Dreamers of the Ghetto Part 24

"What evil can be imagined greater for a State than that honorable men, because they have thoughts of their own and cannot act a lie, are sent as culprits into exile or led to the scaffold?" Already the States-General had attached the work containing this question and forbidden its circulation: now apparently persecution was to reach him in person, Christendom supplementing what he had long since suffered from the Jewry. He thought of the fanatical Jew whose attempt to stab him had driven him to live on the outskirts of Amsterdam even before the Jews had persuaded the civil magistrates to banish him from their "new Jerusalem," and in a flash of bitterness the picturesque Portuguese imprecations of the Rabbinic tribunal seemed to him to be bearing fruit. "According to the decision of the angels and the judgment of the saints, with the sanction of the Holy G.o.d and the whole congregation, we excommunicate, expel, curse, and execrate Baruch de Espinoza before the holy books.... Cursed be he by day, and cursed be he by night; cursed be he when he lieth down, and cursed be he when he riseth up; cursed be he when he goeth out, and cursed be he when he cometh in. May G.o.d never forgive him! His anger and His pa.s.sion shall be kindled against this man, on whom rest all the curses and execrations which are written in the Holy Scriptures...." Had the words been lurking at the back of his mind, when he was writing the _Tractatus_? he asked himself, troubled to find them still in his memory. Had resentment colored the Jewish sections? Had his hot Spanish blood kept the memory of the dagger that had tried to spill it? Had suffering bia.s.sed the impersonality of his intellect? "This compels me to nothing which I should not otherwise have done," he had said to his Mennonite friend when the sentence reached him in the Oudekirk Road. But was it so? If he had not been cut off from his father and his brothers and sisters, and the friends of childhood, would he have treated the beauties of his ancestral faith with so grudging a sympathy? The doubt disturbed him, revealing once more how difficult was self-mastery, absolute surrender to absolute Truth.

Never had he wavered under persecution like Uriel Acosta--at whose grave in unholy ground he had stood when a boy of eight,--but had it not wrought insidiously upon his spirit?

"Alas!" thought he, "the heaviest burden that men can lay upon us, is not that they persecute us with their hatred and scorn, but that they thus plant hatred and scorn in our souls. That is what does not let us breathe freely or see clearly." Retrospect softened the odiousness of his Jewish persecutors; they were but children of a persecuting age, and it was indeed hard for a community of refugees from Spain and Portugal to have that faith doubted for which they or their fathers had given up wealth and country. Even at the hour of his Ban the pyres of the Inquisition were flaming with Jewish martyrs, and his fellow-scholars were writing Latin verses to their sacred memories.

And should the religion which exacted and stimulated such sacrifices be set aside by one providentially free to profess it? How should they understand that a martyr's death proved faith, not truth? Well, well, if he had not sufficiently repaid his brethren's hatred with love, it was no good being sorry, for sorrow was an evil, a pa.s.sing to lesser perfection, diminished vitality. Let him rather rejoice that the real work of his life--his _Ethica_, which he was working out on pure geometrical principles--would have no taint of personality, would be without his name, and would not even be published till death had removed the last possibility of personal interest in its fortunes.

"For," as he was teaching in the book itself, "those who desire to aid others by counsel or deed to the common enjoyment of the chief good shall in no wise endeavor themselves that a doctrine be called after them."

Another stone and a hoot of derision from a gang of roughs reminded him that death might not wait for the finis.h.i.+ng of his work.

"Strange," he reflected, "that they who cannot even read should so run to d.a.m.n." And then his thoughts recurred to that horrible day not a year ago when the brutal mob had torn to pieces the n.o.blest men in the realm--his friends, the brothers De Witt. He could scarcely retain his tears even now at the memory of the martyred patriots, whose ignominiously gibbeted bodies the police had only dared remove in the secrecy of the small hours. It was hard even for the philosopher to remember that the brutes did but express the essence of their being, even as he expressed his. Nevertheless Reason did not demand that theirs should destroy his: the reverse sooner, had he the power. So, turning the corner of the street, he slipped into his favorite book-shop in the Spuistraat and sought at once safety and delectation among the old folios and the new Latin publications and the beautiful productions of the Elzevirs of Amsterdam.

"Hast thou Stoupe's _Religion des Hollandois_?" he asked, with a sudden thought.

"Inquire elsewhere," snapped the bookseller surlily.

"_Et tu, Brute!_" said Spinoza, smiling. "Dost thou also join the hue and cry? Methinks heresy should nourish thy trade. A wilderness of counterblasts, treatises, tractlets, pasquinades--the more the merrier, eh?"

The bookseller stared. "Thou to come in and ask for Stoupe's book?

'Tis--'tis--brazen!"

Spinoza was perplexed. "Brazen? Is it because he talks of me in it?"

"Heer Spinoza," said the bookseller solemnly, "thy Cartesian commentary has brought me a many pence, and if thou thyself hast browsed more than bought, thou wast welcome to take whatever thou couldst carry away in that long head of thine. But to serve thee now is more than I dare, with the populace so wrought up against thee.

What! Didst thou think thy doings in Utrecht would not penetrate hither?"

"My doings in Utrecht!"

"Ay, in the enemy's headquarters--betraying us to the periwigs!"

Spinoza was taken aback. This was even more serious than he had thought. It was for supposed leaning to the French that the De Witts had been ma.s.sacred. Political odium was even more sinister than theological. Perhaps he had been unwise to accept in war-time the Prince of Conde's flattering invitation to talk philosophy. To get to the French camp with the Marshal's safe-conduct had been easy enough: to get back to his own headquarters bade fair to be another matter.

But then why had the Dutch authorities permitted him to go? Surely such unique confidence was testimonial enough.

"Oh, but this is absurd!" he said. "Every burgher in Den Haag knows that I am a good republican, and have never had any aim but the honor and welfare of the State. Besides, I did not even see Conde. He had been called away, and I would not wait his return."

"Ay, but thou didst see Luxemburg; thou wast entertained by Colonel Stoupe, of the Swiss regiment."

"True, but he is theologian as well as soldier."

"He did not offer to bribe thee?"

"Ay, he did," said Spinoza, smiling. "He offered me a pension--"

The bookseller plugged his ears. "'s.h.!.+ I will not know. I'll have no hand in thy murder."

"Nay, but it will interest thee as a bookseller. The pension was to be given me by his royal master if I would dedicate a book to his august majesty."

"And thou refusedst?"

"Naturally. Louis Quatorze has flatterers enough."

The bookseller seized his hands and wrung them with tears. "I told them so, I told them so. What if they did see these French gentry visiting thee? Political emissaries forsooth! As well fear for the virtue of the ladies of quality who toil up his stairs, quoth I. They do but seek further explications of their Descartes. Ah, France may have begotten a philosopher, but it requires Holland to shelter him, a Dutchman to understand him. That musked gallant a spy! Why, that was D'Henault, the poet. How do I know? Well, when a man inquires for D'Henault's poems and is half-pleased because I have the book, and half-annoyed because he must needs buy it--! An epicurean rogue by his lip, a true son of the Muses. And suppose there _is_ a letter from England, quoth I, with the seal of the Royal Society!"

"_Is_ there a letter from England?"

"Thou hast not been to thy lodging? That Royal Society, quoth I, is a learned body--despite its name--and hath naught to do with King Charles and the company he keeps. 'Tis they who egg him on to fight us, the hussies!"

Spinoza smiled. "It must be from my good friend Oldenburg, the secretary."

"'Tis what I told them. He was in my shop when he was here--"

"Asking for his book?"

"Nay, for thine." And the bookseller's smile answered Spinoza's. "He bade me despatch copies of the _Principia Philosophiae Cartesianae_ to sundry persons of distinction. I would to Heaven thou wouldst write a new book!"

"Heaven may not share thy view," murmured Spinoza, who was just turning over the pages of an attack on his "new book," and reading of himself as "a man of bold countenance, fanatical, and estranged from all religion."

"A good book thou hast there," said the bookseller. "By Musaeus, the Jena Professor. The _Tractatus Theologico-Politicus ad Veritatis Lancem Examinatus_--weighed in Truth's balance, indeed. A t.i.tle that draws. They say 'tis the best of all the refutations of the pernicious and poisonous Tractate."

"Of which I see sundry copies here masked in false t.i.tles."

"'s.h.!.+ Forbidden fruit is always in demand. But so long as I supply the antidote too--"

"Needs fruit an antidote?"

"Poisoned apples of Knowledge offered by the serpent."

"A serpent indeed," said Spinoza, reading the Antidote aloud. "'He has left no mental faculty, no cunning, no art untried in order to conceal his fabrication beneath a brilliant veil, so that we may with good reason doubt whether among the great number of those whom the devil himself has hired for the destruction of all human and divine right, there is one to be found who has been more zealous in the work of corruption than this traitor who was born to the great injury of the church and to the harm of the state.' How he bruises the serpent's head, this theology professor!" he cried; "how he lays him dead on his balance of Truth!" To himself he thought: "How the most ignorant are usually the most impudent and the most ready to rush into print!" He had a faint prevision of how his name--should it really leak out, despite all his precautions--would come to stand for atheism and immorality, a catchword of ill-omen for a century or two; but he smiled on, relying upon the inherent reasonableness and rightness of the universe.

"Wilt take the book?" said the bookseller.

"Nay, 'tis not by such tirades that Truth is advanced. But hast thou the Refutation by Lambert Velthuysen?"

The bookseller shook his head.

"That is worth a hundred of this. Prithee get that and commend it to thy clients, for Velthuysen wields a formidable dialectic by which men's minds may be veritably stimulated."

On his homeward way dark looks still met him, but he faced them with cheerful, candid gaze. At the end of the narrow Spuistraat the affairs of the broad market-place engrossed popular attention, and the philosopher threaded his way unregarded among the stalls and the canvas-covered Zeeland waggons, and it was not till he reached the Paviljoensgracht--where he now sits securely in stone, pencilling a thought as enduring--that he encountered fresh difficulty. There, at his own street door, under the trees lining the ca.n.a.l-bank, his landlord, Van der Spijck, the painter--usually a phlegmatic figure haloed in pipe-clouds--congratulated him excitedly on his safe return, but refused him entry to the house. "Here thou canst lodge no more."

"Here I lodge to-night," said Spinoza quietly, "if there be any law in Holland."

"Law! The folk will take the law into their own hands. My windows will be broken, my doors battered in. And thou wilt be murdered and thrown into the ca.n.a.l."

His lodger laughed. "And wherefore? An honest optician murdered! Go to, good friend!"

"If thou hadst but sat at home, polis.h.i.+ng thy spy-gla.s.ses instead of faring to Utrecht! Customarily thou art so cloistered in that the goodwife declares thou forgettest to eat for three days together--and certes there is little thou canst eat when thou goest not abroad to buy provision! What devil must drive thee on a long journey in this hour of heat and ferment? Not that I believe a word of thy turning traitor--I'd sooner believe my mahl-stick could turn serpent like Aaron's rod--but in my house thou shalt not be murdered."

"Rea.s.sure thyself. The whole town knows my business with Stoupe; at least I told my bookseller, and 'tis only a matter of hours."

"Truly he is a lively gossip."

"Ay," said Spinoza drily. "He was even aware that a letter from the Royal Society of England awaits me."