lovely; a double-aisled ambulatory round the warm s.p.a.ce of the High Altar, a _retablo_ of ancient pictures, isolated marble shrines between chancel and choir near which kneel groups of black-veiled worshipers, gleaming bra.s.s _rejas_, a carved _coro_ where the canons chant and where are ma.s.sive illuminated hymnals on the lectern, all make up one"s ideal of a house of G.o.d. Do not miss the sacristy, one"s ideal too of what a sacristy should be, with antique silver wrought by the De Arfe family, with painted and gilded cabinets, and alabaster altars cut like ivory.
St. Teresa"s city is small: one can encircle its walls several times in a const.i.tutional, yet every walk discovers new treasures. We were constantly stumbling on yet other of the imposing portals that exist in their perfection only here and at Segovia, and in the sleepy squares or courtyards we found some of the roughly-hewn stone animals, the primitive G.o.d of Druid days, used later by the Romans as milestones.
From these comes another t.i.tle for Avila, _Cantos y Santos_. An easy afternoon walk can be taken to Son Soles, a hermitage on the lower slope of the mountains, whither the saint must have gone in the summer evenings when the sunset glorified the plain and hills, for the customs of Avila to-day are those of Avila in the sixteenth century. A path led us across the aromatic fields, and country men in wide-brimmed velvet hats gazed at us with clear, fearless eyes, grave yet courteous, like true Castilians. In the meadows we met a gentleman of the town pacing slowly, book in hand; one would have time in the home of the mystic for such fruitful hours of pause, such sessions of sweet silent thought. On the way to Son Soles, just on the outskirts of the town, stands Santo Tomas, the Dominican monastery that long supplied missionaries to the Philippines. Before the High Altar is a white marble mausoleum of Isabella"s period, worthy to rank with that of her parents at Miraflores,--the truly touching tomb of her only son. He lies with calm upturned face, a crown on his thick locks, his gauntlets thrown beside him. The royal prince was educated with ten young n.o.bles in a former palace near this church. Generous, handsome, a scholar and musician, with the fair future stretching before him of the first king to rule the _Espanas_ rich and united, he died suddenly at Salamanca in 1497, turning all the conquests, all the discoveries of his parents" reign to dust and ashes. The Queen bowed her head in submission, saying "The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away, Blessed be his name": but it is told that she often came to sit in her special stall of the raised choir here, to gaze with broken heart on the white tomb of her son. Had he lived would Spain"s evil day have been averted? One can almost believe so; for tyrannic government came in with the Austrian, who ruled here because of Don Juan"s death. Charles V, Isabella"s grandson, was not a Spaniard; he could little understand the system of individual city rights that prevailed in the country he came to govern. Spain can boast she was one of the earliest of European nations to teach the munic.i.p.al doctrine that the state has freedom if the town is free. We too completely forget that it was nearly a century before the celebrated Leicester Parliament that Burgos in 1169 had popular representation.
When the Austrian arrived, with his autocratic idea that all power should be concentrated, the Castilian cities rose in the Comuneros rebellion, but they were ruthlessly put down and for three hundred years the land"s vigor and wealth were exploited for the benefit of one family. I am sure that as she sat pondering in the choir stall of Santo Tomas Isabella foresaw what a tragic loss to her cherished land was the death of her only son. Avila can link the names of Isabella la Catolica and Teresa de Jesus, the two most incomparable women in whom the s.e.x has culminated, both born on the bleak invigorating steppes of Castile, in the same province, within the same hundred years, both making an indelible impression on their race, both leaving a deathless heritage of aspiration and onspurring pride. Is there any wonder that a people who can claim two such heroines look at one with fearless eyes?
Avila is rich in tombs. There is a second lovely one in Santo Tomas, that of Prince John"s attendants, and down by the river bridge, the picturesque chapel of San Segundo holds a most beautiful work by Spain"s best sculptor, Berruguete. The kneeling bishop has so gentle an expression that it is hard to believe he could hurl a Moslem chief from the city walls above this hermitage. In the Cathedral, behind the High Altar, is another Berruguete tomb, Bishop Tostado, whose industry has pa.s.sed into a proverb; he is here represented with speaking, alert expression, leaning forward, this tireless pen suspended in his hand.
The tomb of St. Teresa is not found in her native city, for she was buried where she died, at Alba de Tormes, some miles from Salamanca. Not long after her death Avila stole the saint"s body--strange to our modern notions are those old disputes over relics--but through the influence of the Duke of Alva it was restored to his town.
Admiration for St. Teresa tempted me to Alba de Tormes, but to those who would go thither I must say, resist the temptation. Unfortunately, the spirit of religiosity, which is to religion what sentimentality is to sentiment, has taken possession of her burial place. If you do go to Alba, however, make it a day"s excursion from Salamanca. The evening was over before we reached the town, and we drove in darkness from the station, b.u.mping over the ruts of an awful road. Railway and villages seem often at enmity in Spain; though we had pa.s.sed directly by the gleaming lights of Alba, we ran on some miles further before stopping in its station, hence the necessity of a drive of several kilometers back to the town. The inn was most primitive, being merely the poor house of a country woman, our waiter at table her ten-year old son dressed in corduroys. A friendly pig met us in the front hall, coming out from the kitchen to look at the unaccustomed foreigners; nevertheless, the house was clean and the landlady got out fragrant linen for the bedrooms. On our admiring a picture of their great patroness, the kindly woman, after dusting it, presented it with the customary polite phrase of "this your picture," which was no mere formality, since the next morning when she found it secretly restored to its former place, she rushed out to thrust it again on us as we were stepping into the diligence. This generous landlady, our grave little garcon, the night watchman the _sereno_, calling the hours, a daybreak view from the plaza of the vivid green meadows along the river, these are the pleasant reminiscences of Alba.
Opposite the inn stood the church where the saint is buried, but willingly would I blot out its memory. An excitable monk was our guide.
He turned on the electric light with a spectacular air, as if that, not the great relic, was the boast of the church; he showed the saint"s silver tomb, her heart hung round with votive gifts, archbishop"s rings and diamond coronets, then he led us to the revolving door of the convent, whence personal mementoes were pa.s.sed us for inspection.
Lowering the lights, he bade us look through a grating at the back of the church, and suddenly the electricity was turned on in an interior room, and there on the cot lay the image of a Carmelite nun asleep. The whole thing was in the worst possible taste, on a level with the bad Churrigueresque architecture of the same period. A spot worthy of silent pilgrimage, where one of G.o.d"s greatest saints breathed her last prayer, "Cor contritum et humiliatum, Deus, non despicies," this solemn cell of her death-bed has been turned to a vulgar show. How Teresa"s intelligent simplicity would sweep aside such ill-judged honors! In silent protest at the tawdriness surrounding them, lie the patrons of this Alba foundation, Don Francisco Velasquez and his wife Dona Teresa, distinguished, superb effigies in stone, _hidalgo como el Rey_. Dona Teresa, in the delightful way of Spanish ladies on tombs, is reading tranquilly in her book of devotions.
With this example before us of the pa.s.s to which religious extravagance can be carried, it may be time to touch on a tendency in Spain that is a distress to the northern Catholic who is less childlike in his inward life. Of course, since there is every kind of temperament, there must be every kind of taste; perhaps I am too much guided by personal likes or dislikes. However, I feel that those who crave the appropriate and simple will agree with me that making allowance for an emotional people, a coquettish shepherdess under a gla.s.s case on a church altar, (such as I saw in Cadiz,) is misunderstood religion. One of Spain"s wisest sons, the philosopher Vives, agitated against the dressing of statues, and the Council of Trent later prohibited the bad usage. Why is not their advice followed? I do not mean to criticise the little country shrines whose inartistic decoration is often most heart-moving; in a remote village certain things are touching which elsewhere are displeasing. It should be the effort of the Spanish clergy to discourage the extreme devotion to special altars and statues. Artificial and roccoco in sentiment and expression, it is a menace to religion in the Peninsula. Spain has the vital Christian faith, she is unspoiled by the tinsel, beneath the symbol is a soul; but, if she insists on clinging to what the modern mind finds ugly and insincere, she may lose many to whom the inner religion of a St. Teresa would appeal. People seldom will see both sides justly; to rid themselves of an irritating detail, some will throw away the whole. There are not a few whose antipathy to religion has been caused by this blind clinging to the non-essential: the novelist Perez Galdos, I should say was such a case. Though his stories prove that he has never grasped what interior religion means, has never gone to the fountain head and drank of the pure, mystic waters, but has tasted only the contaminated streams of the valley, yet it cannot be denied that some of the religiosity he depicts is a phase that exists only too truly. The evil is the result of ignorance, not of malice. For this reason it would die a natural death were the Spanish clergy given a wholly rounded education. I do not refer here to the learned canons or monastic orders, but to the parochial clergy. Spain watches her neighbor France too closely, let her look further afield and she will lose her fear that education and skepticism go hand in hand; in England and America the priesthood is with the advancing tide, not against it: knowledge never yet harmed religion, but ignorance cripples her. Science should have no silly terrors for priests whose church is the greatest proof of evolution through the ages, advancing relentlessly so that what is worth retaining of man"s increasing knowledge finds its inevitable place in her body, but advancing slowly, (impatient abuse cannot hurry her magnificent conservatism); a complete organism, a living ent.i.ty ever changing, yet ever the same.[21] We can hardly expect the clergy of a land where tradition is a sacred thing, to be in the vanguard of modern thought, but they at least should not forget their own noted men of learning. Ximenez, Luis de Leon, Feijoo, Isla, Suarez, Balmes,--the names come crowding--all of them churchmen, who, the more they knew, the deeper grew their faith.
After this vexatious visit to Alba de Tormes, it was with trepidation that I came to Avila, there to find Teresa"s vigorous, truly-spiritual personality the living presence of the proud, high-minded little Castilian city. And a happy coincidence the night of our arrival gave proof that her generous enthusiasm, her unresting love of souls, were not things of the past. Having spent the day at the Escorial, at ten in the evening we took the express to Avila. In the carriage _Reservado para Senoras_, we found ourselves with three religious of the Sacred-Heart; a touch of home for me were their familiar fluted caps, b.u.t.toned capes, and silver crosses. The few hours of the journey fled all too swiftly in delightful talk; like nuns the world over, they were gay and happy as children, with the serene youth of the convent life in their faces. One of them was so distinguished a woman that it was a fascination to look at her.
These fragile nuns were to travel through the cold night--and a raw November gale was blowing over the uplands of Castile--to take a steamer at Bordeaux, for they were pioneers, on their way to found a house in a distant part of South America, where education was backward. Three weeks of winter sea, then some tropical days on horseback, before they reached their desolate new home! Truly the heroic spirit of St. Teresa is alive to-day, and fair sisters of the seraphim still walk among us.
EVENING IN AVILA
Around about the town stand eighty gray stone towers, That make a fitter crown, a hardier show than flowers For what is high and brave--the tawny Castile plain-- So patient and so grave, incarnate soul of Spain.
You have made sweet the ways of penury and care With dawn and sunset praise and white still hours of prayer, Old town of mystic saint! Secure you ask: Does peace, Or restless seeking plaint come with your wealth"s increase?
An answering sound of bells across the upland goes, To each field-toiler tells a message of repose, And mounting to the sky"s slow-darkening, tranquil dome The heart-calm echoes rise of peasants lingering home.
MADRID AND THE ESCORIAL
"They who wrought wonders by the Nile of old, Bequeathing their immortal part to us, Cast their own spirit first into the mould, And were themselves the rock they fashioned thus."
GEORGE SANTAYANA.
These two spots, products of men of small idea and nature, are happily so close together that they can fall under the same abuse. Coming from the north, to stop at the Escorial either from Avila with its grand walls of the eighty towers, or from the crag-set castle of Segovia, is such an abrupt transition from heroic times to the doctrinaire centuries that followed them that it is but too easy to be unfair to Philip II"s huge pile. A better way is to go out to it from Madrid; then, somewhat accustomed to cold commonplace, the Escorial gives less of a jar.