Saint Teresa of Avila. By Marcelle Auclair, translated from the
French by Kathleen Pond. (Burns Oates. 30s.) COMPARED with Miss V. Sackville West's biographical essay in The Eagle and the Dove this new, full-length study appears a little painstaking, a little ponderous. Its author has so patently consulted every authority, traced each unimportant personage who figures in the saint's life and correspondence, blocked in every detail of the background from sound contemporary sources. The quotations from Santa Teresa's letters and autobiographical writings are excellently chosen, though a little too copious. One feels that too little is made of her rarity, that Mlle Auclair too readily accepts other people's judgements, plays too safely for the "Nihil obstat," which ornaments the reverse of the book's title page. She off- handedly acquits her heroine of the com- plexes and inhibitions laid bare by contem- porary psychologists. But she forgets that except for a devout public a saint can best be made credible by some exploration of the psychology of sainthood. For Santa Teresa was a strange combination of mystic and business-woman, immensely successful in reforming her order. Yet she knew "that there is no soul such a giant that it does not often need to become a child again." Vigorous and humorous, quarrelsome— though without venom—and something of a bully in the furtherance of her causes, she ended without fear of death and, according to many witnesses, her body did not decay, and was in a state of complete preservation when it was dismembered and the parts sent to different places as relics.
Such a life, such a death and such a preservation require more comment, more interpretation than this book contains. J. M. C.
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