tellect of the practical order. She wrote admirable descriptive
psychology, possessed a will equal to any emergency, great talent for
politics and business, a buoyant disposition, and a first-rate literary
style. She was tenaciously aspiring, and put her whole life at the
service of her religious ideals. Yet so paltry were these, according
to our present way of thinking, that (although I know that others have
been moved differently) I confess that my only feeling in reading her
has been pity that so much vitality of soul should have found such poor
employment.

In spite of the sufferings which she endured, there is a curious flavor
of superficiality about her genius. A Birmingham anthropologist, Dr.
Jordan, has divided the human race into two types, whom he calls
"shrews" and "nonshrews" respectively.[206] The shrew-type is defined
as possessing an "active unimpassioned temperament." In other words,
shrews are the "motors," rather than the "sensories,"[207] and their
expressions are as a rule more energetic than the feelings which appear
to prompt them. Saint Teresa, paradoxical as such a judgment may
sound, was a typical shrew, in this sense of the term. The bustle of
her style, as well as of her life, proves it. Not only must she
receive unheard-of personal favors and spiritual graces from her
Saviour, but she must immediately write about them and exploiter them
professionally, and use her expertness to give instruction to those
less privileged. Her voluble egotism; her sense, not of radical bad
being, as the really contrite have it, but of her "faults" and
"imperfections" in the plural; her stereotyped humility and return upon
herself, as covered with "confusion" at each new manifestation of God's
singular partiality for a person so unworthy, are typical of shrewdom:
a paramountly feeling nature would be objectively lost in gratitude,
and silent. She had some public instincts, it is true; she hated the
Lutherans, and longed for the church's triumph over them; but in the
main her idea of religion seems to have been that of an endless amatory
flirtation--if one may say so without irreverence-- between the devotee
and the deity; and apart from helping younger nuns to go in this
direction by the inspiration of her example and instruction, there is
absolutely no human use in her, or sign of any general human interest.
Yet the spirit of her age, far from rebuking her, exalted her as
superhuman.

[206] Furneaux