Berthold Auerbach

“ What can love offer more, and should the thinker, happy in himself, not be satisfied with friendship alone? Spinoza felt more and more at home in the peaceful serenity of his life, whose equable happiness can be called nothing else than blessedness. For the exercise of the intellect in solitude is the highest felicity of life—near to the eternal sun, above the tumult of the world, above the clouds which float in the atmosphere of the earth. In solitude life is explained; there no cry from without is possible, nothing to break the stream of the thinking existence. ”

“ It was by no means harmonious; the whole building echoed with the wild war-cry,—for what was it but a war-cry, with which they had conquered life and death a thousand times?—"Hear, O Israel! The Lord our God is one Lord!" The soul of each would enter by force the impenetrable first cause of the existence of God. Baruch, too, closed his eyelids fast, and clasped his hands, his nerves thrilling in ecstasy, his whole consciousness, with its longings towards that other world, drawn upward to the rays concentrated in that one point of light where it found itself in God. ”

“ Whether you come to my conviction that no philosophy can reveal the secrets of the world further than the Jewish revelation, or whether you are of another opinion, and accept the Messianic time as one in which your absolute intellectual truth reigns; look back: if it were for nothing but the memory of the innumerable multitude who were murdered for our faith, this alone must keep us fast within its sacred walls. A religion which despises the joys of life, and teaches love of a fearful death for its sake, must it not contain the first spring of truth? ”

“ You see there is really a great truth contained in the common saying that we can hear the grass grow. All through nature there is regular movement of moisture, and wherever there is movement there is sound and tone. Among the stars, in the depths of the earth, and on the surface, there is an eternal murmur and swell and clash. Music is the soul of the universe, is our soul. All is in million-voiced harmony, and the articulation given to man is its divinest revelation."
Olympia's expression of countenance grew brighter and brighter, and Spinoza said:
"You see I do not laugh at you. ”

“ MANUELA.
FOR MY ONLY SON, BARUCH, ALONE.
WHEN these words come into your hands, my mouth will be mute, my soul again with her to whom it ever belonged, and of whom I am now about to tell you. . . . .
My whole youth rises before me, my cheeks burn; from scorn and lies I have won a blessed life.
Give heed.
I was twenty years old the spring when I travelled to Seville to visit my brother Moses, called Geronimo, in his monastery. I say I was twenty years of age; but I knew men, and their dishonest ways. Misfortune and deceit age men before their time and teach them experience. ”

“ Was not my mother a Moslem, and changed to our faith? Should I have remained a Moslem if by chance I had been born such? But thy father and mother loved each other wholly and uncontrollably at first sight, and as to thee, dost thou think Olympia faultless? Hast thou not, flattered by her wild charms, persuaded thyself into a connection that at first appeared to thee so objectionable? A love that must overcome doubt is greater and more enduring than that other that seems as if fallen from Heaven; it is intellectual love. Thou wouldst picture to thyself a life of self-denial. ”

“ Spinoza regarded her with unmoved countenance. Could a man of such fine feeling, sensitive to the slightest influences of thought and imagination, could he not see that here was a soul yearning for conscious communion with his? Had he no feeling for her? Or did he by force of will repress an inclination that could only bring trouble to both himself and Olympia?
"The unutterable of which you speak," said Spinoza after a painful pause, "I see more clearly day by day must remain such with our thoughts of God and nature; we are never more than half understood, or are misunderstood." ”

“ Our master, or, if you do not like to call him that, our teacher, Descartes, after a time of lonely seclusion, recognized that the truth must be extracted from the world if it would again pervade the world. He learned to know men in peace and war; he was even a soldier himself, and travelled much. And you must recognize this too as a revelation of our age, that it has been granted to our century first, in artistic recognition of silent nature, to open the mind's eye to landscape. You too must travel, and if you do not wish to teach the world you must at least learn to know it truly. ”

“ Olympia and Spinoza followed in silence. When they came to the roadside house Olympia said:
"Look, there is the well in which the weak, good-natured Barläus drank his death. Would it not have been more reasonable and manly to give up his faith than his life?"
"We have not given ourselves either faith or life," answered Spinoza. "Suicide of either one or the other is cowardly and weak; strength lies in bearing one and the other; deny yourself for them, or learn to free them." Olympia was silent. ”

“ Spinoza was sociable, gay and contented.
Not so Olympia when he described his new way of life to her.
"I am glad we agree in one thing," she said; "that to spend the livelong day in brooding over the thought of others is either too much or too little work; so much so that it becomes tiresome to me, and I am glad to count my stitches again. When I am sewing my best thoughts come. Do you see that garland of roses? Legends as foolish and extravagant as those of the Gesta Romanorum are imprisoned in those stitches. Ah! how glad I was then that I knew some handicraft." ”

“ Olympia rose and dressed.
"I made out my love to be stronger than it is, to my father," she said to herself. "Was it not in the beginning mere wounded self-love and desire to see no man unconquered that threw me into his arms? No, I loved him formerly, and I love him yet." She took the pearls, clasped them round her neck, and looked at herself well pleased in the mirror. "'I should not have found another husband,' they will say; what does that matter to me? My own consciousness tells me these pearls, and with them a life of brilliant enjoyment, was in my hand, and I despised it all. ”

“ Don Antonio sat by Manuela, wrapped in a large woollen rug; he, too, congratulated himself on the lucky accident that had allowed us to meet so soon.
"If I had gone much longer over hill and dale," he said, "Manuela would have brought me to you as a corpse; the journey rattled all my limbs together so, that I thought I was on the rack again. You have succeeded to your heart's content, have you not, Manuela, now you have persuaded the old fool to this long journey? Yes, yes; my life is worth nothing now; the sooner I die the better, is it not. ”

“ When Spinoza so abstracted himself from all personal considerations in the pure exercise of thought he was often surprised at the recollection that it was some days since he had seen Olympia, even since he had thought of her, and yet he loved her with his whole heart. It was not stormy, demonstrative love with its overwhelming passions; it was the quietly growing inclination whose roots rest in conviction, and the clear knowledge of the necessity of the relationship. This love, however, had its surprises and enigmatical self-torments as well as any other which is torn by storms of passions. ”

“ What is a long life to that ecstasy which existence itself and the devotion of it to the witness of truth gives could it but convince others? But a martyr's death proves nothing to others. Men have gone joyfully to death for the most opposite convictions. I myself once knew what is called a believing Jew, who, in the midst of the flames, when men believed him already dead, chanted the Psalm 'Into Thy hands I commend my spirit,' and breathed out his soul in song. What could a life of every day returning duties, refinements and pleasures prevail against the one all-inclusive act of devotion? ”

“ Even so we can, in the thought of God, form only an ideal, not an image."
Spinoza said at last, smiling:
"I would only explain still further, that though we feel ourselves one with the infinite, the degrees of consciousness of the innate divine power are yet infinitely different. Above all we must lay aside that pride of humanity that regards everything around it as mere means, and itself alone as the end and aim; that values everything only in its relation to itself—the supposed turning-point. Everything in the world consists of means and end combined." ”

“ When wilt thou have mercy on me? When wilt thou hold me in kindness again before thy countenance? When wilt thou pour balm into my wounds? When soften my torments? When wilt thou let me find rest? When wilt thou turn hatred into love, that I may cease to be an abomination, and the mark of scorn unto all nations? Why must I endure eternal dying without death, an eternal death without life? See, race after race have I seen fade and pass away like the grass of the field; kingdoms have I seen arise and crumble to dust before the breath of thy mouth. Everything rots and is brought forth anew ”

“ You too must offer yourself as a sacrifice by following the call of the truth given to you. You will not take me for the dying thief on the cross, and I will only echo the words which the world may say of your life and thoughts: if you possess knowledge of the truth—they will say—and if you are its open and unreserved confessor, come forth from your quiet solitude, come forth into active life, declare, and suffer for it."
With his hands folded on his breast Spinoza answered:
"To die for a recognized truth is blessedness that knows no pain. ”

“ Oh, it is all over, they are letting each other go."
"Be quiet," said Spinoza. "That is only a truce, and if it were sworn to by all the gods, they would break it like men as soon as they had gathered strength for a new fight. Am I not right in asserting that everything depends on the standpoint and position of the pupil? The buffalo mangling the grim tiger with his horns till he lies crushed to death before him is not greater than this spider in fight. Nothing is in itself great, nothing in itself small, only, because it appears so to us, we would make it so. ”

“ If a truly sublime and thoroughly poetic soul had dwelt in Barläus, and the professor not peeped out from every hole and corner in him, the denied possession of his Tesselschade and his own pure love for her alone might have made him become as a fragrant garden of heavenly poetic bloom. If Dante had embraced his Beatrice, if Laura had cooked bread-soup for Petrarch, never would the one have raised himself to be the Homer of the Christian cosmography by his immortal canzones, and the eternal harmony of Petrarch's sonnets would have been drowned in the cries of fretful children. ”

“ Spinoza felt especially glad to stand in the ranks of those who earn their daily bread by the labor of their hands. For all thus engaged quietly fulfil the requirements of the law of their nature. Work is the attribute of man; he fulfils the law in employing himself of his own free will; and it is a great and glorious chorus that comprises all the teaching and writing, the hammering and digging, the drilling and boiling in the individual workshops of the universe, and what results there-from. The quiet life of nature is mere existence; intelligence is thought ”

“ I do not believe you will turn Christian. Trust my experience, if you reach the highest point of free-thought, and have shaken off all prejudice or doctrinal peculiarity, you are, and will always remain, a Jew to them; they will always look upon you as a foreigner. They have imbibed hatred and aversion to the Jews with their mothers' milk; you waste your love on them. What good they may discover in you, they will set down as exceptional; if you strive for wealth and honor, they will say it is Jewish avarice and ambition ”

“ They will think you charming and inimitable if you mock at Jewish folly; but if you attack one of their own prejudices, even if they themselves had long ago made a jest of it, you must not do it, and if you do it, you are a pert, obtrusive Jew. It is the same in this as in other things in life: we confess our faults, and blame ourselves for them; but if another does it, we are annoyed. Sooner will the heavens kiss the earth, or fire and water unite, than a Jew and a Christian embrace in true, tender, all-forgetting love and union. ”

“ Believe me, I know the world better than you; there all is jesting, laughter and song, witty dispute, rich fanciful ideas, in finely expressed trifling. A pure mind like yours sees nothing in it but the laudable freedom and gayety of the classic world. I have heard it called so too; but, properly looked at, it is frivolous mummery, that recognizes neither law nor limit. Have your parents left their fair native land for this— resigning all glory and honor to endure mere sufferance—that now their children may fall into frivolous trifling with all that is most sacred? ”

“ Had fate called him to be a first man, untrammelled by the conclusions of his forefathers, unmisled by their guide-posts, out of the depths of his own life, out of his own conception of human nature and its laws to create salvation? Must each one to whom a revelation of the Eternal is to be given withdraw from the confusion of human society to the lifeless desert, to solitudes where he is alone on earth, where only the pulsations of his heart will be the measure of his time? ”

“ Meyer could contain himself no longer. "What have a set of rabbis in an obscure synagogue to do with the world? They send you into exile; into a world that is much more beautiful and greater than the one from which they banish you."
"You maybe right; but remember I received there my deepest awakenings of pleasure and pain. There was a time when honor and dishonor there were to me the honor and dishonor of the whole world. That is past."
"Now, my friend!" cried Oldenburg, "you will go out into the real world, into the wide, great world, and you will go with me. ”

“ Spinoza smiled at his friend, and explained that man is not really free in solitude, but only in society. Ludwig Meyer often stood as if in prayer beside the bed of the philosopher, who in painless moments looked upon his illness as a circumstance foreign to his real being. Only once he spoke of the trials he had gone through, and extended an idea he had expressed before:
"The heaviest burden that men can lay upon us is not that they persecute us with their own hatred, ingratitude and scorn; no, it is by planting hatred and scorn in our souls. ”

“ Such were Baruch's thoughts as he went away.
On yet another occasion the books lay open before them, and teacher and learner spoke of other things than what was written therein.
"Believe me," said the physician, and he blinked with his grey eyes, like one who has penetrated the deepest secrets; "believe me, I often looked behind the curtains; I know the matrimonial history of what men call matter and spirit, and have coupled with a religious blessing."
"Yet every one desires to be believed," answered the pupil. ”

“ Set free and forgotten is the mortal self, and life becomes thought.
What disturbs in the present and in uncongenial contact wins a milder meaning, and awakens a gentle conciliation in the mind that is inspired by a love of truth and rectitude, and that no reproach can drag down. It was like an awakening from that unconscious life, which yet had moved in the immaterial paths of thought to the inner development of himself, and the consideration of himself, and his relation to the outer world. ”