1. Her special temperament.
It is clear then, first, that in her we have to do with a highly nervous, delicately poised, immensely sensitive and impressionable psycho-physical organism and temperament. It was a temperament which, had it been unmatched by a mind and will at least its equals; had these latter not found, or been found by, a definite, rich, and supernaturally powerful, historical, and institutional religion; and had not the mind and will, with this religious help, been kept in constant operation upon it, would have spelt, if not moral ruin, at least life-long ineffectualness. Yet, as a matter of fact, not only did this temperament not dominate her, with the apparently rare and incomplete exceptions of some but semi-voluntary, short impressions and acts during the last months of her life; but it became one of the chief instruments and materials of her life’s work and worth. Only together with such a mind and will, is such a temperament not a grave drawback; and even with them it is an obvious danger, and requires their constant careful checking and active shaping.
And this temperament involved an unusually large subconscious life. All souls have some amount of this life, but many have it but slight and shallow: she had it of a quite extraordinary degree and depth. A coral reef, growing up from, and just peering above, a hundred fathom-deep ocean, would be an appropriate picture of the large predominance of subconsciousness in this spacious soul. And even this circumstance alone would cause her spiritual lights and fully conscious experiences to come abruptly, and in the form of quasi-physical seizures and surprises. Continuous, and possibly long, incubations of ideas and feelings would thus be taking place in the subconscious region, and these feelings and ideas would then, when fully ripe, or on some slight stimulation from the conscious region or directly from the outer world, make sudden irruptions into that full consciousness. Nor would such natural suddenness of full consciousness really militate against the claim to supernaturalness of the ideas and feelings thus revealed. For they would still be most rightly conceived as the work of God’s Spirit in and through the action of her own spirit: not their causation and their source, but simply the suddenness of their revelation and the channel of their outlet would lose in supernaturalness.
And hers was a soul with habitually large fields of consciousness. Apparently from her conversion onwards, and certainly during the last fourteen years of her life, the moments or days of narrow fields were, till quite the last weeks or even days, comparatively rare; and their narrowness was evidently always felt as most painful and oppressive. And the interior occupation was so intense; the several fields succeeded each other with such an apparent automatism and quality of even physical seizure; and they were either so entrancing by their largeness or so depressing by their narrowness: that to souls not in tune with hers, she must, in the former moods, have appeared as egoistic, as (in a sense) too much of a man, as one absorbed in great but purely general, super-personal ideas which were making her forget both her own and her fellow-creature’s minor wants; and, in the latter moods, as downrightly egotistic, as (in a way) too much of a woman, as one engrossed in her own purely individual, small and fanciful troubles and trials. Yet the “Egoism” is not dominant during her middle period, since it is certain that her charitable and administrative activities, and close affective interest in the daily, physical and emotional lot and demands of the poor and lowly, were most real and considerable. And, in her third period, it was this very “Egoism” which, as we shall see, was the form and means of the interior apprehension and exterior elaboration of her most original and suggestive doctrines, and became the occasion for her stimulation of other intensely active souls on to great nation-wide enterprises of the most practical, permanent, and heroic kind. And the “Egotistic” moods are unapparent before the last two years or less of her life; and they then are clearly but the occasional, involuntary suspensions or partial yieldings of her normally iron will,—rare checks and intermittences which, with little or no preventible faultiness on her own part, give us pathetically vivid glimpses of what that normal life of hers cost her to achieve and to maintain, and of what she would have been, if bereft of God’s generosity ever awakening, deepening, and operating through her own.
All this sensitiveness, subconsciousness, spaciousness, variety, and suddenness of apprehension and feeling; all this largely chaotic, mutually conflicting, raw material of her spiritual life, even if it had existed alongside of but feeble and inert powers of organization and transformation, would not have failed to produce considerable suffering; although, in such a case, that suffering would have remained largely inarticulate, and would have left the soul checked and counterchecked by various tyrannous passions and fancies. The soul would thus have been less efficient and persuasive than the least subconscious and sensitive specimens of average and “common-sense” humanity. But, in her case, all this unusually turbulent raw material was in unusually close contiguity to powers of mind and of will of a rare breadth and strength. And this very closeness of apposition and width of contrast, and this great strength of mind and will, made all that disordered multiplicity, distraction, and dispersion of her clamorous, many-headed, many-hearted nature, a tyranny impossible and unnecessary to bear. And yet to achieve the actual escape from such a tyranny, the mastering of such a rabble, and the harmonization of such a chaos, meant a constant and immense effort, a practically unbroken grace-getting and self-giving, an ever-growing heroism and indeed sanctity, and, with and through all these things, a corresponding expansion and virile joy. It can thus be said, in all simple truth, that she became a saint because she had to; that she became it, to prevent herself going to pieces: she literally had to save, and actually did save, the fruitful life of reason and of love, by ceaselessly fighting her immensely sensitive, absolute, and claimful self.
2. Catherine and Marriage.
Catherine’s mind was without humour or wit; and this was, of course, a serious drawback. And her temperament was of so excessive a mentality, as to amount to something more or less abnormal. For not only is there no trace about her, at any time, of moral vulgarity of any kind, or of any tendency to it; and this is, of course, a grand strength; but she seems at all times to have been greatly lacking in that quite innocent and normal sensuousness, which appears to form a necessary element of the complete human personality. It is true that in the anecdotes of her impulsive and yet reverent affection for the pestiferous woman and the cancerous workman, with the finely self-oblivious sympathy which moves her to kiss the mouth of the first, and long to remain with her arms around the neck of the other, there is the beautiful tenderness and daring of a great positive purity, of the purity of flame and not of snow. And her love of her servants, Argentina in particular, and of poor Thobia, is exquisitely true and constant. Yet even all this can hardly be classed with the element referred to, with that love of children and of women as the bearers of them, that instinct of union with all that is pure and fruitful in the normal life of sex, such as is so beautifully present throughout St. Luke’s Gospel, but which is, at least relatively, absent from St. John’s.
Possibly her unhappy and childless marriage determined the non-development or the mortification of any tendencies to such a temper. But the absence referred to was more probably caused by her congenital psychical temperament and state themselves; and, if so, it would point to her as a person hardly intended for marriage, and as one who, through no fault of her own, could not satisfy the less purely mental of the perfectly licit requirements which make up the many-levelled wants of a normal, or at least ordinary, man’s and husband’s nature. Pompilia’s dying words, in Browning’s “Ring and the Book,” would, probably at any time after her premature involuntary marriage, have found an appropriate place upon Catherine’s lips, had she ever thought it loyal or kind to utter them: “‘In heaven there is neither marriage nor giving in marriage.’ How like Jesus Christ to say that!”
Yet it is at least as difficult to think of her as really intended for the cloister. That early wish of hers to join a religious community, sincere and keen as it no doubt was at the time, evidently faded away completely, probably already before her conversion thirteen years later, and certainly before her widowhood. Perhaps she would have been best suited, throughout her adult years, to the life of an unmarried woman living in the world,—to the kind of life which she actually led during her widowhood, with such changes in it as her earlier, robuster health would have involved for those earlier years. She would thus, throughout her life, have divided her energies, in various degrees and combinations, between attention to the multiform, practical, physico-emotional wants of the poor; the give and take of stimulation and enlightenment to and from some few large-hearted, heroically operative friends; and, as source and centre of all such actual achievements and of indefinitely greater possibilities, indeed as a life already largely eternal and creative,—contemplative prayer of various degrees and kinds. But such a life, if it would have left out much disappointment and suffering, and not for herself alone, yet would also have been without the special occasions and incentives to her sudden conversion and long patience and detailed magnanimity. Her life, in appearing on the surface as less of a failure, would at bottom have been less of a spiritual success.
Indeed the failures and fragmentarinesses of her life, even if and where more than merely apparent to us or even to herself, helped and still help to give a poignant forcefulness to her example and teaching. There is nothing pre- or post-arranged, nothing artificial or stagey, nothing, in the deliberate occupations of her convert life, that is simply brooding about this woman: when she thinks or prays, she does so; when she acts, she acts; when she suffers, she suffers; and there is an end of it. The infinitely winning qualities of a simple veracity; of a successive livingness, because ever operative occupation with the actual real moment, and not with the after-shadow of the past nor with the fore-shadow of the future; and, through all this, of a healthy creatureliness are thus spread over all she does,—over her virtues, which are never reflected as such within her own pure mind, and over her very weaknesses and failings which, summed up in their source, her false self, are ever being acknowledged, feared, and fought, with a heroism not less massive because its methods are so wisely indirect.