Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 133.djvu/139

Rh music, and Spinoza fell in love with her, continues the biographer; nay, even determined, as he himself did often since confess, to marry her. But her wit and her gaiety had also touched the heart of another of Van den Ende's pupils, one Kerckering of Hamburg, who, becoming jealous of Spinoza, increased so greatly in assiduity as to succeed in winning his mistress's affections, to which result a present of a pearl necklace, of the value of two or three hundred pistoles, doubtless contributed. And after the said Kerckering had abjured the Lutheran religion, which was that which he professed, and had embraced the Catholic faith, she fulfilled her promise of marrying him. When Mr. Lewes was writing his "Biographical History of Philosophy" in 1852, he was able to picture this courtship


 * as a sort of odd reverse of Abelard and Heloisa. Spinoza, we fancy, not inattentive to the instruction, but the more in love with it coming from so soft a mouth; not inattentive, yet not wholly absorbed. He watches her hand as it moves along the page, and longs to squeeze it. While "looking out" in the dictionary their hands touch, and he is thrilled, but the word is found, nevertheless.

The romance of a Platonic love, that, being rejected, transformed itself into philosophy, may be a pleasing and artistically proper ingredient in the life of the great mystic. It may be hard for us to be obliged to confess that it is true only in so far as "imagination is truer than fact," but from the historical point of view we must allow it to lapse into the limbo to which modern criticism has consigned the myth of William Tell and the fiction of Julia Alpinula, for we now know, on the prosaic testimony of a marriage register, that Clara Maria Van den Ende was married to Dirck Kerckrinck in 1671, at the age of twenty-seven. She was therefore only twelve years old in 1656, by which time Spinoza had quitted Van den Ende. It does not appear, then, that love-lessons formed any part of Spinoza's occupations whilst he was with Van den Ende. Probably the want of such emotions was not felt by him. Other heavings and stirrings were being felt in the young prophet's breast; and even if the occasion of looking too curiously on a daughter of Eve had presented itself, we must think that his strong soul would have resisted the temptation, with a presentiment that its mission was to go forth amongst mankind, "dread, fathomless, alone."

It was probably Van den Ende who introduced him to the writings of Descartes; a most important event for him. In a mind that was already in more than unconscious revolt against rabbinical authority and rabbinical tradition, the method of Descartes, with its honest individualism and its fearless scepticism, must have produced an explosion. That such and such a doctrine must be believed by you because it was the doctrine of such and such a rabbin, or of such and such a prophet, must have roused indignation from a very early age in the breast of a child who for genius and for character so far transcended all the rabbins, and almost all the prophets. The spark of Descartes' teaching, that the one principle of evidence is clear and distinct seeing for oneself, must have fallen upon very well-prepared fuel.


 * From that time forth [says Colerus] he was very reserved with the Jewish doctors, avoiding as much as possihle all commerce with them; he was rarely seen in their synagogues, showing himself there only in a perfunctory manner (par manière d'acquit); which irritated them extremely against him, as they nothing doubted but that he would shortly abandon them and turn Christian.

We imagine Spinoza in a state of doubt; he does not yet quite see clearly; he leans now to the side of tradition and belief, now to that of incredulity and revolt. His indignation against the falseness and ineptitudes of the Jewish tradition we imagine to have now and then flashed out from him in manifestations honest rather than prudent.


 * Certain young men [relates Lucas] who called themselves his most intimate friends, conjured him to tell them his true opinions. "What think you?" they asked; "hath God: a body? Be there in truth angels? is the soul immortal?"

We gather that to questions such as these