And, as Santa Teresa excelled in spiritual insight, so she has the sense of affairs. Durtal, in M. Joris-Karl Huysmans' En Route, first says of her:—"Sainte Térèse a exploré plus à fond que tout autre les régions inconnues de l'âme; elle en est, en quelque sorte, la géographe; elle a surtout dressé la carte de ses pôles, marqué les latitudes contemplatives, les terres intérieures du ciel humain." And he shows the reverse of the medal:—"Mais quel singulier mélange elle montre aussi, d'une mystique ardente et d'une femme d'affaires froide; car, enfin, elle est à double fond; elle est contemplative hors le monde et elle est également un homme d'état: elle est le Colbert féminin des cloîtres." The key to Durtal's difficulties is given in the Abbé Gévresin's remark, that the perfect balance of good sense is one of the distinctive signs of the mystics. In Santa Teresa's case the sign is present. An uninquiring world may choose to think of her as a fanatic in vapours and in ecstasies. Yet it is she who writes, in the Camino de Perfección:—"I would not have my daughters be, or seem to be, women in anything, but brave men." It is she who holds that "of revelations no account should be made"; who calls the usual convent life "a shortcut to hell"; who adds that "if parents took my advice, they would rather marry their daughters to the poorest of men, or keep them at home under their own eyes." Her position as a spiritual force is as unique as her place in literature. It is certain that her "own dear books" were nothing to her; that she regarded literature as frivolity; and no one questions her right so to regard it. But the world also is entitled to its judgment, which is expressed in different ways. Jeremy Taylor cites her in a sermon preached at the opening of the Parliament of Ireland (May 8, 1661). Protestant England, by the mouth of Froude, compares Santa Teresa to Cervantes. Catholic Spain places her manuscript of her own Life beside a page of St. Augustine's writing in the Palace of the Escorial.
In some sense we may almost consider the Ecstatic Doctor, San Juan de la Cruz (1542-91), as one of Santa Teresa's disciples. He changed his worldly name of Juan de Yepes y Álvarez for that of Juan de la Cruz on joining the Carmelite order in 1563. Shortly afterwards he made the acquaintance of Santa Teresa, and, fired by her enthusiasm, he undertook to carry out in monasteries the reforms which she introduced in convents. In his Obras espirituales (1618) mysticism finds its highest expression. There are moments when his prose style is of extreme clearness and force, but in many cases he soars to heights where the sense reels in the attempt to follow him. St. John of the Cross holds, with the mystics of all time, with Plotinus and Böhme and Swedenborg, that "by contemplation man may become incorporated with the Deity." This is a hard saying for some of us, not least to the present writer, and it were idle, in the circumstances, to attempt criticism of what for most men must remain a mystery. Yet in his verse one seizes the sense more easily; and his high, amorous music has an individual melody of spiritual ravishment, of daring abandonment, which is not all lost in Mr. David Lewis' unrhymed version of the Noche oscura del Alma (Dark Night of the Soul):—
"In an obscure night,
With anxious love inflamed,
O happy lot!
Forth unobserved I went,
My house being now at rest....
In that happy night,
In secret, seen of none,
Seeing nought but myself,