The Eagle and the Dove

by Vita Sackville-West

  These few indications, which could profitably be enlarged into a whole book, will at least suggest the very unusual region into which we are led by even a superficial examination of the chosen of God; though what bearing they may have upon the ultimate truths and virtues I should prefer another to say.

  II

  THERE IS SOME irony in the reflection that Teresa of Avila, who may share with those few others the honour of being known at least by name to a possible ten per cent of the non-Catholic population of Great Britain, should have come down to us as the prototype of the hysterical, emotional woman writhing in a frenzy of morbid devotion at the foot of the Crucifix. Richard Crashaw is partly to be thanked for having familiarised her to us all, and partly to be reprehended for having presented her so indelibly in such a character. He wrote but half the truth, inspired by the coruscation of his own conversion, when he sent up “into the heaven of poetry this marvellous rocket of song,”

  O thou undaunted daughter of desires!

  By all thy dower of lights and fires;

  By all the eagle in thee, all the dove;

  By all 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 thy brim-filled bowls of fierce desire,

  By thy last morning’s draught of liquid fire, By the full Kingdom of that final kiss

  That seized thy parting soul, and sealed thee His …

  Crashaw had evidently studied Teresa closely; he must have been acquainted with her autobiography and, from internal evidence, with some of her other writings also, for his two poems (despite their deplorable lapses) reveal a detailed following of her career; and perhaps he is not to be blamed if his English readers have seized upon the excitable note to the neglect of the other note he was discerning enough to introduce—the reference to her “large draughts of intellectual day.” That strongly compressed phrase deserves to be pondered. It shoots a beam on to a very significant facet of this strange woman’s make-up; it implicitly discountenances the misjudgment that she indulged almost voluptuously in the fits of possession that sometimes came upon her. Never, never, it cannot be over-emphasised, did any mystic more profoundly mistrust such seizures than this sane, vigorous, intelligent, humorous Spaniard, or lose fewer opportunities of warning other people against them.

  III

  TERESA DE CEPEDA Dávilla Y Ahumadafn2 was born at Avila in the province of Old Castile at dawn on March 28th, 1515. Avila is an ancient and, to our minds, startingly picturesque city entirely surrounded by massive walls fortified by nearly a hundred circular and crenellated towers, and pierced at intervals by gates giving admission to the narrow streets. Standing on the flat table of a ridge that rises abruptly from rocky bluffs, its altitude of nearly four thousand feet and its unprotected exposure to the winds that tear straight off the snows of the Sierra de Malagon, the Sierra de Avila, and the Paramera de Avila render its climate harsh in the extreme. This is central Spain, no country of sunny patios, fountains, and orange-blossom, but a dour and ascetic land where the men go wrapped in cloaks, a corner thrown across the shoulder, so muffled that, with the hat pulled well down over the eyes, the fine and bony features are almost hidden; a land where honour is of fierce importance, the quarrel quick and mortal. It is a common and conventional error to regard all Spain as the gay land of romance and song. Excessive and without compassion, the spirit of El Greco’s Toledo in its lurid storm comes closer in truth to the tortured intemperance of a fanatical people. Spain, in some aspects, is terrible, not soft, not pretty. Castile, not only geologically, is made of granite. Northern though it is, there are no mists here, no softening of the naked ashen plains, but a clear light relentlessly discouraging dreams and fallacies, and leaving only the realistic truth as these people see it. Their imagination runs along the same stern lines—the polished lance-like imagination of an honourable chivalry. Don Quixote rides these plains on a gaunt horse. He may be an idealist, but realism always keeps him company. It is as impossible to lose the consciousness of strife in this country where a gritty dust stings the eyes in winter or a shadowless sun burns the hands on the reins in summer, as to remain without the enlargement of the spirit begotten of all desolate places. Practical ability and mysticism were not incompatible attributes in the children of this soil where Avila itself was proverbially said to be made of stones and saints.

  Inside the city walls, poverty was visible in the many miserable beggars, for much of the old activity had departed since the suppression of the Jews and the expulsion of the Moors who, with their Arab luxury and colour, had done something to soften the austerity of granite Spain. A reaction had set in amongst the indigenous families of Castile, a reaction against the alien civilisation: corrupted for a time, they had now reverted to type and little evidence of the Arab element remained save in the presence of a few Moorish slaves moving noiselessly about the staircases of the rough palaces. Ascetism not indulgence was again the note, an asceticism compounded of soldierly honour and religious intensity, a mixture of sobriety and excess, severity and pride. There was the background of high deeds, celebrated in romance, a romance dressed not in silks and velvets but in leather and chain-mail. There were stone floors and thick walls, all grey; and between the battlements the views opened over the grey plains where a convoy of waggons slowly crawled or a messenger rode swathed and huddled on his mule. Life in Avila was closely self-contained; shepherds and goatherds from the hills might come in to market, and companies of professional mountebanks tumble for a few coppers inside the gates; but little truck was held even with older cities, Segovia or Salamanca, not so very far away. Transport was difficult, travel dangerous, and there was little reason for the inhabitants to go much beyond their walls except in search of adventure such as took their sons away on the supreme adventure of the new Spain in the new continent overseas.

  Racial pride was extreme, not only on account of the native arrogance of the Castilians, but also on the triple account of the Moorish infiltration, the hated Jews, and the damning Inquisition. For a Spaniard to hold his head high, it was necessary to boast of impeccably limpid blood, limpia sangre; the purity or limpieza which meant total freedom from all Jewish or Mohammedan connections, and freedom also from descent from anybody once condemned by the Inquisition; a mishap which could not be disguised, for the guilty were forced to wear a yellow robe marked with the cross of St. Andrew. The Cepeda were fortunately secure in this respect, and no taint attached to Alonso de Cepeda, his two wives, or his twelve children. They could all enjoy the hidalgo’s privilege of tratamiento which conferred the prefix of Don or Doña, very superfluous in the case of Teresa who always entered into a rage of indignation when any well-meaning person addressed her by a title. The Cepeda were beyond suspicion in their palace near the ramparts which happened to stand in the old deserted Jewish quarter. Its surroundings must thus have been very derelict indeed, leaving it as a fortress-abode of life in the midst of silence. The sedulous Jews, traders and manufacturers, workers in cloth and carpets and metals, who had once animated the city with their industry, had fled, eleven thousand of them, nearly half the total population, twenty-three years earlier, a tide rapidly receding from the Cepeda walls that loomed above the flotsam and jetsam of the abandoned streets. Here Teresa was born arid brought up, taking as her companion for choice her brother Rodrigo, four years her senior, a little boy of inflamed imagination whose readings and pastimes she shared. There were no Moorish slaves in the Cepeda palace; Don Alonso, a humane man, disapproved of slaves, so the household was strictly and entirely Spanish.

  The children’s mother, Beatriz de Ahumada, married Don Alonso as his second wife at the age of fourteen, bore him nine children, and faded out of life when she was thirty-three. Her story must be very similar to that of multitudes of other Spanish girls, practically incarcerated within their husbands’ domain. Many people, many women, have lived and died and silence has closed over them, lost without
trace. But as Thérèse Martin, more than three hundred years later, was to switch the little torch of her pen on to the simple annals of a middle-class home in Lisieux, so did Teresa in Avila illuminate the gloomy corners of a palace sick-room where her mother lay, looking older than her years. She was of great beauty, according to her daughter, but took no trouble to exploit it; too ill, poor lady, for any such vanity, her one pleasure consisted in reading romantic tales of which her husband did not approve. Teresa thought that although this recreation did her mother little harm, for she never wasted time over it, it was a pity she left her children full liberty to read as much as they pleased, in order to keep them occupied and to prevent them from going astray in other ways; and it is indeed intelligible to the harshest judgment that a sick woman with a scatter of high-spirited children to control would welcome any method of keeping them quiet. Suitably, she remains always in a shadowy background, her very name, Ahumada, swirling a veil of smoke round her, as the smoke had poured from the armorial bearings of her family, a burning tower defended to the last against the Moors. There were two boys of the first marriage and seven boys of her own to come round her bed and say their prayers, besides one girl of the first marriage and two of her own, but of these two only Teresa could really take her place among her brothers, for the other little girl, Juana, was the baby of the whole family.

  Teresa and Rodrigo were the pair who gave their mother the greatest anxiety; they had inherited her taste for reading and they also listened greedily to the stories she told them, but the mixture proved too strong for their small heads. Tales of adventure and tales of martyrdom combined in a vision of such glamour that it must instantly be translated into action. It was secretly arranged between them that they must run away to Africa, for they had of course heard much of the Moors as the enemies of Spain and the true religion. Once arrived in Africa, they would manage to get themselves beheaded, taking a short-cut, in fact, to Heaven. They had read the lives of the saints together, and were much attracted by the idea of martyrdom, though, as Teresa candidly admits, they were unconscious of any particular love for God and merely wanted to attain the great joys they understood were reserved for them in the after-life. To their credit, the thought of their father and mother did trouble them a little; it was their chief difficulty, el mayor embarazo. But they had worked themselves into a state of excitement where nothing could be allowed to stand in the way; they had discovered from their reading that not only pain but bliss was everlasting, and hypnotised themselves into this belief by constantly repeating, “For ever, ever, ever,” para siempre, siempre, siempre! From Teresa’s account, one must suppose that they trotted about the palace, seriously muttering these words. It was their intention to walk to Africa, begging alms on the way, but, since they were not devoid of the Castilian practical good sense, noticeable in Teresa throughout her life, they did take the precaution to lay in a secret stock of dried raisins for the opening stages of their journey.

  They started off through the Adaja gate, crossing the bridge in the direction of Salamanca. Teresa was seven, and Rodrigo eleven. They must inevitably have heard a great deal about the dangers of the road in everyday talk at home, but such things do not mean very much to children; they are merely words with no visual accompaniment, and at best provide only an exciting supplement to the adventures of their heroes in poetry and fiction. It is quite sufficient to tell a child that if it runs away, it will be stolen by gipsies to make this peril immediately appear the most desirable fate that could befall it. Though Teresa believed in retrospect that she knew what beheading meant and would have had the required courage, one may be permitted to doubt it. Fortunately, the enterprise did not carry them very far; they were soon missed at home and servants were sent running up and down the streets in search of them, but meanwhile they had scarcely gained the open country when they met their uncle Francisco who naturally took the culprits straight back to their mother. Teresa states that her mother was always very calm and full of good sense, but on this occasion she did imagine that her children had fallen down a well. Faced by her reproaches, Rodrigo failed in all the traditions of chivalry, laying the blame on “the little one,” la niña, who, he said, had wanted to see God and had wanted to die as quickly as possible in order to do so.

  This treachery on Rodrigo’s part does not seem to have affected their alliance, for, thwarted in one project, they are next to be found playing together at hermits in their father’s garden. There were plenty of stones lying about on that rocky soil, but alas the ‘caves’ tumbled in as soon as they had built them, for they were not strong enough to lift the bigger stones which might have kept the construction in place. But they had other resources to pass the time. There were books in the house; tinder to throw on the flames of their imagination. “So completely was I mastered by this passion,” Teresa says, “that I thought I could never be happy without a book.” It annoyed their father so much that they had to be careful he never saw them. Don Alonso had a library of his own, but with one or two exceptions, (some poetry, and La Gran Conquista de Ultramar,) his shelves were filled with volumes of a most serious character, for example Cicero’s De officiis, Boethius’ De Consolatione philosophiae, Seneca’s Proverbs, the devotional verse of Perez de Guzman, and Juan Padilla’s Retablo de la vida de Cristo. With the aid of these books Don Alonso himself had taught Teresa to read—which suggests an unusual degree of enlightenment on his part in days when it was by no means considered necessary for a daughter of the nobility to master the art either of reading or of writing—not foreseeing that the acquirement would immediately send her in quest of more attractive matter. This she found in her mother’s room, where all the lighter literature had migrated, literature which was not only heroic and gallant in tone, but also extremely coarse and outspoken. She says she spent many hours of the day and night hidden from her father (presumably the mother who had given her this taste was dead by then, for she died when Teresa was about thirteen), and she blames a great many of her shortcomings on this frivolous occupation. She and Rodrigo could think of nothing but honour and heroism, knights and giants and distressed ladies, defeated evil and conquering virtue; they even collaborated in composing a story of their own, modelled on these lines. One would give much to read it, but the manuscript is lost.

  IV

  TERESA MAY HAVE been right in thinking that this feast of romance had a deleterious effect on her character, but perhaps the natural inclinations of her age were equally responsible, for she entered now upon a stage when she thought only of amusing herself as best she could within the very severe limitations imposed upon every Spanish girl. In this, as in many other things, how markedly she differed from her little namesake of Lisieux, who at a similar age was struggling and scheming and pleading and weeping to get herself into Carmel!

  It is somewhat difficult to see on what ground Teresa criticises herself so harshly, for however dashing her tendencies she can have had but little opportunity to indulge them. It is not even likely that, having no mother but only an older sister to keep an eye on her, she over-stepped the code in a house with a father vigilant in the background and nine brothers coming in and out. The reputation of any woman, whether married or unmarried, was an intensely serious matter in which death could very quickly become involved; too open a familiarity, or what might be interpreted as such, must like a magnet persuade the dagger from the sheath, nor might the closest ties of friendship or even kinship between men stand in the way for one instant when there was any question of avenging an insult to their women. Daughter, sister, cousin, wife, all is one. It is remarkable that this excessive and protective jealousy should be found in Spain to a far greater degree than in any other European country, greater even than in Italy where nevertheless the blood is equally inflammable and crimes passionels of common occurrence. In Spain the defence of the code of honour had developed into a regular system. Not only must an affront (agravio) be instantly avenged, but a woman annoyed in the street had the right to demand protecti
on from any man, even a stranger. This arrangement provided an absurd refinement, namely, that if the woman happened to be in disguise for her own reasons she could thus get herself defended against the pursuit of an enraged husband or father while she herself made good her escape. It is one of the functions of art to exaggerate its chosen subject, and doubtless the cloak-and-sword dramatists made the most of their material, but at least there was enough residue of fact for their plays to make sense to the audience. The kernel of actuality was there, to be found behind the iron window-bars of every home.

  Spain had never adopted from the Moors the total seclusion of her women, but she had done the nearest she could get to it. The restraint may have been a necessary one to impose on a passionate race, and its consequences were of course heightened to an extreme degree by the exclusive nature of the Spaniards. It is not pride alone which closes a Spanish house to strangers; it is an inherent absence of the spirit of hospitality; not even superficially, within his own home, is the Spaniard welcoming or gregarious. He keeps his social contacts for the club or the café, but the home is for his family and his women, and seldom indeed will even his closest outside friend be invited to share a meal within that shut circle. But, as might recently be observed in America, prohibition has its dangers. Lively youth will not be wholly repressed, and the more hazardous the game the greater its attraction. Rigid though Spanish morality might be, there was still an unavowed respect for the daring young man who could circumvent it, and an amused esteem for the young woman who, without going too far, could provoke him into a desire to do so. Teresa de Ahumada was such a young woman. She liked people; she was warmly affectionate, and wanted her affection returned; she had no hesitation in raising a clamour when she thought she was not getting as much as she gave, (“I love you dearly; I was keenly hurt at not meeting such love and simplicity from you”;) she was responsive when she met with appreciation, (“whenever I found anyone well-disposed towards myself, and I liked him, I used to have such an affection for him as compelled me always to remember and think of him”;) she loved conversation, and all her life was reputed a brilliant and voluble talker, (“I always had the defect of making myself understood only with a torrent of words”;) she loved gaiety, which in her view was “necessary to render life bearable;” she was full of humour, sometimes rather malicious; her letters prove it. From many little indications that she inadvertently lets slip,—inadvertently, for in her extreme and often exasperating humility she would never consciously write anything a later reader might piece together to her credit—she emerges as a truly charming woman, a woman one would like to know. She was warm through and through. Generous, “if I were possessed of a jewel or any other thing that gave me great pleasure, and it came to my knowledge that a person who I loved more than myself and whose satisfaction I preferred to my own, wished to have it, it would give me great pleasure to deprive myself of it, because I would give all I possessed to please that person;” impulsive; humanly fallible too, “the Devil sends so offensive a spirit of bad temper that I think I could eat people up;” ardent, “when I desire anything I am accustomed naturally to desire it with some vehemence;” grateful; “I see that in my case gratitude has nothing to do with holiness; it must be in my nature, for anyone who gave me so much as a sardine could obtain anything from me” (me subornaran). She possessed furthermore the intellectual’s quality of curiosity; she wishes she knew “the properties of things; I am amused and interested by them.” There is no need for imaginative reconstruction to discover that she possessed all the delightful attributes which arouse an instant interest, sympathy, and response in widely differing types of people, whether the boyish cousins who frequented her home, or the nuns at the convent of the Encarnacion who made much of her “for our Lord had given me the grace to please everyone, wherever I might be,” or so grave and emaciated a saint as Pedro de Alcantara who she said “seemed made of roots of trees more than anything else.” Throughout her life she had innumerable friends, whom she managed, scolded, teased, cajoled, coerced, mothered, and kept always in close devotion however exacting she might be, simply because apart from her bewildering qualities of holiness she possessed also the human quality of a genius for friendship. She could, it is clear, get on with anybody; at the least, she amused and stimulated; and those who were admitted to a fuller knowledge of that rich nature never escaped from her toils nor wished to.