Refuse or crouch beneath their load; the brave

Bear theirs without repining,’

says an English poet.[54] Spinoza was a very different sort of man from Uriel da Costa. He neither raged, nor protested, nor recanted. He accepted the sentence passed upon him, recognising the cruel injustice of it, but recognising also the force of circumstances, and what had been his own share in bringing it about. He removed to a little distance from Amsterdam, and altering his name to its Latin equivalent, Benedict Spinoza, he faced his life under its new conditions. His first necessity was to secure the means of living; and here the Jewish instinct we have so often noted asserted itself at once, and the hands made ready to help the head. He worked as an optician, and it is characteristic of this great man that the lenses and glasses which he cut were as much appreciated by opticians as are his books by scholars. And he wrote and he taught, and in the latter occupation found some compensations from the utter loneliness to which he had been condemned. His pupils conceived an immense affection for him, and one named De Vries, who knewhimself doomed to an early death, earnestly desired to make Spinoza his heir. But the young man had a brother living, and Spinoza would not permit his pupil to put aside the righteous claim of his own kindred. When De Vries died, the brother who came into his fortune would have settled an annual income on Spinoza, but even this he refused, taking only at last, after much persuasion, the half of what was pressed upon him. A man’s conduct in money matters is a very tolerable test of the stuff he is made of, and in another instance, where a legacy was in question, Spinoza acted in precisely the same serenely just and unimpulsive fashion. When his father died, there was a small inheritance left for the family, which, besides this banished son, consisted of two daughters. On the ground of his having been expelled from the community of Israel, the sisters disputed Spinoza’s right to his share of the property. Spinoza did not yield to this injustice; he considered it a duty of every citizen to resist any form of wrong-doing, whether his own advantage was concerned in the event or no. He knew he had not forfeited his right to his fair share in the division of their father’s property, and he would not waive his right. But when his claim was established and allowed, he declined to profit by it. Justice was satisfied, generosity might be indulged. He gave up to his sisters every bit of his portion, save only one bed! He cared very little about money, and even, which is rarer, very little for most of the pleasures which money ensures. His mode of living was most frugal. In his effort to make both ends meet, he once jestinglycompared himself to a snake, which has to wriggle to get its tail in its mouth. Still he was not, in the very least, miserly or misanthropical. He enjoyed social intercourse with people of the ordinary as well as of the clever sort, and indulged his liking by means of correspondence when he could not get talk. In the later years of his life he took up his abode in the Hague, with a family by the name of Van der Spyck, kind, good, uncultivated people, who grew to have the sincerest affection and esteem for their gentle, scholarly lodger. Perhaps it was in return for the interest and pleasure which Spinoza took in the kind woman’s children, that she one day anxiously asked him—for of course they all knew that he was not of the same religion as his hosts—whether his form of belief or theirs was the better. ‘All religions are good,’ he answered, ‘that lead one to a good life; you need not seek further.’ The truth of this axiom was demonstrated in his own life.

Spinoza never renounced his religion, but it shines out more perhaps in his life than in his philosophy. Spinoza showed himself a Jew, in despite, as it were, of himself. He was a faithful, patriotic citizen, trustworthy always, and trusted greatly in a time of panic and danger, which the Netherlands experienced in 1672, when the King of France (Louis XIV.) ‘came down to Utrecht like a land flood.’ He never had much longing for fame, and it was characteristic that when, after the publication of his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, the chair of philosophy at Heidelberg was offered to him, he declined it, fearing that in that responsible position he might feel fettered, and beunable to speak out all the truth that was in him, and thus be less really useful to his fellow-men.

6. Unto this Last.—He went on, year after year, with the work that lay close to his hand, using his loneliness and his trials not as weapons, but as tools. He continued day by day to write, and to teach, and to make his spectacles, doing each different duty with all his might, and each in as perfect fashion as was possible to him. He was of a cheerful spirit, though never of robust health. And, with no wife or child to whom his health was of supreme importance, he died, almost unexpectedly, of consumption, when he was only forty-five years old (Feb. 27, 1677).

7. His Writings.—Of these, the most celebrated are the treatise, partly political and partly theological, called Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, which was published in 1670, and the ‘Ethics,’ his great philosophical work, which was not published till after his death. As it would be impossible to convey, to one who had never read his plays, any intellectual idea of Shakespeare by merely saying that he wrote ‘Hamlet,’ so is it hopeless to get at any notion of Spinoza as an author by a bald statement of his works. Spinoza’s writings are strong meat, and need a trained digestion. ‘His mind,’ says Auerbach, ‘has fed the thought of two centuries;’ and this picturesque statement must serve as the only indication that can be here given of the fare so provided.

8. Results.—To the world, the value of Spinoza is as a thinker; to his people, a small section of whom in mistaken zeal cast him off, his chief worth seems to lie in his mode of life. Among the moretemperate charges which have been brought against Jews, it has been often urged that, whilst the race has produced good learners and clever adapters, among the world’s teachers there have been no Jews in the foremost rank. Jews need not be greatly concerned to deny whatever there may be of truth in this impeachment. Their mission is not to be pioneers in any particular path, but to be witnesses in the way of life. And it is in so far as they fail in this, that as Jews they fail altogether. Therefore that Spinoza, in the character of his genius, was an exceptional Jew may be granted with all equanimity. Genius is always exceptional in its nature, and of no especial nationality. But putting his genius altogether on one side, we claim that in his steadfast, lovable nature, in his temperate, frugal, hard-working life, and in his sober, but humorous acceptance of the circumstances of his lot, Spinoza was a typical Jew, and, moreover, a Jew of no uncommon type. Not an easy-going, nor even a willing ‘witness’ often to the beauties of Judaism was Spinoza, but always, and for all time, a powerful one, and perhaps the more powerful because, to some extent, unconscious. Most of the incidents of his biography have come down to us through a Lutheran clergyman named Colerus, to whom all Spinoza’s philosophical theories were detestable. Thus there can be no suspicion of undue praise about these records of ‘M. Spinoza of blessed memory,’ as he was called by a poor tradesman who knew the man, but had never read a line of the author.

CHAPTER XXXV.
IN NORTHERN AND CENTRAL EUROPE, BEFORE THE DAWN.

1. A Long Night.—Whilst the Jews of Holland were growing in wealth and in importance, and the branch which Manasseh ben Israel had grafted on England was there, though slowly, attaining to a healthy and independent existence, the position of the Jews in the rest of Europe was still deplorable. The dawn was far, as yet, from rising on the Jews in Northern and Central Europe. In the south, in Italy, there was a sort of twilight; a comparatively peaceful and uneventful existence under the intermittently humane rule of the Popes. In Spain and Portugal, the Inquisition, we know, had ended in expulsion, and in France, the edict which banished the race from its shores in 1394 was still in operation. The state of things which, in the east, had ensured a welcome for a Sabbatai Zevi was at work in the west, and produced different, but, as we shall see, quite as harmful results. The standard was lowered throughout Europe. And yet, though deprived of the wealth, and glory, and position which they had so long enjoyed in the Peninsula, though in differing degrees oppressed and degraded in Germany and other countries, the Jews were still, though blindly, ‘toiling upward in the night,’ and taking their share in the slow progress of civilisation.