Who that cares much to know the history of man, and how the mysterious mixture
behaves under the varying experiments of Time, has not dwelt, at least briefly,
on the life of Saint Theresa, has not smiled with some gentleness at the
thought of the little girl walking forth one morning hand-in-hand with her
still smaller brother, to go and seek martyrdom in the country of the Moors?
Out they toddled from rugged Avila, wide-eyed and helpless-looking as two
fawns, but with human hearts, already beating to a national idea; until
domestic reality met them in the shape of uncles, and turned them back from
their great resolve. That child-pilgrimage was a fit beginning. Theresa’s
passionate, ideal nature demanded an epic life: what were many-volumed romances
of chivalry and the social conquests of a brilliant girl to her? Her flame
quickly burned up that light fuel; and, fed from within, soared after some
illimitable satisfaction, some object which would never justify weariness,
which would reconcile self-despair with the rapturous consciousness of life
beyond self. She found her epos in the reform of a religious order.
That Spanish woman who lived three hundred years ago, was certainly not the
last of her kind. Many Theresas have been born who found for themselves no epic
life wherein there was a constant unfolding of far-resonant action; perhaps
only a life of mistakes, the offspring of a certain spiritual grandeur
ill-matched with the meanness of opportunity; perhaps a tragic failure which
found no sacred poet and sank unwept into oblivion. With dim lights and tangled
circumstance they tried to shape their thought and deed in noble agreement; but
after all, to common eyes their struggles seemed mere inconsistency and
formlessness; for these later-born Theresas were helped by no coherent social
faith and order which could perform the function of knowledge for the ardently
willing soul. Their ardor alternated between a vague ideal and the common
yearning of womanhood; so that the one was disapproved as extravagance, and the
other condemned as a lapse.
Some have felt that these blundering lives are due to the inconvenient
indefiniteness with which the Supreme Power has fashioned the natures of women:
if there were one level of feminine incompetence as strict as the ability to
count three and no more, the social lot of women might be treated with
scientific certitude. Meanwhile the indefiniteness remains, and the limits of
variation are really much wider than any one would imagine from the sameness of
women’s coiffure and the favorite love-stories in prose and verse. Here
and there a cygnet is reared uneasily among the ducklings in the brown pond,
and never finds the living stream in fellowship with its own oary-footed kind.
Here and there is born a Saint Theresa, foundress of nothing, whose loving
heart-beats and sobs after an unattained goodness tremble off and are dispersed
among hindrances, instead of centring in some long-recognizable deed.
