VOICES OF PROPHECY
What life meant for average millions in the Philippines, under what
chill shadows of the jail and visions of the firing-squad they must
draw breath, how shifty and blackguard was the Government imposed upon
them, we may glimpse from what happened as soon as Rizal’s absence was
discovered. Civil Guards and official eavesdroppers were busy at
Calamba; all members of the family were dogged, watched, waylaid, and
cross-questioned as if suspected of murder. They must do more than lie
to protect themselves. Paciano, the brother, who had been a confidant
in this desperate plot to take ship and go, was reduced to a kind of
play-acting, running about Rizal’s lodging and inquiring frantically
for his lost brother as if he conjectured suicide, assassination, or
kidnapping. All the Government seems to have been thrown into chill
alarm by the fact that one college student, not yet of age, had left
Manila without its permission. If there has been upon this earth a
tyranny that existed without the finger of fear upon it history,
surely, has no mention of it, and in the case of the Spanish tyranny in
the Philippines the vague and kindergarten terrors that assailed it had
long been notorious. To be afraid of a solitary student whose most
dangerous manifestation had been a taste for radical poetry may seem
fantastical to steadier pulses but was real enough to the anxious souls
that then steered Spain’s sovereignty through unquiet waters. In due
time the fact could no longer be concealed; gone he had indeed and in
very truth—gone, quite gone. Then, in characteristic fashion, the
Government proceeded to revenge itself upon the fugitive’s relatives.
It was again a case of a second cousin where the offender or his
brother was not available. In vengeance the taste of the Government was
never overnice. To make somebody suffer was its length and breadth, and
not too much haggling as to the identity of the victim.
Sketch-book in hand, the cause and occasion of all this uproar pursued
his way in peace, recording types among his fellow-passengers and
sopping up information like some form of sponge. From Singapore he
journeyed by French mail-boat through the Suez Canal to Marseilles, and
so to Barcelona. There he tarried some months and observed without
infection the extreme revolutionary movement that centered always in
that restless city. [60] Many Filipinos were in Barcelona; it was
passing strange to one late escaped from the gag-law and press-gang
conditions of the Philippines to a place under the same flag where men
could say and print what they thought. There were publications in
Barcelona that in the Philippines would have brought out the
executioner and added martyrs to the overcharged lists of Bagumbayan
Field. The Socratic mind of Rizal, with a question for every
phenomenon, could not fail to note this nor to find the cause of it.
Government loved freedom of speech no better in Barcelona than in
Manila. But in Barcelona the people were ready to fight for their
rights as they had fought for them more than once. In this fact lay all
the contrast.
At the University of Madrid, where he came soon after to anchor, he
elected to study medicine, literature, and philosophy, while outside
the university he took on art and modern languages. The burden of so
many studies was less than its appalling appearance, or less for Rizal.
With him, as with other good minds reared in a bilingual atmosphere,
languages were an easy acquisition. In his childhood he had spoken
Tagalog and Spanish; at school he had added Latin and Greek; after the
school of the pedant, to be sure, but still Latin and Greek. He now
assailed French, English, and Italian, all at the same time, and
without apparent difficulty. A little later, he mastered Catalan,
Arabic, German, Sanskrit, and Hebrew.
At Madrid it was with him as it had been at the Ateneo. In a few weeks
the university buzzed about this rare young Filipino that could do so
many things brilliantly and lived so much like a Trappist monk. His
fellows remarked of him that he had at its best the fine, gracious
courtesy characteristic of his people but was no great addition to the
university’s social assets. If the cafés, clubs, and other places the
students thronged knew little of him, he had two good reasons for
keeping to himself and living modestly. His excursion in higher
education was financed on slender terms by his father and his brother,
and he had work in hand that took all his attention; he must be at all
times about his country’s business. To a certain extent when he walked
apart he was doing violence to his own nature. By temperament he was no
horseman for black care to ride behind. He was frank, cordial, quick,
rather sanguine, and appreciative of good company and of conversation
with good minds. When he had the luck to fall in with these and
loosened the rein upon himself, or when he was with his own circle and
forgot the great thing he lived for, he made the common air sparkle
with shrewd, witty comment. [61] His studies in so many languages had
given him an unusual vocabulary; his talk flowed on without a break.
His own circle was a group of about a score of Filipino students, and
(strange to say) one Englishman and one German, that somehow found
themselves to be congenial and elected to meet at one remote café.
There they read the newspapers (London), played dominoes and chess, and
talked about serious things. It was the opinion of these young men that
Rizal came too seldom to their meetings, but whenever he consented to
be of the company he was its intellectual electric battery. He liked to
play chess and played it well; he liked better to discuss and to learn.
One afternoon he came in and announced that he was going away. He sat
by the side of the table and drew with his pencil on its bare top a
merry caricature of every person present. Then he bade them good-bye
and disappeared, and a waiter came with a cloth dipped in kerosene and
erased the drawings. The place did not see him again. [62] A few years
later, the price of those caricatures the waiter so easily expunged
would have equaled the value of the café.
He carried to Madrid his favorite notion of life led by time-tables;
and, dividing his day into segments, set apart one for general reading.
In this his choice was liberal; anything that would be likely to assist
his purpose was welcome. French classics, Shakespeare, Goethe, to help
his lingual studies; books on modern political questions; history above
everything, any history; biography by way of illustration; and the
theater (which he attended as often as his purse would allow) for
readjustment.
A book that early captivated him was a volume of the lives of the
Presidents of the United States, printed in Spain and in Spanish. [63]
It seems to have made a deep impression upon him; he all but wore it
out with frequent thumbings, and procured another edition with later
biographies that he carried with him wherever he went. These stories of
so many picturesque careers to eminence must have had an apt relation
to Jagor’s prophecy, a thing he never forgot. The application was too
obvious to escape such a mind. In a democracy, men born into the utmost
poverty, men born in log huts, the sons of peasants, the sons of
artisans, made their way to the highest positions, and not a soul cast
their birth at them. It was so; here were the recorded proofs. Under
the old monarchical system of society they would have found every door
shut in their faces and a thousand chains of caste to hold them in the
pit where they had been born. In a democracy every door stood open and
nothing impeded their ascent. Why does anybody write fiction when fact
is so much more dramatic and wonderful? In a student’s cell in a back
corner of Madrid was then being forged the wedge of brass that was to
overthrow moldering antiquity in all the Pacific and all the Far East,
and was so far hidden from the wise and prudent of earth they would
have laughed at the mere suggestion of it. Yet there it was, day and
night—forging. Well could Prophet Jagor see what was to happen but not
the manner of it. He knew that in the end it was the United States that
would remake the Philippines, even if at the time he wrote the American
people in general were so little acquainted with this part of the sun’s
dominions that to many of them Filipino suggested only something to
eat; even if he never dreamed that the instrument Fate would use in
strange ways to bring all this to pass was in the hand of a slim brown
youth naturally addicted to poetry and mooning.
While he was yet in the university, Rizal came into contact with
another influence that affected both his career and the story of his
country. He became a freemason. Upon all secret societies, but
especially upon the freemasons, the governing class in the Philippines
had scowled implacably; the friars and the church generally being still
more hostile. The governing class in its jumpy way believed that any
kind of secret organization must signify treason; the Civil Guards
objected because here were keyholes at which one could not watch; the
friars thought freemasonry threatened the economic welfare of the
church. By these, Rizal’s religious convictions were gravely doubted,
but need not have been since they were easily ascertained. He was of a
broad and sweet faith and a charitable practice, cherishing a universal
tolerance refreshing to encounter, but he was in the substance of his
belief a loyal Catholic. In his father’s house he had been accustomed
to hear religious questions discussed without the least restraint; [64]
within those walls Francisco Mercado would have freedom of speech if it
existed nowhere else in Filipinas. From such discussions he had learned
that religion was a matter about which men would differ widely and yet
without just reproach; the independent, courageous, and conscientious
man would decide for himself. When he came to understand the
subjugation of his country and the part played in that great wrong by
the monastic orders his faith in the organized church as the custodian
of men’s minds and thinkings faded out, but not his faith in the
essentials of the Christian religion, from which he seems never to have
wandered.
At the suggestion that freemasonry was or could be a foe to religion he
scoffed. Not only did he accept masonry for himself but he resolved
that upon his return to the Philippines he would further it among his
countrymen. He may have loved it for the enemies it had made; he would
have been scarcely human if he had not felt some such impulse. But
beyond all such considerations he must have found in the ritual
something of beauty and in the associations something of the calm and
fortitude for which the sorely tried soul yearned within him. We are to
remember here again that he was one carried by fate and the stress of
conditions out of his inclinings. He had the soul of an artist; by
sheer force of will he put himself down into an arena of strife. He
loved the cloister, books, and meditation; he forced himself to battle
with primitive men for primitive rights. He was a poet, with an ear
peculiarly sensitive to sweet sounds, a soul on fire about beauty and
its recompenses; and he turned his back upon all these because he
thought he heard a call to duty. Some men give their lives to a great
cause; some men give still more.
To reinforce the pittance his uncle was able to send him he earned
money by tutoring, though to work one’s way through a university was
not so easy nor so common at Madrid as we know it in America. He seems
to have been a fairly human kind of instructor. According to a letter
from one of his class in German he showed an exceedingly human
impatience when his pupils failed to grasp his ideas as rapidly as he
uttered them. [65]
Throughout all his studies he performed better in languages, history,
and belles lettres than in medicine; conclusive proof that he had not
followed his own desires but made a sacrifice of them when he chose
this profession. We have here his school ratings from 1878 in Manila
until the time he left Madrid University; they offer material for an
interesting mental clinic if one cares to undertake the exercise:
SCHOLASTIC RECORDS OF JOSÉ RIZAL
Studies in Medicine
In Manila: First Year (1878–79)
Physics—Fair
Chemistry—Excellent
Natural history—Fair
Anatomy No. 1—Good
Dissection No. 1—Good
Second Year (1879–80)
Anatomy No. 2—Good
Dissection No. 2—Good
Physiology—Good
Private hygiene—Good
Public hygiene—Good
Third Year (1880–81)
Pathology, general—Fair
Therapeutics—Excellent
Operation (surgery)—Good
Fourth Year (1881–82)
Pathology, medical—Very good
Pathology, surgical—Very good
Obstetrics—Very good
In Madrid, Spain: Fifth Year (1882–83)
Medical clinics No. 1—Good
Surgical clinics No. 1—Good
Obstetrical clinics—Fair
Legal medicine or medical law—Excellent
Sixth Year (1883–84)
Medical clinics No. 2—Good
Surgical clinics No. 2—Very good
He became licentiate in medicine on June 21, 1884, with the
rating “fair” (aprobado) (degree granted June 1, 1887).
He obtained the doctor’s degree (1884–85):
History of the medical science—Fair
Chemical analysis—Good
Histology, normal—Excellent
Studies in Philosophy and Letters
In Manila, March 14, 1877, he obtained the bachelor’s degree with
the rating “excellent”
In Madrid, 1882–83:
Universal history—Very good
General literature—Excellent
1883–84
Universal history No. 2—Excellent
Greek and Latin literature—Excellent with a prize
Greek No. 1—Excellent with a prize
1884–85
Spanish literature—Excellent with free scholarship
Arabic language—Excellent with free scholarship
Greek No. 2—Excellent
History of Spain—Good
Hebrew—Excellent
Cosmology, metaphysics, theodicy, and history of philosophy were
studied by him in Manila and finished in July, 1877, and March,
1878, with rating “excellent”
Licentiate in philosophy and letters, June 19, 1885, “excellent.”
Three years elapsed between the bestowing of his licentiate in medicine
and the taking of his degree. The lapse was never explained by Rizal,
but the reason was his poverty. His father was now in much distress,
and Rizal to prosecute his studies must live with narrow scrimping and
sometimes on crusts. He could not afford to pay the fee for his
doctor’s degree and went without it until his fortunes mended.
But his record of triumphs in philosophy and letters must have balanced
all possible regrets for the lack of this laurel while it added to his
great fame in the student world. So many scholarships, honors,
mentions, “excellents”!—these were the prizes he had won with so much
industry. The plan of his career he had now worked out to his
satisfaction: he was to visit the foremost countries of Europe, study
their institutions, learn the secrets of their progress, and carry home
to his countrymen information that might spur them to cast off their
lethargy and emerge from the national eclipse. Meantime, he was to
perfect himself in his profession that he might add to his usefulness
and take up his work among them. From Madrid, therefore, he went to
Paris, where he became clinical assistant to Dr. L. de Weckert, one of
the most famous oculists of Europe. [66]
It was in Paris that he took the first direct steps to his own ruin.
While still in Madrid he had come upon the idea of addressing his
countrymen through the medium of a novel. He had been reading and
studying Mrs. Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” and he pondered with awe the
far-reaching effect upon history and human progress of that inspired
work. The thought occurred to him that similarly wrought pictures of
the servitude of the Filipinos might awaken them to a knowledge of the
yoke that was slowly crushing them, pictures that might at the same
time reveal to the world the justice of the Filipino cause. He went so
far as to suggest such a work to the Filipino club at Madrid, the story
to be of joint authorship; for he seems to have had doubts of his own
ability. When his fellow-members failed to see how great were the
opportunities involved he was driven back upon himself, as he so often
had been and was to be. From Madrid to Paris the idea grew upon him. At
Paris he took his pen and started seriously upon the composition of a
story of Philippine life.
This was the beginning of “Noli Me Tangere,” the greatest work in
Philippine literature and one of the great achievements of all times
and all lands. He was not perfectly equipped to be a novelist, for he
had not the great dramatic fictional sense that sees a moving tale in
the large and coördinates to the catastrophe every incident as the plot
unfolds; but he had assets many dramatic fictionists never possess. He
had the compelling fire of a lofty indignation, the sense of a great
cause, the faultless knowledge of the hearts and minds and sorrows of
the people of his little stage. He had something else that put him in a
class with Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, and William Dean Howells.
He was a great reporter. Nature had gifted him with a marvelous power
of observation; as truly as with his pencil he made those startling and
hardly surpassed sketches of men and things, so accurately his mind
seized and stored the significance of incidents, conversations, petty
broils, clashing ambitions, village tyrants, unsung Hampdens, and
cities of men and manners.
He wrote in Paris the opening chapters of “Noli Me Tangere” and carried
them to Heidelberg, where the next year he was a student at the
university. [67]
By this time he had begun to attract the attention of scientists for
zealot-like devotion to his scientific research. At Madrid, Paris,
Heidelberg, he was first the student and then the close friend and
coadjutor of the foremost oculists of that time. It appears that upon
his capacity and powers of concentration, which were extraordinary,
they founded large hopes of a brilliant professional career. Despite
his preoccupation and his aloofness, it is equally apparent that he
exercised upon them the charm of a singularly magnetic manner. Readily
he made friends; as easily he kept them. To the end of his life some of
the greatest scientists in Europe, men like Virchow, Jagor,
Blumentritt, and de Weckert held him in affectionate esteem and
delighted to correspond with him.
They had sound human reasons for liking him. In addition to so liberal
a store of other good gifts, this man was a master of the now rare art
of letter-writing. To the family at home he sent the most charming
epistles, full of shrewd observations, colorful descriptions, and a
cheerful wit. Often they were illustrated with his incomparable
thumb-nail drawings and humorous designs, and sometimes when he wrote
to his mother he sent her the latest poems on which he had been
engrossed. [68]
From Heidelberg he went to Leipzig and its university, studying, in
especial, psychology; thence to Berlin, where he took cheap lodgings
and settled himself to complete his novel while he should still pursue
his studies; for besides his specialties he had lately taken on
anthropology and entomology.
His association with Virchow enlarged and enlightened his views
concerning democracy and overcame much of the grave disadvantages of
his birth. Men born under a monarchy have always this to overcome if
they are to become effective soldiers of the Common Good. Virchow was a
philosophical democrat that had seen, as in a long perspective, the
ascent of man and had drawn thence an unshakable faith. Although Rizal
was now more than ever a democrat, on calmly reviewing the state of his
countrymen he believed that for his day the national independence of
the Philippines was out of the question. Memories of the popular
ignorance oppressed him. To be free, he thought, a people must know how
to use freedom. It seems not to have occurred to him that there was no
school but one in which that precious wisdom could be taught, and in it
were and could be no text-books. For, whatever scholiasts may imagine
and Utopians dream, it is experience and experience alone that tutors
man in the good use of his freedom. The theory that a nation must wait
until all its men have university degrees before it can be trusted with
its destinies is either the dishonest handmaid of exploitation or, as
in Rizal’s case, the footless product of the cloisters. Man, endowed
with freedom, will use it wrongly and use it rightly; and which is the
right way and which the wrong he will not know until responsibility
enlightens him. After all, it is not wholly strange that even so
excellent a mind as Rizal’s should have gone astray on this point; for
he was codisciple of the schoolmen, and in his day schoolmen taught
only his error. We need not on this account lower any estimate of his
worth and genius. He could see that if in his day and with their
antecedents the people of the Philippines should suddenly arrive at
their independence they would probably make for a time but erratic use
of it. What he could not see was that at its worst their condition then
would be better than the blight and curse of their previous state, and
that under the tuition of experience they would work out their problems
and vindicate their capacity.
But we have to deal here with the unfolding of this marvelous man and
the heritage of his deeds and thought. He meditated long upon the
unfortunate state of his people; he saw them bogged in ignorance and
blinded by superstition, and hence he concluded that until there should
be popular education, independence would mean only failure and
temporary reversion. Of the eventual freedom of the Philippines, as of
their eventual greatness and glory among men, he had never a doubt.
Meantime, the first work in hand was to arouse these people to the need
of education and to wrest from Spain by peaceful means some practical
relief from the savage tyranny that weighed down their hearts, darkened
their lives, and of purpose kept them in ignorance.
With all his other occupations he found time to press the work on his
great book, until he had completed in it an exposition of the full body
of his faith. Perhaps in the way of construction it is not so much a
novel as a series of vivid pictures of life in the Philippines of that
time; but with a strangely vivifying necromancy difficult to analyze or
define, the power of these pictures is hardly excelled in modern
literature. [69] We may believe that the secret of this compelling
power is the intensity of Rizal’s feeling; it gives to his portraitures
a sincerity and virility no striving and no art could come by. He
obeyed, unconsciously, the Sidneyan injunction about the heart and the
writing; some of the passages seem to be done in his blood and some in
his tears. The test of their might is easily made. Take to-day a reader
that has never been in the Philippines and knows nothing of the
peculiar life there; when he has read “Noli Me Tangere” he will not
only feel that he knows that life but it will be to him as if he had
seen it, as if he had heard these characters talking, noted their
visages, and discerned their motives no less than their acts. All this
he will feel in spite of the insulating septum of translation, against
which all the finer beauties of the style must fall dead; the terse,
vigorous, often biting sentences through which this tortured heart
uttered its protest, and even the almost magical charm of the
descriptions of the Philippine environment.
To be thus vivid and convincing about any phase of life is not easy; to
make intimate to the European a life in the world’s remotest outskirts,
of whose terms the European has no conception, in which he has no
natural interest, whose actors are of a different race, color, and
psychology from his own, is a feat bristling with difficulties. Some
critics, piqued, maybe, that a Malay at his first attempt should have
triumphed in a form of art deemed the exclusive heritage of the white
man, have objected that Rizal’s work has no great connected moving
story, such as Dickens or Ohnet would have dealt in. Suppose this to be
true, it is but a narrow view of fictional art. The mirror fiction
holds up to nature may be of many shapes, and the life chosen for
mirroring may be of many phases. All that the world can insist upon is
that they shall be representative and perfectly shown, and for these
Rizal had a facility like that of Cervantes. [70]
The theme is the gross, fat-witted tyranny that had enchained the
Filipinos and the extent to which they themselves were to blame for it.
Neither oppressor nor the complaisant among the oppressed was spared in
those cadent pictures; here each might behold his ugly countenance
faultlessly drawn. With bitter reproach he showed to his countrymen
their ignorance, their sloth, their tame submission that invited more
wrongs. In all human experience one observation has been invariable. It
is that the force that rules with autocratic and irresponsible sway is
able to bear anything else better than ridicule. The ridicule that
Rizal poured upon the dominant powers in the Philippines would have
stung to the quick Caracalla himself. One by one he marches them across
the stage, the whip of his terrible sarcasm always on their shoulders.
It is an immortal procession: the scheming, arrogant, lawless, immoral
friar, drunk with power and greed; the Spanish government officer, all
brute to the native, all crawling sycophant before the powerful orders;
the arrogant Spanish émigré, stuffed with the ridiculous bombast of a
bygone century, the émigré that has become rich in the islands at the
expense of the native and now hates and despises the rounds of the
ladder by which he did ascend; the native that cringes before the feet
of the classes that have so unspeakably wronged him; the woman of
Spain’s Island colony, “more deadly than the male”; the pretentious and
all but worthless educational system; the raw excesses of the courts;
the wanton cruelties of a Government conducted by expatriated savages;
the tortures and pathetic helplessness of the native masses. On all
this the man worked like Hogarth; he will startle and frighten you, but
he will convince you on every page that this is the truth. In this
misery, exactly this, dwelt the unfortunate millions that Spain
misgoverned; in this terror, thus trampled upon, overawed, silenced,
but not subdued. These were the people’s oppressors, lustful, cruel,
rapacious, their burning eyes following every pretty woman or girl,
their pockets lined with the peasants’ money, their claws reaching for
more. All the scenes of the drama and all the players in it, drawn with
irresistible art: the Civil Guards, the coarse instruments of this
despotism; the means by which terror was capitalized; the constant
temptation to revolt; the devilish work of the agents provocateurs; the
sickening punishments devised for those that yielded to the wiles of
such agents. [71] Against this shone the native grace and charm of the
Filipino woman, justly illumined, her goodness, kindness, ready and
apprehensive mind, the pitfalls dug for her by the bestial oppressors
of her people. You will say that all the materials are here for one of
those great dramas of human life that reach down to the primeval base
of first causes and of such framing this book has been made.
Everywhere is dense ignorance. The world that three hundred years
before left all these conditions behind still goes rolling in advance,
and hardly a Filipino knows of its passing. A great population endowed
with the potentialities of free minds, free limbs, free souls, free
ideas, is submitting to a yoke pressed down into men’s very flesh by
superstition on one side and brute force on the other.
We know that many of the incidents were but transcripts of what Rizal
himself had seen and known; many of the characters transferred
themselves from Calamba to his pages. Even when we read them for the
first time, and have, maybe, no previous knowledge of the locale, this
conviction of truth and sincerity possesses us; how much more it must
have reached and stung those whose enormities it paints! “It is only
the truth that hurts.”