Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 133.djvu/149

Rh years before; but still living, thinking, dreaming, and working hard, at the close of his splendid and miserable career, was that prince of luminous darkdess, the magician Rembrandt. The hermit of Rijnsburg made an excursion now and then to Amsterdam; he was there in the spring of 1663. He may have strolled (one cannot help indulging in such imaginings) absorbed in some philosophema of the "De Deo," down the Roosgracht. Then, at the door of a mean house in this mean part of Amsterdam, there may have stood, refreshing himself in the sunshine, and absorbed in contemplation too, but in outward contemplation, a strange old man, with short disordered grizzly hair and beard, wearing a nightcap, or a colored kerchief for a headdress, and a fur-bordered dressing-gown variously spotted with dabs of paint. The philosopher, feeling that he was being scanned as he passed by, may have looked up at the wrinkled face, with its coarse puffy cheeks irregularly flecked with rich crimson blood, and started a little on remarking the powerful mouth, smiling its massive smile with its strong sanguine lips, the vertical fold of the brow with its two deep bordering furrows, and the small eyes shooting out from their deep setting their odd glance of energy and confidence. Then one thinks that these two great kindred spirits must have felt a shudder of no common order as their eyes met; or perhaps they may have felt nothing; the philosopher may have forgotten the distraction in a moment, and passed on in meditation, fancy free; whilst Rembrandt van Rhyn, merely revolving in his mind his observations on Hebrew physiognomy, may have turned to a most exceedingly disorderly palette, and set to work to sketch a memorandum of this Jewish face, as material for some future "Head of an Evangelist."

Rembrandt, one thinks at all events, must have come home to Spinoza in his works with singular nearness. The two natures have singular points of likeness; their lives, as well as their work, have much of the same spirit. Both of these great men were mystics; both of them abstract thinkers, ideologists, metaphysicians preoccupied exclusively with the essence of things, and careless of the outsides of things; visionaries both, looking inwards and disdaining to look outwards; proud, impassable, absorbed in the idea to the extent of forgetting the reality, almost to the extent of denying the reality; alike in their lives of solitary labor, uncomplainingly persevering, and answering the unjust criticism and the unjust neglect of their contemporaries by the production of monumental works that stand like pyramids, in their inimitable solitary grandeur, in the view of their posterity.

The six years' residence at Voorburg was, it may be hoped, a happy one; at all events, it was a tranquil one, and affords the biographer not an incident of any moment to relate. The "Ethica" was slowly crystallizing in the quiet into its perfect geometric form; the "Traclatus Theologico-Politicus" was being thought over lovingly, and lovingly retouched; but, after the fiasco of the attempt to gain the public mind by means of the "Principia," Spinoza seems to have been quite undisturbed by any desire to publish it; a trait that is very characteristic of him. A large correspondence afforded him the means of instructing a coterie of earnest and eager disciples; sometimes, indeed, of instructing persons who were neither disciples nor earnest. Correspondents took up his time with the strangest questions. His friend Peter Balling had heard in the night certain groanings. Afterwards, his child fell ill, gave utterance to groanings which Balling recognized as identical with those he had before heard in the night, and died. Balling wrote to be instructed whether the groanings he had heard were "omens." Spinoza replied at some length in a very curious letter. He considered that the groanings heard by Balling were imaginations." It had happened to himself, he related, that, waking up one morning, the images of which his dreams had been composed remained obstinately before his eyes, as vivid as though they had been real things. Amongst these was the image of a "certain black and filthy Æthiopian" whom he had never before seen. This image in great part disappeared when he directed his eyes with attention to a book or other object; but returned with the same vividness as it at first possessed, so soon as he allowed his eyes to fall anywhere carelessly (sine attentione). The image at length disappeared from the head downwards. His description of the phenomenon may be interesting to students of the psychology of dreams. The most interesting part of the letter is the passage in which he admits the possibility of a certain species of "omens." "The mind has a power of vague presentiment of future events, which it may sometimes exercise (mens aliqiuid, quod futurum est, confuse potest præsentire)." The dreadful correspondence with